The Art of Mechanical Reproduction: Technology and Aesthetics from Duchamp to the Digital 9780226178172

Citation preview

Technology and Aesthetics from Duchamp to the Digital

University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Tamara Trodd is a lecturer in twentieth-century art and contemporary art at the University of Edinburgh. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­13119-­1 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­17817-­2 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226178172.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trodd, Tamara Jane, author.  The art of mechanical reproduction : technology and aesthetics from Duchamp to the digital / Tamara Trodd. pages : illustrations ; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-13119-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-226-17817-2 (e-book)   1. Arts—Reproduction. 2. Art—Reproduction. 3. Technology and the arts. 4. Art and technology. 5. Industrial arts. I. Title. NX635.T76 2014 701’.05—dc23 2014029538 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Acknowledgments  vii Introduction The Art of Mechanical Reproduction  1

4 Xeroxing the Medium  141

Working Drawings Mapping “systems” Photo-­plus-­text The dialectical image

1 Mnemotechnics  19



Oil-­transfer Investing in drawing Apparatus Camera-­seeing

5 Painting at a Standstill  181 Don’t look now The stilled and moving image Pathos formulae

2 Seeing Machines  47

6 Farewell to the Machine Age?  219

The panorama device Collage Large Glass/shop window Ball-­Joint, Rotoreliefs, Guitar



3 Camera Vision  97

Notes 259



Painting shadows Automatic drawing Screening the body Screen memories

The film machine Mechanical ballets Dean’s telescope Film machines after film

Index 295

This book began during my time in the History of Art department at University College London. The UCL department was formative for me and I am grateful to all the staff and students with whom I worked, especially Tamar Garb, Charles Ford, Frederic Schwartz, Tom Gretton, Andrew Hemingway, and Joseph Koerner. Above all I am enduringly grateful to Briony Fer, whose work and teaching remain a guiding light. I have found a second supportive environment among the staff and students of the History of Art department at the University of Edinburgh. I am especially grateful for the warm personal and professional support of my head of department, Viccy Coltman, but I also want to thank the university more widely. The speakers and audience at the Graduate Research Seminar series, the members of the Technologies Reading Group, and all my students have formed an intellectually inquiring and rigorous community that has sustained me. My teaching colleagues continue to provide inspiring examples of grace under pressure and a real camaraderie. Thanks to Ian Gunn and Leigh Haynes for IT assistance, to Janet Black for administrative support, to the library and other support staff, and to Jim Stewart, for early help with copyediting. Special thanks to Isla Robertson, whose professionalism and good humor were invaluable in securing image rights and permissions. I am very grateful to all those who discussed ideas with me, made useful comments and suggestions for further reading, or read portions of the book, including Glyn Davis, John Roberts, Mark Dorrian, Lizzy Cowling, David Har-

vii

 viii

ris, Anna Lovatt, James Boaden, Esther Leslie, Neil Cox, Claudia Hopkins, Jo Applin, Ed Krčma, Klara Kemp-­Welch, Alex Thomson, Dominic Paterson, and Ian Rothwell. Above all, thanks to Alex Davis, who read the whole manuscript over a number of years, with unfailing faith and patience. Thanks to the audiences and participants at the seminars where I have delivered some of this material, and from whose questions and suggestions I have benefited. The venues have included the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; the Montehermerso Cultural Center, Vitoria, Spain; the National Galleries of Scotland; the International Symposium on Surrealism at West Dean College, Chichester; University College Cork; the Association of Art Historians annual conference, London; and the College Art Association annual conference, Atlanta. Thanks to staff in the libraries and archives I have visited, including the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art, the Paul Klee Center, the Musée Picasso, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Many thanks to the artists who so generously gave their permission for me to reproduce images, allowed interviews, or read portions of this work, especially Ellsworth Kelly, Tacita Dean, and John Gerrard. Particular thanks to those artists and rights holders who graciously permitted reproduction of works free of charge. I am grateful to the funders who provided generous grants at key points in my research: University College London, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Moray Endowment Fund, the University of Edinburgh, and the Leverhulme Trust. Finally, thank you to my editors at the University of Chicago Press, Susan Bielstein, Anthony Burton, and Joel Score, with whom it has been a pleasure to work. I am especially grateful to the anonymous readers for the press, whose questions and criticisms have helped make this, I hope, a better book.

In 1921, Walter Benjamin purchased a small, colored work by Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (1920) (fig. 0.1). Personifying it as the “angel of history,” Benjamin wrote about the figure almost twenty years later, in one of his last essays, shortly before his death. Perhaps the most striking thing about this interpretation is that he saw the figure as if in motion: There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.1

Despite Benjamin’s depiction in this passage of history as an accumulation of destructions, his emphasis on the unstoppable momentum of Klee’s figure should give us pause. Facing back, the figure is nevertheless employed as an emblem for our irresistible propulsion forward. Caught in dialectical convulsion, embodying the twist that is distinctive of Benjamin’s thought, the angel offers a critical stance that this book takes as exemplary.

1

Introduction 2

0.1  Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920. Indian ink, color chalk, and brown wash on paper, 12.5 × 9.5 inches (32 × 24 cm). Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Gift of John and Paul Herring, Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder, and Fania and Gershom Scholem. © Israel Museum, Jerusalem/ Bridgeman Art Library.

Klee is one of the few visual artists Benjamin referred to by name in his writings, and Angelus Novus is one of the very few specific artworks he ever discussed in print. Klee’s work was important to Benjamin, I suggest, for three features, each of which is demonstrated in the Angelus Novus. First, his figures are visibly reproduced: they have undergone processes that render them imprinted on the page, and their grainy, disarticulated line bears the marks of this pressure. Second, they are mechanical: skeletal, spare, diagrammatic, “designed on a drawing board,” Benjamin wrote, as if engineered. 2 They are barely human. And yet, third, they are creatures of the future, expressive of irrepressible dynamism: this angel flies forward, while arrows and whirring

mechanisms recur in other of Klee’s compositions. Angelus Novus could thus emblematize for Benjamin technology’s perceived destruction of certain key inherited ideas and formations: the destruction of a certain model of drawing, signaled by the reordering of the human figure (as spare, diagrammatic, mechanical); the destructive reconfiguring of the medium of painting, through the procedure Klee invented known as “oil-­transfer” (discussed further in chapter 1); and, as the culmination of these, the destruction of the idea of “Art,” “in all its overweening obtuseness,” as Benjamin put it.3 Yet the figure could also embody for Benjamin the vital potential of mechanical reproduction to inscribe a sense of futurity. Without these destructions, how would we be free to imagine a future that is different from the past? The destructions Benjamin describes are the hallmarks of the “historical avant-­garde” of the 1910s and 1920s, widely understood as attacking the values of bourgeois aesthetics, meaning the kind of aesthetics that arose in the eighteenth century and prevailed throughout most of modernity, based on autonomy, contemplation, and beauty.4 Benjamin’s account of Klee supports this characterization, and yet this essay and his wider writings suggest an understanding of the potential of the avant-­garde as based on more than the idealization of viewer engagement and participation as tending to promote revolutionary critique, that has sometimes dominated theorization of this tradition. In what follows I pursue the suggestion made in places in Benjamin’s writing that “the progressive reaction is characterized by an immediate, intimate fusion of pleasure—­pleasure in seeing and experiencing—­ with an attitude of expert appraisal”; that is, the new technological situation affords new aesthetic resources for art: new models of visual pleasure, imaginative satisfaction, affective engagement.5 The purpose of this book will be to explore this potential, showing how new artistic values may emerge directly from changing technological conditions, such that we understand the work of art as transformed in the emancipatory direction Benjamin described, offering us insights, achieved precisely through aesthetic pleasure, into our wider “technologized” situation, and pointing beyond these to a sense of a possible future. Accordingly, this book is a study of “the art of mechanical reproduction,” meaning both the transformation of art-­making and viewing by new technologies and the liquidation of inherited cultural tradition (indeed, the liquidation of the very idea of cultural tradition as “inherited”), brought about by the advent of technological production and technologically supported mass culture in the early twentieth century. As such, the book is indebted to Benjamin’s essay, written between 1935 and 1939, properly entitled, as its present translators point out, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.”6 While “in principle, the work of art has always been reproducible,” as Benjamin acknowledges, it is the central argument of his essay that the perception and aesthetic qualities of the work of art are fun-

The Art of Mechanical Reproduction 3

Introduction 4

damentally altered by its becoming susceptible to swift, mass, technologically enabled reproduction.7 In particular, he argues, the work of art loses its “aura,” the aesthetic quality of distance and quasi-­cultic or religious awe of an earlier, pretechnological age: qualities that arose fundamentally because of the work of art’s material uniqueness. The result of this is “a shattering of tradition” that betokens a “renewal of humanity. . . . The social significance of film, even—­and especially—­in its most positive form is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic side: the liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage.”8 In such remarks Benjamin praises the advent of new technologies as emancipatory and demystifying, bringing about a new era of collective reception, production, and reproduction of the image. His enthusiasm at these points may be compared to that of László Moholy-­Nagy, the Hungarian artist working at the Bauhaus, who advocated new light-­based art, kinetic sculpture, and photography as ways of remodeling our sensory interface with the world, and who praised photography for its bringing about “man’s newly won ability to see gradation and differentiation in the light-pattern of his world.”9 Film and photography take a special place in the “Work of Art” essay, as technologies of image production that simultaneously enable mass reproduction and encourage a new mode of “expert” and distracted perception. The impact of modern technology is not seen solely in works of photography or film, however. In an earlier essay, “Little History of Photography” (1931), Benjamin expresses a general enthusiasm for artistic practice that is “scientific” and a distaste for traditional values of “art.” He scatters the word “technology” freely through the essay and builds a wider sense for the term, referring to a whole range of techniques, “from astrophysics to philology,” as “technologies,” in a sense he derives from the way in which he sees artistic practice as having been reconfigured by photography.10 A “technology” in this sense is not a mechanical as opposed to a manual means, but rather a technical means that has not yet become associated in artistic practice with a tradition of use, and which functions as an integer in a compound material practice: “unpretentious makeshifts meant for internal use” (my emphasis).11 Benjamin’s argument is thus that all artistic materials and means of production are transformed by the development of modern, technological apparatuses, as Bertolt Brecht also argued, in essays of the 1920s and 1930s. “The old forms of transmission are not unaffected by the newly emerging ones, nor do they survive alongside them,” Brecht wrote, in an essay published the year after Benjamin’s “Little History,” echoing the sentiment of Moholy-­Nagy’s book Painting, Photography, Film (1925). “The use of technological instruments compels even the novelist who makes no use of them to wish that he could do what the instruments can, to include what they show (or could show) as part of the reality that constitutes his subject matter, but above all to lend to his own attitude to writing the character of using instruments.”12

Thus, Brecht makes clear it is the whole structure of artistic practice that is transformed under the impact of the new, technological model of making (“using instruments”). Modern artistic practice is understood on this account as supported by a variety of technologies such that all its material parts construct a compound, workmanlike enterprise, or what Brecht called an “apparatus.”13 Film was the model for this view of an apparatus: an industry staffed by skilled professionals, supported by the latest forms of technology, that organized the spectator in a new form of mass consumption; and yet apparatus, in Brecht’s usage, refers not simply to modern, compound technological supports such as film and radio, but also to modern systems of distribution that are not obviously technological, such as, he suggests, the book club.14 The key feature of an apparatus in this sense is that it is a set of connected relations of production and consumption that is brought into being by modern industrial developments, even though it may not necessarily be defined in all its parts by use of the most up-­to-­date technology. As in the case of book clubs, an apparatus may include more or less archaic forms (such as books or painting), but it supports new ways of reading, and new forms of social relation, derived from the impact of newer technologies. Brecht’s embrace of technological apparatuses is undertaken for political reasons similar to those that motivate Benjamin, and in terms that foreshadow the terms of Benjamin’s discussion of the destruction of aura in his “Work of Art” essay: “These apparatuses can be used better than almost anything else to supersede the traditionally untechnical, anti-­technical, ‘transcendent’ ‘art’ associated with religion,” he argues.15 More explicitly than Benjamin, and with an eloquence that makes him worthy of quoting at length, Brecht argues against the idea that art should or could hold itself apart from the wider conditions of industrial development: According to this idea there is a part of art, true art, that—­completely untouched by these new possibilities of transmission (radio, cinema, book clubs, etc.)—­uses the old ones (the freely marketed, printed book, the stage, etc.). In other words, this true art remains completely free from all influence of modern industry. According to this idea the other part, the technological art, is something else altogether, creations precisely of these apparatuses, something completely new, whose very existence, however, is in the first place beholden to certain financial expectations and therefore bound to them for ever. If works of the former sort are handed over to the apparatuses, they immediately become commodities. This idea, leading as it does to utter fatalism, is wrong because it excludes that so-­called “untouchable art” from all processes and influences of our time, treating it as untouchable only because it is impervious to the progress of transmission. In reality the whole of art without exception is placed in this new situation; art must confront it as a whole and not split into parts; it will become a commodity as a whole or not at all. The changes wrought by time leave nothing untouched but rather always encompass the whole.16

The Art of Mechanical Reproduction 5

Introduction 6

Brecht’s warning against the idea that merely by avoiding contemporary technologies, or more deeply, the reconfiguration of practice that such technologies bring about, a work of art can avoid commodification, is useful to remember today; only by engaging with its condition as part of a wider Technik, he suggests, can the work of art achieve its full historical and revelatory potential.17 In what follows, I aim to retrieve the critical perspective advocated by Brecht and Benjamin. I focus on the ways in which artistic practice is and has been reshaped by the absorption of technologies and by the model of adaptive and pragmatic usefulness technologies have represented to many of these artists. One of the things this suggests is a deeper understanding of the modernist idea of an artistic “medium,” which I propose may be understood as a compensatory structure, arising precisely in an effort to salve the disruption to tradition heralded by the advent of modern technologies of image production and reproduction. Before the twentieth century, painting, poetry, and sculpture were conceived not as “mediums” but more usually as “arts.” The term “medium” was most famously introduced as a central concept in modernist art theory by the American critic Clement Greenberg in 1939 (the same year as Benjamin’s final version of his “Work of Art” essay) and was developed by Greenberg and others in the postwar years—­in particular, by Michael Fried, whose essays of the 1960s gave the idea considerable new theoretical subtlety.18 These accounts demonstrate the way in which the replacement of “art” by “medium” in modernist thought enabled critical narratives of succession, “genealogies” that helped legitimate a canon of individual artists and their “heroic” achievements and establish art as a realm of serious cultural thought and problem-­solving. By the end of the 1960s, however, the idea of the medium and the modernist values it supported seemed to have run into the sand. More recently, the idea has been further extended by Rosalind Krauss, in a series of thoughtful and thought-­provoking essays published since 1997. What she has termed the “post-­medium condition” arose in the 1960s, she proposes, as a consequence of the reception of photography, the readymade, conceptual art, and poststructuralism.19 While I am indebted to Krauss’s analysis, our accounts differ in certain emphases. Unlike Krauss, I don’t see a post-­ medium condition as emerging first in the 1960s, as a result of late capitalism, but instead argue for a view that understands artists’ engagements with their various material supports from the early twentieth century on, as reshaping the idea of the “work of art” in a more Benjaminian sense, formed by the “age of mechanical reproduction.” Furthermore, unlike Krauss, who advocates the “reinvention of the medium,” I don’t promote the idea of a medium as offering either resistance to spectacle or a means for art to retrieve something like autonomy. Instead, my effort is to read works of art as both supported by and mediating—­transmitting and reciprocally adapting—­their immediate and historical social and technological environments. In returning, as I do in this

book, to the foundational moment of the 1920s and 1930s, my aim is to search for and articulate the promise that art extends for our understanding of both the dangers and the potential that arises in the technologized situation. One example of such potential has to do with the question of cultural reproduction and succession. As already indicated, one capacity of mechanical reproduction is to threaten and transform not only the quality of aesthetic perception of individual artworks but also the wider cultural status of art as secure cultural inheritance. When the work of art can be swiftly copied and transmitted to a mass audience, distributed far across time and space, what is also transformed is the story of art as a vehicle of rhetorical succession—­a way of constructing genealogies, lineages of “great” artists following in each others’ footsteps. Key to emancipation from this structure are the alternative models of cultural transmission and exchange offered by technology, and the full potential of that story is perhaps one of the most interesting and unexplored aspects of the theorization of “art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Accordingly, in chapter 1, focusing on Paul Klee’s oil-­transfer works, we see the way in which an avant-­garde artist employs a range of material practices to constitute a newly apparatized kind of medium, under the pressure of new technologies. Drawing itself has historically performed as something like a technology of transfer between mediums—­transferring designs for frescos, for example, or making sketches for sculpture. Here I show that drawing as a technology for making copies and reprocessing existing works is fundamental to the structure of Klee’s oeuvre and argue that his practice may be understood in that sense as internalizing mechanical reproduction but turning it to different account. This establishes something key for the rest of this book: the way in which the condition Benjamin termed “mechanical reproduction” can become an imaginative resource for artistic practice and a way of modeling the business of art-­making, not in simple opposition to the systems of commodification, but supported and structured by them. Chapter 2, “Seeing Machines,” focuses on the technological devices and experimental objects artists invented between the 1910s and the 1930s, outside traditional mediums, to provide new models of visual experience, as well as studying the documents of these objects, in the form of studio photographs, that functioned to help artists to see and review their work and to establish artistic affiliations with their peers. I open by examining Hans Bellmer’s Doll photographs, from 1933–­34, in a way that displaces the significance of the female body that forms the figuration of much of this imagery, while at the same time deflating valorizations of their avant-­gardist criticality. I then compare Bellmer’s images with two further “heroic” paradigms of the early twentieth-­century avant-­gardes: Picasso’s development of collage and constructions in 1912–­14 and Duchamp’s making and staging of his The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–­23), commonly called the Large Glass, and the related development of his readymades and “precision optics”

The Art of Mechanical Reproduction 7

Introduction 8

projects at the same period. Reconsidering these projects’ attacks on the figure and the mediums of painting and sculpture, I suggest that we may understand these artists’ constitution of and reflection on experimental objects on the model of toys, devices, or small “seeing machines” (doll, readymades, Guitar) staged in tableaux in the studio and captured in studio photographs, using theorizations of “play” drawn from psychoanalytic sources, as well as from Benjamin’s essays on toys and his related writings.20 As Miriam Hansen and others have shown, Benjamin’s remarks on play became the basis for his account of our reception of cinema, expressed in particular in the second version of his “Work of Art” essay (1936), in his idea of Spielraum, or “room-­for-­play.”21 In Benjamin’s words, “The function of film is to train human beings in the apperception and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily,” insofar as “the primary social function of art today is to rehearse [the] interplay” between “nature and humanity” that he says is the grounding of modern technology.22 The key to this account of our playfully adaptive reception of film lies in Benjamin’s theorization of mimesis as both the fundamental basis of our capacity for play, in which the child mimics (or reproduces) anything from the observed behavior of adults to the movement of a train, and the foundation for our making and reception of art.23 Mimesis, arising apparently spontaneously in the human subject, as seen in childhood play, extends the potential for a dialectical reconciliation of nature and technology: responding to and adaptively transforming the current historical state of technology represented by mechanical reproduction.24 In this way, the potential that mimesis extends is for an understanding of art and wider experimental, subjective, and improvised cultural practices as playfully imitating, and so mediating, the realm of industrial technology, represented by larger-­scale apparatuses of work and leisure; as cinema is mediated, for example, through devising and playing with visual toys (as we see in the discussion of Chris Marker in chapter 5).25 This is to understand artistic practice—­which I propose here as on a continuum with our everyday practices of life and habit—­as a kind of testing-­space, in which the subject experiments with the new forms of visuality and behavior that contemporary cultural conditions demand and stimulate.26 The impromptu and nondirected character of this testing distinguishes it from an instrumental form of rehearsal, undertaken so that the subject “gets better” at the activity, for the purpose of a predefined, productive goal.27 Rather, I suggest in chapter 2 that Benjamin’s theory of the mediating function of art vis-­à-­vis technology is well understood by comparison with the account developed a few years later by the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott in his theorization of the transitional object, which Winnicott understands as mediating the subject’s accommodation to the world of objects and others.28 In this way, contemporary technology and the forms of social relation it promotes are understood to become adapted in art and playful cultural practices to the

use of the subject, becoming phantasmatically invested in the process, and so altering the subject’s relation to and understanding of the world (in turn sometimes reciprocally altering the material or technological form or practice too).29 Understanding the practices of the early twentieth-­century avant-­gardes to function on this model of mediation of technology, the result is that rather than simply attacking or subverting commodification, the art practices studied here are understood as fed and enabled by the “age of mechanical reproduction”: contemporary modes of commodified display, for example, in the new plate-­glass shop windows, beloved of the early twentieth-­century avant-­ gardes, suggesting new models of the picture-­space, like the surface-­and-­space of the Glass, that enabled a “holding together” of the work of art, even as it was reconfigured. The picture of exchanges between artists that is broached here, and the question of a visual culture that is constituted in dialogue with wider commercial culture, is explored further in my next two chapters. Chapter 3 examines this question in relation to the work of a generation of American artists who made their first works around 1948–­54, at the same time that Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists were producing their major paintings. This younger generation, among whom I count Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Jasper Johns, were artists who were not young enough to be positioned as “sons” to the Abstract Expressionist “fathers,” but who might be regarded as younger brothers, perhaps. Focusing on the work of Kelly in particular, I examine the way in which he trained his hand to register glimpsed parcels of visual form and translate them into painting: hand and eye functioning as a kind of “camera vision” to reproduce visual observation, and enabling the construction of a depersonalized aesthetic that fundamentally enables nonreproductive, lateral affiliations. Chapter 3 thus picks up from chapter 1 a Bauhaus-­era enthusiasm for the “apparatization” of the human subject, which fits the body into a system of mechanical prostheses and technologically remakes the human sensorium, and moves this story on to a vision of the body immersed in an absorptive technological environment, drawing on the key moment of John Cage’s immersion in the anechoic chamber in the labs at Harvard, circa 1952. Focusing on Kelly’s paintings and drawings, as simultaneously technologized—­transferred recordings of a motor-­borne and instrumentalized vision—­and bodily, full of swelling forms, I argue they disrupt the modernist painting surface but also complicate the avant-­gardist paradigm with a different model of visual pleasure in which the body itself is reconfigured as a “seeing machine.” This chapter exemplifies the way that, as in Benjamin’s description of the toy exhibition at the Märkisches Museum, my focus throughout the book extends to include “not just ‘toys’ [or in my case, works of art] in the narrower sense of the word, but a great many objects on the margins.”30 Just as Benjamin described toys emerging as a displaced form of production, consequent

The Art of Mechanical Reproduction 9

Introduction 10

upon changes in wider artisanal practices, so the forms and objects and “small works” that emerge as a side-­effect of wider artistic production, marginal to both art-­making, on the one hand, and industry, on the other, are understood here as having the potential to mediate the ideological and phantasmatic investments of both: studio photographs, for example, and small, handheld models for sculptures or paintings, like those by Klee and Kelly (discussed in chapters 1 and 3, respectively), as well as pages from scrapbooks, postcards, and experimental painting-­objects hung from the ceiling in the studio. These all point toward what I think is a defining feature and continuing value of the avant-­garde, namely, experimentalism. The practices described might be art-­ making or wider cultural practices, seen in people’s everyday lives. In either case, such a practice contributes to what I see as the continuing tradition of avant-­garde aesthetics, along the lines that Benjamin began to outline. Much conceptual art might be described as experimental in this way. In chapter 4 we see the playful mediation of technology I have described as artists take up the recent invention of a new machine of mechanical reproduction, Xerox, heralded by critics such as Marshall McLuhan as a divine synthesis of photography and the printing press. Enabling a focused and concentrated attack on aesthetic values but, at the same time, the reconfiguration of aesthetic values in new, distributed structures (which, I suggest, we see rephrased in the contemporary media environment), Xerox is exemplary of the problematic this book studies: namely, the ongoing reprise of the Benjaminian thematic of mechanical reproduction, in new technological configurations, as the century progresses. At the same time, I argue that the particular pressures of the historical moment of the 1960s produced distinctive new articulations of the theme: the model of mechanical reproduction given in the photocopy, for example, enabling the distribution of documents via “networks” or “systems” and supporting a concerted attack on aesthetic values, as found in the single, material object, and on the idea of cultural tradition, now expressed in the idea of the “medium.” And yet, even at the point of, once again, the apparent destruction of “aura” and the autonomous work of art, and the renewal of Moholy-­Nagyian techno-­ euphoria in the writings of critics like Marshall McLuhan, I argue that the way in which key works of conceptual art incorporate the photocopier and, in turn, make use of a deflated and pseudo-­documentary photography to construct networks (or apparatuses) of production and consumption, demonstrates not so much the destruction of aesthetics as the renewed and ongoing avant-­garde reconfiguration of aesthetic pleasure in a new, technological sense. Aesthetic experience here is seen to arise dialectically, realized on the site precisely of its destruction. Such technological reconfiguration is what enables the artwork to provide a form of aesthetic experience that reveals the conditions of its production in its historical moment, thus inheriting the form of avant-­garde aesthetics that Benjamin pioneered. For while conceptual art marks the explicit

reconstruction of the artwork outside the structures of privileged and autonomous artistic mediums, and its rehousing within structures of mechanical reproduction, the consequence is not only the impoverished “barbarism” that Benjamin, in some places, celebrated.31 Chapter 4 thus supplies my most direct argument for the view that the destruction of aura does not mean the end of aesthetics; that a medium-­based understanding of artistic practice is not necessary for the survival of art as a realm of distinctive value; and indeed, that such value emerges most forcefully only where the work of art is most directly engaged with “the problem of technology.” Even where artists do not engage new technologies directly, the potential of a cross-­media approach to their work is shown in chapter 5, which is a study of two films, Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), and a painting, Gerhard Richter’s Betty (1988). It is situated at this point in the book in order to give an extended exploration of the ways in which the arts have represented the advent of technological forms of the image and its implications. Picking up on Benjamin’s reference to the forms of beauty flung up by technologized arts as “the Blue Flower in the land of technology,” I trace the “Blue Flower” as a trope of German Romanticism back to Novalis’s 1802 novel, Heinrich von Öfterdingen, in which the hero dreams of a blue flower at the heart of which is a woman’s face. Taking this as a key form of the romantic, nostalgic, and eroticized investment in the image, I trace the recurrence of female figures that are made to personify this investment, through Richter’s Betty to the unnamed woman in La Jetée and the female character, Hari, in Solaris, in order to show the way in which this history of the traumatic construction of photography has been told as a story of the loss of a dream of unity for the subject, embodied in the figure of a woman. It is the movement of each of these women that is a key focus of my interest: Betty’s arrested turning away, her quick movement stilled by the snapshot pose and restilled by the painstaking and virtuosic craftsmanship of the painting, the blossoming of still photographs into moving film that occurs on the site of the woman’s face in La Jetée, and Hari’s convulsive jerking back to life after she realizes that she is only a copy of the original Hari and has attempted suicide, only to find that artificial image as she is, she cannot die. Following Benjamin’s theorization of the shattered, fragmentary form of aesthetic experience that survives in the age of mechanical reproduction, I explore the ways in which Tarkovsky’s Solaris might be seen to present an alternative construction of our intersection as subjects with technological forms of the image. Understanding aura psychoanalytically, as based in our longing for (re)union with the mother, reveals, first, that the “loss” of aura is, more precisely, our projection of an imagined ideal union into the past, as something that we have always already, necessarily lost, and, second, that the question of our ability, culturally, to bear this “loss” ultimately rests on our capacity to allow ourselves to envisage the future as different from the past.

The Art of Mechanical Reproduction 11

Introduction 12

In my final chapter I take examination of some of these questions further by turning to two contemporary artists’ excavation of the machinery of film to produce a reenvisioning and transformation of the 1930s model of the film machine, as the ur-­model of the apparatus itself. Chapter 6 also develops my focus on the question that my previous chapters have shown to derive from mechanical reproduction, of how to make work that acknowledges the past without becoming suborned to structures of inheritance. The form of the machine is mined by certain artists for its usefulness in this task, I propose, and in particular, the form that is the filmic apparatus: instrument of ideological inscription par excellence, but also the quintessential “wonder-­box” of the modern age. Starting from an artist, Tacita Dean, whose declared commitment is to film, which she, like Richter, might appear to mourn as an obsolescent “medium,” this chapter studies instead what new theoretical perspectives might be opened out from what I take to be her materialist commitment to film as a technology. Taking one of Dean’s major film-­works as the principal case study, I show her backward-­looking gaze to be useful for telescoping a visual history of machine aesthetics, just as Benjamin described his method as a “telescoping of the past through the present.”32 Dean’s angle of view makes clear the distance between her present moment and that past time, with the result that her lens reconfigures the past. When, at the end, the focus shifts to John Gerrard, an artist working with the latest computer games technology, this longer history of the film machine is found to be far from obsolete, and instead provides a paradigmatic case of the way in which, throughout the book, I argue that the histories of machines and technologies in visual culture continue to inform contemporary art. This art may be “post-­medium,” but it is grounded in the longer histories of twentieth-­century art, offering an intensified and virtualized descriptive vocabulary for the ongoing machine age, testifying to, exposing, and making us viscerally feel the particular qualities of life lived under and within this economic order. Hollis Frampton, the American experimental filmmaker and critic, published an essay in 1971 that sums up many of the themes of this book. Defining a machine as “a thing made up of distinguishable ‘parts,’ organized in imitation of some function of the human body,” Frampton wrote as if in retrospect, declaring that the “Age of Machines” was over, and describing cinema as its “survival-­form.”33 This is an argument that, in chapter 4, I contextualize, and in chapter 6, I contest, in the sense that I argue that the machine age is not over.34 And yet Frampton’s definition of a machine is, I think, inherent in the way in which artists of the twentieth century imagined machines, and it is a definition that stands for almost all of the machines considered in this book. It is no coincidence, I think, that it is a definition produced by a filmmaker. Machine aesthetics and film theory are so deeply intertwined that theories of film and theories of the machine, almost from the beginning of cinema, amounted to the same thing—­as indeed, we saw in the case of Brecht’s theorization of the

apparatus. Film, too, presides over the imaginary of this book: the cinematic is a constant frame of reference and source for what we might, following and adapting Benjamin, call Denkbilder (thought-­pictures, or pictures for thinking with).35 Thus this book enacts Frampton’s account of film as having swallowed all other machines, since most of the machines, and my entire thinking here, in a sense, are postcinematic.36 Another repeated refrain in these chapters is an emphasis on practice and on artists’ relations to their peers. Klee’s practice is pictured as willfully private, against the background of the technical school where he worked, and yet as deriving its most important significance from it; Bellmer’s work is repositioned as aimed at enabling his artistic affiliation and his incorporation into a more congenial milieu; and Ellsworth Kelly’s reworkings of a European avant-­garde paradigm of mobile and hyperalert vision between 1948 and 1954, I suggest, relies for its legibility on its affiliation to artists who were his contemporaries, working independently at the same period in the United States. A different but complementary dimension of this problematic of affiliation is brought out in chapter 6, where I examine how a female artist positions herself in relation to largely male artistic precursors, through study of the work of Tacita Dean. Such a focus on the practical as well as theoretical questions that emerge from artists’ need to position their own work in relation to that of sympathetic others, is fitting for a study that aims to reconfigure the traditional conceptualization of and status accorded to the medium in modernist art histories. Whereas the medium in the hands of Greenberg, as I have indicated, supported critical narratives of apparently quasi-­autonomous, formal artistic development, which in turn were subtended by a dynamic of Oedipal, heroic succession, my technological reconfiguration of artistic practice enables attention instead to artists’ need to reach out laterally, to address their peers, as well as to the ways in which such technologically based practice may support the questioning of structures of artistic inheritance and succession, as in the work of Dean. The ongoing question of an “art of mechanical reproduction” has this gendered dimension too, this book proposes. There is a related shift in critical emphasis throughout the book from the traumatic—­a key formation of modernism, which has supplied to criticism a model of disruption, subversion, resistance to and critique of contemporary conditions—­to a focus on the everyday and adaptive qualities of our engagements with the world; hence the importance of the studio photograph throughout the book as both an everyday and a carefully staged document. This shift marks also the nature of my engagement with psychoanalysis, both to reemphasize the textures of our everyday, rather than traumatic experience (Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life is a key text in chapter 2), and to develop some theoretically useful sense of the psychic structures that are built into our bodily and imaginative adaptation to the technologically supported world. Screen memories, discussed in chapters 2, 3, and 5, are examples,

The Art of Mechanical Reproduction 13

Introduction 14

I suggest, of such structures. Actively fabricated from the visual scraps and debris of everyday experience and charged with affect and intensity by libidinal energies, they enable a mobile and shifting relation to the past according to our present phantasmatic investments, and provide paradigmatic cases of how things may be simultaneously objects of repression and woven into visual experience: seen and not seen, hidden in plain view, yet the site of ongoing and adaptive work. Here, and likewise in the account given of the apparatus in Klee’s practice in chapter 1 and the space given to consideration of sibling-­ structures of play and fantasy in relation to Bellmer’s photographs in chapter 2, are examples of the slight angle at which I stand in relation to more familiar uses of Freudian theory. In some respects, the approach to the psyche that I make is in tune with Benjamin’s psychology of the expert: retooling shock into a tool of adaptation, survival, and even enriched encounter under newly technologized conditions. A Moholy-­Nagyian/Benjaminian psychology is explored in chapter 1 through an emphasis on habit in Klee’s practice as productive of new forms; in chapter 2, through my stress on the adaptive, in particular, in relation to the “spectacular” imaginary of commercial shop window displays; in chapter 3, in my discussion of Kelly’s, Rauschenberg’s, and Twombly’s distracted studio practice, particularly their doodling and collage-­work using found scraps of paper, as productive of new aesthetic forms; and even in the drilled and repetitive movements of the body in the “mechanical ballets” that I examine in chapter 6. However, the mode of distracted adaptive psychology I have outlined was not Benjamin’s last word on the conditions of our perception in relation to technology. Benjamin’s arguments on this theme extended not only to the “apparatized” view of practice I have outlined, but also developed—­in particular, in the third version of the “Work of Art” essay, of 1939—­into a darker view of technology as a platform for structures of aestheticized experience, ripe for exploitation within the existing political settlement. As Susan Buck-­Morss has emphasized, Benjamin in this later essay connects the alteration of sense perception by technology to the rise of fascism, in places describing the changes in our perception as something more like (in her words) a “crisis in cognitive experience,” causing the “alienation of the senses” and society’s consequent alienation from itself.37 Buck-­Morss develops in particular Benjamin’s remark that “humanity [having once been] an object of spectacle for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-­alienation has reached such a degree that it is capable of experiencing its own destruction as an aesthetic engagement of the highest order,” into an argument connecting Benjamin’s warnings about the exploitation of photography and film by fascist political systems to the more global arguments about technologically supported spectacle that were developed by Guy Debord in his 1967 book Society of the Spectacle. This is where I think it becomes useful to remember Brecht’s warning against what he called “utter fatalism.” There is a conservatism about some

versions of the modernist critical framework, in particular its opposition of high art to mass popular culture that I would hope to resist, and that I think Benjamin’s picture of the technologized reconfiguration of artistic making, as I have outlined it, speaks against. Furthermore the conservative position represses a truth. If we allow the Frankfurt school of critical theory to harden into oppositional categories that cannot be dialectically conceived, then we deny the truthful insight in Benjamin’s always-­moving, flexible, and transformative account of our relation to ourselves and our surrounding world. In what follows I argue against an aesthetic theory solely of critique and resistance, attempting to retrieve instead that adaptive and imaginative model of practice that Benjamin suggested, for example, by his use of the term “technology” in “Little History of Photography” or in the second version of the “Work of Art” essay.38 The point is not to dispute the potential for fascistic or spectacular exploitation of technologies (nor to deny that Benjamin saw the ultimate chance for human emancipation in a revolutionary politics). Rather, the question for this book is how we can construct a critical response to works of art that acknowledges the ways in which they are shaped by their production within current technologized and spectacular conditions, and so retrieves the full dialectical potential of art and aesthetic experience “in the age of mechanical reproduction” (remembering that Benjamin also sought this). As I have indicated, and as this book hopes to demonstrate, the history of the avant-­garde is of engagement with and enthusiasm for the new technologies and image-­forms of mass commercial production. It is necessary to correct histories that would exclude such traffic: part of the work here is to recover a “buried history” of modernism’s engagement with such debased and illusion-­ heavy forms. One of the artists to have insisted most openly on connecting the conditions and processes of industrial and technological production and consumption with the activities of artistic making and viewing, as we have seen, was László Moholy-­Nagy, whose uncritical technological enthusiasm represents something this book tries to avoid but also the possibility of something it hopes to retrieve. Indeed, Moholy-­Nagy is an important, though rarely directly studied figure in the book (works or books by him feature in most of the chapters except chapter 2, where the Austrian theater designer Frederick Kiesler appears in a similar role instead, and chapter 4, where his function is fulfilled by Marshall McLuhan). Moholy-­Nagy’s 1936 photograph of the spiral staircase of the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill, viewed through glass (fig. 0.2), condenses several of the motifs of this book, and permits a final glimpse of the questions that lie at its heart. The plate-­glass window, advanced design light fittings, and the shining metal of the construction, brought out by the gleaming contrasts of the black-­ and-­white photograph, build the picture into a paean to modern materials; the spiral staircase, suspended in air behind the glassy lens, is “dressed” by the

The Art of Mechanical Reproduction 15

0.2  László Moholy-­Nagy, Stairway in the Bexhill Seaside Pavilion, 1936. Gelatin silver print, 20 × 16 in (51 × 40 cm). Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film. Museum purchase; ex-­collection Sybil Moholy-­Nagy. © 2013 Hattula Moholy-­Nagy/DACS.

light and the glass to appear as a sinuous, elegant, mechanized, ideal form. The photograph presents a shallow, glass-­fronted, boxed space, which will prove important as an image-­form for much of the work I go on to study. Moholy-­ Nagy photographed the staircase through glass, rather than on its own, from the other side of the window, as he could have done. The result achieves both a distinctive spatial construction, in the play between the flat, reflective surface and the shallow depth of the inner, compressed space, and striking optical effects, which are released by the sheet of glass overlaying the scene, as reflec-

The Art of Mechanical Reproduction 17

0.3  J. J. Grandville, Interplanetary Bridge, from the original edition of H. Fournier, Un Autre Monde (Paris, 1844). Engraving. © 2013 White Images/SCALA, Florence.

tions add to the general play of light and shadows on the staircase. This image-­ form—­which is post-­Cubist, but also owes much to the modern environments created by shop windows—­may be compared to the similar composition of compressed linear form, in a shallow, boxed space, in the oil-­transfers by Paul Klee, which I discuss in chapter 1, as well as Hans Bellmer’s Doll photographs, my subject in chapter 2. But it also dramatizes a feature of my methodology throughout the book, which is to take up technological forms and use them as a “lens” through which to view works of art and methods of artistic production. The motif of looking as if through glass, or devising experimental forms of optical instruments, called in this book “seeing machines,” is found throughout Walter Benjamin’s writings, and in this sense, my hope is that this book contributes to the constitution of something like a Benjaminian optic.39 An older echo in Moholy-­Nagy’s photograph is perhaps to the engraving by Grandville that so struck Benjamin, the Interplanetary Bridge (1844) (fig. 0.3), showing the cast-­iron walkway between the planets, which is discussed at several locations through the Arcades Project (1927–­40). As such, the spiral staircase photographed through glass at Bexhill is one of a number of industrial-­aesthetic monuments, images of which flash and recur through the book. The Benjaminian term for these monuments is “dialectical images”: icons of a particular stage of industrial development, which, precisely in the moment of the intense aesthetic pleasure they afford us—­characterized by Benjamin as a “lightning flash”—­hold out the prospect of historical insight, or the realization not only of the way in which our present moment is constituted

Chapter One 18

by and in relation to the past, but also, in the shock of pleasure they give, a revelation of the transformative potential of the new technologies and materials that surround us now.40 What such examples demonstrate is that we need a theory of the aesthetic that is engaged with, not simply opposed to, the forms of production and consumption that characterize capitalism—­because works of art, like ourselves, are embedded in them. Accordingly, the chapters that follow record a history of art’s involvement with machineries and technologies of industrial production and mass culture as well as the mediums and practices of fine art. This is a history of the closeness of certain essential forms and impulses of the avant-­garde to the wider, technologically supported culture: the art of mechanical reproduction, in its fullest sense, as the most fundamental condition of our past century and our present moment.

Oil-­t ransfer

Paul Klee’s oil-­transfers are perhaps the most instantly recognizable and visually characteristic of all his works.1 Many of the most famous works by Klee—­the ones to which legends attach—­are oil-­transfers: not only the Angelus Novus, which belonged to Walter Benjamin and which, as we have seen, illustrated his “angel of history,” flying backward into the future, but also Twittering Machine (1922, 151—­the date and work number listed in the oeuvre-­catalogue Klee maintained) (fig. 1.1), which first taught Clement Greenberg, so he said, to “see” abstract art.2 Yet despite their considerable visual interest, their cohesiveness as a clear “type” of Klee’s output, and their intriguing material composition, to date little attention has been devoted to these works as a group in their own right. The appearance of the oil-­transfers is distinctive: black, spidery ink drawings, stained with watercolor in bright pinks, burnt orange, acid greens, and yellows, typically, they present little scenes, boxed around with an inner, black ink border, featuring stick-­figure dramatis personae. Often with narrative or descriptive titles, the works have a stagy, theatrical, if miniature, feel. The space the tiny figures inhabit is shallow and boxlike, transparent through the bright veils of color, but flattened and pinned to the surface of the page by the black web of drawing. This is a pictorial space that can be read as “modernist” in its vaporizing of representational depth and its sensitization of surface, but

19

Chapter One 20

1.1  Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922. Oil-­transfer drawing and watercolor on paper on cardboard, 16 × 12 inches (41 × 31 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. Purchase Fund. © 2013 MOMA, New York/SCALA, Florence.

that, in its fictive, illusory qualities, its illustrative scenery and titles, and the lurid glow of its colors, seems to retain a dragging resistance we could call “kitsch” to more orthodox modernist (Cubist, Constructivist) reconstructions of the picture plane.3 “Oil-­transfer” is the English translation of the German term, Ölpause, that has been adopted by the Paul Klee Foundation as the uniform classification for these works in the catalogue raisonné.4 For a long time, no detailed account of how the oil-­transfers were made was available, since Klee left no written account of it. Indeed, Christian Geelhaar reports that Klee “guarded the technique of oil-­color drawing as a close workshop secret.”5 However, between

Mnemotechnics 21

1.2  Paul Klee, Room Perspective with Inhabitants, 1921. Oil-­transfer drawing and watercolor on paper on cardboard, 19 × 12.5 inches (49 × 32 cm). © Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

1969 and 1970 analyses of the oil-­transfers were carried out at the Klee Foundation, and in 1973 Jürgen Glaesemer, the foundation’s director and author of the first scholarly catalogue of Klee’s works, gave the first full and detailed description of the process (although some details remain speculative). Klee would paint a sheet of paper with black oil paint (or lithographic printing ink), and when the paint had almost dried, but was still slightly tacky, he would

Chapter One 22

turn the painted sheet facedown onto a fresh sheet of paper. Over this, he would place an existing drawing, then trace its contours with a metal-­tipped etching tool. This stage of the process appears sometimes to have varied. Presumably in order to protect an original drawing from becoming too scored and marked by the etching needle, sometimes, it seems, he would substitute a tracing of an existing drawing, or lay a sheet of tracing paper over the original drawing and trace with the etching needle through both sheets. In a few cases, he appears to have traced with the needle directly over the original drawing itself—­the drawing for Room Perspective with Inhabitants (1921, 24) (fig. 1.2) is particularly heavily scored and creased. In any case, the tacky, oil-­painted sheet would function as a kind of improvised carbon paper, transferring a black line to the clean piece of paper underneath.6 However, and here I quote Glaesemer directly, “not only would the outlines of the drawing become visible in a new form, but also randomly distributed flecks and structures of oil paint were left behind, which originated from the rubbing or the pressure of the hand [on the sheet] during the tracing process.”7 The line that Klee could achieve by means of oil-­transfer must have been an important reason for his interest in the technique. Its quality consists essentially in being a visibly imprinted, as opposed to drawn, line: grainy, partial, and in places slightly disarticulated or “removed.” It can appear as “wet” or “dry,” depending on how wet the sheet of lithographic ink was when the transfer was made. Works such as Veil Dance (1920, 34) or The Pathos of Fertility (1921, 130) show a line that results from using relatively dry “carbon paper”: still granulated but achieving a fine, precise, rather scratchy definition. City in the Intermediate Realm (1921, 25) and Mountain Formation (1924, 123), by contrast, illustrate the characteristic qualities of the “wet” oil-­transfer line: blurry and softened by fat, seeping blots that bloom out across the absorbent paper. Although the main period of their production was 1919–­25, oil-­transfers sporadically appear in Klee’s oeuvre-­catalogue right up to 1939, the year before his death.8 A change occurs in the oil-­transfers after 1925. None of the six produced in 1926 is colored, and each is characterized by a centrally placed outline form. In 1927, again, most of the oil-­transfers (e.g., Small Fool in a Trance 2, 1927) are uncolored and the central imprinted figures are increasingly blotched, scuffed, and impacted, almost as though scratched into stone (thus bearing some comparison to the series of small bas-­reliefs scratched into plaster between 1929 and 1932). In the final three years in which Klee produced oil-­transfers—­1933, 1934, and 1939—­none is colored and the outline forms are heavily stained and scarified. These later works reflect Klee’s increased focus on drawing in the last years of his life: between 1937 and May 1940, when he died, Klee produced 1,583 drawings.9 Like many of his late drawings done in charcoal, the late oil-­transfers are usually made with just a single, centrally placed arabesque or geometric linear figure and betray a fascination with reversibility (e.g., The Ugly Woman, 1939, 1181; or, earlier, The Bay, 1930, 39).

What was the reason for the decline in Klee’s production of oil-­transfers—­ especially when they had been such a characteristic and important part of his earlier career? In 1984, Glaesemer noted that the dates of Klee’s major exploration of oil-­transfer (1919–­25) coincided neatly with the dates of his first professional contract with the dealer Hans Goltz. Pointing out that, under the terms of the contract, Klee was paid at least twice as much for colored as for monochrome works, Glaesemer argued that the oil-­transfer technique developed as a simple way for Klee to add value to his drawings, readily transposing works of a kind that he found relatively easy to produce into a medium that provided greater financial reward.10 While it may seem reductive (and Glaesemer himself modified his statement on these grounds), I believe that this explanation touches on something important about Klee’s practice, particularly in these years. (It might also explain why oil-­transfers made from 1926 on were rarely colored. After the contract with Goltz ended, Klee had no further incentive to deploy the technique to recycle drawings for sale as “colored works”—­note, not as paintings—­and was free to concentrate on oil-­transfer, in reduced quantity, as a method for the production of line.) Glaesemer was, I think, right to identify the processing character of oil-­ transfer as its fundamental characteristic, and so to invoke the idea of an economy in relation to these works. Key to the significance of the oil-­transfers is the processing of other existing works: finished works often already listed as such in the running oeuvre-­catalogue that Klee kept. Oil-­transfer was thus a system involving the preservation, retrieval, and retranscription of prized drawings, which drawings in turn were important to Klee’s self-­construction as an artist, as demonstrated in Klee’s essays of the time, for example, “Creative Credo” (1920) and the Pedagogical Sketchbook of 1925, which emphasize draughtsmanship as the basis of artistic practice. It is this that makes oil-­transfer worthy of attention: its status as a procedure or set of operations performed on existing works, and with a reflexive or hermeneutic potential therefore. While Glaesemer identified the significance of oil-­transfer processing in economic terms, as a means of increasing the monetary worth of a drawing—­ and other writers, too, have spoken of Klee’s “thrift”—­the recognition of a critical or hermeneutic dimension to its operations means that the sense in which oil-­transfer is understood to set an “economy” in place must be expanded from any narrowly financial meaning.11 I shall argue that the cycles of making, preserving, retrieval, and reuse of drawings do indeed make up an economic system, but that the full significance of this must be understood in terms of a psychic economy. In an interview in 1986, Felix Klee offered an explanation of his father’s interest in oil-­transfer that runs on similar lines to Glaesemer’s, but also expands it somewhat: “Since he hated to part with his drawings, he devised a ‘transfer method.’ . . . By retracing one of his drawings through his homemade carbon paper and by touching up the new drawing with watercolor, he could keep the original drawing and at the same time earn more money by selling a

Mnemotechnics 23

watercolor.”12 In the simultaneous both/and of the oil-­transfer system that Felix Klee points to here—­simultaneously preserving and “consuming” a treasured drawing in the sense of entering it into the economic cycle that was Klee’s means of material support—­oil-­transfer assumes the character of an achieved solution to a problem of conflicted desires having their root in Klee’s investment in drawing.

Investing in drawing

Chapter One 24

The central importance to Klee’s oil-­transfers of a reflexive involvement with his own, absorbing practice of drawing is borne out by attention to the very first oil-­transfer works. The first oil-­transfer recorded in the oeuvre-­catalogue is a work called Ancient Demon (1919, 70), which has been lost.13 This work is followed by a series of self-­portrait oil-­transfers, which show the artist drawing. The first three are Thinking Artist (1919, 71) (fig. 1.3), Feeling Artist (1919, 72) (fig. 1.4), and Pondering Artist (1919, 73), and the group is rounded out with the pencil self-­portrait, Creating Artist (1919, 74). The next in the series, Absorption (1919, 75), is the drawing for the extensively reproduced lithograph After the Drawing 1919, 75 (1919, 113; also commonly known as Absorption), which, O. K. Werckmeister points out, while “not expressly identified as a self-­portrait or even as a picture of an artist . . . [n]onetheless has been understood as a self-­ representation ever since it was reproduced as a lithograph in the Münchner Blätter of September 1919.”14 The fact that self-­portraits appear as the first oil-­ transfers should not of course be interpreted as meaning that these works were actually the first oil-­transfers Klee made. Rather, his decision to catalogue the self-­portraits, which show him drawing, first, suggests his construction of oil-­ transfer as a system to further enable his ongoing narrativization of drawing as at the “origin” of his practice. Klee has long been acclaimed as preeminently a graphic artist. The reasons for this are summarized neatly by Will Grohmann, who was one of Klee’s earliest commentators, and who tended to stay close to what Klee told him of his own self-­understanding as an artist: Paul Klee produced some 9,000 works of which nearly 5,000 are drawings. They constitute the largest graphic output of any twentieth century artist and surely one of the most significant. . . . At the beginning of his career and for some time thereafter Klee felt that he was essentially a draftsman. . . . He devoted himself almost exclusively to making drawings and prints for some years with only very few attempts at watercolor before 1914 and very few oils before 1919. . . . Everything that caught his interest found its first—­and sometimes not only its first—­ expression in drawing. . . . Even in later years the output of drawings sometimes outnumbers the works in other mediums.15

Mnemotechnics 25

1.3  Paul Klee, Thinking Artist, 1919. Oil-­ transfer drawing on paper on cardboard, 10.3 × 7 inches (26 × 18 cm). Kunstmuseum Bern, Steiger-­Legat. © Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

Chapter One 26

1.4  Paul Klee, Feeling Artist, 1919. Oil-­transfer drawing on paper on cardboard, 10.3 × 7 inches (26 × 18 cm). © Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

Klee’s investment in drawing was perfectly literal: he kept them. The entire condition of possibility for oil-­transfer was the keeping of his drawings. By the time of his death, we know that Klee had a stored collection dating back to at least 1920, since it was around this time that Klee began deliberately to withhold his drawings from public view, refusing to exhibit them in the main, and refusing to sell them. A letter survives, dated 1934 and written by Klee to Daniel-­Henry Kahnweiler, his dealer in Paris, which makes clear that in or around 1920 Klee reevaluated his drawings and, from this date on, attached a new significance to them: “Keep them [the drawings] for the time being if you wish, but do not sell them—­since 1920 I have no longer sold my drawings but keep them all myself, and give at most one drawing away as a special gift. Such is my regard for drawings.”16 In the collection of the Paul Klee Center in Switzerland, a list survives of “Ten large drawings” that Klee sent to the Alfred Flechtheim gallery in 1930, each marked carefully “Nicht verkäuflich”—­not for sale—­and across the list at the bottom a pencil scrawl: “Von Fl. zurück erhalten (persönlich) am 3.VI.30”—­received from Fl. personally on June 3, 1930. It can be inferred that Klee took great pains to ensure that any drawings that left his possession were safely returned. Klee intended these careful practices of retention and storage to ensure that the drawings would remain together as a collection after his death (unfortunately, many of them were sold).17 Klee’s retention of his drawings was in addition to his practice of putting aside some of his works in diverse media to be preserved as a “study collection.” The study collection is identified by O. K. Werckmeister as one of several “memory functions” (though he does not use this term) that he analyzes as operative within Klee’s practice.18 The artist’s archiving of his own work—­ evidenced by several photographs of files stacked and shelved in his studio—­ necessitated intricate procedures of storage and record-­keeping, which can also be said to constitute “memory” systems, even as they also work to help constitute the historical record. An interesting example of such a photograph is reproduced in the first catalogue of Klee’s works for the year 1940, which shows three large stacks of drawing folders piled in the corner of Klee’s studio (fig. 1.5).19 Klee used these folders to store unframed sheets, which were protected within each folder by a separate covering sheet, attached to the upper or left-­hand side of the cardboard mount. A second photograph, reproduced in the catalogue alongside the first, shows a folder like one of those in the stack, opened out, displaying on its inside right-­hand sheet the original drawing—­a charcoal drawing from 1940, Persevere! (1940, 337)—­and on the left-­hand side, a mirror-­reversed charcoal imprint (or Kohleabklatsch, to use Klee’s term), which has been produced on the cover sheet by the pressure of the stack (fig. 1.6). As we look from one photograph to the other, before our eyes, the “stack” is converted into a technology, that is, a system of production. The charcoal drawing that

Mnemotechnics 27

Chapter One 28

1.5  Felix Klee, Studio of Paul Klee with Cat, Bimbo I, Kistlerweg 6, Bern, July/ August, 1937. Photograph, 3.4 × 5.1 inches (9 × 13 cm). Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. Gift of Klee family. © Klee-­ Nachlassverwaltung, Bern.

was fed in has been simultaneously preserved, duplicated, and transformed by the workings of the stack.20 This example illustrates, I suggest, the way in which Klee’s archiving, storage, and record-­keeping practices functioned to condition (and were conditioned by) the forms of making that he adopted into his practice. The stack is proposed here as a model to help achieve an understanding of the oil-­transfer works. The hinged and folded spatial structure of the stack, through which drawing is squeezed, compressed, and turned inside out, offers, I argue, a comparison to the operations of oil-­transfer. There are two features of the stack’s functioning that are pertinent: its remastering of the drawn line as an imprinted one, and its mirror-­reversal of a composition.21 The comparison to oil-­transfer also holds in that both are systems derived from Klee’s archival, record-­keeping, and storage practices, and both were used by him to reconfigure drawing. Perhaps the most important among his storage systems is the oeuvre-­ catalogue, which Klee kept from 1911 until the end of his life.22 Klee identified each work with two numbers, the year and a “work number,” which restarted from 1 each year (hence the convention of writing, for example, “1926, 11” after the title of a work). The catalogue raisonné lists Klee’s works in the same order as his oeuvre-­catalogue, although Klee did not follow chronological order in

Mnemotechnics 29

his number sequence and to date no one has established the exact principles guiding his ordering of works. The time that elapsed between the making and the recording of works in the oeuvre-­catalogue is noted by Klee’s son Felix, who explains that Klee “did not record his works daily, but waited until he had collected a group of about ten.”23 Even then, he might not record all of the works that were completed and ready for recording; indeed, we know of a number of works that were never entered in the oeuvre-­catalogue but which Klee nonetheless preserved, possibly with a view to recording them at a later date. It is also well known that Klee would often record works in the oeuvre-­ catalogue for a particular year that he had in fact produced several years previously. The interval that Felix Klee describes between making and recording a work—­the period of “letting lie,” as if a kind of “development” time for the image—­was, I would argue, of importance for Klee’s working process. He referred to it once himself in a note in the oeuvre-­catalogue: the entry for The Creator (1934, 213), in addition to listing the title, number, and material com-

1.6  Paul Klee, Persevere!, 1940. Pastel on paper on cardboard, 11.7 × 8.2 inches (30 × 21 cm). Photograph shows Persevere! at right, imprint on covering sheet on left. © Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

Chapter One 30

position of the work, also includes the words, “left lying for several years.”24 It seems that Klee maintained two studios, one near his place of work and one near his home, for a similar reason—­namely, so that he would come to see ongoing works anew after an interval away.25 Time-­lapse, delay, retardation, or belatedness are thus built into the structure of the oeuvre-­catalogue and its connection with his practice. Klee would habitually list the drawing that he used to make a particular oil-­transfer later in the catalogue for a given year than the oil-­transfer itself, reversing the usual order of reproduction. He would also title works “Drawing for . . . ,” giving the name of the particular oil-­transfer for which the drawing was used, but would record the drawing sometimes several years before the oil-­transfer in question (for example, Drawing for 1925, 105, which, despite its title, is entered as number 252 in the oeuvre-­catalogue for the year 1923). Simply put, Klee would as a matter of systematic practice reverse orders of temporal priority, mystifying and confounding the material relations between works. Curious effects of prescience and retrospection are created by this system of ordering—­some drawings appear to look forward to works yet to be created, while others look back to oil-­transfers they uncannily double. Even where Klee placed related works adjacent to each other in the oeuvre-­catalogue he would insist on reversing their places. The most frequent examples are those in which he placed a watercolor first with its related drawing immediately following it.26 The twists and turns of Klee’s procedures of making and recording are difficult to follow, despite the appearance of order and system. The worked and patterned fabric of the oeuvre-­catalogue aptly supports an artistic practice itself reliant upon techniques and procedures of backtracking.27 The very idea of “reproduction” is confounded by these structures. The late 1910s and early 1920s—­the period of the majority of the oil-­ transfers—­were crucial years for Klee, exactly in the middle of his adult life. He received his first invitations to teach, he signed his first professional contract with a dealer, he gave his first major retrospective, and he published his first art-­theoretical essay.28 This was also the period of Klee’s most intense involvement in self-­portraiture. In general, Klee’s professionalization and increasing artistic and financial success meant that from the mid-­1910s on, he began to put his affairs more in order and to systematize his artistic reserves. Two key events around this time were his work of transcribing, editing, and rewriting his diaries, and his retrospective reworking and cataloguing of his childhood drawings.29 This last example in particular illustrates the way in which Klee’s absorbed relationship with his own drawing was frequently central to the work, with which he was particularly concerned at this time, of returning to and remaking the material of his artistic self. In recent years, Klee scholarship has focused attention on what Christian Rümelin has called “Klee’s interaction with his own oeuvre.” Wolfgang Kersten

and Osamu Okuda in 1995 published a study of Klee’s practice of cutting up and recombining his own works, and essays by these and other authors have examined the diary, the oeuvre-­catalogue, and Klee’s cataloguing of his childhood drawings as a series of hermeneutic operations Klee performed upon his own works.30 My argument here is that the system of oil-­transfer should be understood as a process like the oeuvre-­catalogue, like the diary, like Klee’s cutting up and montaging of his own works, and that this series of interconnecting systems and processes make up Klee’s practice. Furthermore, I suggest that when these are fitted together, as I have fitted them here, we are provided with a recast picture of how that practice may be understood. In each of these smaller systems or subroutines of Klee’s practice what is at stake is a remaking of origins; which is to say, throughout his career, and especially in the late 1910s and 1920s, Klee obsessively returned to and remade the material of his artistic self. The function of the oeuvre-­catalogue, after all, is to show a beginning, or find an “origin point” for the oeuvre as a whole and within each year. Klee’s diary (or autobiography, as Christian Geelhaar has suggested it is better termed, given Klee’s extensive editing and revision) functions similarly, to show the development of the artist from his “origins.”31 Within the specificity of the oil-­transfer system, I have argued that the site of this “remaking of origins” is drawing; which is to say that drawing is cast as the point of origin for the oil-­transfers and is simultaneously transformed. In the oil-­transfers, Klee’s continuing project of recovering and remaking the origins of his artistic self in drawing is joined with a practice that fundamentally transforms and reconfigures drawing itself.

Apparatus

The oil-­transfers are a system of reinscription over the lines of existing drawings, a form of training the hand. The basic recognition that in learning to draw it is the hand that must be trained goes back at least to Renaissance exercises in the studio.32 But as reports from his students testify, it was something Klee also stressed, that the key to graphic accomplishment resides in training the operations of the hand: “keep your hand in practice,” he used to say.33 He applied the injunction to practice drawing daily not least to himself, writing in his diary in 1908, in a mixture of Latin and German, “nulla dies sine linea etwas lassen,” and repeating the instruction some thirty years later, between two entries in his oeuvre-­catalogue: “nulla dies sine linea”—­every day a line.34 Contour and outline and the practice of tracing or reinscribing around them, have a long history of use as devices of mnemotechnics. Leonardo describes in his notebooks the utility of the outline in learning to draw, describing mnemonic and graphic exercises combined—­“Method for remembering the shape of a face,” for example, or “Method of making a man’s portrait after

Mnemotechnics 31

Chapter One 32

having seen him only once”—­and recommends to the apprentice-­painter that “when . . . in bed in the dark” he is to practice “recalling the outlines of forms you have already studied . . . fixing these things in the memory.”35 As David Rosand points out, in all such early Renaissance accounts, “drawing contour in particular is the essential mnemonic means.”36 We can find the operation of reinscription marked clearly on the body of “drawing” itself, since the drawings which Klee used to make oil-­transfers can be identified by the marks the process left on them, in particular, by the line of the stylus—­called by connoisseurs of drawing the “blind line”—­that Klee used to make the tracing, running around the contours of the original drawing. We might say Klee was “memorizing” his drawings, when he sat and repeatedly, laboriously retraced their original lines with the point of the stylus. Considering the role of the stylus, and the “blind” impression it leaves in the paper of the original drawings, as well as the complex system of interleaving in the oil-­transfers, we may be reminded of another, more contemporary account of memory. Sigmund Freud, too, in 1925, modeled the workings of memory via the workings of a rudimentary, clumsy, and deliberately archaic apparatus—­in his case, a familiar children’s toy.37 Between his “Project for a Scientific Psychology” in 1895 and his “Notes on the Mystic Writing Pad” of 1925, as Jacques Derrida has described, Freud sought a structural model for the processes of memory and consciousness, progressively testing and then abandoning one mechanical model after another until he at last found what he had been seeking: “a writing machine of marvelous complexity into which the whole of the psychical apparatus will be projected.”38 The name of the apparatus he found was the Wunderblock or, as it is usually translated in English, the Mystic Writing Pad, and it would, “in each of its parts, realize the apparatus of which Freud had said in his ‘Project’: ‘We cannot off-­hand imagine an apparatus capable of such complicated functioning.’”39 The key point about the Wunderblock for Freud was its capacity both to be reinscribed and to retain a permanent trace—­very like the “both/and” capacity I have already identified as being key to Klee’s satisfaction with the oil-­transfer technique: oil-­transfer as a system enabled both the preservation of his drawings, in his possession, and with a surface unaltered (to the naked eye), capable of reuse, and the “laying down of a permanent trace,” by the production of further works. These are the two principal features of the faculty of memory that, Freud says, any proposed external model must also possess: the capacity both to retain a permanent trace and to present a fresh surface to stimuli, perpetually renewed. Whereas the model of pen and paper possesses the first—­the capacity to preserve a permanent record—­it lacks the second, since once a mark has been made using pen on paper, as Freud says, “the receptive capacity of the writing-­surface is soon exhausted.”40 The model of chalk on slate, which he also considers, fails similarly, offering an indefinitely renewable surface but failing to provide for the permanent preservation of a trace. The Wunderblock,

however, makes good the deficiencies of both these earlier models: “If it is examined closely it will be found that its construction shows a remarkable agreement with my hypothetical structure of our perceptual apparatus and . . . it can in fact provide both an ever-­ready receptive surface and permanent traces of the notes that have been made on it.”41 The remarkable properties of the Wunderblock are the consequence of its particular physical makeup, as Freud shows: The Mystic Pad is a slab of dark brown resin or wax with a paper edging; over the slab is laid a thin transparent sheet, the top end of which is firmly secured to the slab, while its bottom end rests on it without being fixed to it. This transparent sheet is the more interesting part of the little device. It itself consists of two layers,

Mnemotechnics

which can be detached from each other except at their two ends. The upper layer

33

is a transparent piece of waxed celluloid; the lower layer is made of thin translucent waxed paper. When the apparatus is not in use, the lower surface of the waxed paper adheres lightly to the upper surface of the wax slab.42

To write on the pad, a stylus is used: “At the points which the stylus touches, it presses the lower surface of the waxed paper onto the waxed slab, and the grooves are visible as dark writing upon the otherwise smooth whitish-­gray surface of the celluloid. If one wishes to destroy what has been written, all that is necessary is to raise the double covering-­sheet from the wax slab by a light pull, starting from the free lower end.”43 A permanent trace of what has been written remains indented on the wax slab beneath, which “is legible in certain lights.” The celluloid, meanwhile, is necessary because, as Freud tells us, “experiment will show that the thin paper would be very easily crumpled or torn if one were to write directly on it with the stylus. The layer of celluloid thus acts as a protective sheath for the waxed paper, to keep off injurious effects from without. The celluloid is a ‘protective shield against stimuli’; the layer which actually receives the stimuli is the paper.”44 The similarities between the physical structure of the Wunderblock and the system or apparatus of oil-­transfer are, I hope, clear. Like the Wunderblock, oil-­transfer is a system constructed of interleaving surfaces: tracing paper, drawing, carbon sheet, and the chosen surface for the transferred drawing. Each of these surfaces has a particular function: the tracing paper placed over the drawing serves, like the celluloid sheet on the Mystic Pad, as a “protective shield against stimuli,” in order that the drawing should not be damaged by the point of the metal stylus and should continue to present (at least to the naked eye) a visibly unaltered, continuous appearance; while the fresh sheet underneath the oil-­painted “carbon” paper functions, like the wax or resin block of the Mystic Pad, to retain the permanent trace.45 Like the oil-­transfers, the Mystic Pad has a “complex maintenance”; a set of manual flourishes is required for its operations.

Chapter One 34

Each oil-­transfer is produced by means of the composition of a temporary apparatus: interleaved pages, stored, and retrieved, and reprocessed. Klee’s lifetime store of drawings works like a memory-­bank, in being an archive made over into a technology, or a system of production. The oil-­transfers work over the stored archive of Klee’s drawings, and in each case, a reconfiguration of drawing is effected by means of a remodeling of line and a flattening and compression of the space of the drawing. Furthermore, a physical structure of hinged and interleaving pages is the condition for the set of gestures—­the body’s schooled operations—­that the archive is used to perform. The comparison between the oil-­transfer system and Freud’s Mystic Writing Pad essay also holds in that both work as systems aiding a material modeling of the processes of memory. For Klee, the retention of his drawings, which the oil-­transfer system both necessitated and enabled, operated as one of those several archival, record-­keeping “memory functions” that he instituted in about the year 1919, to which I have already referred. In addition, the comparison is suggestive in terms of the kind of theorization of the apparatus that Freud offers. Freud develops an extraordinary description of the notepad or sheet of paper on which we make our aide-­memoire as “a materialized portion of my mnemonic apparatus, which I otherwise carry about with me invisible.”46 What is fascinating in this remark is the proposal of the psychic function of memory as a kind of elastic field, which stretches beyond the confines of the body and incorporates surrounding objects into its very fabric. It is this expanded mapping of the space of the mind that is so crucial to the theorization of the apparatus that Freud develops, and that I suggest may be particularly fruitful in application to the functioning of the oil-­transfers. Freud’s stress on the “complex maintenance” of the apparatus—­as Derrida glosses it, “the apparatus is not simple to operate, it requires two hands”—­and its consequent whirr and flutter, turning pages back and forth, brings home a sense of the physicality which is also an important part of the model which Klee’s oil-­transfer system represents.47 Klee and Freud share a notion of the fantasized fitting of the subject into an apparatus, which was also explored, as we saw in my introduction, by Brecht, in his analysis of film, as well as by their contemporary, Siegfried Kracauer, in his theorizations of such institutions as the cinema and organized group gymnastics displays.48 In early twentieth-­century Germany, reinscription was rediscovered as a method of training the hand in learning to write. Friedrich Kittler records an educationalist around 1910 asking, “How do we raise the level of performance in German?” and giving the answer, “through ‘transcription exercises,’” which isolate and perfect those “diverse sub-­routines” recently identified “within each cultural practice.”49 The name that Kittler gives to all of this activity is “obsessional cursivizing,” a phrase that draws attention to the way in which all these diverse “sub-­routines” are invested in line and in particular, in outline.50 Notably, Klee himself assigned handwriting exercises when he taught

at the Bauhaus in Düsseldorf.51 “The trained hand often knows far more than the head,” Klee wrote in his diary.52 The “automatism” produced by the oil-­ transfers is thus less the automatism prized by the Surrealists (or that described in the text accompanying Klee’s lithograph Absorption, in which the hand is a seismograph for the inner promptings of desire), than the automatism of routine, or habit. The “unconscious” is figured in these works not as a motivational reservoir of repressed complexes, fears, and desires but, instead, as that “mindlessness,” or “not-­thinking,” of routinized, everyday activity. It is the set of gestures—­the trained movements of the body—­employed to operate oil-­transfer that I want to focus on. We can imagine the movements: Klee reaches back into his stored files, retrieves a drawing, and inserts it into the apparatus; he lifts the pages, completes the transfer, then interleaves once more. This is a physical enactment or bodily mimesis like the one Kittler describes a class of German schoolchildren making, in 1920, quoting a school inspector: “When I next asked ‘How does the knife sharpener work?’ many children were at once prepared to imitate the movements of the sharpener. They imitated not only the pumping of the foot on the pedal and the hands holding the knife, but they also mimicked the bent back, the head thrust forward, the shifting glances to check the edge, brushing off dust, and so on.” “Instead of writing interpretations and thoughtful essays,” Kittler comments, “the pupils engage in a bodily reproduction of technical processes, a reproduction that teaches observation and description.”53 It is an episode echoed by Walter Benjamin, in his account of our mimetic responses to mechanical reproduction. Benjamin recounts that as a child, hearing the word for copperplate engraving—­Kupferstichen—­he knelt under a chair and stuck his head out, as if in mimetic enactment of the misheard word, Kopf-­verstichen (head stick-­out): “If in this way I distorted both myself and the world, I did only what I had to do to gain a foothold in life.”54 As we shall see in more detail in chapter 4, Benjamin links this anecdote to his response to being photographed, and describes a deep-­seated mimetic impulse to transform into a state of similarity in particular with inanimate things, and with one’s surroundings, that is activated as a mode of survival for the subject under modern conditions. The key point I want to draw out here, however, in the proposed analogy between Klee’s making oil-­transfers and Benjamin’s enacting the misheard word, the children’s imitating the workings of the knife sharpener, and Freud’s modeling of memory via the Mystic Writing Pad, is the subject’s responsive mechanization of his activity. The subject is sandwiched, or fits himself, in each case, into a proposed apparatus, and the subject’s mnemonic and psychic functions are made to intersect with the material organization of that apparatus, whether pencil sharpener, stack, or archive. The form of the technological apparatus thus conditions the subtending, phantasmatic dimension of mind through which the subject’s work develops.

Mnemotechnics 35

Chapter One 36

1.7  Paul Klee, Mountain Formation, 1924. Oil-­transfer drawing, watercolor, and pencil on paper on cardboard, 16.5 × 15 inches (42 × 38 cm). Staatsgalerie Stuttgart/ Graphische Sammulng. Legacy of Annemarie Grohmann. © Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

Camera-­s eeing

This chapter so far has aimed to establish oil-­transfer as a system enabling Klee’s remaking of origins, which transformed drawing into an apparatized, semi-­mechanized practice, involving several subsets and interpolated processes. The system of oil-­transfer was about “remembering” drawing, because it enabled the preservation of a drawing in Klee’s collection while releasing its oil-­transfer version to be consumed in systems of exchange, as well as because one of the chief techniques of oil-­transfer is reinscription, itself a

long-­established method of memorization. The way the oil-­transfers work to preserve, or remember, drawing may also be brought out by examining the black ink marks that mark their surface. Close attention reveals that far from being “randomly distributed” (as Glaesemer wrote), the marks were obtained by Klee’s pressing his hand against the oil-­painted “carbon” sheet during the process of the transfer in a number of carefully thought-­out and interesting ways. Indeed, Klee was sufficiently interested in the visual effect of these markings to imitate them in several works that are not oil-­transfers—­in a series of watercolors from 1930, for example, and in lithographs that he marked so that they look like oil-­transfers.55 These marks, which are a notable feature of the oil-­transfers, hold, I argue, the key to understanding the hermeneutic system operating within Klee’s practice: they are the material traces holding the “memory” of what was at stake—­namely, the reproduction of drawing—­in Klee’s oil-­transfer practice. The textural character of these markings is worthy of particular attention, for Klee intentionally varied it across different oil-­transfer works. This variation was achieved not only by using a more or less wet, or “tacky,” oil-­painted sheet, but also by modifying the characteristics of that surface: using differently grained paper and different ways of applying the oil paint or printer’s ink to achieve a different texture. In Mountain Formation (1924, 123) (fig. 1.7) and Dance of the Moth (1923, 124) (fig. 1.8), for example, the printed paint marks are characterized by lines tracing the broad, loose, typically “expressive” sweep of a wide-­headed, coarse-­haired paintbrush across the original painted page. (The tracks that we see in the oil-­transfer are of course reproductions of the expressive gestural mark, and not the mark itself.) By contrast, in Distillation of Pears (1921, 10), the imprinted page is visible in close-­set rows and separated columns (looking rather like newsprint), which reproduce the weave of the paper Klee used in the transfer process. Where marks like these are visible, it is likely that Klee used a roller to apply the paint to the sheet, in order to achieve precisely this even, consistent quality of imprinted surface and to allow the texture of the paper itself to “read” in its imprint. In every detail, what the marks across the surface of an oil-­transfer work “sign” is the page from which they were printed and to which they refer back. In Mountain Formation, the loosely assembled paint marks together construe a unit, the clean-­edged ghostly rectangle at the center of the picture reading as the grainy replica of the painted page from which it derives. The markings form a webbed skein of ink that keeps the element of “drawing” pinned to the surface, confined to the squashed space of an imprinted page, while at the same time the watercolor element plumbs a space, or a mass, that is more like a pellucid volume of water than a space geometrically directed to “recede.” In these and other ways, Klee used the apparently random oil-­marks to achieve an effect of suspending the space of “drawing” in the space of the work—­reframed and re-­presented.56 The “space” of the drawing—­even where that is carefully

Mnemotechnics 37

Chapter One 38

1.8  Paul Klee, Dance of the Moth, 1923. Oil-­transfer, pencil, and watercolor on paper with watercolor, pen, and gouache marginal stripes, mounted on card, 20 × 13 inches (52 × 33 cm). © Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Najoya, Japan.

defined perspectivally, as in the series of “room perspectives” that Klee made in the mid-­1920s (for example, Room Perspective with the Dark Door, 1921, 23, or Spirit Chamber with the Tall Door, 1925, 102)—­is redefined as the obviously flattened space of an imprinted page, and drawing is suspended within the space of the watercolor, like a drop of oil hanging suspended in water. To say that Klee uses these oil-­print marks to suspend the space of drawing within the space of the work is to look beyond the obvious practical importance of drawing for the oil-­transfers, in the sense preexisting drawings were needed to make them, to the importance for the oil-­transfers of the category of “drawing” itself. As a consequence of Klee’s use of the imprinted “flecks and structures” from the oil-­“carbon” sheet, the space of the transferred drawing is

redefined as a “virtual surface,” the obviously flattened space of an imprinted page. This typical feature of the oil-­transfers functions as a reframing and re-­ presentation of “drawing.” Thus, the relation of a drawing to the oil-­transfer Klee made from it is not that of a “sketch” to a painting (as some have held). Rather, in an oil-­transfer work, drawing persists; it remains visible, reconfigured by means of the oil-­transfer process, and becomes the statement that is made, or newly affirmed, by the work.57 “Remembering” is thus cast as a historically specific system of production, within which “drawing” is cast back to and caught up into the oil-­transfer works. The oil-­transfers “remember” drawing in utilizing techniques that train the body in the labor of “memorizing,” drilling and routinizing the hand in a synchronized series of gestures, and fitting these to the operations of a wider apparatus (or system of production). Drawing is remodeled by harnessing two of drawing’s mnemotechnical means in particular: the outline—­as a modality of line—­with the operation of reinscription. However, as I have also indicated, oil-­ transfer is a system that registers the transformation to which memory subjects its material, because oil-­transfer importantly results in a reconfigured line, blurred and “mishandled.” Indeed, I have argued that the quality of this line is a central reason for Klee’s interest in the technique; this, I have suggested, is evidenced by his experiments with replicating it by means of other techniques (for example, Kohleabklatsch). In the oil-­transfer apparatus, the operations of outline and reinscription are harnessed and become the vehicle of a reprocessing and a remaking that alters even as it preserves, like that recasting and transformation to which memory’s processes subject its original material. At the same time, the black marks that are produced across the surface of the oil-­ transfer work to further transform and reconfigure the line and setting of the original drawing. The ink marks that spot and mar the surface of the oil-­transfers produce a strong sense of tactility, often showing, as we have seen, the imprint of the hairs of the paintbrush used to coat the “carbon” sheet, the weave of the paper used to print it, or even Klee’s own thumb or fingerprints—­all of them evidence of his handiwork. In the oil-­transfers, a distinctive feature of the way in which Klee’s drawings generally inhabit the space of the page—­see, for example, the pen-­and-­ink Drawing Knotted in the Manner of a Net (1920, 98)—­is strengthened and confirmed: Klee offers us drawing like a web that might almost be lifted off the surface. There is an appeal to the tactile sense of the viewer, who feels that she might run her fingers over the surface and feel the oil-­transfer lines as a texture, raised or bumped on the surface (again like those engravings in limestone and plaster that Klee made in 1929–­32). The tactility that is modeled by the oil-­transfers is the flip side to a certain idealization that was current at the time of the artist’s vision and his “blindness” to the external world. As we have seen, in Klee’s oil-­transfer Absorption, from the first series of oil-­transfers in 1919, the artist is shown drawing with his eyes

Mnemotechnics 39

Chapter One 40

closed, as if illustrating, O. K. Werckmeister has argued, Kandinsky’s injunction, in On the Spiritual in Art (1912), that the artist should be “blind” to what is around him.58 The oil-­transfers, however, rework the conventional “blindness” of drawing, then linked to a prized, supreme “inner” expressivity. Where Kandinsky had urged the artist to close his eyes, to direct his vision inward, the line that is produced by oil-­transfer is invisible to its creator because it appears beneath the sheet of paper upon which the stylus presses. The oil-­ transfers detach drawing from vision as a function of line’s mechanization, like the change wrought upon handwriting by the invention of the typewriter: not only is the drawn line now “untouched by the writer’s hand but [it] is also located in a place entirely apart from where the hands work.”59 As Friedrich Kittler has described it, “Whereas handwriting is subject to the eye . . . the typewriter uses a blind, tactile power”; similarly, drawing, with the oil-­transfer method, ceases to be a line spooling out from within the depths of the writer, becoming instead a “selection from a countable, spatialized supply.”60 Looking at the oil-­transfers, I am reminded of a quotation that László Moholy-­Nagy, a colleague of Klee’s at the Bauhaus, was fond of repeating for his own purposes, and which it is tempting to apply as a description to the oil-­ transfers, focusing on those black marks across its surface: “This is a clumsy piece of work.” This is what the scientist and physician, Hermann von Helmholtz used to tell his pupils he would say “if an optician were to succeed in making a human eye and brought it to him for his approval.”61 Moholy-­Nagy quotes this story in the section titled “Photographic Vision” in his book Vision in Motion, published posthumously in 1947. Moholy-­Nagy’s purpose was to exalt photography as the means of a new, improved vision—­a better “seeing machine” than the “clumsy” human eye. In light of this, it is interesting to consider Klee’s deliberately “clumsy” oil-­transfer works as a means to model an alternative, more obdurate or resistant, more opaque and archaic technology. Moholy-­Nagy’s valorization of photography has often been theorized in the terms that the artist himself put in place: photography as a faster, sharper, more powerful way of seeing. But Klee’s oil-­transfers suggest a different emphasis, reading the operations and potential of Bauhaus photography in a more physicalized way, as a fitting of the body in harness with mechanical prostheses: the embodied eye as opposed to the New (improved) Vision. This suggests a final way of understanding Klee’s oil-­transfers: reading them against the claims that were to be made for photography when it entered the Bauhaus in 1923, with Moholy-­Nagy’s appointment.62 Photography has a long-­standing association with memory. Charles Baudelaire, in his original denunciation of any pretensions to art that photography might have, in his Salon of 1859, nevertheless was happy to accord it a function as store of and aid to memory: “Let it hasten to enrich the tourist’s album and restore to his eye the precision which his memory may lack. . . . Let it rescue from oblivion those tumbling ruins, those books, prints and manuscripts

which time is devouring, precious things whose form is dissolving and which demand a place in the archives of our memory.”63 In relation to this function of photography, however, Klee’s oil-­transfers work in reverse. What they celebrate is not the restoration of the memory image but its ruin. It is not the precision of memory (or photography) that is celebrated in the oil-­transfers, but the devouring of a precious object in functions of memorization, which in Klee’s own time became a capacity increasingly anxiously attributed to photography. Siegfried Kracauer’s 1927 essay on photography is a classic document of this unease: “The truth content of the original is left behind in its history; the photograph captures only the residuum that history has discharged.”64 (The idea of history mechanically squeezing out a “residuum” is especially reminiscent of the oil-­transfer system.) Referring to the illustrated magazines that proliferated throughout the 1920s, Kracauer acknowledged the function Baudelaire had originally ascribed to photography but countered it with a more contemporary concern: “The reproductions are basically signs that may remind one of the original object. . . . [But] in reality . . . the flood of photos sweeps away the dam of memory.”65 Something of photography’s alleged capacity to supplant the image that was originally the repository of memory is recalled in the eager claim made for photography by advocates of the “New Vision” in the mid-­and later 1920s, that it would supersede and replace older techniques such as painting. Klee’s oil-­ transfers could then be interpreted as defending against this threat homeopathically, by placing mechanical means inside his own practice, and by archaizing and rendering in handwork photography’s mechanical operations, and so engaging with the substitutive and transformative as well as the duplicating and preserving functions of memory. Just as they taught Clement Greenberg to “see” abstract art, I suggest, the oil-­transfers may be interpreted as functioning, like Pablo Picasso’s 1912 Guitar construction and collages, which I discuss in my next chapter, as “seeing machines” to review both the artist’s own work and the contemporary technology, photography, that challenged it. Like photography, oil-­transfer was a system of (semi-­)mechanized reproduction, a remodeling and automation of line and framing edge, and a fitting of the body into a system of prostheses. Again, like photography, oil-­transfer is a system for making a reproduction—­and for transforming what it reproduces. Similarly, the oil-­transfers may be seen as offering a reading of the physicality of contemporary enthusiasm for photography. Klee’s colleagues at the Bauhaus were in coming years to explore the fantasized dimensions of newly technologized activity. “Camera-­seeing,” as Rosalind Krauss has written, was “an extraordinary extension of normal vision, one that supplements the deficiencies of the naked eye. The camera covers and arms this nakedness, it acts as a kind of prosthesis, enlarging the capacity of the human body.”66 As an apparatus of record, of reproduction, and of the remodeling and expansion of the human sensorium, the camera at the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930s

Mnemotechnics 41

Chapter One 42

became a technology incorporating a dimension of fantasized activity comparable to that which I have argued the oil-­transfer system modeled for Klee. We have seen the way the oil-­transfer system constituted an alternative physicality of practice, marshaling confined gestures and posture and repetitive action. Klee’s oil-­transfers present the body’s fitting into the apparatus as stooped and laborious, rather than emancipated and free. Such a posture is illustrated by Fine Work (1940, 106), Klee’s cramped and captive self-­portrait of himself drawing, made in the last year of his life (fig. 1.9). But of course any such engagement must be understood as positioned avant la lettre: the new photography came to prominence in Germany and at the Bauhaus after the period of Klee’s main production of oil-­transfers. Klee’s oil-­transfers present themselves then as something like the obsolescent technologies described by Moholy-­Nagy in Painting, Photography, Film of 1925 (a book that Klee owned), and taken up by Walter Benjamin in his “Little History of Photography” of 1931.67 At the point of their being superseded by new technical means, these obsolescent forms produce a final “flower” that reveals the true potential of the new technologies: Men discover new instruments, new methods of work, which revolutionize their familiar habits of work. Often, however, it is a long time before the innovation is properly utilized; it is hampered by the old; the new function is shrouded in the traditional form. The creative possibilities of the innovation are usually slowly disclosed by these old forms, old instruments and fields of creativity which burst into euphoric flower when the innovation which has been preparing finally emerges.68

André Bazin described something similar twenty years later, when he proposed that cinema was prefigured in the enchantments and devices of a whole generation in the century before its physical incarnation in film. The photography of Étienne-­Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, animated drawings, the phenakistoscope and zoetrope, and stereoscopy all are claimed by him as proto-­cinema, rendering film itself merely a kind of cinematic after-­effect.69 Klee’s oil-­transfers, then, would occupy a space something like Bazin’s description of film’s half-­life in makeshift technologies that never really flourished and died away. Klee’s position in the Bauhaus has often prompted speculation about how comfortably his commitment to a “fine art” practice, and the whimsical, imaginative, and illustrative qualities of his work, fitted into the school’s philosophy of the arts applied for the enhancement of commercial design, and its championing of a new, streamlined, self-­consciously “modern” aesthetic vision. Certainly, Klee kept much to his studio at the Bauhaus, and kept his studio very secret (locking the door and even blocking the keyhole so that no one could peer in); yet he also took up and experimented with some of the new mechanical means that Moholy-­Nagy introduced—­such as the technique of

Mnemotechnics 43

spray-­painting, for example.70 Indeed, even after he left the Bauhaus, in September 1930, he embarked upon a series of sharply geometrical drawings made with the full panoply of mechanical and geometrical instruments that Moholy-­ Nagy recommended, and made a related series of small, geometrical models, from sticks, elastic bands, and strings, to which Klee appears to have referred, in a letter to his wife, describing them as “some sort of handicraft [Basteleien] that damage my soul if I entirely repress them.”71 This series of drawings and models—­which for many years has puzzled scholars, as having neither a clear pedagogical purpose nor any seeming connection with previous lines of development in his own work—­suggests that the nature of Klee’s response to the Bauhaus environment was, as I argue here, in the order of an effort to incorpo-

1.9  Paul Klee, Fine Work, 1940. Chalk on paper on cardboard, 8.3 × 11.7 inches (21 × 30 cm). © Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

Chapter One 44

rate, or to ingest, the mechanical enthusiasm at the heart of its teachings into his own vocabulary of pictorial art, rather than simply to reject or ignore it. The result of this ingestion by Klee was work that brought out sharply the deeply invested fantasy at the heart of the Bauhaus involvement with technology. Moholy-­Nagy advocated the depersonalization of line and recommended the use of rulers and geometrical instruments in drawing, to replace what he saw as the old, misplaced enthusiasm for manual skill.72 Moholy-­Nagy’s remarks, like Klee’s oil-­transfer works, may be used to shed a sidelight on what are perhaps more familiar avant-­garde approaches to deskilling drawing in the early 1920s. Marcel Duchamp, to take one notable example, offered strictures that intersect interestingly with Klee’s own emphasis on the importance of the hand in drawing: “The first problem was to draw and still avoid the old-­ fashioned form of drawing. Could one do it without falling into that groove? Mechanical drawing was the answer—­a straight line drawn with a ruler instead of the hand, a line directed by the impersonality of the ruler. . . . I unlearned to draw. The point was to forget with my hand.”73 The connections between drawing—­and in particular, outline drawing—­ industrial development, and mechanization in the early decades of the twentieth century have previously been explored by Molly Nesbit, in relation to the work of Duchamp, and by Rosalind Krauss, who has discussed Picasso’s neoclassical line between 1915 and 1923 as a fetishistic reaction to automatic, serial forms of industrial production and to photography.74 However, the “internalization” of automated, technological production that I have suggested we see in Klee’s oil-­transfer line represents a different phantasmatic response from that explored by either Duchamp or Picasso; and his depersonalization of drawing through habit and reinscription, as I analyze it here, also differs from Moholy-­ Nagy’s more conventionally avant-­gardist “deskilling” strategies. Klee’s operation retains, and indeed reemphasizes, manual skill, yet turns it inside out, producing an impersonal, mechanized “drawing,” which conflictedly registers both “remembering”—­oil-­transfer serving as a memory function within his practice—­and (a Duchampian) “forgetting,” in the ruin the oil-­transfers wreak on the lines of an original drawing. The fantasized fitting of the subject into the apparatus, which I have argued is the particular form of the oil-­transfers’ technologized production, fits Klee’s work contextually in response to the particular, euphoric, phantasmatic form of contemporary Bauhaus photography, and this supplies a context different from those within which either Duchamp or Picasso worked. I suggest that Klee’s reconfiguration of drawing and the relation of this to his immediate surroundings are captured perhaps best by Walter Benjamin’s description of play, as “the transformation of a shattering experience into habit.”75 On this understanding, the shattering experience is the potential for mechanical reproduction represented by new technologies such as photography, which reprises and refocuses historical anxieties on this theme. The procedures of oil-­transfer are the means by which

Klee harnesses and routinizes the perceived technological threat and releases its unexpected potential. In Klee’s oil-­transfers we see the way in which an avant-­garde artist employs a range of material practices that feed into and come to constitute a newly apparatized kind of medium, under the pressure of new technologies. Certain material practices—­reinscription of contour, the archiving of drawings, and the entering of works into the work-­catalogue—­are shown here to coalesce into the form of a technology by means of which drawing is remade. This suggests also a reworked interpretation of medium-­specificity. In 1939, Clement Greenberg classed Klee with Picasso, Georges Braque, Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky, Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse, and Paul Cézanne as artists who “derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in.”76 What that might mean has been seen in this chapter to expand. Drawing has been shown to have a personal significance for Klee, such that the operations of medium-­specificity that re-­present it become a means of asserting a statement of personal identity. The operation of reinscription and the drilled and routinized set of gestures that remake drawing in the oil-­transfers have been shown to be rooted in a long-­standing modeling of memory that was newly resurgent and widely popularized in German culture at the time. I have suggested that the work the oil-­transfers perform, over the bodies of individual drawings and over the body of drawing more generally, may be described as a process of “remembering” drawing, recasting medium-­specificity as the conflicted engagement with a personally invested set of techniques, in response to the pressures of new technologies. Klee’s oil-­transfers, I have argued, show the artist in the process of turning over his grip on a particular medium, wondering what “drawing” might be or mean in the teeth of the new, oppositional technology of photography, and at the same time, turning inside-­out more familiar avant-­garde strategies of line and technologies of the image. Theorists since the late 1960s have tended to agree on the kind of structure that a medium is: “a material-­in-­certain-­characteristic-­applications,” a material plus “an implied range of handling” (Stanley Cavell); “a material worked in a characteristic way” (Richard Wollheim); “a set of conventions derived from (but not identical with) the material conditions of a given technical support” (Rosalind Krauss).77 Here, I have proposed a reconfigured picture, and suggested that a medium may be conceived as something more like an apparatus—­a fantasized space of technology, which the making subject fits him-­or herself into; or, at least, I have argued that this was a structure that enabled the rethinking of what a medium could be at a particular moment in the 1920s, in Germany, in a context in which photography was being championed as the vehicle for the remaking both of pictorial representation and of vision. It is this aspect of artists’ work with mediums and technologies that my next chapter sets out to explore: the dimension of fantasy subtending work with a particular apparatus of making. In Hans Bellmer’s case, I shall explore

Mnemotechnics 45

the fantasy that his Doll photographs stage and establish for the viewer via their involvement in the contemporary technologies of collage and shop window–­ dressing, as well as in photography. As with Klee’s oil-­transfers, a focus of these technologies and their intersection at the time, for Bellmer as for artists such as Picasso and Duchamp, was the artist’s reflective engagement with the display and staging of his work, not only for his own viewing but also for those other artists to whom the work forms an aspirational address. From an artist who was claimed by the Surrealists, although he remained indifferent to their attentions (André Breton is said to have acquired a Klee watercolor as early as 1921 and included him in the pantheon of Surrealist painters in his first manifesto in 1924, and the Surrealists organized Klee’s first show in Paris in 1925 at the Galerie Varin-­Kaspan, for which the catalogue essays were written by Louis Aragon and Max Ernst), I turn now to one who actively sought to gain entrance to the Surrealist group: Hans Bellmer, and his series of Doll photographs, produced in the years 1933–­37.

The panorama device

A small diagram accompanies the text of Hans Bellmer’s 1934 publication Die Puppe (fig. 2.1). It appears at the end of the essay (“Memories of the Doll Theme”), before the first of the famous photographs of the doll, and shows the torso of the doll, with a cutaway view into its abdominal cavity, where a circular mechanism is housed. A pointing finger presses the doll’s left nipple, and an outsize eye peeps through the doll’s navel, into its abdomen. A problematic of seeing and display is dramatized by the giant eye and by the transparency of the doll’s body to the viewer’s gaze. It does not need to be spelled out; we understand that there is a familiar visual regime that controls this body of work and its representation of a female body, opened to view. The peeping eye looks in on a device lodged within the doll, which, when it existed, comprised a wooden disk, nineteen centimeters in diameter, to which were attached six small, open-­topped boxes.1 The boxes displayed small assemblages of images and artifacts, chosen to exemplify the theme of a juvenile and exaggerated femininity, each lit by a small, colored lightbulb and visible to the viewer who put his or her eye to a small hole in the doll’s navel (as directed by the diagram). The disk was designed to rotate like a wheel when the viewer pressed the button on the doll’s nipple. This apparatus, known as the “panorama device,” makes of the doll a visual toy, something like a phenakistoscope, perhaps: a clumsy, archaicized and semi-­cinematic miniature appara-

47

Chapter Two 48

2.1  Hans Bellmer, diagram included in Die Puppe (Karlsruhe: Th. Eckstein, 1934). Paperbound book with faux marble cover containing ten vintage gelatin silver prints, 4.8 × 4.5 inches (12 × 11 cm). Signed in pencil on dedication page. Courtesy of Ubu Gallery, New York; Galerie Berinson, Berlin. © 2013 ADAGP, Paris/DACS, London.

tus.2 In relation to it we might think of contemporary German descriptions of the cinema as a machine, including Helmut Weihsmann’s “Das Kino . . . ist eine Maschine zum Filmen” and the remark made by Frederick Kiesler, the architect of New York’s extraordinary Film Arts Guild Cinema in 1929, when he explained the need for a new design for cinema architecture: “[We need to] create a better machine, more perfect in operation and more effective in displaying the cinematic art.”3 Kiesler’s design for this screen had mechanical covers that could be made to close and open like an eye (the design was called a “screen-­o-­scope”); like Bellmer’s doll, it housed the functions of a machine

within the semblance of a body.4 In line with such contemporary remarks and manifestations, we may understand the doll as a seeing machine: a viewing instrument or tool of the studio. Previous interpretations of Bellmer’s Doll photographs have tended to focus on the second series, made between 1936 and 1937 (a selection of which was published in Bellmer’s second Doll book, Les Jeux de la Poupée, due to be published in 1938 but, delayed by the war, published only in 1949).5 Commentators have also tended to focus on the figure of the doll itself—­the proliferation and tumescence of its limbs, the violence exacted on it, its dismemberment and uncanny animation. Typically, the photographs are understood on the basis of such a reading as supplying exemplary figuration of a range of Freudian drives and scenarios, including the uncanny, sadomasochism, fetishism, castration anxiety, scopophilia, hysteria, hermaphroditism, and death.6 At the same time, the Doll photographs are increasingly often reproduced in histories of Surrealism and have even been hailed as the “summa” of Surrealism in one influential account.7 One consequence of such readings is that Surrealism risks becoming a movement unified by its exploration of a particular, uncanny imaginary, to which Bellmer’s Dolls are understood as a key. Another is that the fantasy staged in the image tends to be understood only at the level of the figure, that is, on the basis of a reading of the doll. Furthermore, the doll is read as depicting an assault on a female figure, to which depiction is attributed a subversive critical power, and the viewer is not asked to imagine different possible models of avant-­garde activity. I suggest that a reconfigured understanding of Bellmer’s relation to Surrealism, which examines his photographs’ address to artists usually positioned at Surrealism’s margins, enables an altered understanding of the kind of fantasy that is staged in these images and, more broadly, a different understanding of the kind of fantasy that is staged in other works of the early twentieth-­century avant-­gardes. In what follows I take the rhetoric of the fetishistically rearranged female body to belong to the fairly conventional avant-­garde idiom of the time; the sexual subversion of which supported claims to avant-­garde radicalism as well as strategies of affiliation between these (mainly male) artists.8 As other commentators have acknowledged, the theme of the doll or automaton was already established in the work of Dada and Surrealist artists, as well as being a prominent feature of contemporary commercial culture. Indeed, Bellmer’s photographs often appear directly imitative of existing Surrealist work, and one consequence of our observation of the closeness between these images is that it becomes harder to accept the idea that Bellmer’s work can be interpreted as offering a key to the “unconscious” of Surrealism—­since, it seems clear, he sought so ardently to mirror its existing idiom, in order to achieve acceptance by the group.9 I understand the order of fantasy—­as opposed to the level of popular contemporary visual idiom—­staged in the photographs as being a fantasy of the studio and, in particular, of the imaginative possibilities

Seeing Machines 49

Chapter Two 50

2.2  Hans Bellmer, Untitled (The Doll), 1934. Gelatin silver print, 3.9 × 2 inches (8.5 × 5 cm). Signed on recto of mount. Courtesy of Ubu Gallery, New York; Galerie Berinson, Berlin. © 2013 ADAGP, Paris/DACS, London.

of new technologies. In my reading, the doll is a device that enables a particular staging of photography and the work of artistic making. Thinking differently about what is at stake in Bellmer’s photographs in turn helps us to understand the work of certain other artists in new ways. Extending my focus from Bellmer’s Doll photographs to Pablo Picasso’s collages and Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and related projects, what is at stake is a rethinking of the first decades in which artists worked their way out of the structures of traditional mediums. Even as they rejected existing

artistic mediums, these artists invented intriguing experimental objects and devices that supported new forms of material reflexivity and visuality and enabled the reconfiguration of the work of art as well as adaptation to the new, more intensively spectacular visual culture that surrounded them. The studio photograph, used to stage these new devices for review and display, was a crucial document in this effort. As a first case study I will focus on the approximately thirty photographs in the first series of Bellmer’s Doll photographs, made between 1933 and 1934, including those published in Die Puppe, alongside those published in December 1934 in the Surrealist journal Minotaure and those that remained unpublished in Bellmer’s lifetime. What interests me about the first series is the way in which these pictures give a sense of the doll’s emergence from a studio-­type space, even as that space is simultaneously dismantled and turned into a space of phantasmatic encounter. The opening image in Die Puppe, for example, shows the half-­finished doll sitting stiffly and awkwardly on a chair, positioned on the threshold of a room (fig. 2.2). The open door behind it shows darkness engulfing the corridor beyond, while the room in the foreground is brightly lit. The doll is positioned half in and half out of the light, as well as half in and half out of the room—­conditions which suit its semi-­constructed state. The darkness behind the doll creates an ominous and dramatic feeling in the photograph, while the rough simplicity of the doll’s construction makes the image seem simultaneously workmanlike and technical. A reenvisioned studio photograph, halfway between a working document and a posed theatrical scenario, this photograph hovers between dramaturgy and working document. It is a staged “studio” photograph, showing a half-­completed work, but its aim seems to be not simply to make a record of a work in process. Rather, the image provides a phantasmatic vision of the work in hand, functioning to enable the artist both to understand what it is he is making, and to make a certain dramatic content out of the business of making itself. In this respect, the picture stages the particular feature I want to isolate with regard to the first series, the dramatic intensity of which, I suggest, derives precisely from the way in which it pictures work and making. A further example of this is supplied by two photographs from the first series, unpublished in Bellmer’s lifetime (but published by the Pompidou Centre in 1983). The first shows the torso of the doll laid flat, headless, its gaping neck dramatically tilted obliquely toward the viewer (fig. 2.3). A screwdriver and a pencil are prominent in the foreground. The doll is presented as spilled open, the unmade object of ongoing work. The second shows the doll, now with plaster head complete, crouching in the foreground of the same, deeply shadowed room (fig. 2.4). The pose and the strong shadows give a marked sense of the doll’s gradual emergence from this dark space. The doll appears crouched and ready to spring, yet at the same time vulnerable to our intrusion. Looking at these images we may well think that we have never really seen Bellmer’s pho-

Seeing Machines 51

Chapter Two 52

2.3  Hans Bellmer, Untitled (The Doll), 1934. Gelatin silver print, 3.5 × 2.3 inches (9 × 6 cm). Unpublished in Bellmer’s lifetime. Private collection. © 2013 ADAGP, Paris/DACS, London/Filipacchi/Centre George Pompidou. All rights reserved.

tographs before—­or at least, that we have never really seen the “work” that they represent. Construction, studio work, and a staged, shadowed drama of the doll’s gradual emergence are consistent themes in the first series of photographs. Many of the photographs show the wooden skeleton of the doll only partially covered by its flax-­fiber and plaster skin, and this combination of internal armature with partial exterior cladding contributes to the sense that the figure is still a work in progress. This is encapsulated in photograph four in Die Puppe, showing the doll’s parts completely dismantled and laid flat on top of a colored paper drawing, which, like an engineering diagram, shows both the doll’s inte-

Seeing Machines 53

2.4  Hans Bellmer, Untitled (The Doll), 1934. Gelatin silver print, 3.7 × 2.5 inches (9.5 × 6.5 cm). Unpublished in Bellmer’s lifetime. Private collection. © 2013 ADAGP, Paris/DACS, London/Filipacchi/Centre George Pompidou. All rights reserved.

rior and the exterior construction. The drawing itself is creased; indicating that it has been stored folded or rolled up, in the manner of a technical drawing or mechanical blueprint, rather than in a frame or flat in a folder, as an artwork is usually stored. Furthermore, one of the parts shown is a three-­dimensional “printer’s fist” (a frequent element in contemporary collages), suggesting that we read this arrangement as a nonfixed and physicalized kind of collage, achieved or staged not on the surface of the paper but in the picture field of the photograph. In addition, the photographs in Die Puppe illustrate different models of the doll’s construction. Photographs one to four show the first model of the doll, the limbs of which were attached by bolt-­joints, while photographs five to ten show a second model, which Bellmer made at some point in 1934, midway through making his first series of photographs. The legs of this second doll were joined to its torso using ball-­joints, and eventually a large ball-­joint replaced the hollow abdomen of the first doll, which had originally housed the panorama device. Of the eighteen photographs published in Minotaure (all ten of the Die Puppe photographs, plus eight that were previously unpub-

Chapter Two 54

lished), ten show the ball-­jointed doll and eight the bolt-­jointed model. Furthermore, the title under which the photographs were published in Minotaure was “Variations on the montage of an articulated minor.” The word “montage” is a term for collage, of course, and was used as such by Dada artists; however, it also carried connotations of “engineering,” from the German verb montieren, meaning “to assemble,” as well as associations with film, thanks to the techniques of editing pioneered in the 1920s by directors such as Sergei Eisenstein. Indeed, Bellmer used the staple tropes of contemporary cinema to aid the stage-­setting of the photographs: shadow-­haunted staircases, doorways, and corridors were all established features of expressionist film.10 This visual rhetoric helps intensify the sense in which the space in the first series of pictures is constructed as akin to a stage set, which dramatizes and spotlights the activity of making. The space pictured in this series is of course not what we might think of as an artist’s studio (although, as we shall see, in its intermingling of work with domestic space it is fairly typical of early twentieth-­century avant-­ garde artists’ studios). Bellmer photographed all of the first series of Doll photographs in the room he used as his studio at his parent’s home in Berlin; and the domestic elements of the room—­the striped wallpaper, characteristic of bourgeois interiors at the time, the carpeting, the doorway and hall, the bed—­ all help to make the space not entirely a workspace and to interfuse overtones of the uncanny potential of the disrupted bourgeois home. The impression of disrupted domesticity is accentuated by narrative suggestions in the photographs of sexual or other violent assault, typically associated with such locations in contemporary films. And yet, even as Bellmer suggests relatively orthodox narratives of incestuous desire and assault in the Doll photographs and the essays he intended to be read alongside them, as well as in the mythology he encouraged to flourish concerning his supposed desire for his young cousin Ursula, and his dedication of Les Jeux de la Poupée to his daughter, Doriane, the facts of their making—­as a collaborative effort undertaken with his brother and his wife—­point to a different model of sibling and peer relations. Peter Webb, author of the first monograph on Bellmer and the only writer to have had extensive discussions with the artist himself, emphasizes the collaborative process of the photographs’ making: “Bellmer’s first doll project had the strong support of his immediate circle. His brother gave him practical help, his mother financed him without his father’s knowledge, his wife encouraged him.”11 Moreover, “Bellmer’s decision [to build a doll] was greeted with excitement and enthusiasm. ‘My magic spell enchanted my entourage: my wife, my brother, my young cousin,’” Webb quotes Bellmer as saying, and goes on to explain that “his brother Fritz who had the specialist knowledge of an engineer gave up all work to help build the doll.”12 An extraordinarily vivid description of the doll’s making has come down to us from Bellmer via his friend Jean Brun, which manages to suggest simul-

taneously a scene of two busy engineers at work and a scene of sexual assault or murder, while at the same time reversing the traditional Freudian direction of discovery. The father is described as bursting in on the two Bellmer brothers, who are engaged in engineering the doll, only to leave, ashen-­faced and trembling: An engineer’s tool, sickeningly familiar, is used for an irredeemably compromising task. The father is defeated. He sees his son, armed with a drill, fixing the head of a young girl between the knees of his brother, and telling him, “Hold this for me while I pierce her nostrils.” The father leaves, looking deathly pale, while the son looks at his daughter, who can now breathe, which is not permissible.13 Seeing Machines

Bellmer’s account of this reversed “primal scene” (which also seems to be a fantasy of same-­sex reproduction, with siblings giving birth to another sibling) takes its place in the context of the stories he told of his closeness to his brother, and their united defiance of their father. It had been with his brother that Bellmer played at being “more like little girls than boys,” and it was to his brother that Bellmer wrote in a female persona.14 Engineering—­the profession shared by the brothers—­is figured in these photographs and the narratives Bellmer composed to accompany them, as one more aspect of the alliance he forged with his brother, which contributed to the construction of the Dolls. While the story is clearly told in part to indicate the subversion of parental authority, representing the banding together of brothers (and a new sister) against the father, there is another element in the anecdote that I want to stress. That the doll emerged through Bellmer’s relationship with his brother and others around him suggests the idea of “play,” as a form of behavior that permits and supports the experimental constitution of objects and the imaginative transformation of space—­“let this doll be our hospital patient”; “let this bed be a boat and the floor the ocean.” In play, the child experiments with a variety of roles in relation to others and objects, and Juliet Mitchell, in her book, Siblings, of 2003, has suggested that lateral, sibling or peer relationships may enable significantly different structures of fantasy than do parental relations. Part of the potential of sibling and peer relations, she suggests, is for transformative play with and shifting of roles (including gender roles), which the relatively more fixed verticality of parental relations must prevent and forbid.15 One of the functions of play is thus to begin to move away from parental relationships as primary and to establish new social contexts for subjecthood. Dolls and toys that function as intermediaries in collaborative play with siblings and peers of course play a crucial role here, but, before this, the more fundamental psychic significance attaches to the blankets and scraps described by D. W. Winnicott as “the first not-­me possessions” and theorized by him as “transitional objects.”16 Emerging from the branch of psychoanalysis developed in the 1930s by Melanie Klein, among others, known as “object-­relations

55

Chapter Two 56

theory,” Winnicott distinguished his account of the transitional object from Klein’s theorization of the infant’s fantasy life in terms of internal objects. 17 The transitional object is a real external object: a possession, adopted in weaning as a substitute for the breast (but not symbolizing it). Its fundamental psychic function is to stand at the threshold between the inner world of the infant and the world of external reality, neither wholly an internal nor wholly an external object but mediating these two areas. In this way the object helps gradually to accustom the infant to the reality principle and to cope with the frustrations that go along with this process of adjustment. “It comes from without, from our point of view, but not so from the point of view of the baby,” writes Winnicott. “Neither does it come from within; it is not a hallucination.”18 It combines the properties of the phantasmatic with the real external object: “It must never change, unless changed by the infant. It must survive instinctual loving, and also hating, and . . . aggression. Yet it must seem to the infant to give warmth, or to move, or to have texture, or to do something that seems to show it has vitality or reality of its own.”19 While the fate of the transitional object is gradually to become decathected, as the child moves toward maturity, the intermediate zone of experience that Winnicott established in this theorization became the basis for his later account of play, as an activity that takes place similarly in a space that “is not inside, by any use of the word. . . . Nor is it outside, that is to say, it is not a part of the repudiated world, the not-­me, that which the individual has decided to recognize (with whatever difficulty and even pain) as truly external, which is outside magical control.”20 Play thus occurs in that same borderline zone or threshold area between purely mental fantasy or hallucination, and productive activity in the real world; specifically, it enables a form of activity, engaged in alone or with others, founded on an intermediate experience, “a ‘marriage’ of the omnipotence of intrapsychic processes with . . . control of the actual,” in which magical rules of efficacy or make-­believe are permitted alongside the normal rules of cause and effect that govern real-­world activity and creation.21 As such, Winnicott argued, the transitional zone remained a “potential space” available to adults, and a form of activity frequently recapitulated in adult life, in artistic creation and cultural experiences, and, indeed, in psychotherapy.22 Winnicott’s emphasis in this account on the way the child can step in and out of magical belief during play, and the way play enables the gradual acceptance and perception of the outside world, as “the object is repudiated, re-­accepted and perceived objectively,” suggests a useful insight into Bellmer’s and other artists’ practices of reviewing their experimental objects in their studio photographs.23 Closer to Bellmer’s own time, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s essay on play with dolls describes something similar: a psychic function crucial to the emergence of subjectivity. Rilke’s essay, which Bellmer may have read, was inspired by seeing Lotte Pritzel’s wax dolls in her studio (Bellmer would also meet Prit-

zel in 1925, and her dolls were a reputed source of inspiration for his own).24 Rilke’s essay argues that the most important function of the doll is that it be less alive than the subject, so enabling the subject to define him or herself as a self-­asserting subject in relation to it as mute and inanimate object: It was necessary for us to have things of this kind, which acquiesced in everything. The simplest love relationships were quite beyond our comprehension, we could not possibly have lived and had dealings with a person who was something; at most, we could only have entered into such a person and lost ourselves there. With the doll, we were forced to assert ourselves, for, had we surrendered ourselves to it, there would then have been no one there at all.25 Seeing Machines

This account describes the fluidity of the situation of early childhood play, also captured by Winnicott’s account of the transitional object, in which at one moment the child’s belief charges the doll or toy with life; and then, with the withdrawal of the child’s belief, the doll becomes inanimate once again. Indeed, Bellmer himself echoed Rilke’s account of the simultaneously lifelike and lifeless quality of the doll in his essay “Memories of the Doll Theme,” published in Die Puppe in 1934.26 This is a fluctuating putting-­into-­life and out again of objects that helps the subject to establish his or her own sense of aliveness, and as such, is inherently precarious and dangerous to the subject (as Rilke and Winnicott acknowledge). It is a play of belief and liberation from belief that Walter Benjamin also discussed, in his description of childhood play, and in his account of our relation to mimesis, a play from which, Benjamin reminded us, the child is forced to liberate himself with a shriek, lest he be entirely swallowed up by the make-­believe, and so lost.27 Recovering the context of collaborative practice and play that enabled the production of the first series of Doll photographs helps support the suggestion that two models of fantasy as developed within the family—­one based upon the family conceived, in line with orthodox Freudian and Surrealist narratives, as collapsing, traumatic, and incestuous, the other upon the family as the basis in practice of lateral, adaptive, everyday, aspirational, and collaborative sibling relations that support and enable the survival of the subject under threat of extinction or nonbeing—­may be discerned in Bellmer’s photographs as held in tension, or negotiation, in very much the same way that the studio space in the photographs is itself both held together and taken apart, and performed as a staging of fantasy. Play supplies the theoretical structure that supports this interpretation, as a behavior in which received echoes of established conventions are mingled with experiment and improvisation. Looking at the photographs, it is the memory of this type of play-­ behavior that the viewer is able to recover, I suggest, as memories of the provisionality and contingency of play, as well as play’s imaginative fiat in relation to objects, are stirred.

57

Chapter Two 58

For the artist himself, a useful model for a kind of picture-­space that could enable such explorations was available in contemporary visual culture, and this was the shop window. Shop windows provided the most immediate contemporary context in which dolls were staged and arranged in scenographies and tableaux for display. Bellmer worked in commercial advertising, and ran his own agency in Berlin between 1926 and 1933. He was familiar, as a consequence of his professional work, with the latest commercial techniques employed in Weimar Germany, where shop mannequin design and shop window display techniques were undergoing a boom. As Therese Lichtenstein has pointed out, mannequins were often illustrated in the pages of the advertising trade journal Gebrauchsgraphik.28 Contemporary artists showed interest in shop window design and in photographing mannequins: Fernand Léger, for example, designed a shop window display for the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, where Man Ray photographed the new Siegler mannequins in the fashion pavilion (two of these photographs were published in Vogue in September that year).29 In Berlin, shop window displays were artistically adventurous: as in Bellmer’s photographs, clothed and partially clothed mannequins were placed on display and staged in elaborate scenic environments. Janet Ward has described the adventurous tableaux constructed in the display windows of department stores, such as the staging admired by Sergei Tretiakov in 1931, in the window of the Ka De We department store in Berlin, showing a weirdly animated crowd of mannequins falling over one another in grotesque and lifeless poses.30 Yet it is not just mannequins and their particular, often uncanny stagings that link Bellmer’s photographs to shop windows. Even more important, I want to argue, was the shallow, glass-­fronted space of these displays. This vitrine space, a box with a glass surface, may, I think, be compared to the shallow tableau space, closed by a background plane, that Bellmer constructed for his photographs. It is striking that each of the ten photographs published in Die Puppe constructs a narrow foreground, with the figure dismantled against a closed background. Under this treatment, the picture-­space becomes a shallow box, closed off by a background plane or by darkness. Strong oblique angles are utilized in several photographs, which shrink the picture-­space further, or else the doll’s parts are photographed from above, lying flat within the picture plane. The background plane—­whether provided by a wall, a door, or a bed—­ reiterates the flat surface of the picture, while in several photographs the doll’s parts and limbs are arranged to echo the linear edges of the picture: fitted into the frame and reiterating it. Altogether it seems that the dismantling of the figure and the progressive construction of internal scaffolding for the picture edges and surface are jointly undertaken, and conceived as complementing each other. In addition, the reflectiveness of the glass surface of the shop window, and its simultaneous transparency, enabling a fluid intermingling of items reflected on the glassy surface with objects situated within, is echoed in the

Seeing Machines 59

2.5  Hans Bellmer, The Doll, or Self-­Portrait with the Doll, 1934. Gelatin silver print, 4.5 × 3 inches (11.5 × 7.5 cm). Courtesy of Ubu Gallery, New York; Galerie Berinson, Berlin. © 2013 ADAGP, Paris/DACS, London.

photograph published as number three in Die Puppe (and reproduced in Minotaure), in which we see a shadowy image of the artist himself, bending down next to the doll (fig. 2.5). The half-­constructed figure of the doll is posed against the drawn diagram of itself, hung behind it on the wall. As in photograph four in Die Puppe, discussed earlier, we are encouraged to read, collagelike, the relation of drawing, to object, to shadowy projection; at the same time we see,

Chapter Two 60

collagelike, Bellmer’s own head cutting off and replacing that of the drawn figure of the doll. The inclusion of the artist’s own image points to the display function of these photographs and their utility in providing a staging of the artist that might be seen by others and recognized. The need to forge a collaborative group around himself was certainly felt by Bellmer at this time in the early 1930s. We know that when these photographs were made, Bellmer felt exiled in his native Germany and longed for entrée with the Surrealist group in Paris. We know he read Dada and Surrealist periodicals and magazines, which were sent to him by friends in Paris.31 We know that at his first opportunity, in 1934, he sent his cousin Ursula with a portfolio of his work to visit leading Surrealist artists, a strategy that paid off when he was rewarded with a double-­page spread in Minotaure later that year. The photographs found an immediate and ready welcome among the Surrealists, Paul Eluard and André Breton in particular, who not only invited him to publish the spread in Minotaure but also arranged for the French translation and republication of Die Puppe as La Poupée in 1936. Bellmer himself visited Paris in 1935, exhibiting with the Surrealists for the first time in February of that year, and again in 1936, 1937, and 1938. In due course he made more photographs to illustrate poems by his new friend, Eluard, and with the aid of his new friends, he hand-­colored them.32 Bellmer’s Doll photographs should thus be taken seriously as picturing and indeed accomplishing an artist’s ambition and desire to find acceptance within an artistic milieu, and so as picturing construction and affiliation rather than breakage and subversion. Or rather, to the extent that they picture breakage and subversion (of artistic tradition and wider social values), I suggest that this was only as a means to win the other things—­namely acceptance (in a different set of social relations) and alliance (with an avant-­garde fraternity), as well as a new model of the work of art. Photography was the supremely comprehending, flexible medium that enabled this simultaneous destruction and creation. What we see in Bellmer’s first series is therefore not just the drama of making the doll but also a drama that concerns the making of the artist himself, and his emergence into a secure stylistic affiliation and professional identity. Alongside these, we also see the emergence of photography as a certain sort of support: not the kind of craft-­based practice, established over decades, enabling artistic legacies, contestation, and continuation, that is implied by the modernist conception of the mediums of painting and sculpture, but instead a certain way of using photography, as a pragmatic instrument, to enable particular artistic projects and affiliations. It would have the potential perhaps to alter our understanding of “Surrealist photography,” finding a position halfway between the alternatives posed by Rosalind Krauss’s essays in the 1985 exhibition catalogue L’Amour Fou, which emphasized the manipulated Surrealist image, and Ian Walker’s more recent emphasis on “straight” Surrealist photographs in his 2002 book City Gorged with Dreams.33 This version of “Surrealist

photography” would have something in common with the distinction Abigail Solomon-­Godeau has drawn in a different context between “art photography” and “artists using photography”: a treatment of photography as having specific use-­value for artists, in this project of expanding beyond the traditions and aesthetic conventions of artistic mediums.34 Let me sketch out a summary of this usage of photography, drawing together what I have said so far based on Bellmer’s photographs. Photography is used in the first series as one step up from a working document. It makes an image that is relatively quick and easy to produce and that records certain activities of making in which the artist is engaged. It enables the artist to picture himself together with his work, aiding the consolidation of his self-­image. It enables the stage-­setting of his workspace as something a little more heightened and mysterious. It enables a certain shared and collaborative model of practice, with a small circle of friends and family—­above all with the artist’s brother. It produces images that are easily portable and, crucially, can be sent abroad, in an effort to forge international alliances with other avant-­garde artists, or confrères. Because the images photography produces are easily reproducible, like Klee’s oil-­transfers, some can be sent away, but at the same time some can be kept by the artist. These photographs can be reproduced in the black-­and-­white journals and periodicals of the time without significantly impairing their quality, but they can also be published more painstakingly in artists’ books, and both procedures will improve the circulation of the images. But this “usage of photography” was not purely practical. At its root lay an engagement with the project to break out of the medium of painting in the first decades of the twentieth century. Photography was useful because it could be understood as allied to certain avant-­garde rhetorics concerning the disruption of the bourgeois art of painting. It was used by Bellmer to house echoes of contemporary popular cinema, by means of which to stage-­set and disrupt the home, and it was generated in part by the experimental device he constructed, the doll, as a “seeing machine,” the operations of which echoed the functions of the camera. Beyond these breakages of conventional forms and structures, photography enabled the construction of a shallow, pictorial space, often containing a figure, objects, and drawn parts, all working in relation to one another. The shop window supplied a readymade model for this picture-­space, available in contemporary visual culture, and the glassy, reflective surface of the shop window also modeled for photography its capacity for the inclusion, via double exposure or other technical tricks, of the artist’s own body in the picture-­field, producing as a consequence an image that supports the narcissistic self-­projection by the artist of his identity as a maker, as well as an address to imagined others, in a mimicking of the shop window’s display function. The deeper origins of this usage of photography, and the expansive kind of picture-­space it provided, I propose, lay further back among earlier twentieth-­century avant-­gardes.

Seeing Machines 61

Collage

Of all studio photographs in the early twentieth century, Pablo Picasso’s are among the most numerous and fascinating; not least because Picasso’s studio itself was perceived as a place of such extraordinary and radical experimentation, described by one visitor, around the year 1912, as “more incredible than Faust’s laboratory.”35 As Anne Baldassari has shown, Picasso began taking photographs very early in his career, and two of the first known are his Self-­ Portrait in the Studio, of 1901 (fig. 2.6), and The Blue Studio, of 1902 (fig. 2.7).36 Both show the studio wall with an arrangement of pictures hung upon it. A notable feature of The Blue Studio is that the central painting (Two Women at Chapter Two 62

2.6  Pablo Picasso, Self-­ Portrait in the Studio, 1901. Gelatin silver print, 5 × 3.5 inches (12 × 9 cm). Picasso Archives, Musée Picasso, Paris. © 2013 Succession Picasso/DACS, London/ RMN-­Grand Palais.

Seeing Machines 63

a Bar, 1902) is shown hung upside-­down. Paintings hung upside-­down have a particular place in the mythology of the studio, as testified by the story of Wassily Kandinsky first “seeing” abstract art by looking at a painting upside-­down in his studio—­a story repeated in respect of many modern artists, including László Moholy-­Nagy and Max Ernst.37 Here, this striking feature suggests that Picasso is exploring how a photograph might enable him to see differently and, in particular, how a photograph might enable the construction of an arrangement that goes beyond a display of the individual pictured works to produce a new ensemble held upon a single surface. Baldassari points to the way in which the studio wall “forms a living support for works hung edge-­to-­edge, suggesting a continuous, potentially unlimited expanse of pictorial space.”38 This suggests, we might think, a form of collage, which is here accomplished within the medium of photography. The butterfly pinned to the wall in the corner of The Blue Studio foreshadows the butterfly used by Picasso in his collage Composition with Butterfly, of 1932, a work that was praised by André Breton for its expansion of the possibilities of the picture-­field: “It is only in 1933 [sic] that a real butterfly has been able to enter the field of a painting, and has been able to do this, moreover, without its entire surroundings crumbling immediately into dust.”39

2.7  Pablo Picasso, The Blue Studio, 1902. Gelatin silver print, 4.6 × 5.1 inches (12 × 13 cm). Picasso Archives, Musée Picasso, Paris. © 2013 Succession Picasso/DACS, London/RMN-­Grand Palais.

Chapter Two 64

2.8  Pablo Picasso, Self-­ Portrait with “The Smoker,” Paris, rue Schoelcher studio [1914–­16]. Gelatin silver print, 7.1 × 5.1 inches (18 × 13 cm). Picasso Archives, Musée Picasso, Paris. © 2013 Succession Picasso/DACS, London/RMN-­Grand Palais.

In Self-­Portrait in the Studio, an image of the artist himself has “entered the picture-­field,” superimposed upon various works pinned upon the studio wall and creating a fluid space holding multiple, transparent planes layered on one another in a kind of collage.40 Jeffrey Weiss has recently described the construction of a similar picture-­space in photographs Picasso took in the summer of 1909, using a multiple exposure to superimpose different versions of his Horta paintings upon each other, creating a shallow bas-­relief: “the paintings are ‘stacked’ and viewable through one another—­like transparent

projections—­in shallow space,” Weiss writes. This produces a “photographic pseudo-­space (a fictive realm of shallow depth created by a successive process of exposure and exchange). . . . Shuffling the canvases . . . within one shallow space that is simultaneously actual, depicted and embodied by the medium,” Weiss continues, has the result that “the studio itself becomes a strategic domain,” or “contingent realm,” in which the art object becomes unfixed and unsecured: sculptural objects reading more readily as pictorial, and paintings extending in relation to each other in space, as if sculptural.41 In the 1902 photograph, however, there is the additional consideration that the space of the studio is staged as a location in which to dramatize or stage a shadowy artistic self-­portrait. The grandiosity of this self-­dramatization, and the quasi-­Surrealist space it produced avant la lettre in the picture-­field, is indicated by the sentence that, Baldassari notes, Picasso jotted on the back of the photograph, apparently paraphrasing an episode from Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror: “This photograph could be titled, ‘The strongest walls open as I pass. Behold!’”42 This theatrical self-­presentation is a common feature of the studio photographs, many of which show Picasso and his friends, sometimes in costume, staged in front of or among his own works: one from 1915–­16, for example, shows Picasso stripped to the waist, as if a boxer, and another from 1911 shows him wearing his friend Georges Braque’s military uniform (this photograph is matched by one of Braque in the same uniform). These culminate in the photograph taken in Picasso’s rue Schoelcher studio sometime between 1914 and 1916, Self-­Portrait with “The Smoker” (fig. 2.8), in which the artist, seated in a deck chair and looking up at the camera, appears like an impresario surrounded by theatrical “flats,” each constructing a different scene or environment, in which a number of his most important works (including Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907) are staged.43 As the different scenographies in this photograph indicate, an important function of the studio photographs for Picasso appears to have been to pose an arrangement of artworks to be viewed in relation to one another. We see this at perhaps its most intense in a famous series of three studio photographs from December 1912, showing different drawings and papiers collés displayed on the wall above a studio couch or bed, around the centrally placed, wall-­hung cardboard Guitar construction of 1912 (fig. 2.9). This was a moment at which collage was uppermost in Picasso’s concerns: his Still Life with Chair Caning, often called the first Cubist collage, was made in May 1912, and the cardboard Guitar of later the same year, the focus of the compositions here, is widely seen as one of Picasso’s most innovative constructions, inaugurating his work in papier collé and contributing to his pulling apart of figurative representation into different notational systems, as well as his play between two-­and three-­ dimensions.44 The subject of recently renewed discussion and research, these photographs are extraordinary: displaying the litter and mess of construction, with

Seeing Machines 65

Chapter Two 66

2.9  Pablo Picasso, wall arrangement in the artist’s studio at 242 boulevard Raspail, December 4, 1912, or later. Collection of Musée Picasso, Paris. © 2013 Succession Picasso/DACS, London/RMN-­Grand Palais.

workmanlike scraps of cut paper on the bed in front of the display and a glue pot visible in the foreground.45 The works seem to have been photographed with the glue in the papiers collés still wet, and in some cases, portions of newspaper that now form parts of particular works, have not yet been attached. The way the works are pinned to the wall looks provisional and temporary; we can see loose edges and corners of sheets flapping and rising up, and Anne Umland reports that multiple pinholes in the papiers collés indicate that their hanging was rearranged and contingent.46 The invitation to read from one work to the next is extended especially by the photograph in this series on which Picasso has scrawled numbers in ink on the surface of the print, enumerating the papiers collés and drawings and creating a left-­to-­right ascending sequence among them.47 Here it seems that Picasso used the photograph in a certain way: that he looked at it, and proposed to himself a reading of the relationship of the works pictured in it. That a new way of seeing was something Picasso derived from photography is indicated by his remark in a letter of March 21, 1913, to his dealer, Daniel-­Henry Kahnweiler (who regularly arranged for photographs to be

Seeing Machines 67

2.10  Pablo Picasso, Still Life with “Guitar” and Bottle, 1913. Assembled before November 15, 1913. Paperboard, paper, string, and painted wire, installed with cut cardboard box, paper, and wood molding. Photograph, 4.4 × 6 inches (11 × 15 cm). D.-­H. Kahnweiler Inventory, Picasso Archives, Picasso Museum, Paris. © 2013 Succession Picasso/Leiris Gallery/RMN-­Grand Palais/ DACS, London.

taken of Picasso’s works in progress by a professional photographer): “Yesterday I received the photos which are good and please me as usual since they surprise me. I see my paintings differently from how they are.”48 What kind of new way of seeing they offered might be suggested, for example, by a photograph made in early 1913, Still Life with “Guitar” and Bottle (fig. 2.10), that shows the cardboard Guitar hung on the studio wall with a selection of other elements arranged around it: two apparently blank pieces of paper pinned up together to the left, as if to make a “background” or in a gesture toward wallpaper; a drawing of a diamond-­patterned flask pinned at the right; and an improvised cardboard shelf jutting out from the wall, upon which Guitar and the “flask” apparently rest. Beneath the “shelf ” another piece of card or paper has been folded in the middle and pinned to the wall, its central fold jutting out as if to provide extra support to the “shelf.” In this display, the studio photograph provides a flexible and expanded picture-­space, combining flat planes and three-­dimensional forms that together read against the back-

Chapter Two 68

2.11  Pablo Picasso, Still Life, 1914. Relief. Painted wood and upholstery fringe, 18 × 3.6 inches (25 × 46 cm). © 2013 Tate, London/ Succession Picasso/DACS, London.

ground plane of the studio wall. The expanded picture-­space here anticipates, I suggest, a wall-­hung, wooden collage-­construction such as the Still Life Picasso made in early 1914 (fig. 2.11), in which the real wall functions as a background plane in a materialized papier collé, from which the tasseled tabletop juts forward. It is, of course, the Still Life itself that composes the expanded, elastic picture-­space around its various elements, but it is what Breton called the “precision mechanism” of the photograph that captures this achievement, frames it, and lets it be seen.49 An even more daring exploration of the problematic is seen in Picasso’s Photographic Composition with “Guitar Player” and “Violin” (1913) (fig. 2.12). This is one of the most elaborately staged of his studio photographs and offers perhaps the most complex and playful meditation on pictorial representation and picture-­space. Indeed, the figure in this photograph, with newspaper arms and sketched-­in features, and the assemblage constructed around it, from a mixture of real and represented things, have the quality of spontaneous invention with poor materials that Charles Baudelaire praised as the highest characteristic of play (just as Breton praised this quality in his essay on Picasso’s stu-

Seeing Machines 69

2.12  Pablo Picasso, Photographic Composition with “Construction with Guitar Player” and “Violin,” 1913. Gelatin silver print, 4.6 × 3.4 inches (12 × 8.7 cm). Collection of Musée Picasso, Paris. © 2013 Succession Picasso/DACS, London/ RMN-­Grand Palais. All rights reserved.

dio).50 Here, drawing, papier collé, and three-­dimensional objects are arranged, framed by the camera, to read in relation to one another in the resulting photograph.51 The diamond-­patterned flask from Still Life with “Guitar,” discussed above, is on the wall to the left, and the paperboard construction, Violin, which Picasso also photographed at this time in a separate wall-­hung assemblage, is hung against the canvas on the right, the surface of the large canvas here supplying the usual role of the wall. (These inclusions are typical of the way in which Picasso’s photographs explore the same, small set of works and scraps of works, reassembled in different combinations.) In this photograph what is at stake seems to be the relation between “real” objects and depicted ones. Real, three-­dimensional objects, such as the table, the guitar, and the wine glass, are combined with signs for things, like the

Chapter Two 70

2.13  Pablo Picasso, Au Bon Marché, 1913. Collage/drawing. Oil, adhesive, and cardboard, 24 × 36 inches (60 × 71 cm). Collection of Museum Ludwig, Aachen. © 2013 Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln/ Succession Picasso/DACS, London.

drawn figure, and the arrangement is held together as a kind of tableau in the invisible, elastic membrane of the photograph. The photograph also holds a joking mirror-­relation between this ensemble and the papier collé on the wall to the left, Au Bon Marché (1913) (fig. 2.13), which represents a woman sitting at a dressing table, just as the outsize drawn figure “sits” at the real table in front of it in the photograph.52 A similar relation is staged in another photograph of the now partially disassembled ensemble. In this photograph, Picasso himself takes the place of the figure with newspaper arms; seated in front of the canvas, he looks at the camera with his eyebrows slightly raised and an ironic half-­smile on his face.53 In each of these cases, a real or feigned guitar is key to the work that is going on. In the three 1912 photographs, the papiers collés drawings and scrap pieces of paper displayed around the centrally placed Guitar construction, as Anne Baldassari has argued, “coher[e] around the ongoing exchange between the camera and el guitarron,” or, as we might put it, between the double apertures of camera lens and sound-­hole.54 Such stagings suggest a new salience to Jean Paulhan’s description of Picasso’s papiers collés as “seeing machines,” in that these, and the Guitar too, might be devices or improvised instruments for testing visual possibilities and extending the artist’s understanding of his own work and, as such, for mirroring, in a material and imperfect form, the form

and function of the camera.55 Like the doll for Bellmer, as we saw it pictured in the diagram showing the panorama device, the Guitar (with its central sound-­ hole echoing the peephole in the doll’s abdomen) appears, as indeed Breton had described it in an earlier essay, a kind of visual toy, employed to enable a certain kind of play, with useful and strategic functions for the artist.56 I quoted earlier Weiss’s commentary, suggesting that the Horta studio photographs from 1909 explore the merging of pictorial and sculptural space that characterized Picasso’s painting practice in this period. But I see something more at stake in the studio photographs of 1912–­13. Not only is the gap between pictorial and sculptural space what is bridged by Picasso in these photographs, but also—­in the sense in which Breton described Picasso’s “amazing guitars made of shoddy strips of paper” functioning as “veritable emergency bridges”—­the boundary between real and imaginary, that very boundary that Surrealism had made it its project to traverse.57 (The paraphrase from Lautréamont on the back of the Self-­Portrait in the Studio suggests as much.) Thus we might see the studio photographs as characterized by the psychic ambiguity that is also a feature of play, as we have seen it described by Winnicott: “The area of playing is not inner psychic reality. It is outside the individual but it is not the external world. Into this play area the child gathers objects or phenomena from external reality and uses these in the service of some sample derived from inner or personal reality. Without hallucinating, the child puts out a sample of dream potential and lives with this sample in a chosen setting of fragments from external reality.”58 The studio photograph, on this reading, is used as a space within which to hold a kind of collage, but this becomes a rather different kind of collage than we are used to thinking of in Picasso’s practice. This is a collage accomplished within the medium of photography, using the studio wall as a proxy picture surface, in which, accordingly, the rupture of the picture plane is not the main drive. Indeed, this can be seen in the 1913 photograph of Violin (fig. 2.14), showing the wooden and paperboard construction hung on the wall, on which is also pasted torn wallpaper and newspaper to make a background that is just like the background used in papier collé works of the same period (for example, Bottle of Vieux Marc, 1913). In this photograph, as in the similarly wall-­staged Still Life with “Guitar,” the collage is driven by a logic of assemblage and interrelation and enabled by the newly expansive and fluid space provided by photography, within which a “picture” can be established. This is a kind of collage that offers a performance of the “picture” holding together rather than breaking apart. There is a certain psychoanalytic matter at stake here. Collage, rupture, breaking the picture plane, and dismantling the figure have long been theorized in terms of symbolic violence. Certainly Picasso’s later collage practices would support such a reading, especially his Guitar collages of 1926 (which in 1930 were used by Louis Aragon to exemplify his account of collage as a

Seeing Machines 71

Chapter Two 72

2.14  Pablo Picasso, Still Life with “Violin” in the Studio at boulevard Raspail, 1913. Assembled before November 15, 1913. Paperboard, ink, watercolor, pencil, and string, installed with torn wallpaper, cut-­and-­pasted colored paper, and paper. Picasso Archives, Musée Picasso, Paris. © 2013 Succession Picasso/DACS, London/RMN-­Grand Palais. All rights reserved.

violent and iconoclastic attack on painting).59 A reading of collage that emphasizes its destructive focus has also been linked to the impact of photography in Picasso’s practice by Rosalind Krauss, who reads the impact of the “Kodak” on Picasso as threatening a decapitation, or castration, and resulting in a frozen, phobic line.60 But the model of collage that I am proposing, made dramatically visible by the expanded picture-­space provided by the photograph, sees photography as providing an elastic and invisible medium, by means of which Picasso was able to expand the “picture” to fantastically, impossibly, hold more. Such a conception is, I suggest, in tune with his pyrotechnical feats of pictorial imagination—­such as turning a pair of bicycle handlebars upside

down to read as the horned head of a bull—­which seem ultimately more about preserving a kind of illusion, and so a kind of picture-­space, than destroying it. Photography, I want to propose, was an important part of the means Picasso used forcibly to expand the picture-­space beyond painting; indeed, it provided a model of this new space—­albeit a very provisional one, which did not have an important public life, but remained largely a private matter, enabling the artist’s working processes. As with Bellmer, this was accomplished in the context of a close working (but perhaps more fundamentally, playful) relationship with a fraternal peer: Georges Braque.61 Of course we cannot overlook that there is also an attacking and dismantling of the figure in these staged photographs, and indeed, that this is vital to all of the constructions, collages, and papiers collés pictured in them. The conventional drawing and modeling of a figure—­which had been the foundation of the beaux-­arts tradition of oil painting—­is pulled apart, in Photographic Composition with “Guitar Player” and “Violin,” into different signifying systems, including schematic line drawing and cutout paper arms. There is a sexual logic at work in this dismantling too. The papier collé on the wall to the left of the figure, Au Bon Marché, has been interpreted as suggesting a lewd sexual viewpoint and pun—­first, in 1965, by Robert Rosenblum, and then some years later and more fully by Edward Fry.62 Au Bon Marché was published in La Révolution Surréaliste in October 1925, and Elizabeth Cowling argues that its “Lun B TROU ICI” pun (glossed by Fry as referring to the female figure in the collage, and saying “you can make a hole here inexpensively”) was probably recognized by the Surrealists and appealed to them.63 Furthermore, Cowling likens a photograph by Eugène Atget of shop window dummies modeling corsets (Boulevard de Strasbourg, Corsets, 1912), published in La Révolution Surréaliste in June 1926, to Au Bon Marché, arguing that the reference to lingerie, and the illustration of a woman modeling a liberty bodice in Picasso’s collage, makes the two works “directly comparable.”64 This sort of investigative prying into and dismantling of the figure is crucial to the structures of childhood play. Think again of the first model of Bellmer’s doll, with the panorama device in its abdomen, and recall the well-­known passage in Baudelaire’s essay on toys describing “the overriding desire of most children . . . to get at and see the soul of their toys.” The child “twists and turns his toy, scratches it, shakes it, bumps it against the walls, throws it on the ground. . . . [A]t last he opens it up, he is the stronger. But where is the soul?”65 In his essays on the subject of the doll, written to accompany the photographs, Bellmer expresses a similarly overpowering curiosity. What he desires to know is, apparently, the core of female sexual difference. He pries and probes inside the female body, and among the paraphernalia of “feminine” things (sweets, lace underwear, roses), but without success.66 In this sense, the doll Bellmer constructed seems the very model of a “philosophical toy”: a device built to aid in his deliberately childish investigations and researches. And Picasso’s Guitar

Seeing Machines 73

Chapter Two 74

perhaps seems similar: a philosophical toy for opening out the figure, a seeing machine, exploratory and experimental. The sexual reading of the “trou” in Au Bon Marché is extended by some to the central sound-­hole of the famous cardboard Guitar of 1912, suggesting that the work of dismantling traditional sculptural modeling that is accomplished in that construction is allied to the kind of sexualized dismantling of and probing into the female figure that was such a feature of Picasso’s and most other avant-­garde art at the time (indeed, the form of the guitar is widely understood as having a quasi-­anthropomorphic significance throughout his oeuvre: “After all we all know why we began with musical instruments,” Picasso is quoted as saying).67 Thus, what may seem to be at stake in the photographs that stage these collages and this construction together in the studio—­in particular the 1913 Still Life with “Guitar” ensemble, and the Photographic Composition with “Guitar Player” and “Violin”—­as in Bellmer’s photographs, is the idiom of the pried-­into and disassembled female figure that was so often apparently necessary for the early twentieth-­century avant-­gardist project of picture-­breaking, even as it was supported and enabled, unseen, by the construction of a new, more expansive picture-­space in the photograph. My suggestion is that the studio photograph supplied Picasso with a means to compensate for the symbolic violence his work performed: preserving the pictorial function that he was simultaneously engaged in destroying. Like Bellmer’s photographs of the doll, Picasso’s photographs of constructions in his studio give us tableaux (non-­vivant) that unpick and simultaneously remake the tableau. Photographic Composition with “Guitar Player” and “Violin” shows us the figure dismembered and the mediums of painting and sculpture unpicked, dismantled with the help of a kind of collage accomplished within the photograph. Like Bellmer’s photographs, they show that the attack on painting and sculpture was something that had to be performatively staged in tandem with certain restorative stagings of the artist’s own persona. For there was a constructive dimension to this work too: formally speaking, photography enabled precisely the building of a fantasy space designed to “hold” the avant-­garde’s destructive experiments and the building of avant-­garde alliances. While Picasso’s photographs remained largely private (so far as we know), we can nevertheless see in them a use-­value, deeply pragmatic but also intensely phantasmatic, that is similar to that which I have already explored in Bellmer’s case. The photograph was a means to enable the artist to see and to imagine the completion of his work, and also to stage-­set the work of making and the problematic that was elaborated in the works. Furthermore, while it may be true that photography enabled these things chiefly in a private sense—­ that it supported a kind of studio-­viewing, rather than being a public medium of exhibition like oil painting or sculpture—­it is clear that for Picasso, too, it supported some limited avant-­garde affiliations, extending even beyond Braque and his immediate circle. The photograph from 1913 of the wall-­hung

guitar and diamond wall flask, Still Life with “Guitar” and Bottle, and the similar photograph of the wall-­hung Violin with wallpaper pasted behind it, were both published in Apollinaire’s journal Les Soirées de Paris in November 1913, along with two other photographs of wooden wall-­reliefs and constructions that continued an exploration of the way in which a broken-­apart real object could constitute a kind of pictorial space around itself, within which its form remained legible as a broken guitar, or a human figure. And we know that in this publication, the photographs were seen by artists of the international avant-­garde, arousing the interest of Russian artists in particular. Later, as we shall see, a further means of the international dissemination of Picasso’s wall-­staged collages was Frederick Kiesler’s popular book Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display (1930), which reproduced one of the Guitar constructions (Bottle and Guitar, 1913) that Apollinaire had previously published.68 Apollinaire’s publication of these photographs caused a number of the magazine’s readers to cancel their subscriptions, threatening the journal with financial collapse. The constructions, with their rubbishy, ephemeral materials, seemed to the majority of the magazine’s patrons shocking, risky, and provisional. Only by the Surrealists were these collage-­constructions and their materials seen as poetic, and celebrated as such: in Breton’s statement that the images revealed “an entirely new visual experience” and, as I have mentioned, in Louis Aragon’s 1930 essay “The Challenge to Painting” (written to accompany a Surrealist exhibition of collage that included two Guitar collages from Picasso’s 1926 series), which celebrated the baseness of the artist’s materials.69 Twenty years later, photographs of Picasso’s studio again became a staging post in the changing reception and interpretation of his Cubism. In February 1933, photographs taken by Brassaï of Picasso’s studio were published in the first issue of the Surrealist magazine Minotaure (which we know Bellmer read), accompanied by the previously cited essay in which Breton developed a post-­Cubist theorization of Picasso’s work via an account of the artist’s studio, “Picasso in His Element.”70 It was Picasso’s involvement in this project that brought him closer to the Surrealist group (and indeed, in later years he was to maintain that 1933 was the year of Surrealism’s greatest influence on his work). In particular, the project introduced him to Paul Eluard, who was also to become Bellmer’s “contact” with the Surrealists. It was Eluard who wrote the poems (and selected the pictures) for Bellmer’s Les Jeux de la Poupée, in 1936, and Eluard to whom, at around the same time, Picasso gave the only one of his studio-­constructions from the period 1912–­14 that he permitted to leave his possession during his lifetime: the Still-­Life of 1914.71 These links to Surrealism would be established only in the decades to come, however. Before this, there were more surprising ramifications of Picasso’s experiments, which took root somewhat closer to home.

Seeing Machines 75

Large Glass/shop window

Chapter Two 76

The new model of expansive picture-­space I am pointing to in Picasso’s practice emerged not only from his intense, playful, and experimental exchange, around the year 1912, with Braque, but also under the stimulus of competition with immediate imitators (the salon Cubists) and foreign innovators (the Futurists), as well as pressures from within his painting practice, including perhaps a sense of exhaustion and frustration with the stifling and airless oil paintings of 1911 that directly preceded the breakout into collage and constructions. Other, younger French artists felt these pressures too, among them, of course, Marcel Duchamp. Both Duchamp and Picasso came up with a similar construction at about this time: Picasso’s cardboard Guitar in 1912, which marked his turn to collage, papier collé, and sketchy, rapid, improvised constructions out of ordinary materials, and Duchamp’s Coffee Mill in 1911, painted on cardboard and made to decorate his brother’s kitchen, ornamented with small, whirring arrows (reminiscent of those used by Paul Klee) to indicate the mechanical movement of the device. Coffee Mill was described by Duchamp as “the key picture to his complete work,” and in its vernacular objecthood it opened the way to his readymades of the following years.72 There is of course a certain peculiarity in returning Duchamp’s practice to a Cubist context. Cubism is precisely what Duchamp had seemed to escape, in 1912 in Munich, with his abandonment of the painting of multiple views of a figure in motion, and his leap into a language of mechanical drawing and readymade forms. Interestingly, the departure was precipitated not only by internal dissatisfaction with Cubism but by a crisis in Duchamp’s fraternal relations, when his brothers were sent to ask him to change the title of his work Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) before it could be exhibited with other largely Cubist paintings of the time. Duchamp, famously, withdrew the painting rather than change its title, and left Paris for Munich shortly afterward.73 Duchamp and Picasso went in different directions from this point: Picasso returning, after 1914, to drawing—­if in a nerveless line indebted, as Carsten-­Peter Warncke and Rosalind Krauss have argued, to photography—­and Duchamp, with his readymades, aligning himself, after 1917, more with Dada than with Picasso.74 Yet for a certain, fragile moment, in Paris, then Munich, and later New York, a dissatisfaction with painting, a frustration with Cubism, peer pressure, and a desire to escape all these things, led to a similar turn toward the experimental rendering of everyday objects and the production of risky, provisional photographs of staged assemblages in the studio. The readymades fit many of the descriptions of studio objects established so far: experimental devices, improvised out of things that were ready to hand. Giorgio Agamben, indeed, in his essay on toys, cites the readymades specifically as typifying the character of toys as objects taken out of use.75 Several bear

Seeing Machines 77

2.15  Man Ray, Photograph of Marcel Duchamp’s “Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics),” 1920. Five painted glass plates turning on a metal axis, electrical wiring, wood, and metal braces. © 2013 Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris/ DACS, London/Telimage. © 2013 Succession Marcel Duchamp/ ADAGP, Paris/DACS, London.

a useful or accommodating relation to the body (urinal, snow shovel, hat rack). The very first readymade, the bicycle wheel, functioned as a “seeing machine” in the studio: Duchamp nailed the wheel to a stool and liked to turn it idly, gazing into the blur produced by the spokes.76 (On some accounts, Duchamp would even affix a small piece of mirror to the spokes, to compound its visual effect using dazzle and gleam.77) Walter Benjamin described the “objects removed from their functional context” produced by the Surrealists, citing Duchamp in particular, as affording the contemporary viewer more likelihood of an artistic experience than “legitimate works of art,” because they allow chance more Spielraum, or room for play.78 The readymades appear in perhaps the most obvious guise of the toy of all the experimental objects so far consid-

Chapter Two 78

ered: each of them was miniaturized for the Boîte-­en-­Valise (1935–­41). Indeed, Duchamp engaged in an apparently endless play with them, producing and reproducing replicas for the rest of his career. Duchamp photographed the readymades arranged in his studio with other works, and sometimes posed himself, or a close male friend, in relation to them, suggesting that his studio photographs may be seen as part of that wider photographic staging of the self in relation to the work, and in relation to a fraternal peer, that we have seen in the practice of Bellmer and Picasso.79 These photographs include two taken by Man Ray, showing Duchamp standing behind his newly constructed Rotary Glass Plates (1920), in which he is nearly vanishing, in an optical effect. An optician’s chart is included in the background of one of the photographs, and the bicycle wheel can be seen in the foreground, suggesting a comparison between the two varieties of experimental optical disk (fig. 2.15).80 Perhaps the most famous photograph, however, is one from 1917 showing a shadowy, seated figure, often identified as Duchamp (though it may be Henri-­ Pierre Roché) beneath a ceiling-­hung arrangement of readymades (fig. 2.16).81 This photograph, which stages a seated, half-­illusory figure among Duchamp’s 2.16  Henri-­Pierre Roché, Marcel Duchamp in Studio, 33 West 67 Street, New York (“Hat Rack” at upper far right, ghost figure seated on chest), 1917–­18. Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art. © 2013 Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/ DACS, London.

works, suggests an irresistible comparison with the figure in Picasso’s Photographic Composition with “Guitar Player” and “Violin,” who similarly seems to flicker in and out of reality, composed as he is of drawn, papery, and objective elements. Duchamp’s figure, half-­vanishing in a piece of photographic trickery, then (no doubt coincidentally) becomes a mirror for the dubious ontological status of Picasso’s drawn figure, holding a real guitar (the orientation of which is reversed). Looking at these photographs, and remembering also Picasso’s rue Schoelcher studio photograph and Bellmer’s Self-­Portrait with the Doll, we might be reminded of the anecdote told by Walter Benjamin, more than once, concerning the Chinese painter. This painter invited his friends to his studio to see his latest work, but when they looked around, they saw that “he had left them—­that he was in the picture,” smiling back at them, miniaturized, having disappeared into his own painting.82 Duchamp, like Picasso before him (and Bellmer yet to come), has, it seems, performed a similar stunt. Altogether, Duchamp’s studio photographs of this period look experimental and provisional in a way that I think is comparable to Picasso’s studio photographs of 1912–­14.83 They construct, I think, a similar space of play, in which a set of objects is endlessly recombined and reassembled in a series of experimental propositions. In each, photography is used as a tool for avoiding the artist’s “hand,” or “patte,” as Duchamp called it, and for fashioning a new kind of display space for the artist’s works: a screwball mirror for the careful arrangement of artworks as luxury objects in patrons’ and collectors’ homes, also often photographed at this time. Photography’s low-­down, documentary function was apparently viewed by both men as complementing the project of using rubbishy, cheap, ephemeral, and “readymade” materials, a project that underpinned both Picasso’s experiments with collage and Duchamp’s with the readymades. The attention both men paid to their photographs—­cutting out, collaging, and hand-­coloring them—­is also something that connects the two. Picasso made at least four prints of Photographic Composition with “Guitar Player” and “Violin,” for example, in two of which he masked out different sections in the development process to create papier collé–­like effects; while Duchamp reprinted, cut up, and hand-­colored reproductions of the readymades for inclusion in his Boîte-­en-­Valise.84 My point is not that Duchamp might have known Picasso’s photographs (we can be fairly sure that he did not, apart from those reproduced in Les Soirées de Paris), but rather that there is a similarity in the thinking of these two artists at this roughly contemporary moment, pointing to concerns that were to a certain extent shared: a project to break apart the picture-­space and move out into alternative three-­dimensional spatial construction, to dispense for a time with painting and the conventional materials of both painting and sculpture, to explore the use of photography as a means of reviewing the artist’s own works, to retreat from conventional spaces of display, and to engage with alternative modes of vision. Improvised studio objects, or what I have called

Seeing Machines 79

Chapter Two 80

“seeing machines” (readymades, Guitar, doll, Rotary Glass Plates), were the experimental means these artists developed to attack the resources of painting and sculpture and to develop new models of viewing. Studio photographs of these inventions helped support the artists in this endeavor, enabling artists at the intersection between Cubism and Surrealism to construct an expanded space of heterogeneous assemblage that involved a “holding together” of a picture-­field and so, phantasmatically, of their identity as artists and their desires for affiliation with other artists, even as it would also hold the destructive and experimental objects they invented to destroy existing models of the artwork, repudiate tradition, reconfigure visual pleasure, and break painting and sculpture apart. Working on glass became a method, for Duchamp, that inherited these functions of the studio photograph. First, making a picture on glass continues the attack on the painted picture surface and destroys the kind of visual appeal made by painting. We see the destruction of the picture surface and the generation of new visual experience, for example, in the Rotary Glass Plates, which originally had a prescribed viewing position of one meter and which, when activated, spun into a hypnotizing whirr of mechanically reconfigured visual experience. Similarly, To Be Looked At (from the Other Side of the Glass), with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour (1918), one of Duchamp’s earliest works on glass, requires a fixed, peephole viewing position, the picture surface functioning as an instrument for the gaze to pass through, reminiscent of squinting through the aperture of a camera, or a fairground peep show, rather than the contemplative gaze solicited by oil painting. Painting on glass was an experiment Picasso had also tried in 1912, as part of his exploration of unconventional materials. His Violin and Newspaper (1912) has sand applied to it (perhaps rather as Duchamp applied dust to the Large Glass) and was photographed in his studio against the wall; part of this real architecture, the dado rail, is visible through the glass of the picture and thus enters into the imaginary space of the work.85 Glass, then, could also model the kind of flexible and expanded picture-­space, incorporating, as did the studio photograph, a heterogeneous assemblage of objects into one pictorial field. While it was not a lasting form for Picasso, for Duchamp, above all in his major work of these years, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–­23) (fig. 6.13), often called the Large Glass (and first drawn out on the wall of his studio), it became the means for articulating a fundamental theme, enabling an imaginary restitution, I suggest, an as-­if restoration of fraternal relations, a compensation for the breakage with fraternal alliance that it also, in its anti-­Cubism, signals.86 The iconography of the Large Glass is divided between the “realm of the bachelors” in its lower half and that of the “bride” in the top. Machinery depicted in a spare, linear style and made up of readymade objects connects them, harnessing the bachelors together in what Duchamp referred to as the “bachelor machine” and facilitating their attempts to reach the bride with

their love darts or “Bachelor’s Splashes.” And yet this iconography of the sexual assault on a female body by busy mechanomorphic men is not, I would suggest, the main or only phantasmatic business of the work. The machinery harnesses men together to produce a kind of synthetic fraternity in alliance against the gross female form above (which dwarfs their miniature forms as if they were so many toys); the Large Glass thus comprises a space of artistic self-­projection and affiliation as much as the imagining of sexual assault. Furthermore, Duchamp’s use of glass as a surface to bear these things produces a picture-­space like that of the studio photograph, with the capacity to merge “real” with depicted space, as the viewer looks both at and through the Glass. Thus, a new picture-­space is enabled that is elastic, uterine, encompassing—­ borrowing these qualities, perhaps metonymically or by association, from the female body that it is the work’s business to open out, as if in the fullest realization of the doll or guitar as “seeing machine.” The transparent surface of the glass, and the view it gives through to some three-­dimensional scene, may be compared to the ease of visual access given by the photograph and its apparent transparency, qualities that help it appear flexible between the two-­dimensionality of a flat picture plane and the three-­dimensional space that is captured by it. The female body is what is encased and displayed in this space—­positioned as if dreamed of, imagined—­while the body of the artist is what is thereby supported, on the surface (in the buttressed forms of the bachelors). In this sense, the Large Glass may be compared to Picasso’s studio photographs, which hold the image of the dismantled female body in the work of the papiers collés and the Guitar pictured therein, but also supply a surface for the projection, by superimposition, of the image of the artist himself (or, in the 1913 photograph, his newspapery stand-­in). Both the Large Glass and Picasso’s photographs are comparable in these respects to Bellmer’s Doll photographs, in which the female figure’s dismemberment is posed alongside the image of the artist, in one case, and which also supplied the surface to support Bellmer’s construction of his own identity as an artist. For each of these artists, one particular structure supplied a model to help him begin to imagine this expanded picture-­space, or space of practice, in which real and imaginary space merged around a female figure staged for display. This, as I have already indicated, was the shop window, which in the 1920s was a form that the Surrealists in particular took to their hearts. Louis Aragon’s novel Paris Peasant, published in 1926, described his delirious wandering around and entranced spectatorship of the shops in the Parisian arcades that also inspired Walter Benjamin. It recounts in particular a hallucination in front of a window display of canes and walking sticks, in which this new “art of spatial panoply” is transformed into an underwater scene, complete with mermaid.87 Indeed, Benjamin quoted from Aragon’s novel in the “Mirror” convolute of his Arcades Project, composed between 1927 and 1940. Here, Benjamin

Seeing Machines 81

Chapter Two 82

expanded his own thoughts on shop windows, centering on the capacity of their reflective, glassy surfaces to compose an “interweaving of spaces,” combining inside and out, setting the objects they contain into unexpected proximity with one another and with the viewer and other passersby, and prompting acts of impromptu mimesis, “seeing-­like” or “as-­if,” in the receptive mind of the viewer (for example, seeing the arcades as mimicking an underwater world). For Benjamin, this mode of perception offered a recapitulation of childhood cognition, in which the object-­world is endowed with unexpected and undependable life and things readily read as signs for others.88 It is an effect he characterized in terms of an unsteady animism. “There is no thing here that does not, where one least expects it, open a fugitive eye, blinking it shut again,” Benjamin comments, “but if you look more closely it is gone.”89 The French photographer Eugène Atget took numerous photographs of storefronts and shop windows, some of which were published by the Surrealists. Several of his photographs show the merging, through reflections, of commercial goods and uncanny mannequins with the everyday environment of the street (for example, three he took on the Avenue des Gobelins in 1925, and one called Magasins du Bon Marché from 1926–­27). The Surrealists also published photographs of shop windows by other artists that reveled similarly in the fantastic effects to be obtained by the merging of the contents of the vitrine with the reflections on its surface—­as, for example, in a photograph in which statues of angels and a Pietà figure, like shop mannequins, float “within” the reflected facades of shuttered houses, which appeared on the cover of La Révolution Surréaliste on April 15, 1925 (captioned “end of the Christian era”). The particular attraction of such photographs of shop windows was the distinctive, albeit post-­Cubist model they offered of a shallow “picture”-­space that could hold arranged tableaux of objects and could also bear upon its surface the intermixed and shifting signs of the world outside. In the early decades of the century, however, it was not only Surrealists who were fascinated by shop windows. In a different, more Constructivist-­and Cubist-­inspired context, other avant-­garde artists saw a certain utopian potential for the shop window. In New York, shop windows were seen as potential forums for novel displays of contemporary art, transmitting the latest avant-­ garde developments to a mass public. In 1930, the Austrian theater designer Frederick Kiesler, who had emigrated from Vienna to New York four years earlier, published a book, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, that received widespread acclaim and soon went into a second edition.90 Kiesler presented avant-­garde art in conjunction with the latest designs for storefronts, window displays, and mannequins, arguing that there was in this new surface an opportunity for European artistic developments to meet the latest commercial ideas and to be disseminated to a new American public. Among the illustrations, as we have already seen, Kiesler included a reproduction of one of Picasso’s 1913 Guitar constructions, Bottle and Guitar (1913),

which had previously been illustrated by Apollinaire, as well as a painting by Paul Klee (Around the Fish, 1926), in conjunction with photographs of store fronts and the latest mannequin designs. Kiesler’s articulation in his book and in other essays of the promise of shop windows suggests a vision of contemporary display environments as potential modern-­day cave paintings, with the capacity to fuse image and world, and thus to produce a “pattern of everyday experience” in which “vision” and “fact” are no longer separated but, instead, “the same space” encompasses both our material selves and our “demons.”91 It was in these terms that Kiesler explained the innovations in his design for Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century exhibition (on display 1942–­47), where some of the paintings were hung without frames and others received elaborate peep-­show displays, including Duchamp’s Boîte-­en-­Valise.92 While it was in the encounter that the shop window stages—­ the crucial feature of which is the separation of viewer from display by only the thinnest of transparent boundaries (a point upon which Kiesler dwelled in his essays on the subject)—­that he first saw this capacity for the merging of the world or the space of the viewer with the imaginary of the display, the key artwork that Kiesler saw as condensing and exploring this potential was Duchamp’s Large Glass, a work he described as “nothing short of the masterpiece of the first quarter of twentieth century painting.”93 It is unclear when Kiesler first met Duchamp, but it was possibly when Kiesler worked on a “television room” for the International Exhibition of Modern Art organized by Duchamp and Katherine Dreier in New York, in 1926, where The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even was shown for the first and only time in its unbroken state.94 Their acquaintance continued over subsequent years and seems to have been particularly reactivated in 1936, when Lisa Phillips, editor of a major exhibition catalogue on Kiesler’s work, records that the two men met “frequently.”95 Duchamp was in New York at that time to try to repair the Large Glass, which he had only just discovered had been broken. Over the next few years, their friendship developed particularly in relation to the Large Glass, and through their collaboration on exhibition installation.96 In May 1937, Kiesler published what was only the second essay to be written on the Large Glass (the first had been André Breton’s “Lighthouse of the Bride,” published in Minotaure in the winter of 1934–­35).97 In his 1937 essay Kiesler announced that he intended to look at the Large Glass “not to interpret [the] bio-­plastic exposition of the upper half of the picture, or . . . the mechano-­manic lower part,” for, as he rightly prophesied, “such physio-­and psycho-­analysis will be readily found here and there, now and later.”98 Instead, what Kiesler said he was most interested in was its structuring of space, to which the use of glass was vital: Translucent material such as glass [is] being used more and more in contemporary building . . . for constructive reasons. . . . Glass is the only material in the

Seeing Machines 83

building industry which expresses surface-­and-­space at the same time. It satisfies what we need as contemporary designers and builders, an inclusive [form] that is space in itself, an inclusive that divides and at the same time links. Normally one looks through a translucent plate glass from one area into another, but in painting an opaque picture like this [i.e., the Large Glass], one also accentuates the space division optically.99

Chapter Two 84

In other words, glass is fascinating to Kiesler both for structuring a certain shallow space behind it and, when painted or otherwise worked upon, for retaining an emphasis on surface, thus producing a shallow and materialist articulation of spatial structure. This is an understanding that might have come straight out of Cubist reorganizations of the picture plane but that may also be understood as influenced by the model supplied by shop windows—­especially given Kiesler’s argument in Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, where he explicitly compared the shallow bay of space-­and-­surface orchestrated by the shop window to avant-­garde experimentation with the picture plane and advanced relief-­sculpture, illustrating this, as we have seen, with a reproduction of a construction by Picasso. Duchamp’s repeated insistence that the Large Glass was “not to be looked at,” takes on a new meaning, perhaps, in light of this reading.100 It was designed to be looked through, perhaps, like a shop window. Like a shop window, certainly, the lower portion of the glass puts various readymade objects on display; some of which are reputed to have had their origins in retail displays: the chocolate grinder, which Duchamp himself said first caught his attention in the window of a shop in Rouen, but also the device hanging the bachelors’ liveries, which various scholars speculate may have been suggested by the mechanisms in a dry-­cleaner’s shop, or by shop mannequins, as well as the part of the Glass Duchamp termed the “oculist witnesses,” which resembles the charts used in opticians’ displays.101 Like a shop window, the Large Glass is built to orchestrate or structure a shallow bay of space behind its surface, as if constructing a display space. We know that this was an understanding always vital to Duchamp’s own conception of his works on glass: photographs of the Large Glass and the related Glider Containing a Water Mill (in Neighboring Metals) (1913–­15) show each installed in such a way as to enable a view through the work to the space beyond, and in particular, a view through to a figure or to objects, in some of which Duchamp took a commercial interest. Two photographs show glass works screening sculptures by Constantin Brancusi, for whom Duchamp acted as dealer from 1926 through the 1930s: a 1936 photograph taken for Duchamp by the commercial photographer Sam Little (who photographed many of Duchamp’s works) shows the Glider installed in the Hollywood summer house of his patrons, Walter and Louise Arensberg, in front of Brancusi’s Bird in Space (1924), while a better-­known photograph of the Large Glass installed in front of a window in

Seeing Machines 85

Katherine Dreier’s library shows the view through the window to the garden and Brancusi’s Leda (1920).102 Duchamp’s later installation of the Large Glass in the Philadelphia Museum ensured that one could look directly through it into the courtyard, where at that time could be seen a fountain, as well as, perhaps, a statue of a nude woman by Maria Martins (with whom Duchamp was then in love).103 Other historical photographs of Duchamp’s works on glass often show them with a figure visible through the glass: for example, the photograph taken by Marcel Jean in 1958, which shows the Glider Containing a Water Mill (in Neighboring Metals) installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with a woman standing behind it, her face turned away from the camera.104 Thus, it appears, the Large Glass was always a surface intended to trap a space behind it, in which might be snared and displayed an object or a figure. This is something that Kiesler seems to have been particularly alert to seeing. In 1945, he produced a remarkable photo-­collage portrait of Duchamp for the special issue of View magazine devoted to Duchamp (fig. 2.17). This portrait overlays an image of the Large Glass on six photographs of Duchamp in his studio (taken on commission for Kiesler), matching up individual elements of the Glass with the arrangement of objects in Duchamp’s studio, as Jennifer Gough-­Cooper and Jacques Caumont, in their key, short essay on the portrait, have explained: Various objects around Duchamp’s table were transformed by Kiesler’s magic wand into elements of the Large Glass: two saws, a lamp and cords hanging from

2.17  Frederick Kiesler, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1945. Photo-­collage portrait of Duchamp in his studio, overlaid with a photograph of the Large Glass, with foldout sections. Published in View magazine, March 1945. © 2013 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna.

the ceiling became the Pendu-­femelle, film spools change to the Water Mill wheel, and the ribbons of film to the Glider; a chair leg turns miraculously into the Louis XV chassis of the Chocolate Grinder, etc.

Chapter Two 86

In addition, Kiesler “cut out a flap in each of the two outer panels of the triptych, which assume the shape of one of the Malic Molds when interlocked, but when folded across the center panel, conjure a mirage of the Bride Stripped Bare.”105 The portrait thus constitutes an ingenious, playful collage, or materialized, paper-­based “seeing machine,” with which the viewer or reader engages, opening and folding back the cutout flaps in order to read the layered, transparent planes of the Large Glass, like a lens, across the studio interior and its contents. In matching up details of the Large Glass with studio objects, posed around the central figure of Duchamp, the artist is made to appear rather like a shop mannequin surrounded by commercial wares “for sale,” with what appear to be shadowy, transparent reflections of the details of the Large Glass floating over the top, as if reflected in a shop window. Duchamp himself made several shop window displays, beginning in 1943, shortly after he moved in to live with Kiesler for several months.106 One of these, designed in 1960 to publicize Robert Lebel’s monograph on him, posed a succession of naked female mannequins on a staircase, as if in incarnation of his painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), a reproduction of which stood to one side (fig. 2.18). He included notes on shop windows and glass display cases in the White Box (published in 1967, but including notes written years earlier).107 In the Green Box, he included a note, written in the period of the genesis of the Large Glass, on his idea to “put the Bride under a glass case or into a transparent cage.”108 Molly Nesbit has mounted an argument for understanding Duchamp’s readymades as attempts on his part to “master” the commodity and so “defeat” the interrogation of the shop window. She interprets the note on shop windows from the White Box as describing Duchamp’s sense of imprisonment or persecution by the “round circuit” of desire stimulated by the display of commodities. His seizing of banal, mechanical-­industrial forms in his readymades then represents the “smashing through the glass” of the shop window, which the note describes: “He tried in his answer to break away from the mandatory round trip, to remain self-­possessed in front of the windowpane. He took to symbolic violence.” “In the readymades,” she concludes, “Duchamp seized control of the dialogue dictated by the shop window: the model is taken out of circulation, often given an absurd title, hung in a limbo, and effectively silenced. . . . The language of industry was . . . assumed and then subjected.”109 My own understanding of the way Duchamp worked with the shop window differs somewhat, extending more along the lines suggested by Kiesler’s portrait. The several photographs Duchamp took of his readymades hung around his studio, like the Large Glass, illustrate a model of expansive picture-­space

Seeing Machines 87

2.18  Peter Handy-­Boesser, photograph of Bamberger’s window installation by Marcel Duchamp, Newark, New Jersey, 1960. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art, Marcel Duchamp Archive. Gift of Jacqueline, Paul, and Peter Matisse in memory of their mother, Alexina Duchamp. © 2013 Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/DACS, London.

that was enabled by Cubism but also imaginatively supported by contemporary commodified display.110 This type of staging of the readymades was not limited to the studio photographs, but in later years was repeated in the Boîte-­en-­ Valise, where the readymades again appear arranged for display in conjunction with the picture surface of the Large Glass, and in exhibition installations that Duchamp designed.111 These stagings, as well as Duchamp’s own shop window displays, which contain jokes and allusions to his other works, in particular to the Bride theme, suggest that he engages with the shop window not by breaking but by redeploying it. They indicate an envisioning of artistic activity that is not held apart from or outside the circuits of commodification, but instead is merged with these circuits: a space in which objects are held suspended,

Chapter Two 88

assembled in an expanded picture-­field and arranged for display, with a visual appeal that is derived from contemporary commercial contexts. Furthermore they suggest that this picture-­space affords the opportunity for a narcissistic staging of the self: a projection of the artist as “artist” and his activity and works staged so as to inherit the display functions of the shop window: “to be looked at.” Thus, I understand Duchamp’s engagement with the circuitry of desire installed by the shop window less as a mastering, or indeed a dismantling, of it than as, in the Large Glass and the readymades, a mobilization of the fantasy structure the shop window enabled for the staging of his own work. As with Bellmer’s Doll photographs, I suggest—­in place of a model of the violent, disruptive force of repressed content, or the similarly disruptive avant-­gardist critique of the commodity form—­the work displays a more adaptive engagement with the stock of the everyday world, existing artistic idiom, and the structures of commodified desire. In this respect, I propose, the shop window surface may be compared to the model of the mind that emerges from the chapter on “slips of the tongue” in Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901). In the course of his argument, Freud quotes at some length from a study published slightly earlier by other scientists, Rudolf Meringer and Carl Mayer, on this same subject.112 The rival study provides an evocative account of the ways in which speech and the mind intermingle, placing great weight on the various ideas of “contact sounds,” “pre-­sonances,” “perseverations,” “anticipations,” and “contaminations,” to explain why, in a particular case, a slip of the tongue is made. On this account, the mind is something like a screen on which play, in the authors’ words, multiple “‘floating’ or ‘wandering’ speech images. . . . Even if they are beneath the threshold of consciousness they . . . can be brought into play by any resemblance to the complex that is to be spoken.”113 Freud goes on to extend and develop his own account of slips of the tongue, stressing that in his view it is necessary to pursue “a longer path, through [more] complicated series of associations,” in order to arrive at the more deeply unconscious thoughts that lie at the root of most disturbances of speech; Mayer and Meringer, he suggests, remain too much at the “surface” of the mind. Nevertheless, as Rosalind Krauss has pointed out, Freud was indebted to this older model for the “laws of association,” such as condensation and displacement, which it had already put in place, and indeed the account given by Mayer and Meringer of the mind is useful to us here.114 For this account pictures the mind as analogous to the doubled, transparent space or surface of the shop window, with reflections of things in the world coming through; its strength is to suggest something of the movement and flexibility of fantasy, which is captured in the model of the shop window as screen for moving images, for shifting reflections, and for the play of light and shadow. Hans Bellmer suggested a similar model of the psyche in his essay “A Brief Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious; or, The Anatomy of the Image,” on which he worked between 1942 and 1954: “One can

envisage a kind of projection screen erected between the ego and the outside world, onto which the unconscious projects the image of its momentary source of arousal, but which only becomes visible to consciousness when the same image is simultaneously cast on to the screen from the other side and the two images are congruent.”115 My suggestion is that this description, which in its imagining of a “projection screen” receiving images from both within and without may be seen as indebted both to film and to the transparent surface of the shop window, offers a model for the kind of fantasy that is made available to the viewer of Bellmer’s photographs, Duchamp’s Large Glass, and Picasso’s collages.116 This is a model that, rather than being grounded in the twin ideas of trauma and repression (which have long supplied our theoretical models for the art of the avant-­gardes), describes a flexible psychopathology of the everyday, staged in a mixed, merging image-­field that incorporates consumer idiom together with artistic ambition, enabled by a shifting, adaptive relation with the materials and technologies of the everyday world, and describing a preoccupation with the elasticity of our experience of the body and of things in the world. The frequent inclusion of the body of the artist in the image-­field of the shop window photograph, furthermore, not only is a figure for a certain reflexivity of the image—­a clue to the artist’s preoccupation with his own work of making and the kind of identity it produces for him—­but also functions as a support for his narcissistic self-­projection (and therefore, of course, as an imaginative stand-­in for the viewer). This is something demonstrated, as we have seen, in Kiesler’s photomontage portrait of Duchamp. Kiesler’s viewing of the Large Glass was echoed in a more commercial context just a few months later. Four months after the special issue of View in which his portrait of Duchamp appeared, in July 1945, the front cover of Vogue magazine, no less, showed the Large Glass, positioned at an angle to a studio wall (fig. 2.19). A female fashion model in evening dress stands just behind the glass, her face averted and her hand a little raised. Once more, the photographer—­Erwin Blumenfeld in this case—­has taken up, as had Kiesler, the invitation of the Large Glass to pose a body behind it; once more, the studio is constructed as a shallow, vitrine space behind a glass pane, and behind the photographic surface. It is at first somewhat difficult to tell whether the figure on the Vogue cover is a mannequin or a real woman, emphasizing once again the boundary between real and imaginary that this chapter has explored. The model’s body arcs slightly, as though to deflect the viewer’s gaze, and the whole—­Glass, model, wall—­is staged to orchestrate a shallow bay of space and describe an enmeshing of the body in vision. A rim of shadow outlines the model’s body as it falls upon the background wall. The body is “caged in glass”—­the promise of the Large Glass made flesh—­and at the same time, photography is figured in this registering of cast shadow on the studio wall.

Seeing Machines 89

2.19  Erwin Blumenfeld, cover of US Vogue, July 1945. Woman in gray gown with gold belt, jewelry, and accessories seen through Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass. 10 × 12 inches (25 × 33 cm). © 2009 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

2.20  Hans Bellmer, Untitled (The Doll), 1934. Hand-­colored gelatin silver print, 5.5 × 5.5 inches (14 × 14 cm). Courtesy of Ubu Gallery, New York; Galerie Berinson, Berlin. © 2013 ADAGP, Paris/DACS, London.

Returning to Bellmer’s Dolls, I suggest we look at the photograph from 1934 of the incomplete doll standing in front of the striped wallpaper (fig. 2.20). A cast shadow of the figure is outlined on the studio wall, just as it is in Duchamp’s Vogue cover, the photograph staging the narrow gap between the glassy surface over the doll and the wall behind. The studio wall serves as a surface for the collagelike display of the doll, just as it does in Picasso’s photographs of his constructions, and at the same time as a surface to register the play of shadows (thus, the doll appears once again as a proto-­cinematic device). This is the problematic that I have argued is explored in Duchamp’s Large Glass, as well as his shop window designs: a collagelike interaction of three-­and two-­dimensional forms, imbricated with phantasmatic projected images and commercial idiom, all held together in a shallow space backed by the studio wall, and staged for the camera as if held behind glass.

Ball-­J oint, Rotoreliefs, Guitar

The Surrealist exhibition of 1938 presented Duchamp, Picasso, and Bellmer together in a shallow space filled with shop window dummies. Duchamp was appointed as general organizer, alongside Breton and Paul Eluard, and contributed a mannequin (dressed in his own suit jacket and hat), behind which hung framed examples of his latest optical disks, the Rotoreliefs (1935). To the right of Jean Arp’s mannequin, meanwhile, which was first in the row, Breton hung a selection of six of Bellmer’s Doll photographs (more were hung behind Léo Malet’s mannequin). Just a few spaces further along, Breton hung two photographs of Picasso’s sculpture Glass of Absinthe (1914).117 The space in which all of these works were presented was narrow, and thus not only mimicked the language of commercial display in its use of mannequins, but also used its space as a model. I have mentioned Bellmer’s imitative relation to the Surrealists. Another thing that is worth noting, and that to date has received no attention at all, is Bellmer’s imitation of Picasso, which could be very straightforward, although this was an influence that only Breton seems to have been open to seeing.

2.21  Hans Bellmer, Ball-­Joint, 1935–­36. Assemblage: painted wood, glass eye, and tulle on painted paper fixed on wood, 20.5 × 18 × 2.8 inches (52 × 46 × 7 cm). Collection of Virginia and Herbert Lust. Image courtesy of Vancouver Art Gallery. © 2013 ADAGP, Paris/DACS, London.

Seeing Machines 91

2.22  Pablo Picasso, Guitar, May, 1926. Pencil (drawing), string, mixed, tulle (fabric), 5.5 × 3.9 inches (14 × 10 cm). Collection Musée Picasso, Paris. © 2013 Succession Picasso/ DACS, London/RMN-­Grand-­Palais/Béatrice Hatala.

2.23  Man Ray, Surrealist Exhibition of Objects, Galerie Charles Ratton, Paris, 1936. Gelatin silver print, 6.6 × 9 inches (17 × 32 cm). Collection Birger Raben Skov, Denmark. Courtesy Galerie 1900–­2000, Paris. © 2013 Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris/DACS, London.

Nowhere is the connection between Bellmer and Picasso more apparent than in the clear visual relations between Bellmer’s 1935–­36 collage-­object Ball-­Joint (fig. 2.21) and Picasso’s 1926 series of collages, each called Guitar (about which Aragon wrote in his “Challenge to Painting” essay) (fig. 2.22). It was, of course, Breton who organized the show of Surrealist objects at the Charles Ratton Gallery in Paris in 1936 (an exhibition that Walter Benjamin may have visited), in which a Guitar and the 1914 Still Life by Picasso and Bellmer’s Ball-­Joint appeared together, along with readymades and constructions by Duchamp (fig. 2.23).118 The fact that Breton hung photographs of Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe next to Bellmer’s Dolls in the 1938 exhibition indicates how close Cubism was imagined by these artists as being to Surrealism at this point, collaborating in a joint problematic of incorporating real objects in a fictive or imaginary space, like the reflections that saturated the surface of a shop window. It is, again, the fluid play between reflections and transparency that made the shop window so useful to these artists. This is a fluidity seen elsewhere in their works: like Duchamp, Bellmer modeled his disarrangement of the body as a play with words, describing the body as a “sentence” to be rearranged and,

in 1954, publishing a volume of anagrams.119 Bellmer, Picasso, and Duchamp all shared an engagement with wordplay (puns, riddles, anagrams), which produced a slippery, associationist, and mobile circuitry in their work, like the early-­learning language games of a child learning to speak. And like a child’s language games, all these artistic forms and experiments are, we find, propped, anaclitically, on the breast.120 For the key to the mobility of the doll in Bellmer’s second series of photographs is the device of the ball-­joint. The photographs in Bellmer’s first publication, Die Puppe, as we have seen, were split, half and half, between two different models of the doll, and the key difference between the two models is the way that the limbs are joined to the torso. The discovery of the ball-­joint at some point in 1934 was a breakthrough: the new design producing a greater suppleness and fluidity, making the doll seem less stiff and constructed, and giving to the second series its more supple capacity for reversal and transformation. The ball-­joint became a crucial mechanical device for Bellmer, who devoted his second essay, published in Les Jeux de la Poupée, to its inspirational workings. In this essay he compared the ball-­joint to Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs, which he may have seen on his trip to Paris in 1935, when Duchamp exhibited them at the Concours Lépine, a trade and inventors’ fair, although one was also reproduced in a collaged arrangement on top of Man Ray’s photograph of the Large Glass, Dust Breeding (1920), on the cover of Minotaure in the same issue in which both Breton’s essay on the Large Glass and Bellmer’s Doll photographs appeared (fig. 2.24). Bellmer devotes “Example Four” in his essay to a description of the disks: Contraction and forcible reconciliation of concentricity and eccentricity are pushed to the extreme in Marcel Duchamp’s “Rotoreliefs,” to the point where they are mutually resolved. The principle is as follows: a series of eccentric circles arranged around the false center B are drawn on a disc with its center at A. When placed on a gramophone, the disc rotates around A in such a way that every point within the circles is in concentric motion about A, while appearing to be in eccentric motion around B. Although this theoretically scandalous contradiction results from an illusion, it produces an optical miracle: the surface of the circles rises up like dough or a heaving bosom, only to collapse and rise again at periodic intervals.121

This description vividly suggests a link to the tumescence of the doll’s limbs in Bellmer’s second series of photographs and mirrors their quality of confusion between phallic and breastlike forms. The swelling and detumescence conjured in Bellmer’s word-­picture of Duchamp’s disks was further materially configured and made most grotesquely apparent by Bellmer’s construction of his sculptural object The Spinning Top (1938), which recalls the action of the arm of a record player and is composed of a pyramid of breasts

Seeing Machines 93

Chapter Two 94

2.24  Marcel Duchamp, cover for the magazine Minotaure, no. 6, Winter 1935. © 2013 Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP Paris/DACS, London/White Images/SCALA, Florence.

of varying sizes, suggesting the optical illusions of inflation and diminution that would be produced were it to be set in motion, as its title suggests.122 This object—­a kind of erotic toy, or bedazzled seeing machine—­seems a direct, if literal, homage to Duchamp’s optical disks, which were designed to play on a turntable, just as Bellmer had earlier paid homage to Picasso’s Guitar collages with his Ball-­Joint. (In letters to Katherine Dreier, Duchamp referred repeatedly to the Rotoreliefs as a “toy” and “playtoy.”123) Bellmer’s discussion in his essay of the ball-­joint and Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs further likens both these devices to Girolamo Cardano’s diagrams of rings, for their insistent relocation of the inside to the periphery—­like reflections on the surface of a shop window, seen in photographs.

I have suggested that fantasy, as staged in the studio photographs and other works by Bellmer, Duchamp, and Picasso, is a mode produced and supported by an engagement with invented toys, devices, experimental objects, and technologies of making, rather than being easily read off the figure as though the images were simply explications of Freudian narrative scenarios. This is to model the unconscious on the reflection-­bathed surface of a shop window: stocked with certain narrative forms and idioms, uncertain and wavering in its reception of influences from outside, and constantly modifying its inner “content” through the interplay between these realms. The account of the psyche that is produced here explores the functions of staged and half-­fictive assemblages; the half-­conscious adoption or “trying-­on” of visual idiom is posited in place of an unmediated inheritance of key culturally located psychic complexes or traumas. This question of the encounter between mind, eye, and world is explored further in my next chapter. After the 1930s, however, studio-­based photography of dolls was a means to which Bellmer no longer had recourse. It had after all, it seems, been only a means of initial artistic affiliation, enabling his escape from Berlin into the more sympathetic milieu of Surrealist Paris. Indeed, none of the works I have studied here was a form that lasted—­neither Bellmer’s Doll photographs, nor Picasso’s Cubist collages and constructions or his photographs of them, nor Duchamp’s readymades, optical disks, or Large Glass. They were all experimental, provisional, not fully fledged. In this sense, they are precisely like children’s toys, or the transitional object, which cannot maintain its function for the subject through into adulthood, but at a certain point must simply be laid aside. It is for this reason that they are unlike artistic mediums, which enable successive genealogies of descent and development. Nevertheless, the “seeing machines” improvised by these artists enabled substitute forms of medium-­specificity to be developed, derived from experimental play with these forms and constructions, and from their staging in studio photographs for review by the artist and his close associates. In each case, photography played a silent, supportive role, functioning to hold doll, guitar, and Glass—­these three forms of attack on drawing, sculpture, and painting—­in one provisional picture-­space. Indeed, photography emerges here as the flexible and elastic support, based in the studio, in which each of these alternative seeing machines had its birth. The camera is, on my account, the key device that all these other things were built reflexively to mimic. As in chapter 1, then, the reflexivity of these practices cannot be described precisely as medium-­specificity but instead, in this instance, as something more like play with a toylike device—­reading by analogy across mediums, not modeling resistance or autonomy, but mediating an exchange with commodity display. This was a use of photography that enabled phantasmatic assaults on the bodies of women and intense affiliations between men. But we can also see the deeper phantasmatic ground of the supporting technology, not only this figurative

Seeing Machines 95

Chapter Two 96

iconography: that is, the glass, or photograph, that supplies the support for these projects and broaches its innovative picture-­space, bridging “real” space and that of representation. The picture of exchanges between artists that is developed here, and the question of a visual culture that is mined from and constituted in dialogue with wider commercial culture, will continue to be explored in my next two chapters. How an avant-­garde is formed among peers and how a “medium,” or distinctively artistic mode of practice, is established or reconstituted differently, will be examined in particular in relation to the generation of American painters that formed immediately after World War II. Collage remained important to these artists, and yet, despite the effort that had gone into thinking out the break from painting, the painted surface was not abolished, but instead reasserted its grip on a generation of postwar artists. The painted surface, when it returned, was not uninflected by the prewar avant-­gardes’ experimentation and explorations of different viewing technologies. Rather, as we shall see, it was hybridized.

Painting shadows

Zigzag patterns of short bars and blocky, truncated strips are scattered in flashes of color across a white surface in each of the first three of Ellsworth Kelly’s series of paintings La Combe I–­IV (1950–­51) (figs. 3.1–­3.3). Each painting is divided into nine regular, vertical segments, across which the bars of color spill unevenly, seeming to break across the joins, jumping, flashing, and flickering. Only in La Combe II, which is made as a hinged and folding screen, are the “panels” actual; in La Combe I and III the divisions are straight lines in the white paint, seams marked only by the cutoff of the zigzag bars. The pure whiteness of the ground in the first three paintings contributes to an impression of brightness and sun-­dazzle. The colored patterns derive from Kelly’s observation of the shadows cast by railings on a staircase leading down from his room at the villa, called La Combe, where he stayed during the summer of 1950. The nine vertical “panels” in the paintings correspond to the nine steps of the staircase, and each of the first three paintings has a different configuration of lines, corresponding to the patterns of shadow on the steps at different times of day.1 Kelly captured the patterns in a number of drawings, made at two-­hourly intervals, as well as at least one collage and at least one photograph (fig. 3.4). The fourth painting in the series is a slightly different case. La Combe IV (fig. 3.5) is the result of an exercise Kelly undertook with students in his art class at the American School in Paris, as Kelly has explained:

97

Chapter Two 98

3.1 (above)  Ellsworth Kelly, La Combe I, 1950. Oil on canvas, 38 × 63.5 inches (97 × 161 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of the American Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc., Leonard A Lauder, President, 2002. Photo courtesy of the artist. © Ellsworth Kelly. EK27. 3.2 (below)  Ellsworth Kelly, La Combe II, 1950–­51. Oil on wood (folding screen of nine hinged panels), 39 × 46.5 inches (99 × 118 cm). Private collection. Photo Jerry L Thompson, courtesy of the artist. © Ellsworth Kelly. EK34.

Seeing Machines 99

3.3  Ellsworth Kelly, La Combe III, 1951. Oil on canvas, 63.5 × 44.5 inches (161 × 113 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Doris and Donald Fisher Collection and Helen and Charles Schwab Collection. Photo courtesy of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. © Ellsworth Kelly. EK 36.

Chapter Two 100

3.4 (above)  Ellsworth Kelly, Shadows on Stairs, Villa La Combe, Meschers, 1950. Gelatin silver print, 14 × 11 inches (36 × 28 cm). Private collection. Photo courtesy of the artist. © Ellsworth Kelly. EK PH 50.58. 3.5 (below)  Ellsworth Kelly, La Combe IV—­Collaboration with a 12-­year-­Old-­Girl, 1951. Oil on wood, 39 × 60 inches (100 × 153 cm). Private collection. Photo Ron Amstutz, courtesy of the artist. © Ellsworth Kelly. EK 39.

At this time I was teaching grade-­school children at the American school at Boulogne-­sur-­Seine. One of the projects I gave the children was inspired by the La Combe series. I wished to direct the making of a picture. The children were told to divide a piece of paper into vertical panels and color them with bands as they wished. From the many solutions, I chose the watercolor of Elizabeth Huffer, aged 12, and enlarged it exactly into the painting I called La Combe IV, Collaboration with a 12-­Year-­Old Girl.2

The collaborative method, divergence from the original motif of the shadow-­ striped steps, and multicolored bands make La Combe IV, in some respects, the odd painting out in the series. Its visual qualities of flicker, however, and jumping, sun-­dazzled color, together with a method of composition that deliberately avoids authorial control, join it to the others and render it a fitting culmination: a jazzy, improvisatory riff on the theme. Altogether this remarkable series serves well to pose the questions I want to address in this chapter, concerning the work of a generation of American artists who made their first works around 1948–­54, including Kelly, as well as Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Jasper Johns. Among this group, the key story, I propose, is of the recovery of Bauhaus-­era technological enthusiasm and its reworking into a new cultural paradigm. This was of particular importance to those artists associated with the composer John Cage, many of whom first met at or were loosely affiliated with Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Is there a common way to understand the remodeling of the painting surface and the restructuring of the painterly mark that Kelly and these other artists performed? And how should we theorize the kind of visuality that emerged in their works as the 1950s progressed—­very different from that which emerged as, in parallel, Abstract Expressionism developed into “color-­field” in the works of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman? In these works, we see processes of copying and reproduction internalized, brought into the body, to rework the painting surface and the expressive painterly mark into a new relation with a wider urban visuality. In the process, the story of technologically reconfigured cultural inheritance, or “mechanical reproduction,” which is part of this book, is developed further. Ellsworth Kelly was an artist at the margins of the group, but his practice too, I aim to show, was a part of these currents. La Combe is a key early series, which came at an important stage in Kelly’s development, soon after his breakthrough abstract works in 1949 (such as Toilette and Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris), and before his move into the brightly colored, multipanel works that dominate 1952. In particular it emerged from an intense exploration and investigation of cast shadows in drawings, ceiling-­hung “mobile” paintings, wall-­propped reliefs, and photographs. Reconstructing Kelly’s development through 1950–­51, an outline narrative must start with the painting Window V. This was Kelly’s first work related

Camera Vision 101

Chapter Three 102

3.6  Ellsworth Kelly, “Window V” in Kelly’s Hotel Bourgogne studio, Paris, 1950. Gelatin silver print. Private collection. Photo courtesy of the artist. © Ellsworth Kelly. EK DAP 50.7.

3.7  Ellsworth Kelly, Wood Cut-­Out with String II (EK 4), 1950. Gelatin silver print, 14 × 11 inches (36 × 28 cm). Private collection. Photo courtesy of the artist. © Ellsworth Kelly. EK PH 50.22.

to cast shadows, painted early in 1950, the motif of which Kelly has explained as “the projection of light at night from a street lamp shining through an irregular-­ shaped window onto the wall of my room.”3 In a prefiguring of this feature of La Combe, the cast shadows (in this case, of telephone wires) are represented as narrow bands in brilliant black across a pure white surface. In its first exhibition, this work was hung from the ceiling by a string, and a photograph survives showing it hung this way in Kelly’s studio (fig. 3.6); such an arrangement would have added to its quality of flicker, mobility, and brilliance, as well as linking it, as Benjamin Buchloh has noted, to Duchamp’s hanging of his readymades in his studio (and, we might note, to Picasso’s 1924 sheet-­metal Guitar

construction, which we saw in chapter 2, hung from the ceiling cornice at the Charles Ratton Gallery in 1936).4 This painting was followed by Kelly’s visit to Arp’s studio in February 1950, by the collages he subsequently made (discussed below), and by his construction of Wood Cutout with String I, II, and III in June 1950. These are wooden reliefs, pierced and strung around a central “sound-­hole,” which Buchloh has compared to Arp’s reliefs using string from the early 1920s as well as to Picasso’s string-­and-­cardboard construction, Guitar, of 1912 (discussed in chapter 2).5 A photograph from 1950 shows that Kelly hung Wood Cutout with String II by a string from its top edge, as he had also hung Window V, and that in this mobile position, hung close to a wall, the relief was used to cast a barred shadow on the surface behind (fig. 3.7). Wood Cutout with String I and II bear inverted, positive/negative relations to one another, and it seems that both in their construction and in Kelly’s reflections upon them, aided by the photographs he took, these works served as instruments to enable certain visual experiments also involving cast shadows. This use of paintings as “seeing machines” is seen also in a second photograph, showing Wood Cutout with String I again hung from the top edge by string, close to a wall, and placed at the end of a line of reliefs, all angled and leaning against the same wall.6 What seems to be a detail from this photograph shows Wood Cutout with String III also angled against a wall and casting a sharp shadow of itself against the wall. A later photograph, taken in 1958 in Kelly’s Coenties Slip studio by Hans Namuth, shows the artist seated with Agnes Martin, with Window V and Wood Cutout with String III hung on the wall behind them and Wood Cutout with String II and a related work, Cutout in Wood (1950), leaning against the windows, making frames and apertures for the light.7 Altogether these photographs illustrate Kelly’s distinctive remodeling of painting at this point in the early 1950s, as small, blocky, handheld seeing machines: hung and manipulated to offer new angles of sight and models of visual pleasure. The La Combe series of drawings, collages, and photographs was made in August 1950, and the La Combe paintings were completed by February 1951. The next major painting project after La Combe was Cité and the series of three other canvases related to it, painted in the summer of 1951. This series represents an important shift in Kelly’s work, as the grid emerges for the first time. Although the paintings appear to retain the shadow-­flecked patterning of La Combe, in fact their inspiration, according to Kelly, was a dream.8 Nevertheless, a photograph from that summer survives showing the shadows cast by a balcony upon the ground, with a remarkable similarity to the patterning of Cité; suggesting that some such sight may have been an unconscious or perhaps a forgotten inspiration for the design. A change occurred in Kelly’s practice during that summer of 1951, which may be seen also in the application he submitted for a Guggenheim fellowship to fund his proposed book, Line, Form, Color (its methodical title and

Camera Vision 103

Chapter Three 104

approach recalling Bauhaus publications such as Kandinsky’s 1926 Point and Line to Plane or Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook of 1925).9 This project heralded a newly systematic approach to painting, and color in particular, which may be seen as leading to the multicolor grid paintings of the second half of 1951. Seine, although black and white, was the first of these works, which Kelly made in autumn 1951, followed by the collages Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance I through VIII. In November, he painted the well-­known Colors for a Large Wall (now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York), after which his painting took a definite turn in the direction of his mature work, with the extensive exploration of often single-­color units, arranged as multipanel paintings in grids or rows, through 1952. La Combe and Cité are thus transitional works: the last of the “patterned” canvases, marked by and producing the type of flicker produced by patterns of cast shadow, before the decisive move to the grid. A related kind of optical flicker remains a feature of Kelly’s later color-­block gridded works, but here it is produced more as an effect of close-­valued color contrasts and the dancing visual effects of numerous small, brightly colored squares than by the sequentially ordered, two-­tone, broken flicker that characterizes La Combe I–­III or Seine (the last of which is, in this respect, very much a halfway house between the paintings of the first and the second half of 1951). Kelly’s interest in “flicker” in his early works of 1950–­51 finds articulation not just in his explorations of cast shadow patterns on a painting’s surface, but also in the kind of flicker produced either by making a painting mobile (as in the hanging of Window V) or by prompting the viewer to move in front of a painting. The friezelike panel arrangement of the La Combe series encourages the viewer to move laterally along it, and the truncation of the colored stripes makes it appear as though the pattern in the painting itself has been made to “jump” across breaks and gaps. Both these features are also evident in two later sculptural commissions Kelly made for the Transportation Building in Philadelphia, between 1956 and 1957: Seven Sculptural Screens, which he designed for the restaurant (now destroyed), and Sculpture for a Large Wall, made for the lobby area (now owned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York) (fig. 3.8). Here the model of painting as seeing machine is expanded, the scale of the project composing something more like a large-­ scale apparatus, into which the viewing body is slotted, as if patrolling the slot-­pierced drum of a zoetrope. The arrangement of panels or strips in an irregular grid formation in these works is reminiscent of the grid structure of the panels in the Cité series, and the shapes of the individual panels in Sculpture for a Large Wall resemble the torn-­paper strips in Meschers from that series, drawing attention to how screenlike are those earlier paintings. Similarly, the structural role played by gaps and spaces between the bars and planes of the screens in both sculptures reminds the viewer of the pattern of shadows that is formed in the La Combe paintings by the bars and gaps between the staircase railings.

Camera Vision 105

3.8  Ellsworth Kelly, Sculpture for a Large Wall, 1956–­57. Anodized aluminum (104 panels), 11.5 × 65.5 × 1 feet (350 × 1993.9 × 33 cm); installed 15 inches off the wall. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Jo Carole and Ronald S Lauder, 1998. Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery, New York. © Ellsworth Kelly. EK 112.

3.9  Ellsworth Kelly, Sculpture Model, 1958. Cardboard, wire, and wood, 16.5 × 14.5 × 7.5 inches (42 × 37 × 19 cm). Galerie Maeght, Paris. Photo courtesy of the artist. © Ellsworth Kelly. EK 132.

3.10  Ellsworth Kelly, Shadow of Model for Sculptural Screen No. 4, 1956. Gelatin silver print, 7.1 × 5 inches (18 × 13 cm). Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery, New York. © Ellsworth Kelly.

Chapter Three 106

As James Meyer has shown, some of the most interesting examples of seeing machines in Kelly’s practice are the sculptural maquettes he produced around 1956–­58, connected to his work on the large-­scale sculptural projects of these years.10 These include the polychrome Sculpture Model (1958), comprising a wooden frame strung with wires, on which are threaded colored cardboard shapes (fig. 3.9), and the similar, but flatter, white cardboard, wire, and wooden maquettes, Model for Sculptural Screen No. 4 and Model for Sculptural Screen No. 5 (both 1956). A photograph taken by Kelly in 1956 shows shadows cast by the former small work flickering on an exterior wall and producing an overall effect reminiscent of both the Cité series and the two large sculptural screens (fig. 3.10). Indeed, each of these objects would cast broken shadows and light patterns under the right conditions, and Kelly’s photograph indicates that he was interested in these effects. Cast shadows and light patterns have been since the early twentieth century a means by which photography has defined itself. A repertoire of scenes of the everyday world made illegible by tilted viewpoints and patterns of cast shadow is characteristic of an early genre of American modernist photography in particular, exemplified by the work of Paul Strand. Strand’s work emerged from the pictorialist aesthetic of the Photo-­Secession group centered around Alfred Stieglitz, and still retained a strong pictorialism—­a luxurious depth of tone, a certain picturesqueness of composition, a diffuseness and sense of mystery in the shadows—­even while the sharp edges of shadows were used to produce dynamic, tightly packed, geometric new forms, some years before the “New Vision” emerged in Europe. Kelly has cited Strand as one of the photographers whose work he admired when he was still a student in America.11 Strand’s photographs circa 1916 in particular explore an early modernist use of light and shadows to produce a flat, abstract, patterned surface, which helped to define new artistic possibilities for photography, beyond the “imitation of painting” for which the “pictorialist” work of the Photo-­Secessionists was criticized. As Maria Morris Hambourg has shown, it was Strand’s choice of motifs in his photographs of this period that created what was to become a prototypical photographic iconography: Abstraction, Twin Lakes, Connecticut (1916) (fig. 3.11) and Porch Shadows (1916) are good examples.12 Many of these are echoed in Kelly’s own way of taking photographs. Strand’s photographs of the shadows of railings (Porch Railings, Twin Lakes, Connecticut, 1916), shadows on a staircase (Morningside Park, New York, 1916), the sketched, pencil-­line forms of tree branches (Winter, Central Park, New York, 1913–­14), and the looming forms of telegraph poles (Telegraph Poles, Texas, 1915), all seem to prefigure photographs Kelly was to make more than thirty years later.13 In Strand’s handling, these were the scenes that provided the means for photography to develop a distinctive visual language of its own and to separate itself from painting in the second decade of the twentieth century. This was, first,

Camera Vision 107

3.11  Paul Strand, Abstraction, Twin Lakes, Connecticut, 1916. Silver and platinum print, 12.9 × 9.6 inches (33 × 24 cm). © Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive.

because a language of cast shadows provided a means for photography to reference its own light-­sensitive technical means and, second, because the visual aesthetic that resulted produced a distinctive mode of the pictorial. Cubism, of course, had influenced photographers like Strand and Stieglitz in modeling a picture surface that was similarly tightly packed, with a flattened depth. But the emphasis on sharpness of focus, and the way of making pictorial form from observed details of the everyday world were new and provided photography with its own direction to explore. One important marker of the kind of photographic modernism of which Strand’s work may be taken as exemplary was his “liberation of the picture

Chapter Three 108

space from its normal orientation based on human verticality,” as Hambourg has argued, Strand “swiveling his camera with unprecedented freedom down, on a slant, even up to the sky.”14 This characteristic would be seen in the photography of Aleksandr Rodchenko and the German photographers of the New Vision just a few years later, and it is also a feature we see in Kelly’s La Combe—­the downward view, swung up and to the right producing a sensation of dramatic upswing, tilt, and movement. A further comparison to La Combe is produced by Strand’s White Fence (1916). “To a lesser artist the graphic impact of the white fence would have been enough to hold the picture together, but Strand let it trot across the ground on a slight cant [in all] its obliquity and irregularity,” Hambourg wrote.”15 The erratic canter of the fence across the field reminds us that Kelly worked similarly with the progression of the steplike semblance of “panels” in La Combe. Strand and Kelly both use seriality in these pictures as a means to produce extension across a lateral field, and each does so via an externally derived system: the run of slats in a wooden fence, for example, or the number of steps in a staircase. Such comparisons suggest that much of the repertoire of forms in Kelly’s painting and, more generally, the visual-­ pictorial system that emerged from his observation of the everyday world, may be compared to a way of looking at the world and composing abstract pictures that was developed in modernist photographic practice. Thus, a picture emerges of Kelly’s visual language as composed of sharply angled views, crisply defined forms, sharp edges, abstract visual pattern, strong contrast, and blindingly white grounds, built out of acute visual observation of the everyday world, and produced by a kind of “camera-­eye.” Kelly’s begins to look like a hybrid painting surface, hybridized in part using the language of modernist photography. By the 1950s, however, cast shadows had gained a whole new field of reference and received a new—­Duchampian—­configuration. In their new constellation, cast shadows made their appearance in the remark by John Cage, in 1954, that “the way to test a modern painting is this. If it is not destroyed by the action of shadows it is a genuine oil painting.”16 Cage and Kelly were friends (the two met when Cage visited Paris in June 1949, and they continued a correspondence after that date), and Cage was familiar with Kelly’s painting. Kelly sent Cage photographs of his recent work in 1951 (soon after he made the drawings and collages for La Combe) and received Cage’s encouragement. Cage, an older and more established artist whose work Kelly admired, provided crucial sympathy and support at a particularly important and formative time. His letters to Cage contain many valuable insights into Kelly’s own understanding of his artistic practice at this point, and are the source for many of the most often-­repeated quotations from Kelly in the literature. The La Combe series in particular was known to Cage, who looked after La Combe III for three years between 1951 and 1954. Kelly had sent the painting to an exhibition in Boston and then, rather than ship it back to Paris when the show finished, sent it on

Camera Vision 109

to Cage, asking him to take care of the painting until his return to the States in 1954.17 Nevertheless, when Cage made his remark about the action of shadows, it is usually held that he had in mind as his model of “modern painting,” not Kelly’s La Combe series, but Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, painted the same year, in 1951 (fig. 3.12). The White Paintings were conceived by Cage as blank monochrome panels for cast shadows to fall upon. “The white paintings caught whatever fell on them,” he wrote in a retrospective account in 1961. “Why did I not look at them with my microscope?”18 This (idealized) receptivity was the reason for his famous description of them, in the same article, as “airports for the lights, shadows and particles.”19 Branden Joseph has charted the importance of Cage in transforming Rauschenberg’s own understanding of these pictures, from an initial view of them as continuing the European modernist tradition of the monochrome, referencing Malevich’s White on White (1918) in particular, to reinterpreting them as postmodern, receptor-­type surfaces. Joseph’s valuable reconstruction of Cage’s aesthetic, to the formation of which (he argues) the White Paintings were

3.12  Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting [seven panel], 1951. Oil on canvas, 72 × 125 × 1.5 inches (183 × 318 × 4 cm). Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. © 2013 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Licensed by DACS, London/ VAGA, New York.

Chapter Three 110

crucial, connects Cage’s ideas to László Moholy-­Nagy’s belief in a progressive trajectory of modern painting toward the ideal receptivity of the photographic surface or the film screen. In particular, Joseph suggests that Cage’s reception of Rauschenberg’s paintings is analogous to Moholy-­Nagy’s transformative reception of Malevich’s white monochrome, as a “surface for projection,” changing the modernist, abstract picture surface into, in Moholy-­ Nagy’s words, “a miniature cinema screen.”20 The suggestion is supported by the fact that for years, an apocryphal story circulated that Rauschenberg’s paintings had been used as projection screens at an early Happening organized by Cage at Black Mountain College. The story, though untrue, confirms that a photographic and, indeed, filmic aesthetic readily gathered around the White Paintings, in their association with Cage.21 Of course, the White Paintings differ from Kelly’s La Combe series precisely in the quality of receptivity that Cage claimed for them. While the White Paintings, in Cage’s construction, invite the casting of shadow upon them, Kelly’s paintings are painted transcriptions of shadows, and so do not perform the radical decomposition of the painting surface that Cage saw in Rauschenberg. Borrowing the indexical language of photography, but in painted means, Kelly’s works occupy a midpoint between a modernist, autonomous painting surface and a photo-­technological hybrid. It is precisely for this reason, I propose, that Kelly’s painting has the potential to offer another perspective on the aesthetic currents of the 1950s. And yet the suggested comparison between Kelly’s work of the early 1950s and Robert Rauschenberg’s has been discussed by a number of authors previously, only to be dismissed. Yve-­Alain Bois has led commentators in arguing that Kelly’s “transfer” of what he calls “already made” motifs from the world into his paintings should be sharply distinguished from the strategies of indexical marking and the recovery of the Duchampian readymade that is associated with the work of Rauschenberg and, a few years later, Jasper Johns.22 Such strategies are held to mark the strong disruption of a tradition of modernist abstract geometric painting with which Kelly’s work would seem to be more obviously continuous. Yet too great a focus on distinguishing Kelly’s painted mark from the directly indexical cast shadows that Cage saw solicited in Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, risks too strong a bifurcation of practices that shared a great deal in common. Adding Kelly back into the picture we build of this moment may help to refine our understanding of what was at stake for these artists in avoiding direct expression, seeking to avoid deliberate composition, taking on certain aspects of a technological marking system like photography, and taking up parts of the Duchampian legacy. Certainly important differences between Kelly’s and Rauschenberg’s paintings must be acknowledged. One such difference is the relative size of the works. The dimensions of the one-­panel White Painting are 122 centimeters square, while the two-­panel painting extends to 183 by 244 centimeters, the three-­panel to 183 by 274 centimeters, and so on, expanding through the series.

Rauschenberg’s related “Black Paintings” of the following year are mostly large, ranging in size from 135 by 105 centimeters to 180 by 90 centimeters and up to 250 by 75 centimeters. La Combe I is smaller, 97 by 161 centimeters, and even La Combe II, which, as I’ve said, is made in the form of a folding screen, is only 99 by 118 centimeters. Hence despite its form (which, as furniture, might be thought implicitly to configure an address to the human body), it would seem to be separated from the kind of phenomenological implication of the viewer that had become so important to the dynamic of American painting since the 1940s, and which was a part of Rauschenberg’s painting practice by the time of the White Paintings and related “Black Paintings.” This difference in size must register in the viewing experience, Kelly’s paintings operating at a more “European” scale, making each one more of a small, even decorative “painted object” and offering less of the “field” of vision associated with the American Abstract Expressionist painters. Some caveats must be entered, however, against reading the La Combe paintings as too small and “European.” For one thing, La Combe III, the largest painting of the series, and in fact the largest Kelly had painted to date, is over five feet tall and nearly four feet wide (161 x 113 cm). The fact that Kelly chose this painting to send back to the exhibition organized by his alma mater in the States suggests that he may have seen this large-­ scale work as the most exemplary of the series and, perhaps, the most “manifesto-­like” of his paintings so far (La Combe III is also, of course, the painting that ended up in Cage’s possession.) Furthermore, there is evidence that the only reasons Kelly did not paint at a larger scale at this time were practical ones (including his lack of funds and suitable commissions), and a letter to Cage in 1950 states clearly his intention to create larger works.23 A drawing exists from this time showing Cité at wall-­size, far larger than the small stick figure of a viewer who is sketched before it. The belief that a tradition of painting is continued in Kelly’s work, with which Rauschenberg breaks, should also be challenged. While color and the continuing investigation of abstract geometric form might be thought to be more obviously associated with Kelly’s work than with Rauschenberg’s, the artists’ different degrees of commitment to “painting” at this point are not easy to establish: Rauschenberg’s early statements on his White Paintings express a belief in transcendent and spiritual values in painting and the importance of continuity with a European tradition, which Kelly’s pronouncements vehemently renounce. Compare, for example, Rauschenberg’s “Today is their creator” letter to Betty Parsons in 1951 with Kelly’s “To hell with pictures” speech, which he made in the letter to Cage mentioned above.24 Where Rauschenberg defended the place of his White Paintings in the canon “with other outstanding paintings,” it was Kelly who declared that he was “finished” with painting “as it has been accepted for so long.” These contrasting claims suggest that alle-

Camera Vision 111

Chapter Three 112

giances to painting in the early 1950s were allotted differently than would seem to be the case later in the decade. Finally, the question of the reception of Duchamp into painting practices of the 1950s may also be reconsidered by investigation of the comparison between Kelly and Rauschenberg. Perhaps in these artists’ early works, strands other than the readymade or “indexical” may be seen to develop from the Duchampian paradigm.25 The first work by Duchamp that Kelly saw was apparently one of the French artist’s “precision optics” projects, the Rotary Demisphere (1925), in 1951; precisely the period of Kelly’s own experiments with cast shadow and mobile, hung paintings.26 Carl Andre, writing to the experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton in the early 1960s, in turn suggested that Kelly’s interest in cast shadows might be related to Duchamp’s painting, Tu m’ (1918). Andre did not specifically refer to La Combe but argued the case with reference to the crispness of Kelly’s shapes and edges in his paintings more generally, which he read astutely as deriving from the sharpness of line found in cast shadows: Ellsworth Kelly has painted paintings which concern themselves with the division of colors one from the other and with the invisible precision of a sharp late shadow. Kelly’s work reminds me of the shadows in the Tu m’ of Duchamp. It is important to Kelly that he and his manipulations be invisible in terms of his image. Kelly has an ideal derived from nature by way of his observations of the sun streaming through his rubber plant.27

Andre’s remarks relate Kelly’s interest in the sharp edge of cast shadow explicitly to his involvement with painting. His words suggest that alternative valences of the cast shadow than that of the “indexical” were available to artists working at the time: for example, focusing on the sharp edge of the cast shadow as a device to be used to divide up the painted field (rather than destroying it with an alien mode of marking). Tu m’ offers an intriguing comparison with the La Combe paintings in a number of respects, not least in the sideways spread of the work, across which representations of various of Duchamp’s other works are plotted, as on a chart or graph. The lateral extent of Duchamp’s painting presents a frieze ribboning out sideways and divided by its various elements into different segments, which we are encouraged, not least by the pointing finger, or “printer’s fist,” to read from left to right—­not unlike, perhaps, the artist’s earlier Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), in which stop-­motion frames read quasi-­cinematically, unscrolling across the painting as if it were a screen. The representation of the readymades in Tu m’ came from an idea that was first explored in one of Duchamp’s studio photographs, his Shadows of Readymades (1918), reminding us that not only did Duchamp, like Kelly, stage his works in studio photographs but he also used the experimental objects he produced as instruments to cast

and orchestrate shadows. The readymade thus features in Tu m’ not simpliciter, but translated first into cast shadow and then into painting; similarly, perhaps, the cast shadow, as used in both Tu m’ and La Combe, should be seen as a figure not for the indexical action of photography, and so a disruption of painting per se, but as something rather different: producing a hybrid surface somewhere between photography and painting, with a distinctive, flickering address to the eye. The kind of visuality at stake here is well demonstrated by a series of drawings Kelly made shortly after his return to the United States after a six-­year stay in France. E. C. Goossen, in his monograph on the artist, records the episode: “In the fall of 1954 . . . Kelly went to Staten Island to visit a friend. After the ferry ride, he took a bus. He was making an effort to read a paperback book on his lap, but black shadows from the lampposts and telephone poles kept breaking across the white pages as the bus drove on. Inspired, he took out his pencil and as fast as he could, recorded the outlines of the shadows, flipping the pages as each image disappeared.”28 Kelly made twenty or so drawings in pencil, captured on succeeding pages of a single sketchbook, and added ink to the drawings later (figs. 3.13–­3.14). A facsimile of the sketchbook was published in 2007, and the cinematic quality of this project, which is captured in Goossen’s description of Kelly “flipping the pages,” can now be recaptured by a contemporary spectator: transforming drawings that represent passing time as separate, time-­segmented frozen stills, into the jumping, black-­and-­white flicker of the moving image.29 As Kelly explains in a note at the back of the facsimile publication, the notebook he used was a blank-­page “publisher’s dummy” of Sigfried Giedion’s 1928 publication, Bauen in Eisenbeton, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Frankreich, which originally had a cover photograph by László Moholy-­Nagy (although this is not retained in the facsimile edition). The connection is telling, for something of Moholy-­Nagy’s euphoric idealization of urban and mobile, precisely perceptive “camera vision” seems retained in the use to which Kelly put the sketchbook, while at the same time his drawings translate Moholy-­Nagy’s model of a technologized vision back into a clumsier, more handmade aesthetic. The drawings thus give visual testimony to the technologized body, in a new, postwar inflection. Kelly uses his hand as if it were a recording instrument, while the vision that stimulates its movements and that it attempts to record is enabled by the specific technological support of the moving bus. But at the same time, the drawings that result are very sensual: the black ink is ripe, richly toned, and luscious, strongly contrasting with the white pages. The drawings have a brushy quality, the ink apparently applied with swift, open strokes. The facsimile edition reproduces as well the dirty smudges and imprints made by the original drawings on their facing blank pages, and sometimes a patina of just visible, lightly sketched pencil lines or shapes apparently mapping out a drawing that Kelly did not, in the end, ink in. The lines of the black, inked

Camera Vision 113

Chapter Three 114

3.13  Ellsworth Kelly, Study for “Atlantic,” 1954. Ink on paper, 10.5 × 15 inches (27 × 38 cm). Private collection. Photo courtesy of the artist. © Ellsworth Kelly. EK D 54.164.

3.14  Ellsworth Kelly, Study for “Black White,” 1954. Ink on paper, 10.5 × 15 inches (27 × 38 cm). Private collection. Photo courtesy of the artist. © Ellsworth Kelly. EK D 54.166.

drawings are swinging and rounded, implicitly indexing the swell of the artist’s thigh, which molds each page. Throughout, the sketchbook has a sense of flip and curve and biomorphism, conveying the bulge and sway of moving bodies and a flickering, changeable vision.30 Goossen records that Kelly made two paintings based on his New York bus drawings, both in black and white: Atlantic (1956) and Black and White (1955–­58) (the drawings for these paintings appear on consecutive double-­ pages of the facsimile sketchbook).31 Both paintings retain and dramatize the qualities apparent in the drawings: simultaneously technologized—­as transferred recordings of a motor-­borne and instrumentalized vision—­and bodily, full of swelling forms. Both paintings also relate to other experiments that, we have seen, Kelly made while in France: first, in that they record shadows falling across a surface that is not even, with the consequence that the shadows are broken up and discontinuous; second, in the moving, changing character of the shadows, which in both projects, Kelly recorded in multiple drawings. In these key works we see the use of drawing as a time-­sensitive registration practice, translated back into painting, but we also come to understand how the painting surface can be imagined by the artist as a support translating experiences of visuality derived from the technologically supported body. This is something we see also in the experiments made independently at this time by Kelly’s contemporaries in the United States.

Automatic drawing

In the same summer of the Staten Island bus drawings, Kelly visited Rauschenberg in his studio on Fulton Street. Kelly made the visit at the suggestion of John Cage, but despite Cage’s good offices, the visit was a failure. Each artist felt his work to be both different from the other’s, and at the same time, too close for comfort; and their attempt at a meeting was not repeated.32 Rauschenberg was, however, in exchange with another artist at this time, in a relationship that was close and important for both concerned. This artist was Cy Twombly, whom Rauschenberg had met in 1951 at the Art Students League in New York. The two went together to Black Mountain College that summer, where Rauschenberg painted his first series of White Paintings. In the spring of 1952 they traveled together through Florida to Cuba, and that May, Rauschenberg took the Fulton Street studio, which Twombly shared with him on and off for the next couple of years. Rauschenberg spent that summer again at Black Mountain College (where he met Cage and where Cage saw the White Paintings), and Twombly visited him there. In the autumn of 1952 Rauschenberg and Twombly traveled together to Italy and then Morocco, returning to the United States in the spring of 1953. Twombly was called up for military service in the late autumn of 1953 and spent most of the following year, until August

Camera Vision 115

Chapter Three 116

1954, in Augusta, Georgia, during which time Rauschenberg met Jasper Johns in New York (Augusta was, incidentally, Johns’s birthplace). Rauschenberg left Fulton Street for a studio in Johns’s building on Pearl Street in 1955, and in 1957 Twombly finally left America for Italy, which he made his main home from that time onward.33 Twombly’s connections with Kelly, by contrast, were tangential. The two appear to have overlapped for a year at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which Kelly attended between 1946 and 1948 and Twombly, between 1947 and 1949, and later they knew each other when Kelly lived on Coenties Slip, between 1954 and 1957. Nevertheless, Twombly’s work may revealingly be compared to Kelly’s, and may in turn serve as a link back to Rauschenberg’s, to help to reconfigure our understanding of the work of all three artists at this point in the early 1950s, before certain more familiar configurations ( Johns-­Rauschenberg, for example) had fully formed. The particular moment I want to focus on, 1954–­55, is a turning point in all these artists’ relations: the summer of 1954, when Kelly visited Rauschenberg, was just after the period of Rauschenberg’s and Twombly’s greatest closeness, when Rauschenberg had got to know Johns but was still using the Fulton Street studio. A series of photographs taken in this studio in late 1954 or early 1955 by Twombly, just a few months after Kelly visited Rauschenberg there, shows a group of Twombly’s own recently completed dark-­ground paintings with white, writerly markings stacked, propped and leaning against the wall (fig. 3.15).34 The paintings are posed leaning against one another, propped close to the camera frame, so that their dark surfaces fill almost the entire frame of vision. They are grouped as if in some chaotic, multipanel assemblage, the white markings appearing to jump and flicker across the dark fields indiscriminately, spilling from one painting to another and generating a furious, active static. In places the white marks seem continuous with splashes of paint on the surrounding walls and floor, erasing the differences between painting and architectural ground. The ragged white lines suggest scratches on the photographic surface, as if the original gesture of marking on the surface of the paintings had been repeated on the surface of the photograph; indeed, the negative-­reversed system of white marks on a dark ground suggests a photographic system of marking even in the original works. These paintings exist now only as photographic documents, since Twombly destroyed the whole series shortly after they were finished, with the sole exception of the largest painting among them, called Panorama (1954–­55).35 Panorama was Twombly’s first large-­scale work, and even in a photograph it is possible to see the join a foot or so from its lower edge, where two pieces of drop-­cloth were sewn together to constitute its support (at this stage in his career, Twombly could not afford a large piece of canvas). Although the related paintings were destroyed, it is possible that some people saw them in

Camera Vision 117

situ in Rauschenberg’s studio, and Panorama itself was shown in January 1957 at the Stable Gallery, where it made a notable impression, both in the gallery and when reproduced in a review of the exhibition in Art News. Kirk Varnedoe records the artist Ivan Karp, for example, who remembers cutting the reproduction out of the magazine where it appeared, saying, “I thought that was the most important object of abstract art in the world.”36 Panorama was owned for many years by Rauschenberg, and by his account was a particularly treasured item in his personal collection.37 Perhaps because the artist destroyed all but one of the works, this series is often overlooked in accounts of Twombly’s development, which usually cite the series of cream-­ground paintings that followed it later in 1955, including The Geeks and Academy, as his “breakthrough” works.38 Yet it was in this

3.15  Cy Twombly, Fulton St. Studio, New York City, 1954. Color dry-­print technique, 10.4 × 10.4 inches (26 × 26 cm); ed. 3/6. Image courtesy of Schirmer/Mosel. © Foundazione Nicola Del Roscio.

Chapter Three 118

earlier dark-­ground series, and Panorama in particular, that Twombly made the breakthrough to the more writerly system of marking and the more dispersed picture-­field that characterize his later production. The paintings that Twombly made immediately before this series are cream-­ground works, with a few fetishlike forms scarred and gouged, usually centrally, into the canvas (for example, Castle, 1954). In Panorama and the related series, by contrast, he used a lighter, more scriptlike marking to cover the canvas more or less all over, in the way that became typical of his work, and that he elaborated the following year in the better-­known paintings The Geeks and Academy (the titles chosen at random from a list of names drawn up in collaboration with Rauschenberg and Johns).39 This method of working out a breakthrough first of all in the austere and graphic system of dark-­ground works, then elaborating it in more painterly light-­ground works, compares interestingly with Rauschenberg’s similar tendency at this time to work out a breakthrough in black or white before switching to color. This method is also seen in Kelly’s early practice. It is striking that Twombly returned to dark-­ground painting only once more, just over a decade later, and at a similarly important time emotionally and artistically, as he turned the corner of a crisis in his career. This was after the disastrous reception of his Nine Discourses on Commodus paintings in New York in 1964 (and after Rauschenberg won the prize at the Venice Biennale, where Twombly also showed, in the same year). The dispersal of pictorial composition seen for the first time in Panorama was to lead to Twombly’s painting often seeming to belong more to a collage-­ than to a drawing-­system. In well-­known works such as Leda and the Swan (1960) or School of Fontainebleau (1960), for example, the dispersed field, and the use of fragments of pictures and words, begins to resemble the surface of a collage. Rauschenberg’s transfer drawings, begun on his trip to Cuba with Twombly in 1952 (and taken up again in 1958 for his series of drawings on Dante’s Inferno, which, Thomas Crow has suggested, refer back to Twombly in their classical references), were a possible influence on Twombly in this respect—­the transfer drawings sharing both the dispersed, fragmented field and the play with disparities of scale that are present in Twombly’s paintings from about 1959 on.40 The extraordinary system of marking in Twombly’s Panorama series of paintings includes fragments of pictures and shapes, although the schematic, graffiti-­like renderings of body parts, including penises and buttocks, that are characteristic of his later works have not yet emerged. (One shape, in the upper right-­hand corner, has been recognized as that of an existing sculpture by Twombly, supporting the impression of the surface of this painting as a kind of collaged compendium of forms, like Duchamp’s Tu m’, reviewing the artist’s own former works.41) Nevertheless, the markings in this painting should be distinguished from those used when Twombly returned some ten years later to dark-­ground paintings, with his second, better-­known series of “blackboard” works,

between 1966 and 1971. The thinned, gray ground and the dry, dusty signs in the second series of blackboard paintings make these appear far more like repetitive writing exercises. They were heralded on their first exhibition as appearing less expressive than his previous works, the white lines a more automatic, and more serial, type of mark: “a kind of backwards rote,” as it was described at the time.42 It was the “rote” character of the marking in this series, as much as their dark grounds, that gave rise to the description of them as “blackboard” paintings.43 A key difference between the earlier and the later series is that the markings in the 1954–­55 paintings go right to the edges of the canvas and appear to overspill them (like the markings in Kelly’s La Combe paintings), whereas in the 1966–­71 works they are contained within a central area of the canvas and, as a consequence, appear more controlled.44 The earlier paintings thus have a vital liveliness that is missing in the later series, a randomized energy and crackle that seems to charge the whole surface. Roland Barthes picked up on this quality when, in one of his two famous essays on Twombly, he compared Panorama to a television screen: “In Panorama, the entire space crackles like a television screen before any image is flashed on it,” he wrote, though we may think that both the title of the painting—­Panorama—­and the scale of the work suggest instead the wide screen of the cinema.45 The line that charges the surface of this painting with energy is thus far from being an authorially expressive mark: it is not directed, does not seem composed, and appears more like noise production (hence my comparison to static). Comparisons to technological forms of energy seem irresistible. As Kirk Varnedoe has described, it is broken and fragmented, “insistently discontinuous,” with “programmatically repeated passages” marking the surface with “a dispersed, jumping, nervous electricity.” “Local structures” pull apart the whole, and in comparison with the more painterly, freely flowing, libidinal line of Pollock’s drip paintings from a few years before, Varnedoe argues, Twombly’s marks read as anti-­expressive.46 Nevertheless, this is an energized anti-­expressivity, which seems to take on a form of technological life, and as such should be distinguished from the rote or serial, repetitive form that anti-­ expressivity takes in the later series. Furthermore, a strong visual flicker arises from this marking, which is not a feature of the later, gray-­ground “blackboard” paintings. This impression of visual crackle and energy, line fizzing across the surface, suggests a comparison between Twombly’s Panorama and its related paintings and Ellsworth Kelly’s La Combe series. There is a similar practice of “deskilling” drawing at the basis of each, which in both cases has the consequence of breaking line into fractured, demotivated segments. Twombly’s series of paintings emerged directly from the period of experimentation that he undertook while on Army service between the winter of 1953 and the summer of 1954. Like Kelly and many other artists of the time, he explored drawing with his left hand, drawing with his eyes shut, or looking only at the motif,

Camera Vision 119

Chapter Three 120

or in the dark. It was these drawings that Twombly has said established “the direction everything would take from then on.”47 For his part, Kelly had first explored deskilling techniques such as automatic drawing in the summer of 1949, when he collaborated with his friend Ralph Coburn, “in making cadavre exquis, and drawings with [his] eyes closed, and collages arranged by chance.”48 We see the results of these and similar experiments in works such as Kelly’s Automatic Drawing (Shelled Bunker), Pine Branch, and Automatic Drawing (all 1950), drawings that simultaneously recall the dispersed, broken, and sprinkled field of his La Combe paintings, and Twombly’s work. According to Bois, Kelly’s “‘automatic’ drawings fall into two categories: either they were done ‘blind’ (looking only at the motif, not the paper), or blindfold.”49 Automatic Drawing (Shelled Bunker) was apparently made by the former method. Other “automatic” explorations of drawing Kelly undertook at this time resulted in reworkings of drawing as spatters and as liquid runoff, as seen in Automatic Drawing: Glue Spots and Automatic Drawing, ink on paper, both from 1950. All these drawings immediately predate or were produced in parallel with Kelly’s work on La Combe, from August 1950 on. However, in La Combe, what has happened to drawing is not only a deskilling or automatism: line is also broken apart across separate panels, which appear to have been cut up and scrambled, then collaged together again to reconstitute the picture plane. Beginning in 1950, Kelly frequently cut up drawings or ink-­marked paper and made pictures using the pieces. He was introduced to this procedure by Jean Arp, whom he visited in his studio in France in February 1950 and again in June of that year.50 Kelly’s use of collage in the La Combe series provided him with a further means of fracturing and breaking line, in addition to the forms of “automatic” drawing. Both may be interpreted as solutions to the problem of how to “motivate” the extension of line, when subjective, “inner” motivation has already been rejected. But collage does rather more to line than demotivate it: collage also breaks “drawing” up into units whose addition, one to the other, produces line or extension in a measurable, countable supply. In Kelly’s usage, collage becomes a technology that remakes drawing, and also remakes the painted field, reconfiguring it as multipanel units, extending in space. (As Kelly himself remarked, “In the panel paintings, the ‘line’ or ‘drawing’ leaves the surface of the canvas and literally becomes the edge of the panel.”51) Such seriality became an important means by which Kelly structured his paintings at this time, equally as significant and long-­lasting as the grid. Kelly used a found serial structure to motivate lateral extension perhaps first in his gouache drawing Awnings, Avenue Matignon, 1950 (though it is embryonically visible also in Stacked Tables and Reflections of Trees in the Seine, both from 1949), and would go on to use it in his breakthrough multipanel works, such as Red Yellow Blue White, of 1952.52 The alteration to the painted surface that these techniques produce is suggested also in Robert Pincus-­Witten’s description of Twombly’s works in the

mid-­1950s: “At about this time . . . the earlier, more consciously composed abstract canvases were replaced by compositions of all-­over graffiti. . . . Instead of informally balanced affairs of linear incision, smudges, and blank surfaces, that is, compositions contained upon the picture plane and retaining points of reference to the perimeter, the picture now becomes a machine for spatial extension.”53 Pincus-­Witten’s description of the picture as a machine brings out the point that collage and line here function as technologies, integrating with and reconfiguring painting. In Twombly’s dark-­ground series, as in Kelly’s La Combe, extension is pushed out across a lateral expanse by seemingly automatic means: Twombly’s “arrhythmic,” repeated marking functioning as does Kelly’s addition of modular panel units. In each, line is stretched across a surface, and made a measurement of spread, until it overruns the edges of the canvas, as the product not only of “automatic” drawing, but also of a reconfigured collage practice. A comparable use of multipanel units, which function both to break up the painting field and enable its spatial extension, is exemplified by Rauschenberg’s modular White Paintings, and he continued the principle in his series of “Black Paintings,” which he is on record as saying he conceived as indefinitely extendable.54 Rauschenberg’s own comments on these works make clear what is at stake in this reconfiguration; he based the extendibility of these paintings on his conception of their “decenteredness”: “How far can you push something that doesn’t have a center? That was what those paintings were supposedly about. And the black paintings are supposed to continue any time I want.”55 Thus, the reconfiguration of the picture-­field as a multipanel, serial structure was tied by the artist directly to an anti-­expressive, anti-­subjective rhetoric, which is also close to the language employed by Kelly at the time.56 (Multipanel units were soon taken up by Johns in his first Flag paintings, as Roberta Bernstein has pointed out, and Johns is, of course, famous for the remark, “I didn’t want my work to be an exposure of my feeling.”57) While both those series of paintings by Rauschenberg are monochromes, the artist also experimented, as Kelly had done, with using multipanel units to break up line and extend it as pattern across several surfaces, for example, in This Is the First Half of a Print Designed to Exist in Passing Time (1949) and in Automobile Tire Print (1953), which Rauschenberg made with the assistance of John Cage. Both these works use white markings on a dark ground and have a quality of visual flicker arising from the combination of this strong visual contrast with dynamic, seemingly randomized markings (which in the former work again produces an effect resembling static on a TV screen). The fourteen wood-­cut prints comprising This Is the First Half . . . are bound together at the top with twine like a sketchbook or cinematic flip-­book, making it comparable to Kelly’s own black-­and-­white Drawings on a Bus from 1954. A comparison to Kelly’s Drawings on a Bus also seems apt in the case of Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print, which is similarly the result of drawing’s engagement

Camera Vision 121

Chapter Three 122

with a motorized “support,” Rauschenberg’s instruction to Cage to drive over twenty joined-­together sheets of paper representing as much a means of reconfiguring drawing as did his attempt, in the same year, “to use the eraser as a drawing tool.”58 The wavy, pressured line that the tire tread marked in the black ink resembles that which zigzags across the “panels” of La Combe, or the line of Kelly’s and Twombly’s automatic drawings, and indeed, Kelly had stored a found tire-­print of his own, at around this time, in his collection of drawings now known as Tablet (1948–­73).59 A similarly fractured, pressured, and negative-­reversed line runs down this print (although in this case, the print was produced by a bicycle and not a car tire). Thus, these three artists shared a number of strategies amounting to a set of technologies to reconfigure the painted field as a serial or automated structure (these included breaking the ground into modular units, using an imprinted or found line, employing chance or “readymade” or found compositions, drawing “as if with the left hand,” and cutting up drawings before recombining them). The marks produced as a result of these experiments are clearly randomized or visibly derived from an automatic source (such as a tire print), and so read as “impersonal,” screening the hand and body of their maker behind a seemingly technologically rendered scrim. This, combined with these artists’ shared interest in working in black and white and, in particular, in using white markings on a dark ground, helps produce a flickering, black-­and-­white contrast that energizes the surface and dazzles the eye, readily suggesting technological comparisons, such as TV static or electricity. The effort to escape subjective expression, however, which lay behind the reconfiguration of painterly extension as automated and technologized, did not mean an effort to escape bodily and sensual address. We have already seen the kind of sensuality that could emerge from reconfiguring drawing as a technologically supported registration system in Kelly’s Drawings on a Bus, for example. The term I suggest we use for the specific bodily aesthetic produced in these works is the “technologized body,” aiming with this to capture both the reconfigured way in which bodily reference and sensual feeling are registered in these works, and the way in which the work’s visual appeal to the viewer is rendered systematically, or “technologized.” Part of what this means also has to do with the way in which these artists experienced themselves as embodied, as I want now to explore.

Screening the body

As testimony of the exchange between Twombly and Rauschenberg, perhaps no document is so striking as Rauschenberg’s photographic work, Cy + Roman Steps, I, II, III, IV, V, from early September 1952, made during the artists’ joint travels, which began in Italy that autumn (fig. 3.16). In Rauschenberg’s series the camera’s eventual focus on the groin is determined by an external system.

Rauschenberg does not lift his camera’s sightline as the body moves closer down the steps, with the result that by the fifth photograph, Cy Twombly’s crotch is squarely in the center of the picture. This steady homing in on the core erogenous zone of the body “eroticizes” the series, and yet it is as if this eroticism were merely the logical consequence or by-­product—­almost a sort of friction, or excess—­of the external system, rather than an expression of the erotic desire of the photographer. Compared to a contemporary painting such as Willem de Kooning’s Woman II (1952), which Rauschenberg photographed in progress in de Kooning’s studio in New York, just before he and Twombly left for Europe, the articulation of desire in relation to the depicted body is cool and systematic, lacking the direct, expressive violence of the Abstract Expressionist work.60 “System” here is a machinery for the erotic, which is produced as an infinitesimal extra or overspill, just as Duchamp described the system of production he called infra-­mince (examples of which he gave as the “whistling sound” produced by legs in velvet trousers brushing against one another, or the scent of the mouth carried by exhaled tobacco smoke).61 This systematicity turns the sequence of photographs into a seeing machine, its serial mechanism producing a frisson of visual/sexual pleasure. As images of a body on a staircase, in which lateral extension is propelled by the progression of steps, Cy on Roman Steps recalls (in this context, at any rate) Kelly’s La Combe series, even though the figure is absent in Kelly’s paintings. More directly, Rauschenberg’s photographs of Twombly may be viewed as a reception of Duchamp’s work, particularly well known in America, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. In Rauschenberg’s photographs, Duchamp’s painting receives a deadpan, flat, serial, and homoerotic inflection. The figure in Duchamp’s painting itself is of ambiguous gender, and was the subject, on its first exhibition, of numerous cartoons in the contemporary press, redolent of anxiety on this point.62 The painting had already been restaged in photographic form earlier in 1952, as a time-­lapsed composite photograph of the artist descending a staircase (fig. 3.17). (The photograph, by Eliot Elisofon, was published in Life magazine in April 1952 and was also used for the cover of Robert Lebel’s 1959 monograph on the artist, which became a vital document in the reception of Duchamp by American artists.) Rauschenberg’s photographic portrait can also be seen as a reception of Eadweard Muybridge’s

3.16  Robert Rauschenberg, Cy + Roman Steps (I, II, III, IV, V), 1952. Suite of five gelatin silver prints; overallVision Camera size, 29 × 80 inches (51 × 123 203 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Purchase through a gift of Phyllis Wattis. © 2013 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Licensed by DACS, London/ VAGA, New York.

Chapter Three 124

3.17  Eliot Elisofon, Artist Marcel Duchamp Walking Down a Flight of Stairs, published in Life magazine, no. 284, New York, April 1952. Photograph, 7.8 × 9.6 inches (20 × 24 cm). © Eliot Elisofon/Time-­Life Pictures/ Getty Images.

stop-­motion photographs of “animal and human locomotion,” photographs which Twombly would later reference in his second series of blackboard paintings (for example, in Night Watch, 1966).63 At this point in the early 1950s, however, Cy + Roman Steps presents a time-­ sliced, modular, multipanel image-­field that connects with Rauschenberg’s nonphotographic works, including Automobile Tire Print and This Is the First Half of a Print Designed to Exist in Passing Time, as a serial, black-­and-­white, multiunit work that measures passing time in modular segments. The artist’s White Paintings, as we have seen, were also conceived in this way. Rauschen-

berg, apparently quoting Cage, described these as functioning like a “clock of the room,” explaining, “I always thought of the white paintings as being—­well, hypersensitive. So that one could look at them and almost see how many people were in the room by the shadows cast, or what time of day it was.”64 The paintings in Kelly’s La Combe series also function like “clocks” in recording the fall of shadow at different times of day. Like Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, as well as Cy + Roman Steps, Kelly’s paintings are serial and split into panels, comprising a narrative frieze, or assembled time-­slices that choreograph the viewing body as it patrols the length of the work. In Kelly’s painting of a staircase, as we have seen, there is no body directly depicted within the picture-­field; the same is true of Rauschenberg’s White Paintings. This does not mean, however, that the body is absent from or irrelevant to either work. Caroline A. Jones has argued that Rauschenberg emphasized the bodily aspect of his White Paintings, pointing out that he “held these canvas panels to be ‘hypersensitive,’ tender membranes, registering the slightest phenomenon on their blanched, white skins.”65 Such a reading counters any tendency to see the White Paintings entirely as Moholy-­Nagyian, pristine receptor-­surfaces. In this light the systematic way in which the body is made visible in Rauschenberg’s Cy + Roman Steps might be understood as offering another rendering of the “technologized body” that I would argue is registered in a more oblique and elliptical way in Kelly’s, Twombly’s, and Rauschenberg’s other works. The key to understanding how this might be is suggested in a well-­ known story told by John Cage. In 1952 Cage visited Harvard and was invited to try out one of the university’s anechoic chambers. Inside the chamber, Cage was surprised to discover that he did not hear silence. He could hear two sounds—­one higher and one lower. He asked the engineer what they were. The higher sound was the noise of his nervous system in operation, he was told; the lower sound was his blood circulating.66 This experience was revelatory for Cage, and led directly to his composition of 4’33”, his famous “silent” piece for piano, which was first performed in August 1952 by David Tudor, and which in turn he linked to Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, writing, in 1961, “To Whom It May Concern: The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later.”67 The body is not absent in Cage’s story—­far from it. The “silence” is filled, precisely, with the noises of the body, which, however, is heard and not seen. One has to become attentive to it, like Kelly on the Staten Island bus, picking up on the curve of his thigh beneath the flattened page, articulated in concert with the movement of the bus and flickering shadows from above, the artist’s perception taking on the supersensitive capacity of a mechanical instrument to become capable of minutely discerning its flickering hum and hiss. This combination is precisely the distinctive trait of the “technologized body” as I want to characterize it here, and in this light, the significance of Cage’s story is the way it moves a certain historical narrative forward. It picks up a Bauhaus-­

Camera Vision 125

Chapter Three 126

era, technological enthusiasm for the “apparatization” of the human subject, which fits the body into a system of mechanical prostheses and technologically remakes the human sensorium, and moves the story on to a vision of the body immersed in an absorptive technological environment. Just as the camera served Moholy-­Nagy, so the anechoic chamber functions to enhance the body’s listening sensitivity, making it an instrument capable of increasingly fine discrimination and registration. However, in Cage’s story, the hypnotic repetition of the sounds, the secure enclosure of the anechoic chamber, and its function, to direct the attention of the subject deeper into himself in an exercise of rapt self-­absorption, all give a different flavor to this technological encounter than the active, gymnastic encounters staged in photography of the 1920s and 1930s. I would not want to overemphasize the difference between the two, for the shift is finely poised. Cage’s moment of euphoric technological discovery and the embrace of new technologies in the works of the other important figures of this moment, such as Marshall McLuhan, Charles Olson, and Buckminster Fuller, as we shall see more fully in the next chapter, retain much of a Bauhaus-­type enthusiasm for new media as “extensions of man,” as McLuhan put it. But there is, I think, a difference, and this difference can to an extent be read in bodily and sexual terms. Where Moholy-­Nagy and others in the 1920s and 1930s celebrated a certain armoring of the body by technological extensions, and proposed a phallic model of “camera-­seeing,” enabling the human eye to penetrate further into the surrounding world, Cage’s aesthetic, as Helen Molesworth has pointed out, leads attention deeper inside the body and opens the body of the work to the outside world.68 The difference here may be expressed by saying that while both bodies are “technologized,” Cage’s technologically supported body, by contrast to that extolled by Moholy-­Nagy, is dephallicized. The training of the body to take up the hypersensitivity of technological instruments that we see here in Cage, just as we have already seen it in Kelly’s drawing practice, cuts loose the artwork from traditional structures of cultural authority, which function on the model of mastery and denial of lack that a psychoanalytic analysis describes as “phallic,” and undoes the expressive control ascribed to “heroic” paradigms of the artist. My claims here are related to the way in which, in her important and thoughtful theorization of Cage’s “silence,” Caroline Jones connects his rejection of expressivity to his identity as a gay man in the homophobic society of 1940s and 1950s America. In this context, she argues, Cage’s refusal of expressivity should be understood as a marker of the exclusion of homosexual expression within a dominantly heterosexist society—­“silence” as silenced—­which was developed by Cage into a positive, alternative aesthetic: “The utopian politics of Cage’s silence, at least, should be clear; secrets and silence may be enforced by the oppressor, but they can also hide the oppressed (or the liberator, or beauty, or love), from the controlling, panoptical view.”69 But where

Jones sees Cage’s aesthetic as bodiless (describing 4’33” in particular as a “fundamentally disembodied piece”), the interpretation I want to offer reads his aesthetic of “silence” and Kelly’s aesthetic of the “screen” in terms of the technologized body and its systematic forms of registration, not its absence.70 Further, I would seek to extend the reading of the body and the sensuality that is at stake from a biographical basis in the artist to a basis in the body of the viewer, whether gay or straight, male or female. I have already suggested that we should understand Kelly’s as a kind of “camera-­seeing,” and indeed Kelly himself has compared his way of looking to photography.71 This comparison is suggested not because his visual aesthetic is primarily established through photography—­as we have seen, Kelly’s drawing practice was his chief means of recording his visual observation and translating it into painted form, although he sometimes also used the camera to make visual notes. Rather, Kelly’s is a kind of “camera-­seeing” because it is an intensely observant visuality, extracting, framing, and cropping from the real world to produce abstract segments of form. As the artist himself has recounted in numerous anecdotes, this is a way of seeing often based on a process of “focusing through an aperture.”72 Through this practice of visuality, furthermore, Kelly develops a formal language of black and white, crisp contrasts, and sharp edges, often derived from cast shadows or fragmented portions of the visual world, which as we have seen, had already been established as founding features of modernist photography. That Kelly’s painting practice, too, aims at and is underpinned by a particular sensual address to the body is something John Coplans was one of the first to show: “Kelly has explained that Black and White (1955) is the form of a bent knee seen sideways, Bar (1956) is an extended leg, and Palm (1957), refers to the palm of a hand.”73 There is a strong and specific sensuality in these works—­in Kelly’s near obsession with the articulation of two close forms, for example, two large circles touching (as in Rebound, 1959, and Study for Rebound, 1955) or nearly touching (as in Green Curves, 1951), or the emphasized line that separates the legs in an early drawing, Nude Reclining (1948). Examples could be multiplied, but one in particular is worth mentioning for its closeness to Rauschenberg’s study of Cy Twombly in Rome. Kelly’s watercolor study from 1959, Swim Suits (based apparently on a beer advertisement), homes in on the groin area, showing two bodies, male and female, from waist to midthigh, in cropped shorts (fig. 3.18). The form of the man’s crotch and legs inspired the later work White Sculpture I (1968), while, the authors of the early catalogue of Kelly’s sculpture argue, the female swimmer’s hips and thighs “prefigure” the form of Kelly’s series of Curve sculptures from 1974.74 The sensuality of Kelly’s address to the body is confirmed by his remark concerning how he came to develop his method during the years in France: “The forms found in the vaulting of a cathedral or even a splatter of tar on the road seemed more valid and instructive and a more voluptuous experience

Camera Vision 127

Chapter Three 128

3.18  Ellsworth Kelly, Swim Suits, 1959. Watercolor, 11.1 × 8.5 inches (28 × 22 cm). Private collection. Photo courtesy of the artist. © Ellsworth Kelly. EK D 59.56.

3.19  Ellsworth Kelly, Untitled (Empire State Building), 1956. Oil on printed postcard, 5.5 × 3.5 inches (14 × 9 cm). Private collection. Photo courtesy of the artist. © Ellsworth Kelly. EK D 56.117A.

than either geometric or action painting.”75 Kelly’s deliberate collision here of the “highest,” most “spiritual” pleasure with an example redolent of the “lowest,” is distinctive: the liquid “splatter of tar on the road” is almost bodily as it is contrasted with the language of either geometric or action painting, in favor of a new model of painting that will be “voluptuous.” The form of the voluptuous in this quote—­the splatter of tar, connoting ejaculation—­may be understood as suggesting a sensuous pleasure taken in the male body. And yet the theme of a submerged bodiliness in Kelly’s work involves both male and female references, as is probably most vividly encapsulated in his postcard collages: in Untitled (Empire State Building) (1956) (fig. 3.19), for example, the addition of two circles of white paint makes the famous American monument into a giant cock and balls, while Horizontal Nude of 1974 (fig. 3.20) uses a partially concealed nude female torso to echo the hills of a postcard landscape. These

examples of “screened” references to male and female bodies suggest a wider sensual reading of Kelly’s particular practice of visuality. His paintings, as we have seen, are rooted in a practice of mobile, alert, and hypervigilant visuality: the artist moving around the city, his vision stimulated and electrified by sudden glimpses and encounters. This is a kind of viewing that might be compared to “cruising,” in which the subject is on the qui vive to catch another person’s eye—­except, of course, that Kelly is out to catch parcels of form, color, and shape in the world, from which to make paintings.76 In the essay “Les Soirées de Paris,” written in the same year (1979) as his essays on Cy Twombly, but published after his death, Roland Barthes gives a good account of this kind of mobile viewing, which in his own case he calls an “insatiable cruising,” though more often than not it fails to result in any sexual encounter. After making an arrangement with a young man he meets in the street for an assignation that fails to materialize, Barthes asks himself if he is disappointed and concludes that he is not: “Since mere eye contact and an exchange of words eroticizes me, it was that pleasure I paid for.”77 On another occasion, Barthes records making eye contact with a young Moroccan man and, again, making a “vague date” for tomorrow. Walking on, Barthes

Camera Vision 129

3.20  Ellsworth Kelly, Horizontal Nude or St Martin Landscape, 1974. Postcard, collage, 4 × 5.8 inches (10 × 15 cm). Private collection. Photo courtesy of the artist. © Ellsworth Kelly. EK D 74.36.

Chapter Three 130

records that he feels “light-­headed, physically at ease”; it seems he takes away something with him from these encounters, a scrap of something intangible: a glance, a murmur, remembered colors of clothing, a smell of cigarette smoke.78 It is all something like the small intensities of form and color that so charge Kelly’s own walking in the city, adding electricity, excitement, intensity to his seeing. Another essay, “Incidents,” also written in 1979 and published after Barthes’s death, concerns his experiences in Morocco, in a series of fragmentary, journal-­like entries. These last writings of Barthes, in which he records his sexual encounters alongside other more mundane observations and occurrences, read in many ways like a kind of “color diary,” or notes kept by a painter, recording scraps of color just as Kelly’s many scribbled pencil marks annotate his drawings. The very first entry sets the model: “The bartender, in a station restaurant, came out to pick a red geranium and put it in a glass of water, between the coffee machine and the sink full of dirty cups and saucers.”79 A few pages later he describes “an adolescent black, in a wretched raincoat and a bright blue sombrero” (16). Sometimes what is recorded is a fine attunement to subtle differences and gradations of hue: the gray-­white of pigeon shit on a snowy white djellaba, set against a glass of milk, for example (14–­15). At other times it is the vibration of bright colors in combination: “A young black, crème-­de-­menthe shirt, almond-­green pants, orange socks and apparently very soft red shoes” (18). Even when not directly sexual, as these examples record, it is nearly always young men who catch Barthes’s exoticizing eye. “A certain Ahmed, near the station, wears a sky-­blue sweater with a fine orange stain on the front” (22). Sometimes these men are his sexual partners. Often what are fantasized about are stains of one sort or another. “Aliwa (a good name to repeat over and over) likes immaculate white trousers (late in the season), but the toilets being what they are, there is always a stain on these milk-­white garments” (19). The critic Pierre Saint-­Amand has offered a reading of these essays in terms of what he calls Barthes’s “gay erotics,” which at the outset he distinguishes from an attempt to expose the “open secret” of Barthes’s homosexuality.80 Naming and identity are not the point: homosexual desire is not positioned as the explanation of the work, although neither is the specific articulation of desire in this writing ignored. Instead Saint-­Amand proposes to attend to the way in which Barthes’s text generates, through its juxtaposition of sexual and more prosaic encounters in an obliquely charged texture of the everyday, “a different body and other affects,” amounting, he suggests, to “a particular and marginal (or minority) erotics” (155). This, he points out, has much in common with the account of “écriture féminine” developed by Luce Irigaray. Fragmentary and fleeting encounters, scraps of “incidents,” are gathered by Barthes into a “surface” of writing, producing a model of the text as skin, sensitized and enlivened by a million light touches and responding, Saint-­Amand suggests,

perhaps to the attachment-­drive theorized by Didier Anzieu, rather than to the more familiar oral/anal/genital drives, centered in the usual erogenous zones and producing the more conventional literary structures of narrative, action, and climax (162). This is to find in Barthes’s writing “a semiotics both complex and lightweight,” “voluntarily unappeased” and “refusing the assurance of signs” (155). It might be likened to the way in which homoerotic fragments litter the field in Twombly’s paintings of the later 1950s and 1960s, producing a sensual flicker, or frisson, within the paintings’ thicket of markings. The value that arises from this dispersal is that which we have already seen Barthes characterize as “eroticization” (rather than merely the “erotic”): the value that emerges from, in his words, “mere eye contact, the exchange of words,” or that which is, in Saint-­ Amand’s summary, “light, diffuse, mercurial, which circulates without coagulating” (155). This eroticization of experience is composed of rapid “sketches,” impressions of bodies and voices—­a “fragmentation,” as Saint-­Amand points out (155–­56), such that, to use the formulation of a different critic, one “can’t tell elbow from ass,” a statement inadvertently recalling Kelly’s paintings based on the curve of a knee or a shoulder.81 There is a deliberate avoidance of the phallic model of sexuality, which finds expression in the fixed series of paradigms “active/passive,” “fucker/fucked,” Saint-­Amand argues, and an avoidance of fixing erotic energy in any one part of the body (158). Instead, Barthes—­and, I suggest, Kelly too—­”prefers to conceive of the body in an aleatory and imprecise way. Unsettling the meaning of erotic gestures is for him the happy beginning of a reinvention of the body. The Barthesian sexual act is a patchwork of sensualities” (159). The text that is made from this erotics of encounter—­or the paintings, in Kelly’s case—­comprise “a plural surface” (162), displaying “a capricious, liquid, mercurial performance: ‘Flashes, formulas, surprises of expressions, scattered through the great stream of the image-­ repertoire,’” in Barthes’s words (165). In this account, sex is “pensive; it is full of sense but keeps it in reserve, by not annulling itself in coded satisfaction. It is full of intentions, but keeps its secret. It is caught in a voluptuous suspension” (171). Is this a “queer aesthetic”? Certainly, some commentators have argued for such a reading of the work of Cage, Rauschenberg, and Johns. Yet it would be more in tune with Kelly’s particular time to avoid this term. As Caroline Jones points out in relation to Cage, “These and other artists of the time did not ‘come out’ in the post-­Stonewall sense.”82 I propose we instead follow Saint-­ Amand’s suggestion that we study Barthes’s writing for the way in which it generates a “marginal erotics,” which he points out has much in common with a feminist understanding.83 This is proposed partly in an effort to avoid the prescriptive and aggressive “outing” of Barthes, Kelly, or any other artist (which, as another writer on Barthes points out, often risks seeming like yet another form of police entrapment).84 It is also in positive recognition of the distinctive

Camera Vision 131

Chapter Three 132

aesthetics that Barthes, like Cage and, I suggest Kelly, developed, founded in each case on a passionate rejection of semiotic “fixing” and identification and a commitment to a practice of more ambiguous signification, reliant on the viewer whose eye is caught to do half the work. The task set for us by Barthes’s writing—­and for that matter, Kelly’s painting—­is to perceive and acknowledge its sensual address and to register the eroticism in its forms, without fixing or naming it in the kind of politics of identity that Barthes, for one, sought so consistently to elude, and furthermore, to acknowledge what kind of aesthetic this evasion helps form. Put more simply, this is to begin to recognize in what sense Cagean “silence” can be recognized as a distinctive aesthetic formation developed from the particular technological and social pressures of the 1950s and not just as “silenced” expression in the old, direct mode. The other challenge that these artists’ work presents, in demanding recognition of the distinctiveness of the aesthetics of the “screen” or of “silence,” is to see how this kind of viewing connects to wider technological modes of making and viewing. These artists’ shared avoidance of an aesthetics of direct expressivity results in work that systematically automatizes line, fragments forms, and charges the surface with what seem electrical and nervous energies, developing thereby an address to the senses that sensitizes the viewer to observe minute differences. Such an aesthetic arises from an effort to develop alternative forms of seeing, writing, hearing, or painting that bring into being a newly experiencing body. But it also arises, as Caroline Jones has pointed out in relation to Cage, from the taking up of a deliberately technological aesthetic that aims to destabilize and undo conventional aesthetic structures and forms of making and to denaturalize the body. Jones sees this as exemplified in Cage’s development of the “prepared piano,” in which the case of the piano is opened up, its metal strings revealed and visibly manipulated with “a variety of foreign objects,” as well as in his call for “‘the use of technological means,’” requiring “‘the close anonymous collaboration of a number of workers.’”85 We may see the bodily dimension of Cage’s technological aesthetic in both these cases, as also in his work with Merce Cunningham’s dance company (discussed further in chapter 6). The anecdote about the nonsilence of the anechoic chamber, for example, was one of the “eighteen or nineteen stories,” each timed to last one minute, that Cage used as spoken-­word accompaniment to a dance called How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run (1965).86 In this example, Cunningham’s dancers’ moved as organized bodily parts performing in a vernacular of ordinary movements and tasks, while Cage’s words formed an ordinary-­language, mathematically regulated “score” that radically disrupted usual principles of musical composition. In Kelly’s case, I have suggested a similar aesthetic is exemplified in his “camera-­eye” practice of drawing. Both examples involve taking technological forms of making into the body of the artist and/or the work in order to attack established forms of composition, harmony, expression, and creativity. The body itself is remade as a seeing machine.

Kelly’s charging of scraps of color and form with affect, sensitizing the viewer to precise changes in hue, precisely off-­balance forms, the rhythms of multipanel paintings, and a distinctive, flickering appeal to vision is thus, I suggest, comparable to the way Cage asks us to listen to our bodies and the sounds around us, striving to reconstitute music as a broken surface, or open frame, patterned by irregular flashes from the external world. The erotics of encounter and incident that emerges from the works of these artists becomes an aesthetics that offers a different model of our relation to the everyday world: a model of pleasurable connection producing intense sensation, which nevertheless remains mobile and unfixed. Like the cinema environment (another of Barthes’s subjects, ansd one of the cruising grounds he describes), this is painting and music that surrounds and stimulates the viewer, producing an image-­or sound-­field composed of fragments, which constitutes the body differently.

Screen memories

In 1965, Kelly traveled back to Paris for the first time in eleven years. In 1968, he opened up his old boxes and files for John Coplans, who was then preparing a monograph on the artist, and rediscovered his old photographs.87 He reprinted them.88 And he took up photography again, for the first time since his years in France. He went back to France for a third time in 1968, and it was then that he photographed for the first time many of the subjects of his paintings from the years 1948–­54—­for example, the wall on the rue Saint-­Louis-­en-­l’Ile and the window of the museum of modern art (now the Musée de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, in the Palais de Tokyo)—­in a kind of after-­the-­event memory-­effect. In 1971, he exhibited his photographs and, for the first time, publicly acknowledged the relation of his painting to his visual observation of the world. Then, two years later, in 1973, Kelly reinvestigated and systematized the archive of his drawings going back at least twenty years, mounting selected sheets and pages on two hundred pieces of board. This archive was first exhibited as a single, multipart work under the name Tablet, in 2002, by the Drawing Center, New York; the catalogue to the exhibition, published the same year, took on the look of a scrapbook (figs. 3.21–­3.22). Thus, in the early 1970s, Kelly’s practice publicly assumed the form of painting-­plus-­archive, and as such it may be compared, as Benjamin Buchloh has pointed out, with the structure of practice seen in the work of Gerhard Richter, whose own gridded photo-­archive, Atlas, was begun in 1962 and first exhibited in 1972.89 Tablet comprises drawings, of course, rather than photographs, an important difference from Richter’s archive—­though some of the early panels in Atlas include sketches—­but both Kelly’s drawings and Richter’s photographs and sketches are working materials, sometimes used to develop later paintings.

Camera Vision 133

Chapter Three 134

3.21  Ellsworth Kelly, Tablet #2, 1955. Ink and pencil, 15.5 × 21 inches (39 × 53 cm). New York. Menil Collection, Houston. Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery, New York. © Ellsworth Kelly. EK T.2.

As an archive, Tablet is strangely disordered. The drawings are mounted haphazardly and not in chronological order, as a glance at the dates and postmarks on the scraps of paper scattered throughout the archive makes clear. Indeed, Tablet may be said to present a scrambled time-­field like that of La Combe itself. What kind of memory could such a disarranged collection support? The putative form of the archive is undone both by this scramble, and by being composed of drawings made “automatic” by haste or distraction: unconscious doodles in place of photographs, and even in place of the kind of drawings that record things like photographs. The drawings in Tablet are not finished works like Kelly’s celebrated line-­drawings of plants, nor are they sketches or working drawings, carefully annotated with color names or cues to memory, as we see elsewhere in his practice. They are quasi-­automatist doodles, nearly all of them made on scrap paper (torn fragments of letters, bills, invitations), presumably quickly, possibly with something else in mind (but at the same time not in mind). The specific archival or memory-­bank form that Tablet presents, and the relation it bears to Kelly’s painting practice, suggests parallels with the account Sigmund Freud gives of the constitution of “screen memories,” the “distinctive feature” of which, Freud says, is that “they are extremely well

Camera Vision 135

remembered but that their content is completely indifferent.”90 The central case study Freud recounts (apparently a thinly disguised autobiographical study) is that of a man with an intense childhood memory of playing in a green meadow with two other children, a boy and a girl, picking yellow dandelions. He remembers himself and the other boy taking the little girl’s bunch of flowers away, before running up to a peasant woman and being given bread to eat. This seemingly inconsequential memory was associated in the man with strong remembered sensations: the yellow of the dandelions was intense, the bread delicious. Why, asks Freud, should such a nondescript scene of childhood be remembered when far more important events are not? And furthermore, why should such strong visual and physical qualities be associated with this nondescript scene? The answer to the first question, Freud argues, is that such “memories” are formed at a later moment in life, out of the scraps of the most ordinary, seemingly innocent content, in order to “screen” some repressed psychic content. The fantasy that is screened by the memory may belong either to a current moment in the subject’s life, in which case the projection is like that we see in a cinema, the “projection-­beam,” or libidinal investment, moving from where we are now, toward the “screen memory,” or to the period of early infancy or

3.22  Ellsworth Kelly, Tablet #3 (Four Sketches), 1955, 1970, 1973. Ink and pencil, 15.5 × 21 inches (39 × 53 cm). Menil Collection, Houston. Photo courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery, New York. © Ellsworth Kelly. EK T.3.

Chapter Three 136

childhood, in which case the screen memory appears as if rear-­projected, lit up from “behind” the events it appears to describe.91 In either case, a screen memory is entirely unreliable as a record of past events and may not even be a memory of anything that really happened. Instead, scraps of “memory” are chosen for their suitability in disguising some fantasy (in the case of the young man with the dandelions, Freud suggests, it was his desire in the present to “deflower” a certain young woman), and the scraps are woven together to compose a kind of screen, onto which unconscious fantasy can be projected. It is this cathection with buried psychic energy that explains the special, almost cinematic vividness and intensity of the colors and physical sensations associated with the “memory.” This work of reinvesting remembered material so that it becomes a screen memory seems, as Freud describes it, very like the labor of artistic creation, especially as seen in Kelly’s practice. La Combe II, of course, was itself made in the form of a folding screen. But more broadly, and across his practice, I suggest that that Kelly’s paintings function as the kind of “screen memory” Freud described: composite surfaces formed of sewn-­together, remembered fragments, recathected and made to hold together as a scene producing intensely vivid affects in the subject by way of the buried psychic content that subtly invests them. The intense affective power these fragments of form and color possess is felt by the viewer: Kelly’s shaped and multipart canvases are structured to encourage and stimulate mobile viewing, and as we walk between and among them, we feel their intense, saturated colors and off-­balance shapes and rhythms in our bodies. Scraps of the once-­seen are turned into fragmented, brightly colored paintings, which carry an affective load far in excess of their seemingly simple forms, as much as they seem in excess of their quotidian origins in glimpsed parts of the world. Like screen memories, Tablet, it would seem, offers a space for misremembering, countering the archive’s project to document and remember, and countering too any critical elevation of “memory” (which has the archive as its support) as a means of simple opposition to spectacle in the latter half of the twentieth century. The function of such an archive (like the shop window, as we saw in chapter 2) is to bear the projection of a certain fantasy, which is not a real “memory” but which serves as apparently a memory, to enable a certain fantasy to maintain continued life. In Kelly’s case, as we have seen, the fantasy may be erotically charged, but (again like the shop window) I want to suggest it also concerns the role painting has both in relation to its past forms and in relation to the external, commodified world. Despite the deranging effects of fantasy, which are seen in Tablet in the automatism of the drawings and in the disorder of their collection, some form of “memory” (or in other words, fantasy) of modernist painting is sustained, both here and in the painting practice of which it is a part (as well as in subsidiary forms of practice, like the postcard collages I have already mentioned). Modernism’s highest forms of pictorial

abstraction, its utopian hopes for pure color and form, as represented in the European tradition to which Kelly was connected, are “remembered” even as they are disordered by the operations of a distracted and sensualist, libidinal cathection. Thus, Tablet is not a document of or monument to painting in opposition to spectacle or the encroachments of other media but rather, like Richter’s Atlas (which I discuss further in chapter 5), records the reconfiguration of a painting practice via its integration with photography and film and with other forms of looking. A pictorial system is sustained, not destroyed, in Tablet, in the development of a patchwork support for pictures from the materials of the everyday. Torn paper, collaged, folded with hands, parceled up, and put together out of parts, betrays Kelly’s bodily involvement in this system of painting. Found and turned to use, this is a practice, like Paul Klee’s oil-­transfers, of everyday involvement in the studio with wider commercial forms and visualities. Furthermore, in Kelly’s practice the “memory” of painting’s past forms and the preservation of a painting practice are sustained not through the cultivation of pictorial autonomy but, on the contrary, through an engagement of painting’s forms and visuality with the forms and ways of seeing common to everyday life, cathected by a libidinal undercurrent. Kelly’s drawings often make use of particular lines or squares, lettering, colors, or forms already on the scrap of paper but ask us to ignore adjacent marks or print that shows through from the other side of the paper as palimpsestic remains (as in Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing of 1953). The cast shadow problematic in his painting of the early 1950s belongs to a similar preoccupation with a form of visual attention that is simultaneously hyperacute and distracted. Kelly’s interest in making use of the varying levels of our perception and attentiveness or inattention in Tablet is comparable to Jasper Johns’s expressed intent in using readymade, found surfaces, to open onto the stream of mental attention that is habitual, that occurs when one is not paying attention.92 It is also comparable to the “vernacular gaze,” the “city-­dweller’s rapid scan,” that Brian O’Doherty has identified in Rauschenberg’s work.93 It is present in the virtuosic, disconcerted pattern of looking that Kelly evidences in his painting, as well as in the distracted mindlessness of Twombly’s drawing, doodling, and urban scrawl (as Kozloff wrote of the second series of blackboard paintings, “These are exercises not so much in boredom as in distraction”).94 The many photographs Kelly took of his paintings outside in the street further demonstrate the connection between Kelly’s paintings and the urban, everyday environment. This distinctive form of the “studio photograph” offers real-­world equivalents of the postcard collages, with slabs, oblongs, lozenges, and shaped panels of pure color shown balanced between lampposts, on curbsides, and against walls, inserted and sliced into urban or sometimes natural environments.95 The effect is as if the paintings (or, in the case of the postcards, collage-­models for paintings) interfere with vision,

Camera Vision 137

Chapter Three 138

interrupting the everyday scene like static interference, memory flashes, bright lights, or sun-­dazzle. I’ve suggested that Freud’s is a very cinematic account of memory and that the panel-­mounted drawings in Tablet might be compared, not to the archive, but to screens, surrounding the viewer in a quasi-­cinematic environment. Plugged into the changes in the fantasy-­screen of our imaginaries since cinema, Kelly’s paintings too take on a “cinematic” resonance (his story of making a painting, Tennis Court, in 1949, from the glimpsed frame of a flickering black-­ and-­white film confirms as much).96 They utilize the continuum of attention/ inattention that is offered by our experience of the everyday, such as our simultaneously ordinary and cinematic perception of flickering shadows, which Duchamp first put on the map for painting in his various “precision optics” projects, including the Rotoreliefs filmed in Anémic Cinéma of 1925–­26; the Rotary Demisphere Kelly saw in 1951; and the scroll-­like painting of cast shadows, Tu m’. In the La Combe series in particular, Kelly uses this to transform the traditional wall-­hung easel painting into works that evoke the cinematic screen, ruled by flicker and movement. These, like Kelly’s paintings in general, are not paintings designed for the kind of absorbed, sublimated contemplation that the single-­panel modernist painted surface elicits. Instead the viewer is encouraged to move among Kelly’s works and glimpse flickers of color in her peripheral vision. Kelly’s canvases are more like film frames, stilled and put on show, which we animate through our mobile engagement with them. Writing in 1971, the American conceptual artist Robert Smithson would advocate all-­night movie sessions, to promote the accumulation in the mind of a kind of cinematic sludge.97 Operating some twenty years before this, Kelly’s model of spectatorship has perhaps more in common with the kind of cinemagoing André Breton describes having practiced in his youth, when he and his friend Jacques Vaché used to walk in and out of cinemas, catching fragments of films and making a kind of mental collage from the parts. Recalling this practice in 1951, Breton reports feeling “charged” and “magnetized” by the experience.98 Distracted, alert, yet euphoric, infused with the brighter colors and hallucinatory vividness of desire-­charged seeing, Kelly’s works similarly promote the immersion of the body in a whole sensory environment, which, however, stimulates movement. Charged and focused by the glowing screens, the viewer is as if integrated into a film machine, her body one cog in the larger whole. Her body sensitized, her fantasy awakened, the viewer is “sutured” to the screen by this technologized environment—­but only intermittently and in patchwork. The importance of cinema for painting would receive a more absorptive reading a few years later, in Mark Rothko’s large, nuanced, glowing canvases and in his desire increasingly to use his works to create a whole-­room environment, with lowered lighting. But Kelly’s (like Twombly’s and Rauschenberg’s) is, at this point in the 1950s, a different articulation of the cinematic. Breaking

the field of painting up into intensely cathected flickering parts, making use of gaps and spaces, as in his Sculpture for a Large Wall, Kelly produces painting and sculpture as “screens” that stimulate simultaneously mobile and entranced viewing on the part of the spectator. Kelly’s paintings supply an envelope of sensitive stimulation, flashes, glimpses, and encounters, producing the viewer as the kind of “technologized body” that is also described in Cage’s anecdote about the anechoic chamber. Rapt and immersed, simultaneously distracted, these works promote a complex interaction with the forms and technologies of everyday spectacle. At precisely the point that Kelly was constructing Tablet, however, in the 1960s and 1970s in America, new technologies were taking hold within the visual and remodeling the image into something more like a document. In conceptual art, painting was systematically dismantled and the very idea of visual pleasure challenged, even as, at the same time, forms of 1920s and 1930s techno-­enthusiasm were revived and reconfigured. Therefore, putting painting and cinema aside (to return to them in chapter 5), I turn now to the question of spectacle and the forms of the aesthetic in works by leading American conceptualists Mel Bochner, Robert Smithson, and Douglas Huebler. Without the support of painting, structured instead by the format of photo-­plus-­text, presented in the form of a book or as loose-­leaf papers, or mounted on boards and hung around a room, what forms of projection and immersion do conceptual artworks sustain, and in what sense, if at all, does the aesthetic survive these material reconfigurations?

Camera Vision 139

Chapter Three 140

Working Drawings

The 1950s and 1960s were decades of the most concerted renewal of techno-­ euphoria in America and Europe since the 1920s. The politics of the Cold War funded massive technological expansion and sponsored a huge rate of new inventions, including atomic energy, satellites, the integrated circuit, and microwave ovens (indeed, the number of patents issued in the United States between 1945 and 1965 more than doubled).1 Just as what Reyner Banham identified as the First Machine Age (extending from 1800 to the 1930s) had seen a cult of aesthetic investment not only in the forms of iconic machines—­ the steam engine, the production line, the automobile, the bicycle—­but also in the idea of the mechanical as remaking human relations, human gesture, rhythms of speech, and so on, so too the sense of a Second Machine Age was expressed not only in iconic machines—­Sputnik, the space suit, high-­design cars—­but also, in a deeper, more pervasive sense, in a new cult of technicity.2 Across the field of cultural production, especially as the 1960s progressed, this took shape in a new emphasis on information structures, networks, and distribution circuits. In artistic terms, we might see these structures as beginning to be manifest when Minimalism took the step beyond painting and sculpture (announced by Donald Judd in his 1965 essay “Specific Objects,” with the words “half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor

141

4.1  Douglas Huebler, Site Sculpture Project #5, 50 Mile Piece (Haverhill, Mass.–Putney, ­Vt.–­New York City), 1968, as installed in the exhibition January 5–­31, 1969, Chapter Four at Seth Siegelaub’s New York 142 work is formed gallery. “This by thirteen photographs that serve to mark the location of sites . . . which actually describe 50 mile intervals of highway space.” Museum of Modern Art, New York, Seth Siegelaub Archives. Gift of Seth Siegelaub and the Stichting Egress Foundation, Amsterdam. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © 2013 MOMA, New York/ Scala, Florence/ARS, New York/DACS, London.

sculpture”), and beyond the single object, with the expansion of the space of the work to include “space, light and the viewer’s field of vision” (as summarized by Robert Morris, in 1966).3 This latter step produced a decentralized and “distributed” model of the work of art, and a model of perception that moved beyond looking “into” the work to engage with the spatial situation around it, while the former fostered the development of material supports shared with and extending the aesthetic directly into the wider technological environment. Douglas Huebler’s Site Sculpture Project #5, 50 Mile Piece (Haverhill, Mass.– Putney, Vt.–New York City), 1968 (fig. 4.1), demonstrates the way that in works of conceptual art, the material and spatial expansion characteristic of Minimalism became the final freeing of art-­making from anything that looks like an object, let alone a traditional medium, and the extension of the space of the work beyond the gallery, together with the consequent adoption of “information” and documentation as explicit structures of the work of art. Thus in the course of a single decade were produced the loss of focus on the single object, and indeed on making any kind of object at all (the “dematerialization” diagnosed by Lucy Lippard and John Chandler in 1968), and the loss of traditional mediums (the “post-­medium condition” analyzed more recently by Rosalind Krauss)—­the consequence of which in the present, according to Krauss, is that art is no longer able to distinguish itself from commodity experience, but participates instead in a wider trend toward an “utter generalization of the aesthetic,” in which a general aesthetic “glow” spreads over all experience.4

From beyond the narrow purview of the art world, Friedrich Kittler has offered his own account of the post-­medium condition that links it directly to technology, arguing that it was the development of computing in the 1960s that sowed the seeds for the final eradication of all specific media, with the introduction of a technological support capable of replacing all formerly distinct and “incompatible data channels” (he cites “television, radio, cinema and the postal system”) with a single platform for the composition, storage, and dissemination of music, images, and literature.5 The idea that computing represented the end of specialist media and the rise of a new, generalized technicity was popular at the time, heralded, for example, by Marshall McLuhan, who cited the rise of “electronic technology” and “computerized” methods of “information retrieval” as marking the end of nineteenth-­century modes of “mechanization” and “specialism.”6 Exhibitions on the “end of the machine age” and the rise of computer art were held in America and Western Europe in the 1960s (for example, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Machine Age, curated by Pontus Hulten at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1968; Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts, curated by Jasia Reichardt in London in 1968 and touring the United States in 1969; and Software: Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art, curated by Jack Burnham at the Jewish Museum in 1970). Distinctive forms and structures linked to computing were identified and articulated in these shows and in critical writing of the time, including the “network” (Lawrence Alloway), “information” (Kynaston McShine), and “systems” ( Jack Burnham)—­and even as they were extolled, these forms were described as signaling the decisive destruction of traditional aesthetic values (indeed, it was precisely because of this destructive power that they were celebrated by some).7 The trend is summed up by Jean Baudrillard, who in 1968 described a new “cybernetic imaginary mode whose central myth will no longer be that of an obsolete organicism, nor that of an absolute functionalism, but instead that of an absolute interrelatedness of the world,” which in later essays he has linked to a condition of “proliferation” understood as representing a pervasive and thoroughgoing destruction of art—­something he terms the “‘Xerox-­degree’ of culture,” corresponding to the “zero degree of art.”8 And yet, as we have seen, the threat to art represented by new technology had been articulated before, in the first machine age, when photography was perceived to be the chief technological object of menace (and liberation). Like other neo–­avant-­garde repetitions, I suggest, the techno-­euphoria of the 1960s, and the concomitant anxieties about the impact of technology on the work of art, should be understood as an intensified reprise of a historical form, which nevertheless, as is characteristic of neo–­avant-­garde repetitions, produced its own specificities.9 The great techno-­euphoria of the 1960s would represent, then, the last flowering of machine aesthetics on a Benjaminian model, where, under historical and technological pressure, something new is

Xeroxing the Medium 143

Chapter Four 144

produced and can be glimpsed just before it is overtaken: an articulation of the aesthetic possibilities of new technologies that it is perhaps important for us to grasp now, from the vantage of the present, far more intensively computerized, moment.10 At the point of this last efflorescence, the chief poet and enthusiast talking up the new age was Marshall McLuhan, who in his energy and enthusiasm may be seen as a veritable second Moholy-­Nagy. His publications reprise the techno-­enthusiasm and many of the formal features of Moholy-­Nagy’s, though with a focus on questions of mass distribution and systems in general, rather than on photography or film. In material terms, books such as The Medium Is the Massage of 1967 are as typographically adventurous as Moholy-­ Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film of 1925 and, like the earlier book, clearly aimed at stimulating new forms of attention to the page and an active readership (by, for example, changing font sizes, requiring the reader to turn the book sideways, and including pages in mirror writing and pages with no text at all), as well as providing seductive, athletic, and libidinally charged images of the user of new technologies (such as a smiling man in a business suit, surfing, accompanied by text referring to the new “electronically-­configured whirl,” and a photograph of the crossed legs of a woman wearing a miniskirt and webbed, crochet tights, with a caption reading, “when information is brushed against information . . .”).11 Conceptually speaking, both men’s publications are historically overreaching, naively technologically deterministic, and thoroughly utopian, and McLuhan’s work shares the feature that was so striking a feature of Moholy-­Nagy’s own, namely, the absence of any sense that the form of the work of art should (or, indeed, could) hold itself apart from contemporary forms of labor and power, or the technological articulations and forms that capital was newly taking. And yet, arguably, as Walter Benjamin saw, it is precisely for this reason that art gains any revelatory capacity in relation to wider society: because it is made in dialogue with and mirrors the deep structures of labor, production, and capital in the wider society, thus opening them to visibility and revealing the fantasies and older historical forms that underlie them. Furthermore, as Benjamin also saw, it is not necessarily in works directly engaging the new technologies that the most interesting potential of a new technological order is glimpsed. My focus here will be on conceptual art: paper-­based work, typically taking the form of photo-­plus-­text and often accompanied by other forms of documentation. Despite critical claims made at the time, conceptual art was never entirely divested of material supports, to the point of being “dematerialized.” Instead, it was supported—­as has often been the case in advanced artistic practice—­by makeshift technologies that functioned to enable affiliation and sharing among artistic peers. The dialectical “work” of the conceptual artwork, then, and the key to its (perhaps unexpected) aesthetic richness, I shall argue, is located in the actual forms of mate-

rial support, which, despite dematerialized appearances, works of conceptual art employed and with which they engaged in dialogue, forms with their own historical and political specificity. One such material support was the photocopier, like the computer, a machine whose fundamental utility emerges in a society that is organized in a variety of bureaucratic systems and has need of technologies to support the networked distribution of replicated documents. (Indeed, the two inventions were directly linked, through the Xerox Corporation’s involvement in the invention of the personal computer in the 1970s, at the firm’s research center, Xerox PARC, in Palo Alto, California.12) In 1966, Mel Bochner was asked to mount an exhibition of drawings at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he was then a teacher. The drawings he selected, from artists whose work he admired, including Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, and Robert Smithson, were rejected by the gallery director, who said the gallery would not pay to frame them.13 As an alternative, Bochner decided to photocopy the drawings and display them collated in large ring binders. Four such files were eventually displayed in the gallery, each exhibited on a waist-­high pedestal (fig. 4.2). In this form, the show was called Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art, the title each of the folders also took. Bochner’s collection of photocopies came to have an ambiguous status: somewhere between an instrument of exhibition, a work authored by Bochner himself, and a sheaf of paper merely “documenting” other works, generated by a technology of cheap, mass reproduction but dedicated to a reconceptualization of the studio practice of drawing. In fact, Bochner was relatively unusual in using a photocopier to make this work. Other well-­known works of conceptual art name-­checked or referenced the idea of the Xerox machine but only used the machine in a limited way. The most famous of these was Seth Siegelaub’s “Xerox Book” show, of December 1968. As Alexander Alberro has pointed out, Siegelaub sought sponsorship for this project from Xerox but could not obtain it.14 Without the benefit of a free staff photocopy card, such as Bochner enjoyed, actually xeroxing the pages of the catalogue would have been too expensive. So although the Xerox machine was used to make the original catalogue, the “Xerox Book” was actually duplicated using old-­fashioned offset printing (done at a corner store, Siegelaub has recalled).15 As this example illustrates, at this point in the mid-­1960s the idea of the Xerox machine was more important than its practical utility (which we might think is the hallmark of a truly significant technology).16 Deskilled, nonaesthetic, mass-­reproducible, connected to wider social structures such as the bureaucratic routines of office work—­the Xerox copy offered just the qualities for which we know conceptual artists strove in their work; these were also, we might observe, the hallmarks of photography, as it had been imagined by Benjamin in the 1930s (and reconceptualized by conceptual artists themselves in the 1960s).

Xeroxing the Medium 145

Chapter Four 146

4.2  Mel Bochner, Working Drawings, 1966. Installation photograph, School of Visual Arts Gallery, New York. Four identical loose-­leaf folders, each with 100 Xerox copies of studio notes, working drawings, and diagrams, collected by the artist, displayed on four sculpture stands. © Collection of the artist.

Indeed, we might almost understand the photocopier as photography for the networked age. Xerox really was a new technology at the point Bochner used it—­only six years old, if the age is calculated from 1960, when the first machine to be commercially sold rolled off the production line and was shipped to its buyer. But its development goes all the way back to the first machine age. The story of its invention is told in entertaining style by New Yorker journalist David Owen, who stresses how unusual Xerox was in several respects, not least in having a single inventor, Chester F. Carlson. Carlson, who came from a background of “almost unspeakable poverty,” according to Owen, took a physics and chemistry degree at the California Institute of Technology in 1930, then worked in the patent department of the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York, taking night classes at law school and studying on weekends in the New York

Xeroxing the Medium 147

4.3  Chester F. Carlson, patent for “Electron Photography,” filed on September 8, 1938. Patent no. 2,221,776, November 19, 1940. Sheet 1. Inventor—­Chester F Carlson. © US Patent and Trademark Office/Xerox Corporation.

4.4  Chester F. Carlson, patent for “Electron Photography,” filed on September 8, 1938. Patent no. 2,221,776, November 19, 1940. Sheet 2. Inventor—­Chester F Carlson. © US Patent and Trademark Office/Xerox Corporation.

Public Library, before arriving at the idea for a copying machine using what he termed electrophotography, on the basis of an article he read in 1937 in a German scientific journal.17 The patent Carlson filed in the autumn of that year, and in an expanded version a little over a year later, was purely theoretical: a case of putting ideas together to describe an invention that ought to work, without the means as yet to actually put the ideas into practice (figs. 4.3–­4.4). It was also wholly original (as Owen points out, dryly, “there was no-­one in France or Russia who was working on the same thing,” nor did “the Chinese . . . invent it in the eleventh century BC”), and Carlson recognized its importance immediately, dedicating the rest of his life to seeing the machine through its long progression toward industrial manufacture and commercial sale.18 The procedure remained basically the same through all subsequent decades, on all subsequent makes and

Chapter Four 148

models of photocopier; indeed, the photocopier itself was not technologically superseded until very recently, with the arrival of digital scanning. As an invention, the Xerox machine is an imaginative product of the most up-­to-­date scientific theories, not least, electroconductivity and photoelectricity (which latter phenomenon was first explained by Albert Einstein in 1905, and for which he won the 1921 Nobel Prize), together with far older influences, including patent law, hand-­copying, office filing, even taxidermy (early development work for the machine was undertaken in an office above a taxidermy shop, and rabbit fur supplied by this shop was used to generate static electricity in early prototypes). The twenty-­two year development history of the machine makes it a kind of fossil of different machine ages, the skills, materials, and theory employed representing a mixture of the outdated and the lethally up-­to-­ date. What delayed the production of a commercially viable model was, above all, finding the investment necessary to solve the many and immense technical difficulties in the way of making a smoothly functioning machine. After ten frustrating years, the crucial funding came, in 1948, when, immediately after World War II, the American military began looking for an “A-­bomb–­proof substitute” for a camera.19 On sites contaminated by radiation, conventional photography was useless, as silver-­emulsion films would fog. So electrophotography, as Carlson called it, acquired a military use, the Signal Corps poured money into Carlson’s work, and soon the company had a viable working model of a photocopier (which still, however, took twelve years to refine). The photocopier even looks like an A-­bomb–­proof camera: a large, reinforced shell, suggestive of a bomb shelter, encloses the mechanism, and the bright, searing flash that accompanies its working makes it look as though an explosion is happening inside. Even though the procedure of electrophotography is quite distinct from photography, a strong link between the two technologies was popularly imagined (not least by Carlson himself, who in his original patent described his invention as aiming “to provide improved means and devices for use in photography”).20 This is something the company encouraged: the brand name “Xerox” was developed specifically on the model of “Kodak,” and is similarly alliterative and satisfying to say (the name was originally spelled with a capital X at each end: XeroX). The new technology made an immediate cultural impact: a short story on the Xerox was published in the New Yorker in 1967, and Owen reports that an early advertisement for the machine in Fortune included a “six-­page fold-­out insert with die-­cut openings, which allowed readers to look inside the machine”; acknowledging the considerable popular interest in and curiosity about its workings.21 McLuhan (of course) seized on the potential of the new technology and became one of its most enthusiastic advocates, heralding the Xerox machine as the apotheosis of the printing press. “Anybody now can become both author and publisher,” he proclaimed. ”Take any book on any subject and custom-­ make your own book by simply Xeroxing a chapter from this one, a chapter

from that one—­instant steal!”22 Such passages might remind us of the way both Moholy-­Nagy and Benjamin heralded photography and film as enabling “authors” to become “producers” and viewers to become “experts”; in light of the way McLuhan links the printing press directly to the machine age—­since it produced “the first uniformly repeatable ‘commodity,’ the first assembly line,” and was the first form of “mass production”—­we might also be reminded of the way in which Benjamin had linked photography in turn back to print.23 In this way, the Xerox machine emerges from McLuhan’s writings as a kind of divine synthesis of photography with the printing press, and as such, inherits many of the utopian aspirations and dystopian anxieties attendant on these previous technologies. With the capacity, like photography before it, to enable mass reproducibility and mass distribution—­together with the attack it threatens, as pointed out by McLuhan, on authorship, authenticity, and uniqueness—­perhaps it is not surprising that compensatory structures in contemporary critical thought arose to match the perceived destructive potential of the Xerox machine. The 1960s was the era in which the idea of the “medium” emerged in art criticism with unprecedented intensity. In the writing of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, a new insistence emerged that the work of art should cleave to inner, formal logics of painting and sculpture precisely in order to stave off wider engagement with social and technological change. Thus, just as, according to McLuhan, the concept of the “author” arrived with the printing press or, as we have seen in Benjamin’s writings, the idea of “aura” arose at the point of its destruction by photography, so too, we might say, the concept of “medium” was born at the same time as the photocopier.24 Indeed, we might see the deep structure of the two ideas—­the medium and the Xerox machine—­as bound together: each conceived as a structure that enables cultural transmission and exchange, but one irredeemably mechanical, enacting transmission as lateral circulation through the production of copies, eradicating the authenticity of the artist’s touch and destroying the specificity of particular material forms in an “ironing out” of all medium-­specificity, while the other is based on craft, enables cultural transmission hierarchically through studio tradition, produces unique original works, and generates rich forms of aesthetic specificity through practice-­based investments established over time in particular materials. Seen in this way, the two appear as mirror reversals of each other. And indeed, I aim to show, such a mirror-­image vision of “medium” and Xerox machine is revealed by the way that Bochner worked with both ideas in Working Drawings. Bochner’s use of the photocopier in Working Drawings might at first seem amenable to “dematerialized” interpretive models, the photocopier functioning to strip original works of any aura, and seeming to support the idea that the works on display are no more than plans or documents, whose significance lies elsewhere than in their material properties or features. Yet such an

Xeroxing the Medium 149

Chapter Four 150

account would ignore the significant physical integrity of Working Drawings as an object; obscure its historical specificity, pointed up by the artists whose work it includes and the particular model of “drawing” that it expands; and neglect the ways in which the form of the work engages with the specificity of its actual material support. A lead is gained by following Robert Smithson, who several times returned to the subject of “conceptual” art in interviews, again and again repudiating the separation of mind and matter that the label seemed to him to promote: “My attitude toward Conceptual Art is that essentially that term was first used by Sol LeWitt in a personal way and then it sort of established a certain kind of context, and out of it seems to have developed this whole neo-­idealism, kind of an escape from physicality. . . . I’m concerned with the physical properties of both language and material, and I don’t think that they are discrete.”25 In another interview, Smithson described conceptualism as “idealistic”: “A lot of it relies on a cultism and pseudoscience and that sort of thing. Conceptual art is a kind of reduced object down to a notion of ideas that leads to idealism. An idealism is a kind of spiritualism and that never seems to work out.”26 For himself, he said, “I’m interested in zeroing in on those aspects of mental experience that somehow coincide with the physical world.”27 This “coinciding” is, arguably, precisely what Working Drawings enacts. Smithson’s materialized take on conceptual art is evident in a drawing of 1966, A Heap of Language, in which heavy, dense-­sounding, matter-­connected words are materialized in a “heap,” as units composing a physical shape. The drawing connects Smithson’s thinking to Mel Bochner’s work, in particular Bochner’s word-­portraits of Eva Hesse and of Smithson himself, also in 1966. Indeed, we can imagine a “Smithsonian” reading of the works included in Bochner’s Working Drawings, as hopelessly complicated plans, mired in contradictions. Artifacts of a lost civilization, built to an unguessable purpose, the drawings present palimpsests of rethinking, revision, and new ideas in layered accretions of muddied thought, and swarms and mazes of geometrically imperfect systems. The drawings are like those failed-­futuristic objects that the contemporary artist Tacita Dean has said she is drawn to: “things that have lost their function, that were built in a visionary way, built as an idea and then they never really successfully functioned in society and were just neglected.”28 Like Dean’s abandoned objects, discussed further in chapter 6, the drawings possess a complex temporality. They may be seen as representing hopeless structures or pointless monuments, laid out with elaborate care and with detailed specifications for a future that never happened. Such a reading of Working Drawings is appropriate because imagination is a faculty the work seems especially designed to stimulate. We are encouraged to imagine the objects for which the drawings serve as plans. The convention, in working drawings, of noting colors as text—­as, for example, in Robert Man-

gold’s drawings in the catalogue, where “gray-­green-­darker gray and green” and “brown gray” are written—­gives rise to a spectral, hallucinatory, imagined color, a kind of lush “mind-­sight” flourishing in the absence of more conventional appeals to the eye. The baffling of visuality, which these black-­and-­white diagrams and lists perform, is combined with a richness of imaginative appeal comparable to Smithson’s later Sites/Nonsites. (Smithson acknowledged that the pun on “non-­sight” was intended, even while he exploited hallucinatory imaginative experience to the utmost.) Like Smithson’s sculptural objects, Bochner’s Working Drawings “appear” half in and half out of the mind. Working Drawings thus dramatizes a simultaneous mapping of inner onto outer space—­like Smithson’s “coinciding” of the mental with the physical world, a particularly important problem at this time, in the move from Minimalism to the expanded space of the new work. The problematic is also made visible in the model of line seen in Working Drawings, which mimes expressivity even as it is drilled throughout by the order of mechanical reproduction. Blotchy and granulated, simulating the expressivity of blots, pentimenti, shading, hesitation, and quiver, as though the line were a seismograph of the artist’s internal state, the variable and imperfect marks that mar the line are also quite obviously the result of so many haphazard accidents of copying. Each drawing is rendered absolutely equivalent in its mode of presentation, scale, and “handling.” The list of contributors, on page 2 (fig. 4.5), is processed through the form of a till receipt, supplied as a “working drawing” later in the book (fig. 4.6); the artists’ works are presented in strictly arbitrary and equivalent, alphabetical order; and the drawn line is restructured through the photocopier and made multiple. In each of these features we recognize the ruthless operation of that principle of general equivalence that is taken to symbolize the workings of the commodity in culture. Such infiltration of the artwork by mechanization and repetition enacts the threat that the loss of the medium has, within modernist criticism, been understood to present. In the postmodern era of the “post-­medium condition,” the artwork is understood as invaded by the commodity. Lack of medium-­ specificity provides the artwork with no “resistance”; the artwork is seen as “delivered up” to the systems of mass culture, “global spectacle,” and “entertainment.”29 In high-­modernist medium theory, “specificity” is conceived as a means to oppose art’s traffic with the commodity and its consequent contamination by the forms of commodified culture, in a construction that would hold the space of the artwork apart from the forms of the commodified world. Such separation is precisely what Bochner’s Working Drawings—­in its use of the form of the invoice, the till receipt, and the form of line produced by the photocopier—­would seem to complicate. A mapping of inner onto outer space is also performed by the overall formal structure of Working Drawings. Two diagrams bookend the whole: the first, on

Xeroxing the Medium 151

Chapter Four 152

4.5  Mel Bochner, from Working Drawings, 1966. List of participants. © Collection of the artist.

4.6  Mel Bochner, anonymous contribution to Working Drawings,1966 (till receipt). © Collection of the artist.

the front inside page, is a floor plan of the gallery where the work was shown (fig. 4.7). The last, on the final page of the catalogue, scaled to the same size as the gallery map, is a diagram from a Xerox user’s manual, with the machine’s inner workings labeled (fig. 4.8). The latter diagram, though not the floor plan, is presented as one of the “works” in the exhibition, reproduced in the same format as the other drawings in the book: the image on a full right-­hand page, with the facing page blank except for the name of the “artist,” “Xerox,” in typed capitals, midway down. In the “mirrored” presentation of the two diagrams, the space of the inner workings of the photocopier, as the material technology of the work, is symmetrically positioned and made equivalent to the “outside” space of the gallery, even as a kind of “medium-­specificity” is established

Xeroxing the Medium 153

4.7  Mel Bochner, from Working Drawings, 1966. Floor plan of the gallery where the work was shown. © Collection of the artist.

4.8  Mel Bochner, from Workings Drawings, 1966. User manual of Xerox machine. © Collection of the artist.

through the self-­referential inclusion of the brand name, Xerox, and the diagram of the machine’s workings as one of the “artists” and “artworks” included in the show. That each Working Drawings volume is bookended with the two diagrams is like a parodic performance of medium-­specificity: the work loops in upon itself in a tight circuit of self-­reference, as if in hysterical dramatization or travesty of the medium’s terms at this time. The performance of tautological self-­reference as the governing structure for presentation of a “work” mimes that arid and increasingly empty reduction of “medium-­specificity” to “self-­ reference” that became associated with art theory of the 1960s. Bochner’s writings of that decade suggest he may have had his own word for the perfor-

Chapter Four 154

mance of self-­reference in Working Drawings: in an essay of 1967, closed, self-­ referential systems are recast as crazy solipsism, the resulting work comparable to that of “a madman,” Bochner explained, quoting the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, “shut up in an impregnable blockhouse.”30 Bochner’s account of solipsism enables an understanding of Working Drawings as performing a reductio ad absurdum of the medium’s terms: Bochner displays the two “alternatives” at this historical moment—­resistance to commodity culture or contamination by it—­as structured by one another and mutually dependent. Working Drawings seals the work into a self-­referential loop but at the same time allows the operations of mechanized reproduction to invade every element of the work’s form, thereby exposing solipsistic self-­reference as no kind of “solution” to the object’s vulnerability to invasion, its openness to its situation in the world. There is a particular spatial model of the subject produced here. Solipsism, in his account, renames both the subject who is locked into a circuit of self-­reference and the subject who is so thoroughly invaded by external systems that she articulates those systems wholly, with every part of herself and no part left outside. In each case, there is no “inside” or “outside” to the self that is the system, both coincide so utterly. The ideal of autonomy is shown to be identical with the eradication of any private mental or psychic space, even as it would seem to mime the preservation of such a space. This Bochner shows to be an experience of madness. (Of course, Bochner’s is an exaggerated, parodic representation.) It is appropriate, I think, to perceive the influence of a certain Cold War politics here. The significance of Greenberg’s art criticism of the 1950s and 1960s in relation to the Cold War has been analyzed previously, by Eva Cockcroft and Serge Guilbaut, among others, who have pointed out the ways in which Greenberg’s championing of “American-­type painting” served the cause of the United States’ assertion of cultural supremacy during these uniquely charged years.31 But building on the insights suggested by Bochner’s parody of medium-­ specificity through his use of the photocopier in Working Drawings, and his recasting of self-­reference as solipsism in his writings, we might extend the analysis further, to the terms of Greenberg’s conceptualization of “medium” and “medium-­specificity” themselves. The exaggerated self-­sufficiency of Bochner’s narrow, self-­referential performance of medium-­specificity might be understood as a parody of America’s overblown insistence on her own self-­ reliance and the sufficiency of her own resources, together with a paranoia concerning external threats to these resources that may have made their way “inside.” The photocopier itself is an appropriate vehicle for this articulation, since the Xerox machine, as we have seen, is itself inscribed into Cold War politics: funded by the American military specifically in view of the atomic threat represented by the Soviet Union. As the latest technology of mass reproduction and dissemination, however, the Xerox machine represented both defensive

strategy and the incarnation of the threat of invasion. In the Soviet Union itself at this time, photocopiers were closely guarded, and as Hans Magnus Enzensberger reports, individual photocopies were numbered and tracked; such was the threat the new technology represented of uncontrollable dissemination.32 In the United States, the availability of Xerox machines was also limited; as we have seen from Siegelaub’s experience, it was relatively hard to get hold of one and make copies, and indeed, models were at first leased rather than sold, though this was mainly on the grounds of cost (the first model cost around $30,000, putting it beyond the reach of most individuals). Bochner’s Working Drawings uses the photocopier—­ a Cold War technology—­systematically to expose the self-­sufficiency of medium-­ specificity as a paranoid structure, already invaded by what it seeks to exclude. In the model of line developed in its remodeling of “drawing,” we are shown the way in which a formal structure of self-­sufficiency is invaded by duplication and the external logic of the commodity. Furthermore, the photocopier is a copying machine, and even while Bochner structures each book internally in a loop of self-­reference, he makes this invasion explicit by the simple expedient of displaying multiple copies of the book. This structure of display expands the space of the work beyond the single object into a chain of related parts—­which is, in theory, indefinitely extendable—­thus exploding any internal effort at solipsistic self-­sufficiency. This expansion of the space of the work into the virtual realm of the copy, supported by the platform of the photocopier, as duplicating machine and support for mass distribution, points toward work that conceptual art would take forward: extending the work of art more directly into the form of the “system.”

Mapping “systems”

Like the photocopier, the idea of the “system” that emerged in the 1960s had deeper roots. One of the most important sources was the theory of cybernetics, set out by Norbert Wiener in a book first published in 1948.33 Again, like the photocopier, cybernetic theory was a direct outgrowth of military needs: in this case, the devising of feedback systems to improve the precision of anti-­aircraft artillery, part of the effort to defend Britain against German air raids during World War II. Aiming at a moving target requires calculation and adjustment in relation to the object’s movement, necessitating a theory for utilizing ongoing feedback within a system. As described in his book, Wiener perceived a wide range of potential uses for the theory he developed: in sociology (to improve game theory), in the design of prosthetic limbs, and in manufacturing (though here he expressed caution and the need for consultation with labor unions to mitigate consequent threats to employment). The most immediate expansion of uses of the theory in the Cold War period, however,

Xeroxing the Medium 155

Chapter Four 156

was in computer technology, where it contributed to the development of the Internet, which originated as an internal military communication system. In the field of art, meanwhile, as we have seen, cybernetics was taken up directly, and the link was made to computing. The text on the flyleaf for the catalogue of the aforementioned Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts defines cybernetics as “the science of control and communication in complex electronic systems” and sets out the exhibition’s aim as being to explore cybernetic systems and the use of computers in particular in the arts.34 Jack Burnham is the critic most identified with developing the idea of the “system” in connection with art: his essay “Systems Esthetics” was published in 1968 in Artforum and reprinted a few years later in his book Great Western Salt Works, together with a second essay, “Real Time Systems,” originally published in 1969. In “Systems Esthetics,” Burnham reechoed the popular idea of a fundamental shift in culture linked to new technologies, in particular in the direction of a new quality or intensity of interrelation—­in other words, in the direction of “systems.”35 Citing the economist J. K. Galbraith, Burnham linked this shift to new technologies, describing “an incipient technocracy shaped by the evolving technostructure” and founded on “the central storage of information.”36 He identified “systems analysis” as “the major tool” for analyzing and interpreting culture under these conditions, and directly acknowledged the origins and contemporary usage of this theory within “the Pentagon,” owing to “the expense and complexity of modern warfare.”37 Like McLuhan and Moholy-­Nagy (both of whom he cited), Burnham asserted the futility of any attempt by artists to stand outside these conditions: “as technology progresses this [aesthetic] impulse must identify itself with the means of research and production.”38 Accordingly, “for systems [art], information, in whatever form conveyed, becomes a viable esthetic consideration.” Burnham cited Moholy-­Nagy again when giving an example of system-­based art, mentioning the story recounted in Moholy-­Nagy’s book, The New Vision, of ordering paintings by telephone, which Burnham compared to the Minimalist sculptor, Robert Morris, having new versions of his L-­beam sculptures refabricated for a particular exhibition: “In the context of a systems esthetic, possession of a privately fabricated work is no longer important. Accurate information takes priority.”39 Further consolidating the association of systems theory with Minimalism, Burnham directly linked the “systems esthetic” to what Michael Fried had termed “theatricality” in his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood,” and quoted the anecdote about Tony Smith driving on the unfinished New Jersey turnpike as a further example of the new aesthetic.40 In recent years, Burnham’s writings on conceptual art and systems theory have seen a revival among art historians and critics. Perhaps the first important influence in this regard was the reprinting of Burnham’s original essay in Peter Osborne’s book Conceptual Art, published in 2002; another notable source was the exhibition Open Systems: Re-­Thinking Art c. 1970, curated by Donna De

Salvo, which opened at Tate Modern in 2005.41 In addition to using the term “systems” in its title, the exhibition catalogue again reprinted Burnham’s essay, and in the critical discussion that ensued, his work received much detailed attention.42 Today conceptual art is often discussed in relation to systems theory, which is sometimes taken almost as an interpretive key to the movement. And yet, systems theory in Burnham’s hands remains surprisingly inert, and his application of the idea to works of art tends to make them merely illustrations of systems as they are found in contemporary society, rather than anything more directed or specific. Burnham takes his definition of a system from the biologist Ludwig van Bertalanffy: “a system is . . . a ‘complex of components in interaction,’ comprised of material, energy, and information in various degrees of organization.”43 In this way, describing a system as something that is “stable and ongoing,” quasi-­autonomous and self-­modulating (as in cybernetic theory using feedback to perfect itself ), systems analysis emerges in Burnham’s account as something that is fundamentally instrumental, designed to enhance efficient functioning.44 The artist using systems “consider[s] goals, boundaries, structure, input, output, and related activity inside and outside the system.”45 This fundamentally instrumentalist bias is apparent in Burnham’s conclusion: “it is . . . likely that a ‘systems esthetic’ will become the dominant approach to a maze of socio-­technical conditions rooted only in the present.”46 Thus, systems theory is presented as a better means of solving problems, as if the single object were simply outmoded, in a technological logic of obsolescence that presumes a teleological drive toward a “better” art, an art that better matches or “solves” contemporary conditions of life. Such a teleology is repeated in some recent critical accounts that revive Burnham, even though artists themselves rapidly broke with such optimistic and instrumentalized versions, as Luke Skrebowski has pointed out, citing an (unfinished) work by Hans Haacke, Norbert: “All Systems Go” (1970–­71), in which, he argues, “cybernetic theory . . . is mocked, its optimistic feedback-­steered vision of human progress undermined.”47 Despite the limitations of Burnham’s own utilization of systems theory, I want to argue that the idea remains important, both for pointing to the wider technological environment within which Minimalism and conceptual art emerged and for suggesting a specific means to begin to theorize the shift from the single object to a wider field of interconnected parts, some material, some immaterial, that we see in these works. The potential of the idea of a “system,” then, would be to help theorize the kinds of structures or supports that Minimalist and conceptual artists adopted to replace more conventional, craft-­ based mediums such as painting and sculpture; but it remains to be explored what the significance of individual uses is, or how artists developed their own particular kinds of system, which might be seen to reflect upon or mediate the systems used by the burgeoning technocratic society around them. Furthermore, it is important to counter some of the idealism of Burnham and other recent enthusiasts for systems theory by noting that, for all its flirta-

Xeroxing the Medium 157

Chapter Four 158

tion with the idea of the system, conceptual art, for the most part, remained far more material and clunky than other forms of art that adopted the immaterial structure of an information system more directly. Works of Fluxus, or performance, or mail art, or artists working with electronic technologies, offer more justification perhaps for being described in terms of systems analysis. To the extent that there is a system in conceptual art, I shall argue, it is more like the Brechtian idea of an apparatus, apparent as a fitting together of multiple parts with connections between them, to form a complex structure that engages the spectator partly through the activity of reading, partly through looking, and partly through imagining. A variety of material supports are used, most of them ready-­to-­hand and adapted as makeshifts. Maps, photostats, photocopies, diagrams, drawings, photos, text—­all become material integers within a constructed system. Conceptual art also remained for the most part tied to the gallery and did not dissolve itself into everyday systems, as some artwork of the time did, for example, radio art or, again, mail art. In fact, this is precisely what is useful for reading against contemporary systems theory, I want to argue: the way that works of conceptual art hold onto certain material and institutional structures of visibility and apartness from the everyday world, giving the kind of “system” they explore an exemplary visibility, a productive gap that helps it read more interestingly in relation to and against wider social technologies and techno-­enthusiasms. One of the notable features of conceptual art, indeed, is the way it retains certain of the older forms and materialities of networks (e.g., roads, maps, card files, the typewriter), using them as a material drag, to mesh with the newer forms of idealized systems, and helping to produce articulations of “systems” with historical depth. After all, the idea of the network itself was hardly new, as Armand Mattelart has pointed out, noting the ways in which nineteenth-­ century inventions such as the telegraph, railways, undersea cable, and radio were conceived by their contemporaries as remaking the world in terms of new and more intensified interconnectedness.48 Indeed, the fetishization of older, nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century forms of administrative support in conceptual art—­for example, the card file, as seen in Robert Morris’s Card File (1962)—­are precisely what Benjamin Buchloh pointed to in his famous analysis of conceptual art’s “aesthetics of administration.”49 It is in this sense that, I want to propose, we may see many works of conceptual art as dialectical images in a Benjaminian sense: arising because of the pressures of new technologies, encoding within them the memories of older technologies, and casting a flash of light upon the new, to produce an envisioning of its potential. Perhaps the most interesting thinker about systems in the late 1960s was Robert Smithson, whose Site/Nonsite works might be seen as offering a primitive, muddy version of a systems theory. Cutting against the high-­tech rhetoric of “systems,” “information,” and cybernetics in the 1960s art scene, to which terms such as “dematerialization,” “art as information,” and “networks” were

key (and also, we might think, against the high-­tech and high-­technicity of recent revivals of this rhetoric in writing about art of the 1960s and present-­ day Internet art), Smithson brought in the far past as well as the futuristic, the muddy and the earthy as well as airports, maps, and information exchange. In Smithson’s work we see no immaterial system. Instead, we find a system laid out but deliberately slowed down and made difficult to read, visibly enmeshed in institutional structures of support (most notably, the gallery system). Indeed, unlike more “dematerialized” forms of art, then and now, Smithson’s work does not attempt to escape the gallery but instead brings to prominent visibility both the desire to escape it and the ways in which the work remains enmeshed with it. In this way, conceptual art, advancing out of the gallery, leveraging the space of the work between two or more sites, develops a formal structure that falls between the two models, of medium-­specific, gallery-­based art, on the one hand, and socially engaged, non–­gallery-­based work, on the other. Neither self-­referential, or wholly “inner,” nor produced in a space of encounter that is wholly “outside” the gallery, instead the “system” as the form taken by works like Smithson’s in the later 1960s is used as a structure to help mediate the interface between artistic production and the latest forms of technology and technicity. Furthermore, the “systems aesthetic” that Smithson and others developed used readymade parts that were already invested with their own aesthetic qualities and embedded within particular iconographies. As Caroline Jones has noted, the move out of the gallery was often a drive.50 For artists such as Smithson or Douglas Huebler in the years between 1966 and 1968, the road became a crucial platform or support, providing the means to move, physically, out of the sculptural paradigm they had inherited from Minimalism, to begin to occupy the space of the new work. The American road trip was already iconic, having featured in Beat poems and prose of the 1950s (explicitly cited by Smithson), key American films of the 1960s, and, further back, in photographs of 1930s dustbowl migrants by Dorothea Lange and others. Ed Ruscha, in Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), turned the familiar narrative arc into a kind of emptied-­of-­affect shopping list. Ruscha’s photobooks also make clear their link with the program of Minimalist sculpture, building repetition and seriality into a structuration of space, but performing this travel outward, finding a vision of entropic drain under an endless horizon and across miles of urban concrete sprawl. Smithson used a photograph from Ruscha’s Royal Road Test (1967) to illustrate his essay “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” in 1968. At the same time, Marshall McLuhan was also turning his attention to the road as a “system,” or “medium,” but his technological optimism—­what Smithson called the residual “humanism” of his view of media as “extensions of man”—­is at odds with Ruscha’s utilization of the road as a system of drain and emptiness.51 Ruscha’s stylized artlessness and photographic unhinging of the experiential

Xeroxing the Medium 159

Chapter Four 160

trajectory of the “road” is better captured by Smithson’s comment, in an essay describing the first road trip out to a “slurb” site in New Jersey he made in the company of Donald Judd, that “the rear-­view mirror dislocated the road behind us.”52 These works by Ruscha and Smithson make explicit the change that had already occurred with Judd’s “specific objects,” which were “neither painting nor sculpture.” Leading out the cinematic edge of Judd’s highly polished and baffling objects, Smithson and Ruscha read reflective Minimalist and urban surfaces, and the illusory, moving images they produce, as a kind of drain on the specificity of the object and a hallucinatory reconfiguration of the experience of space, even as they make clear the way in which the contemporary environment could be mapped in terms of existing and everyday “systems.” Not surprisingly, since the key operation of this work is spatial expansion, the map became a crucial figure for early systems thinkers like Smithson. As a platform or material support enabling the development of his model of a “system,” the map had the advantage of being ordinary and everyday (rather than brand-­new or overtly technologized). Indeed, maps appear frequently in the work of many different artists from the mid-­1960s to the early 1970s, as a shared figure that arrived apparently spontaneously and readymade in the consciousness of each of them, as though a precipitate of the historical moment.53 The map was also a very practical aid in enabling work at this particular time, as artists literally found their way (and indeed, we might say that it is essential for any medium-­type structure that it be ready-­to-­hand, easy to find, cheap, practical, and directly useful). In 1966, Smithson began to make “regular excursions to urban, industrial, and quarry sites in New Jersey,” many of which journeys he documented in an unpublished photo journal.54 Smithson described these as his “cartographical expeditions.”55 An unpublished essay by Smithson from 1966, “Atlantic City H-­13”—­the title includes a map grid reference—­is an account of such an expedition, making mention of his and his companions’ efforts to read the maps they used to get to their location, and describing the maps in piles, “stacked on the floor” of the car.56 The maps seem very much part of the furniture, both physical and conceptual, of the trip Smithson describes. Beyond its ordinary and everyday uses for getting around, however, the map was embedded in more specific experiences for many of these artists. Douglas Huebler, for example, took the map from his experience in the military, citing his work in World War II as an intelligence officer and his experience of military briefings as the reason for his lighting on maps: “I had not given much thought to that wartime experience until I found myself searching for alternative methodologies for the expression of my creative interests,” he has said.57 His earliest conceptualist works, many of which are based around maps, show an interest in transferring lines or a shape drawn on a map into “real space,” either by tracing the line or shape out via some external system—­

such as jet contrails (in Site Sculpture Project Air Marker Piece, May, 1968) or the postal system (in Site Sculpture Project 42˚ Parallel Piece, September, 1968)—­or by physically traveling distances or moving materials from one site to another (Site Sculpture Project Cape Cod Wedge Exchange, July, 1968). The basic movement involved in “mapping” as it is illustrated here derives clearly from drawing (as a tracing out of lines and connection of points)—­a technology that, as noted in chapter 1, had historically contributed to the systematicity of medium-­conditioned practice in painting and sculpture, by enabling the transfer and exchange of ideas and compositions between the different mediums making up an artist’s practice. In conceptualist works, as we shall see, mapping similarly becomes the means to systematically expand the boundaries of the medium-­condition. For Smithson, the map emerged through his work with industry, with his commission from an architectural firm in 1965 to build a work on the site of the Dallas–­Fort Worth Regional Airport.58 An architect from the firm Tippetts-­ Abbett-­McCarthy-­Stratton was in the audience for a talk Smithson gave on “Art and the City” at Yale in 1965, and on the basis of what he heard, he invited Smithson to work with the firm on the airport project. (One of the firm’s drawings is included in Bochner’s Working Drawings, as are some of Smithson’s plans and drawings for this project.) “So I invented this job for myself as an artist-­consultant and for about a year and a half, from 1965 through 1966, I went there and talked with the architects. And that’s where the mapping and the intuitions in terms of the original structures really took hold in terms of areas of land—­I was dealing with grids superimposed on land masses,” Smithson reports.59 Specifically, it was the materials, tools, technologies, and paperwork to which Smithson was exposed over the course of this project that stimulated a new direction in his artistic production. “I worked with these architects from the ground up. As a result I found myself surrounded by all this material that I didn’t know anything about—­like aerial photographs, maps, large-­scale systems, so in a sense I sort of treated the airport as a great complex, and out of that came a proposal that would involve low-­level ground systems, that would be placed at fringes of the airport, sculptures that you would see from the air. This preoccupation with the outdoors was very stimulating. Most of us used to work in a closed area space.”60 Taking the map in this way, as a useful instrument enabling a spatial expansion out of the gallery, and as readymade and ready-­to-­hand in their contemporary military and industrial experiences, the map, as Smithson and others came to use it, in time became more than an iconographic feature or enabling instrument and developed into, as Huebler described it, “a most essential kind of conceptual model.”61 As Smithson became “interested in the dialogue between the indoor and the outdoor” through his work on the airport project, he explained, he developed “a method or a dialectic that involved what I call site and non-­site. . . . It’s a back-­and-­forth rhythm that goes between indoors

Xeroxing the Medium 161

Chapter Four 162

and outdoors.”62 “Most sculptors just think about the object, but for me there is no focus on one object so it is the back-­and-­forth thing,” he also said.63 Very soon, he began to describe this work in terms of mapping: “My nonsites in a sense are like large, abstract maps made into three dimensions.”64 “The nonsite exists as a kind of three-­dimensional abstract map that points to a specific site on the surface of the earth. And that’s designated by a kind of mapping procedure.”65 At the same time the map has some of the functions of the mirror: “There is this dialectic between inner and outer, closed and open, center and peripheral. It just goes on constantly permuting itself into this endless doubling, so that you have the nonsite functioning as a mirror and the site functioning as a reflection.”66 By 1969, Smithson already had a clear idea of how the different parts of his own work related to one another, and he suggested that each was linked to the other by its involvement with the map: “There are actually three kinds of work that I do. There’s the nonsites. And then there’s the mirror displacements; [and] then another type of work which I call earth maps or material maps.”67 Such a plotting of his different works itself represents an operation of mapping—­the casting of one space over the frame of another—­and brings out the potential of the map as a figure for the merging of different conceptual spaces. In this way, Smithson began to develop his use of the map into something more like a system: fundamentally dynamic and relating parts to other parts. We see here what differentiates Smithson’s articulation of a system from that utilized by Burnham or in cybernetics or contemporary systems theory. Smithson’s “systems aesthetic” stands at an angle to the contemporary idea of a system: slanted, emphatic, dynamic, and destructuring, taking elements drawn from the everyday world and industrial uses, but operating precisely upon sites and institutions of power to destabilize them. Yet what is produced by Smithson’s remodeling of the “system” is not only institutional critique, and is not simply de-­aestheticizing, but on the contrary, restructures the aesthetic. The fundamental effect of Smithson’s use of the map was to reroute the experience of the sculptural object away from the phenomenological presence of contemporary Minimalism and into a condition of partial absence, producing the figuration of an “image” or mental field of aesthetically invested attention, to cover over that lack. This reconfiguration of sculptural affect, building the lack of the object into the structure of the work, and taking a leap into the hallucinatory condition of the image, was key for the development of conceptual art, the operation of imaginative transfer being a feature also of Douglas Huebler’s Location pieces, as we shall see, and some of Bochner’s works. Huebler’s and Smithson’s works at this time show a similar interest in folding different spaces into the viewer’s mind, mapping mental onto physical space, conjuring the experience of an object or place that is absent and weaving it into the experience of (and so transforming) what is present. And it is in these features that their common “system

aesthetic” resides. It is precisely in such operations that we see the potential for that “generalization of the aesthetic” condemned by Krauss and Baudrillard, but, I want to suggest, in these artworks it becomes a structure held up to exemplary visibility, dialectically crashing gear with contemporary technologies, not least, in Smithson’s case, through the invocation of different time zones. Smithson used the map-­based system in particular to mobilize the fantasy of time travel, developed, for example, in what Smithson called his “last nonsite” (though it was not, in fact, his last), the Nonsite, Site Uncertain, which, as he explained in an interview in 1972, “involves coal, and there the site belongs to the Carboniferous Period, so it no longer exists; the site becomes completely buried again. There’s no topographical reference. It’s a submerged reference based on hypothetical land formations.”68 Smithson also used the map as a figure enabling articulation of the merging of time zones in his Spiral Jetty project (1970–­71): “I needed a map that would show the prehistoric world as coextensive with the world I existed in,” he wrote, and then described how he found, and filmed, “an oval map of such a double world. The continents of the Jurassic Period merged with continents of today.”69 Later projects for “earth maps,” small islands, and “meandering jetties” developed this vision of the map as a site of complexity and wandering sprawl. (Smithson once described his proposed Island of Broken Glass (1970) as “an inversion of Tatlin’s Monument,” bringing out the antimonumental and entropic, rather than progressive, force of his particular interest in the dynamic movement of the map.70) Smithson sometimes called his earth maps “disappearing continents” or “hypothetical prehistoric continents,” emphasizing that these were intended to be temporally as much as physically dissolving sites. His photograph Map of Quicksand and Stones with Two Snakes (1969) shows rocks disappearing in quicksand and half submerged in water, the site animated by the twisting bodies of two snakes, in a squalid, abject, but dynamic effect. Thus the kind of “aesthetic” that is at stake is emphatically not idealist. Smithson’s transformation of space, throwing the viewer’s attention between different places and time zones, uses and sometimes exhausts the viewer’s memory in the process. This exhaustion of the viewer’s mental capacity is something Smithson insisted on. His interest in setting up a system lay in the potential the dynamic movement within it would create for reciprocal drain (“the sites are receding into the nonsites and the nonsites are receding back to the sites”), mutual destruction, mirroring, and canceling, set up by a repeated movement between set points.71 His production after 1969 can be seen as extracting this basic dynamic motor from the different models of his production up until this point, and isolating and intensifying its innate entropic drive, in works such as Glue Pour, Asphalt Rundown, and Concrete Pour, all from 1969, and Partially Buried Woodshed of 1970. His interest in mobilizing the dynamics of a site to produce a disintegration of the field also found support in his reading of Anton Ehrenzweig’s analysis of the perceptual mode he called

Xeroxing the Medium 163

Chapter Four 164

“de-­differentiation.” Scanning and decentering are two important themes of Smithson’s poetics of perception, rooted in the back-­and-­forth movement of mapping that he first developed in the Sites/Nonsites dialectic, and sharing its antivisuality.72 Fundamentally, this dynamic is to be understood within the terms of Smithson’s expressed interest “in limits, and how those limits destroy themselves and disappear,” as was also emphasized by Ehrenzweig. In describing his Sites/Nonsites, he insisted that the focus of his interest was on “a back-­ and-­forth rhythm, that goes between indoors and outdoors . . . for me there is no focus on one object, so it is the back-­and-­forth thing. . . . It is always back and forth, to and fro.”73 This is an interest in the use of a system to dislocate the viewer—­displacing, disorienting, and replacing the self elsewhere, canceling out, as Robert Hobbs has observed, any sense the subject may feel of “hereness.”74 “In other words,” as Smithson himself explained, “you are really going from some place to some place, which is to say, nowhere in particular. To be located between those two points puts you in a position of elsewhere, so there’s no focus. The outer edge and this center constantly subvert one another, cancel each other out. . . . There’s a suspension of destination.”75 This emphasis cancels out any potential positivism of the map as a model for the work: the map is used not simply as a method of sign-­posting destinations—­in any case, “these places are not destinations, they’re kind of backwaters or fringe areas,” as Smithson said—­but instead is reconfigured as a system of imaginative reorganization, a hallucinatory displacing and disorientation of the viewing subject.76 Thus, the point of the operations of “scanning” and “de-­differentiation” in Smithson’s practice is not just mental exhaustion or disintegration, as has sometimes been emphasized in Smithson studies. It is also important to recognize the transformative and fantastic aspect of the situation produced by entropy and “de-­differentiated scanning.” Smithson emphasized the dynamic force of the Site/Nonsite dialectic in its effect on perception: “You are thrown back onto the site. The piece is there in the Museum, abstract, and it’s there to look at, but you are thrown off it. You are sort of spun out to the fringes of the site.”77 He also made clear that the particular force of the dynamism of back-­ and-­forth mapping is to throw the viewer violently into fantasy: The metaphor of Oz . . . through the force of the twister, you’re propelled to this central image. . . . The people go there, the child and the scarecrow, to the Emerald City of Oz, which is a palace—­but essentially a crystalline building. . . . I mean, that to me is a kind of fairy-­tale level that’s indicative of something . . . it’s the terrible aspect behind the element of the twister, behind the centrifugal aspect of the twister, that’s a kind of disruption of gravity almost, or a kind of agony of gravity within the force of the cyclonic centrifugal notion. . . . I mean the entropy gets so intense that it breaks into imaginative or fairy-­tale results. Like the ultimate reality, it’s like going from the black-­and-­white film in the picture to Technicolor.78

The experience produced by the dynamics of Site/Nonsite and of mapping is thus an extreme experience of fantasy, on a cinematic model. The role of color here is a further sign that what is at stake are violent, lurid, and transformative aesthetic qualities. Smithson’s work sets up a mental plane of the fictive and imaginary, and he uses mapping operations to shape this mental field of attention, thereby setting in place a field of fictional mental attention that is key for conceptual art. What Smithson’s development of a “systems aesthetic” enabled, using the support of the map, was the formulation of a structure to support the survival and extension of the aesthetic beyond medium-­conditioned art experience. Where Minimalism had repressed and suppressed spectacle (which returned at the edges of the Minimalist aesthetic, in the use of lurid colors and reflective surfaces), and modernism had defensively mounted a fragile, paranoid insistence on the work of art’s material self-­reflexivity, producing secure borders to the work that nevertheless, we have seen, may be revealed as drilled by an external order, Smithson’s inner/outer dialectic releases the energies of the aesthetic to work explicitly in dialogue with forms of industry. This is a dialogue that was continued in conceptual art’s development of the “system” in photo-­plus-­text works, which in turn would develop their own distinctive forms of viewer engagement, affect, and response.

Photo-­p lus-­t ext

The essential form of Huebler’s work is a photograph or photographs (usually black-­and-­white snapshots) plus text (typically a brief, typed paragraph, displayed alongside). Sometimes maps or other documents accompany these core elements. Unlike Smithson, there is no retention of a sculptural object, making this work more apparently “dematerialized.” And yet a single sentence recurs in almost every work by Huebler, usually placed at the end of the typed text: “the ten [or however many] photographs join with this statement to constitute the form of this piece.” This sentence is intriguing in light of the “de-­aestheticized” rhetoric that has accompanied so much conceptual art, for it asserts that the work does have a “form” and draws our attention to the way that this form is structured by relations among its parts. Furthermore, in emphasizing that the form is photo-­plus-­text, it tells us that the work requires looking plus reading, thus hybridizing visual appeal with informational intake and cross-­cutting the conceptualist “information” paradigm with pictorial structures of attention. Typically, Huebler’s work investigates the business of making connections, extending that function beyond its material basis in drawing to a variety of suggested species of connection that might be employed to do the work of “line” in connecting the photographs in his pieces to one another and to the

Xeroxing the Medium 165

Chapter Four 166

text. The viewer is invited to “match” photographs or place them in a sequence. Causation, coincidence, similarity, and magical chance are invoked and simultaneously subverted. In all the works, fantastic, weblike traceries are drawn and redrawn as we mentally shuffle and connect the pieces. Lines are set up in the work of casting the mind back and projecting it forward, in a work which is like drawing, inasmuch as it involves a casting out and reeling in of line. Viewing Huebler’s work involves responding to an invitation to assemble together different constituent parts. The typed statement provides an account, perhaps of an event or a task carried out, and the photographs and map are offered to be fitted into this account. Sometimes there are more or less obvious inconsistencies between what the images tell us and what the text has led us to expect. The photographs sometimes produce mismatching, internal contradictions, or evidence in excess of the supporting narrative, and sometimes seem to bear the given story out. The texts and photographs provide each other with uncertain support, undercutting one another, splitting open alternatives, supplying an undercurrent, subverting one another, and opening up gaps and spaces, lacks and disjunctions in the mental fabric of the whole. What is produced is a field of mental awareness. We reconstruct, we peer, we reread. We put the time in, and the work is structured via our involvement. Our focus on the work expands into a space and a span of attention within which we mentally hold and rearrange the parts. A key factor in producing this suspension is that Huebler scrambles the order of his photographs, presenting what Bochner once described (quoting the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen) as a “directionless time-­field.”79 This disarray ensures that the viewer stares at the work for a beat or so longer than she might otherwise, in the effort to work the material out. The work is structured, in other words, specifically to prolong the extent of the viewer’s attentive looking, and it is in this prolapsed space that the work has its effect. Huebler uses close-­up and aerial views to vary our focus in and out of the display—­as, for example, when squares are drawn enclosing a specific point on a map. We proceed by employing and testing out various strategies of meaning-­ making: similarity or “matching” (for example, identifying point “A” on the map with the location pictured in the photograph marked “A” in Location Piece #13 Kern County, California, June, 1969; fig. 4.9), reference, inference, causal connection, and elapsed duration. The fact that Huebler will typically have scrambled any obvious sequence between the photographs, such as, for example, the order in which the photographs were taken, or the order in which they were originally matched to the text, is a complicating factor. Such disruption by the artist is even more extreme in some works—­for example, in Variable Piece #39 (1969), in relation to which, Frédéric Paul says, “the artist nonchalantly informs us that some of the photographs are not even of the film in question, and therefore manifestly outside the strict domain of the event being documented.”80

Xeroxing the Medium 167

4.9  Douglas Huebler, Location Piece #13, Kern County, California, June, 1969, 1969. Two maps, three color photographs, printed text. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © 2013 ARS, New York; DACS, London.

Chapter Four 168

Sometimes Huebler sets the point of completion of the work some way in the future. Then begins the work of casting the mind back and projecting or throwing it forward. The viewer develops ways of working out what happened, sometimes mentally marking a particular photograph or idea as a “point of origin” from which to take subsequent bearings, but this is complicated by Huebler’s construction of a narrative that does not build logically in sequence but aims to throw you off track. Viewing the work, we imaginatively play through various sequences of events, which unfold in a structure of deferred certainty or postponed belief. Again, we might liken our construction of the work to the casting out and reeling in, the shuttling between points that makes up drawing. Standing before the works in an exhibition of Huebler’s work, we find that mechanisms of memory, projection, and hypothesis are put into play, as we engage in making and remaking sense. Shuffling the elements in the work and casting our minds forward and back in space and time, we come to see the surface elements on the wall as like a map, only the surface of a wider, deeper edifice or spatial structure. Once again, we are reminded of Smithson’s interest in the way mental experience can be made to “coincide with the physical world.” Huebler’s works investigate the modes and interchange between these areas of coincidence and, in so doing, produce a text-­invested restructuring of the pictorial field that we might think could be compared to the absorbed yet distracted form of attention, simultaneously surface-­or screen-­based and engaged in virtual “depth,” that is solicited by Internet browsing in the present. The question of to what extent the art of the 1960s should be seen as prefiguring new media art has received a certain amount of critical discussion.81 Simon Penny puts the idea in its characteristic form in an essay of 1999: The prodigious experimentation in the visual arts of the 1960s and 1970s can be interpreted, with hindsight, as conceptual research into the art of future media, at that time unspecified and unimaginable. The commonplaces of today’s digital milieu (long-­distance simultaneous interaction, virtual spaces, disembodied cultural information, storage forms that require complex decoding systems, the destabilization of the clear artist/artwork/viewer relation, interaction with quasi-­ intelligent spaces and quasi-­intelligent machines) all are prefigured in various movements of the 1960s and 1970s, not just Happenings, body art, and performance, but Conceptualism, mail art, copy art, and of course video.82

The positivist teleology of techno-­enthusiasts like Penny results typically in claims that the new media “perfects” what was only clumsily realized in the old. And yet this passage reminds me of the character in one of J. G. Ballard’s short stories, who, taking another character down the steps into a drained swimming pool, explains earnestly, “It’s an engine, Anne, of a unique type. It’s no coincidence that the Space Center is surrounded by empty swimming pools.”83 In

other words, what seems to be imagined here, as in much conceptual art, is a kind of laughably homespun, material, archaic, and dysfunctional construction of material mimicry: outdated objects constructing mirror images of space-­age technology. The utopian possibilities of new technology are glimpsed in the mimic-­versions constructed in older ones, but at the same time, the old stuff exerts a material drag on the new and thus offers the possibility of a different angle of view. To be more specific: even as it dismantles the form of the single object and the form of attention specific to painting, conceptual art constructs a field of attention that pictorializes and aestheticizes a network of objects and spaces in a way that is comparable to the form of attention solicited by the Internet, but which materializes that technology ahead of time and so may be used to read it dialectically, opening it to new insights. A useful comparison to the kind of materialized system that is constructed in Huebler’s works, we might think, is the Memex. This was an early model of a screen-­interface “computer,” described in an essay by Vannevar Bush, then director of the American Office of Scientific Research and Development, that was published in Atlantic Monthly in July 1945 and is now often cited in histories of computing (the essay also speculates about the possibilities of “dry photography,” using electron beams, in ways that read interestingly in connection with the history of the Xerox machine).84 Envisaged as a theoretically possible device, but never built, the Memex was a machine for holding and displaying information via a roller-­operated system of microfilms, projected and displayed via “slanting, translucent screens” on a desk (fig. 4.10).85 Handwritten notes and “business correspondence” would be automatically photographed by the machine and stored, together with books and current periodicals purchased on microfilm, to be retrieved at the touch of a button.86 Furthermore, the user’s pathways through stored material would be stored by the machine and offered to her when she used the machine again—­in this way the Memex would store “trails of thought.”87 For, “any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another,” Bush writes: This is the essential feature of the Memex. . . . When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. . . . The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. . . . Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled by tapping a button. . . . Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails. . . . And his trails do not fade. Several years later . . . [he] photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to a friend for insertion in his own Memex.88

Xeroxing the Medium 169

Chapter Four 170

4.10  Diagram of Memex machine, published as illustration in Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Life 19, no. 11 (September 1945): 112–­14, 116, 121, 123–­24. All rights reserved.

Seemingly astonishingly prescient of e-­mail, web browsing, and contemporary Internet technology as a whole, yet at the same time, palpably primitive and materialist—­literally winching microfilms via an electrically powered roller system to display, projected, on screens—­the Memex seems a parodic meeting of machine-­age technology with the desires and aspirations born of the new information age. For my purposes here, one of the most important features of the Memex (and indeed, the principal way in which it represented a step forward in the history of computing) was its dedication to the storage of associative mental connections, and its conceptualization of the distinctive field of information, structured as a “web,” that such storage would produce. As Paul A. Mayer has described, in being an “associative machine,” Bush’s hypothetical invention represented a step “far beyond the arithmetic applications of computational devices” that had for the most part dominated conceptions of computers up until that point.89 Bush himself described the human mind (like Mayer and Meringer, as we saw in chapter 2) as functioning primarily associatively: “With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.”90 The kind of “system” that this early precursor to the Internet establishes is thus open to subjective feeling, the influence of individual memory or forgetting, and the vagaries of individual association.

Similarly, in Huebler’s works, the shuttling I have described is often structured by the emotional pull and tug that he sets in play. Lucy Lippard early on clued in to this feature of the work: “There is a lyrical quality to Huebler’s work which moves me the way memories move me, not through sentiment but through the intoxication of sensing another time or place, in all the associative richness of an indirectly perceived reality.”91 The kinds of systems Huebler is interested in deploying and exploiting to structure his works are not just “bureaucratic” or institutional, such as the postal service, which he used in Location Piece #3A, American Alphabet Survey (1969), or the serial-­numbered system of paper money, which he used in Duration Piece #13, North America–­ Western Europe (1968). In an interview in 1972 he also included “secrets” as an example of a “system” that might be used to structure a work, and in 1969 he had already done so, in Variable Piece #4, New York City, May, 1969, which was included in Burnham’s Software show. The work instructed participants to write out a secret and post it in the box in the exhibition space. “Your secret will be photocopied,” Huebler explains in the text accompanying this work, and “the operator of the photocopy machine will acknowledge your submission by giving you the photocopy of another secret. (If you choose, you may submit as many as five secrets and receive an equal number in return.)”92 This work looks forward to the anonymous and confessional (or leaked) forms of exchange that we see today online, suggesting that the artwork here reads the logic of a coming technology in advance, revealing the “open secret” to be a form inherent to an incipient technology, albeit in a humbler and more archaic, paper-­based form. The potential of the comparison suggested here, between the structure of conceptual art—­built upon associative links made by the viewer—­and the form of the Internet, can be taken further via consideration of the way in which photoconceptualism maintains an engagement with the form of the image, both through the use of photographs (which are hybridized and textualized, and rendered partially discursive) and in the form of attention that works of conceptual art construct. As we have seen, conceptualism maintains a (disturbed) kind of picture-­field, absorbing the viewer in looking “into” the structure of the work, rather than engaging in real space with sculptural forms. These features are perhaps some of the reasons why conceptual art has historically attracted criticism for maintaining too great an engagement with the “picture”; Rosalind Krauss, for example, criticizes Huebler and Robert Barry for remaining “painters.”93 Clearly these artists did not remain painters in a literal sense, but the remark, I think, points to something that is true: namely, the way these artists’ photoconceptualist works fundamentally engage in remodeling both the structure of the image (to become one element in a wider system of information) and the picture-­invested field of attention. This absorption of the viewer’s attention risks appearing to resurrect the auratic work of art, in a way that, as we shall see in more detail in chapter 5, can be spectacularizing—­and indeed

Xeroxing the Medium 171

Chapter Four 172

is what leads to the Baudrillardian criticism of the aestheticizing of the world. What such criticism overlooks, however, is the way in which the works of both Huebler and Barry operate to puncture the picture in both these senses, systematically draining the photographs they use of meaning and cross-­cutting visual structures of attention with information to create new image-­based forms of aesthetic attention. For some dialectical engagement is in operation here. Not only does Huebler make every effort to render his photographs ordinary and banal, de-­aestheticized and devoid of pictorial interest, but more fundamentally, the structure of his work operates to empty the image-­field he constructs of spectacular effect, to baffle the spectator’s ability to connect parts, and to slow down the time of reading these relations. Huebler’s Location Piece #23, Los Angeles–­Cape Cod, August, 1969, provides a good example (fig. 4.11). The text in this piece explains that for the duration of the work’s exhibition in the ACE gallery in Los Angeles, the dimensions of that gallery’s floor will be marked out, each day, onto a different location in Cape Cod, so that an “exchange” of the two spaces will be effected in the viewer’s mind. Photographs of the six Cape Cod locations accompany the text, together with a list of the locations by name and the dates on which they will be “transposed” into the gallery. In Huebler’s words, “Having been transposed in that manner, the virtual physical substance of the area so marked will exist, for one day, within the actual space contained within ACE’s walls.” The photographs in Location Piece #23 show, variously, trees in a glade, a section of ocean, a field of tall grass, and a high street with shops and people. If the viewer attempts to perform the imaginative “leap” directed by Huebler, mentally transplanting these locations into the gallery, then the experience of this work is potentially transformative: the experience of trees suddenly appearing to grow and surround one in a gallery as in an area of woodland. The imagined sounds of these places, in particular, are affective: the sound of wind blowing in the trees, or of surf washing in and out, or of traffic and people talking on a street, hypothetically figure the possibility of transforming the space the viewer stands in, crowding in to suggest the possibility of enriching the work. The last line of the text Huebler supplies adds the finishing touch to the experience: “As there is a three-­hour time differential between Cape Cod and Los Angeles, a visitor at ACE will be experiencing a location that is in near darkness.” At this, the experience of the “location” is, in imagination, changed again: you are standing amid trees at night, the street empties, and you can hear the ocean’s hush in darkness. The spatial field of the work is recast through the additional dimension of time, and the threshold moment that is specified—­”near darkness”—­opens the work out to the space and time on either side of it. It is difficult, but absorbing, to attempt to imagine the transposition of the spaces that Huebler’s text instructs us to perform, doubly so in that we are

Xeroxing the Medium 173

4.11  Douglas Huebler, Location Piece #23, Los Angeles–­Cape Cod, August, 1969, 1969. Statement, map, six photographs. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Panza Collection. Gift, 1992. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © 2013 ARS, NY; DACS, London.

Chapter Four 174

prompted to imagine the rectangular photographs, offered to us as visual maps of the dimensions of the gallery floor, somehow blown up and fitted into the scale of our present space. Furthermore, the contraction of the photograph to being merely a frame around information, its image-­content canceled as it becomes only a “window” onto another space, is comparable to the structure of the image online. On the web, rather than the image operating as a picture per se, it typically operates as a screen for the image, modeled as an informational window and blocking pictorial investment: inherently empty and leading on to other links. In addition, Huebler (like other photoconceptualist artists) constructs a textual “drain” of his photographs via his accompanying statements, which systematically require us to search the image for something it cannot provide. For example, in Duration Piece #5, New York, April, 1969 (fig. 4.12), the viewer is invited to attempt to reconstruct the sequence of the photographs the artist took on a walk through Central Park in New York, and thus to reconstruct his route. The accompanying text explains that the photographs were taken in the following way: During a ten-­minute period of time on March 17, 1969, ten photographs were made, each documenting the location in Central Park where an individually distinguishable bird-­call was heard. Each photograph was made with the camera pointed in the direction of the sound. That direction was then walked toward by the auditor until the instant that the next call was heard, at which time the next photograph was made and the next direction taken.

The viewer’s task in reconstructing the sequence of the photographs is accompanied by awareness of a resounding lack, the absence of the birdsong that originally motivated the artist’s direction and his photographs. The essential connection between the images is now utterly inaccessible. This piece illustrates one of the basic syntagmatic units of Huebler’s work, which may be termed the emptiness of the image. The photographs in Duration Piece #5 are structured by a directedness we cannot recover. Several are compositionally empty, trees and lampposts framing an empty portion of sky or landscape, but they are further emptied by the lack of the birdsong they once allegedly documented. The experience of this work is simultaneously of fullness and depletion, the experience over time both of a fullness of an effect of “meaning,” accentuated by the powerful sense of the loss and emotion captured in the work, and of that fullness washing away, and deflating in the emptiness and banality of the shots. It is an experience that is inherently bathetic. Nevertheless, in neither of these pieces, Duration Piece #5 or Location Piece #23, is the effect nonaesthetic; instead, a complex engagement with and refiguration of the aesthetic is performed in each. Standard Romantic tropes of aesthetic experience are invoked, and figured, but only in their absence, or shown

Xeroxing the Medium 175

as failing.94 Duration Piece #5, for example, might be imagined as a deadpan, serially inflected and automated rendering of John Keats’s poem “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819), employing as it does the Romantic ur-­trope of a walk through a landscape and an aesthetic experience arising as a consequence of and substitution for the song of a bird. In conceptual art such as Huebler’s, as in the work of Romantic poets like Keats, a model of aesthetic experience is developed that is self-­consciously presented as an escapist idyll that cannot last (“Fled is that music . . .”). Just as the pastoralism of Romanticism arose in reaction to burgeoning industrial modernity, and figured aesthetic experience in dialectical tension with the encroachments of the city and mechanization, so this ironic and dialectical structure of the aesthetic is recovered in conceptual art and intensified, reading against contemporary systems theory and new technologies to produce new dialectical images.95 Works of conceptual art such as Huebler’s retrieve the aesthetic in its absence by figuring it as a blank spot, crowded out by glitchy links and expired connections, but acutely apparent in the great figured gap that is made for it. This is a model of aesthetic experience that recalls Theodor Adorno’s account of Samuel Beckett’s work as “the extrapolation of a negative kairos [moment of revelation],” in which “the fulfilled moment reverses into perpetual repetition that converges with desolation.”96 How should we theorize the weblike network of objects, documents, and diagrams described here, and the way in which the subject’s attention is

4.12  Douglas Huebler, Duration Piece #5, New York, April, 1969, 1969. Black-­and-­white photographs, printed text. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © 2013 ARS, New York; DACS, London.

Chapter Four 176

drawn into it, in a fluctuating dynamic of richness and desolation? A possibility is suggested, as we saw in chapter 2, by Walter Benjamin’s story of the Chinese painter who disappears into his painting (like the artists examined in that chapter, pictured disappearing among their works in their studio photographs). In the 1934 version of his essay “Berlin Childhood around 1900,” Benjamin tells this story in the context of a wider discussion of mimetic behavior, including the Kopf-­verstichen episode we saw in chapter 1. In a discussion recalling his similar but more pessimistic account of the childhood portrait of Franz Kafka, in “Little History of Photography” (1931), he applies this description to a studio portrait of himself as a child, staged in front of a painted backdrop of the Alps, into which, he suggests, he felt drawn, like the Chinese painter. “This would happen as I sat painting with watercolors,” he continues. “The colors I mixed would color me.”97 The subject is drawn into states of identification with her surroundings or the inanimate objects of her attention, and then out again. As Shierry Weber Nicholson has pointed out, this was a motif shared with Adorno, who employed the comparison in his discussion of the Romantic composer Gustav Mahler’s Lied von der Erde: “‘The pavilion song, which ends like a transparent fata morgana, is reminiscent of the Chinese story about the painter who disappears into his painting, a futile and indelible pledge. A miniaturization, this vanishing is the appearance of death, in which music preserves at the same time what perishes.’” Here, Nicholson explains, “the disappearance is a sacrifice, a pledge, which allows the image to be retained and which is retained in the image.”98 It is an image employed by thinkers of the Frankfurt School for the survival of aesthetic experience, under the impact of shock.99 It is in this sense that conceptual art should be understood, neither as de-­ aestheticized nor as so generalizing the aesthetic that it is utterly exploded, to the point of the “zero degree of art” condemned by Baudrillard and Krauss. Rather, I suggest, key works of conceptual art reengage with the form of the aesthetic experience, as this ideological construct arose in the period of early industrialization, and reprise its fundamentally dialectical structure. They employ and reconfigure key tropes of Romanticism (from which members of the Frankfurt School also derived their aesthetic theory, as we shall see in more detail in chapter 5). The particular specificity developed in such works is the form of the system, utilized in such a way as to drain the image, but also to reconstitute an absorbed form of attention in a new, more expansive image-­field—­so prefiguring, in Benjaminian manner, the possibilities of new technologies, as yet unrealized at that point in the 1960s. Furthermore, the work suggests a dialectical edge in its prefiguring: the resounding emptiness in Huebler’s photographs, which systematically fail to demonstrate what the accompanying texts claim for them, produces a structure of failure and disappointment that sucks meaningfulness out of the image. Huebler’s work empties the photograph and makes its obsolescence apparent (more even than

Ruscha, whose photographs at least retain the iconic flavor of Pop). In this sense, conceptual art certainly employs contemporary systems and technicity to destructure and deflate the kind of image presented in photography. And yet it does not represent the end of art, nor of the aesthetic. Conceptual art such as Huebler’s still provides an aesthetic experience, absorbing us into an expanded picture-­field and so reading against contemporary de-­aestheticized and instrumental systems theory: studding the idea of a systems aesthetic with imaginative investments, feeling, blank spots, and irrationality. In this way it represents a necessary puncturing and exceeding of the kind of idealist systems theory with which other artists and writers in the 1960s (and in the present) so enthusiastically engaged, a theory that fitted neatly with contemporary military and industrial developments. At the same time it prefigures the possibilities of the new technologies that were then just beginning to be developed, holding up to exemplary visibility the forms of the aesthetic that might survive these restructurings.

The dialectical image

Just as we saw Working Drawings earlier as standing between Minimalism and conceptualism, and the photocopier as standing halfway between the machine age and the information age, so I have tried to position conceptual art as structured by investments in the machine age, but pointing forward to the Internet—­not the same as this contemporary technology, but a dialectical image pointing backward and forward, capable of throwing gleams of revelatory light in both directions. In key works of conceptual art we see the idea of a “system” not articulated as a dematerialized structure—­as was conceptualized by systems theorists like Burnham—­but given material and glitchy articulation. The retention of specific material supports, such as the photocopier and the map, helps to produce a reading of systems theory to counterpose to more idealist versions of it found in techno-­enthusiast literature of the time. Thus, whereas systems theory in its cybernetic or dematerialized version is entirely consonant with military-­industrialist applications of systems theory, Smithson’s version seems to anticipate our experience online, making a deliberate aesthetic out of failures and glitches of the system—­using, for example, deliberately slow download times, failures to load, hyperlinks that lead nowhere, tacky graphics, clutter, and glut. Reading conceptual art against the emerging Internet in this way helps us to understand the particular work conceptualism performs upon the photographic image. In photoconceptual works like Huebler’s, the image is explicitly and deliberately constructed as nonspectacular, as merely a carrier or vehicle for information, which it may or may not provide. One image points you

177

only to another, so that as the viewer follows the association, the meaningful content of one is transferred to the other. And some of the “links” offered in Huebler’s works (and in other examples of conceptual art) don’t work. The experience of conceptual art (like our experience online) is often slow, frustrating, and dysfunctional, and thus the viewer’s awareness of her own role in processing the information and images provided is heightened. This is a reading that, I would argue, helps us understand in a new way the baffling and provocative way in which photography was restructured in the hands of 1960s conceptual artists. In 1960s photoconceptualism, as online, the viewer is positioned as a “user” rather than a consumer of the material—­hence, some of the most influential critical claims that have historically been made for the subject-­position constructed within conceptual art. And yet, as the reiteration of this subject-­ position within Internet-­based consumption shows us, the position of “user” does not automatically entail emancipation. Lev Manovitch and Boris Groys are among recent commentators who have asserted that the age of the Internet is the end of the age of spectacle, because everyone is now a user of images rather than a passive consumer; and yet, they point out, this does not result in the idealized activist subject imagined in older avant-­garde rhetorics.100 In conceptual art, as online, the viewer’s engagement with photo-­plus-­text produces a new form of aestheticized attention and investment, and rather than emancipating subjects or dispelling the aesthetic, it spreads the aesthetic out so as to aestheticize the world. What conceptual art shows us, however, or so I have argued here, is that this does not mean either the destruction of art and the aesthetic or the resurrection of a falsely auratic aestheticized spectacle but may be interpreted as producing a dialectical form of aesthetic experience, in the post-­Romantic manner outlined by Benjamin and Adorno. Like the expanded picture-­field enabled by the shop window, which I examined in chapter 2, this is not a form of the aesthetic that enables the artwork to escape the wider social and industrial structures of the society that surrounds it. Rather, it reads within and on the site of those structures in a way that it is important for us to recover and remember today. It doesn’t look like medium-­specificity or nostalgia for older forms of technology. Instead, it points a pathway forward, to a new way of understanding contemporary Internet culture. Painting, sculpture, and other specific artistic traditions are credited by some critics with the ability to provide experience, the terms of which will withstand the forms and frame of debased, common, commercialized experience: resourcing and helping to constitute a noncompromised space for aesthetic experience and the production of subjectivity. Countering this modernist position, I have argued for recognition of the ways in which art practice has historically engaged with the forms of the everyday world, and also with the image-­forms and qualities of commodified culture. But the dissolution of

mediums is not something that is “achieved” for once and all. In the years that followed the radical experiments of Minimalism, conceptual art, and other movements of the 1960s, painting continued to be practiced, albeit—­as was the case throughout the twentieth century—­in dialogue with other media. I want to turn now to examine the way in which that was done: what painting looked like, even as it was internally restructured by other, technologically based forms and structures.

179

181

Don’t look now

Gerhard Richter’s Betty (1988) is a painting at which we are invited to stand and marvel (fig. 5.1). In perhaps no other painting of the second half of the twentieth century is virtuosity so proudly laid claim to and yet, at the same time, so deliberately undercut. It is a painting that looks like a photograph; this is, evidently, its proudest boast, but also its most abject condition.1 What a fate for painting! To look only, and unmistakably, so much like a photograph. The painting shows us it is aware of this as a humiliation: its central figure turns her back on us. I think we are being slyly offered a model for our own spectatorship. We are recommended to turn our backs on the dazzling display of painterly verisimilitude that is before us, for sober contemplation of painting’s past possibilities. Like Betty, it is suggested that we deny ourselves the seductions of what is now only mimesis by rote, to become absorbed instead in the abstract surface of one of Richter’s gray monochromes, which hangs on the back wall of the painted scene. It is typical of the grace and cunning of this picture to offer us two paintings in one, two alternative visions of painting’s possibilities, not canceling each other out but held within the space of one painted surface. If only for this reason, I suggest we should not turn our backs on this painting yet.

Chapter Five 182

5.1  Gerhard Richter, Betty, 1988. Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri. Oil on canvas, 40 × 28.5 inches (102 × 72 cm). Catalogue raisonné no. 663-­5. © 2013 Gerhard Richter.

Giving with one hand what it takes away with the other is the central gesture of the painting. Visually, the canvas is a surfeit of painterly detail. The girl’s jacket, its red embroidered flowers carefully rendered against their white background, its slightly rough, toweling texture, its loose swing and tauter molding against the girl’s body as she turns, and the soft gleam of her hair—­all of these elements invite our admiration. The warm tint and roundness of a face, just glimpsed as it turns away; a body braced awkwardly, pivoting on its near arm; the slightly brash contrast of pink-­and-­white jumper with red-­and-­

white jacket, blended into almost-­harmony by the carefully rendered softness of the fabrics—­each of these elements appears casual, mere happenstance, the simplest, photographic contingency, but each has been selected and composed to provide a catalogue of painterly satisfactions. The painting is a feast for the eyes and a deliberate demonstration of skill: it appears to bestow its gifts amply upon us. And yet the subject’s face, the whole point or focus of the painting—­which is, after all, a portrait—­is withheld from us. This aversion of the face can appear, again, the merest happenstance. We are used to this. One sees it all the time in amateur snapshots: at just the moment the shutter clicks, the subject moves, her attention called away, however briefly. Indeed, the composition of this painting may be said to reflect the typical “snapshot” pose. Yet once again, of course, this impression of snapshot instantaneity is only an illusion; in fact, the pose has been carefully chosen and laboriously translated into paint, where it unspools a wholly different symbolic load: no longer signifying chance, momentary movement, it becomes instead a permanent emblem of loss or withholding. The two, contrasting temporalities—­the quick, stilled instant of photography and the longue durée of painting—­are braided in this picture in the contrapposto pose of the central figure. Indeed, the figure’s serpentine pose, her child-­soft hair formed into a chignon, is itself representative of the complex braiding that this painting is, and which I propose in this chapter to unpick, following the threads set out here, not only by the combining of painting with photography but also the condensing of stillness with movement in the figure of a girl suddenly arrested in motion. The ambition of the picture is apparent, not just in its skill, audacity, and grace but also in the references that it sets up compositionally. As a portrait of a female figure trapped in a shallow space, blocked by a background plane that serves as a stand-­in for the painting surface, we might think of comparing Richter’s Betty with Édouard Manet’s Bar at the Folies-­Bergères (1882), another “manifesto” painting in which the turning of a female figure is key. But where Manet’s painting seems celebratory—­paint like fireworks scumbled jubilantly over the mirror surface—­Richter’s seems the cold ashes of painting’s last moment of celebration. There is a photomechanical polish to the facture of Richter’s work that (especially in the contrast with Manet) speaks more surely than anything else of painting’s end. Furthermore, there is this difference: in Manet’s work the painterly surface at the rear of the scene, offered as an audacious double or mimic of the painted surface itself, is a mirror—­a device by which vision is expanded. As such, it constitutes a greedy statement of what painting can do, a landgrab, claiming space and surfaces that would not normally be seen from this viewing position, a full 360-­degree panorama of viewing. The mirror as a double for the painted surface supplies a “good image” of painting for the viewer to admire it in: swaggering, triumphant, and all about display. But in Richter’s work the tone has changed: the painterly surface is a

Painting at a Standstill 183

Chapter Five 184

monochrome, a “bad image” of painting’s loss of plenitude; vision is no longer rewarded and celebrated but instead punishingly denied. Instead, in Betty we are offered an emblem of a new, more uncertain situation. The girl is figuratively poised between two of painting’s surfaces: the representational tradition, perfectly exemplified by the surface of this canvas, and abstraction, represented within the painting by one of Richter’s monochromes. Painting, Richter suggests, is caught undecidably between these options. Both are marred, neither can really be taken. One—­the path of representation—­is centrally flawed by its omission of the girl’s face; the other is too obscure to be made out clearly, let alone to be able to offer any of the transcendent, visionary values that abstraction once offered the beholder. Richter began this practice—­“canceling” painting while at the same time grimly, determinedly continuing—­with one particular work, which makes evident the predicament that holds his practice in its vice, and from which he dates his mature production. This work was Table, of 1962, which Richter painted after a photograph he cut from a magazine (fig. 5.2). In an interview in 2002, Robert Storr asked Richter about this work: Was the Table of 1962 the first cancelled painting? [Richter:] Yes. [Storr:] And what provoked you in that case to smear the image? [Richter:] I painted it very realistically and it looked so stupid. You can’t paint like that, that’s the problem. You can’t stand it anymore. Or very seldom.2

Betty should, I suggest, be seen as just as much a “failed” or “cancelled” painting as Table, despite the clearly virtuosic skill with which it was made. It is the image of a failed painting as it is also the image of a failed photograph, of the sort that reminds us of amateur photographic albums (now made obsolete by the rise of digital photography). The impact of photography, apparent in the marring obliteration of the figure’s face, is a scar that runs like a seam down the center of the painted surface. Poised as she is, looking back, Betty readily lends herself to being understood as a figure symbolizing loss. Iconographically, she might remind the viewer of Orpheus, the mythical character who, granted permission to enter the Underworld to recover his dead wife, Eurydice, was told he could not look back at her on their ascent to the earth but must walk ahead, face forward, trusting her to follow. Needless to say, he looked back, and so doomed his wife to death a second time. In the figure of Betty, we might think, the figures of Orpheus—­taking his last, forbidden look back—­and Eurydice—­whose countenance is finally and irretrievably lost to his sight at this moment—­are braided together in one figure. At a different, more biographical level, the tone of loss in the painting is heightened by our knowledge that it is a portrait by a father of his daughter. Richter’s daughter was twelve years old when the photograph

Painting at a Standstill 185

on which the painting is based was taken, captured in a pose expressing not just a moment’s motion but also the cusp between childhood and adolescence. A girl leaving childhood behind and her father marking this farewell are blended as minor, private, human notes into the grander, historical narratives of loss that the painting also constructs. This blending, I suggest, is a consequence of the painting’s incorporation of the photographic with the traditions of painting; what the painting gains in forcefulness through its access to the greater immediacy and emotive power of the photographic, it simultaneously loses in splendor, as if we now had access to these grand narratives of the past only through the cheap sentimentality of photographic clichés. The sense of photography’s impact upon painting as representing, cumulatively, a loss is expressed by Richter in several of his published writings and remarks, perhaps most famously in an interview with the critic Benjamin Buchloh in 1986, two years before he painted Betty: “I see myself as the heir to an enormous, great, rich culture of painting, and of art in general, which we have lost, but which nevertheless obligates us. In such a situation it’s difficult not to want to restore that culture, or, what would be just as bad, simply to give up, to degenerate.”3 The exchange continues:

5.2  Gerhard Richter, Table, 1962. Oil on canvas, 35.4 × 44.5 inches (90 × 113 cm). Catalogue raisonné no. 1. © 2013 Gerhard Richter.

[Buchloh:] How would you account for this loss, if not politically, socially or historically? The way you speak now, it sounds almost like Theodor Adorno’s famous statement, “After Auschwitz lyrical poetry is no longer possible.” Is that a position that would apply to you? [Richter:] No. Lyrical poetry does exist, even after Auschwitz. [Buchloh:] But when you say that one can no longer paint this way . . . [Richter:] Then I meant first of all a particular quality which we have lost. [Buchloh:] Because of what? [Richter:] Well, photography is surely an external factor that has contributed to the fact that we are now unable to paint in a particular manner and that we can no longer produce a certain artistic quality.4 Chapter Five 186

One thing Richter means, Buchloh suggests, is that as a consequence of the impact of photography, painting has lost its representational function. Paintings “have lost their descriptive and representational function, among other reasons, because photography does it so perfectly. Hence this task is simply no longer given.”5 Certainly, this loss is one of the things Betty points to: in its mocking, photomechanical perfection it embodies the loss of the meaningfulness of a perfect, painted imitation. But Richter’s argument ranges more widely. The painter argues that the loss he is heir to can’t just be put down to photography, because it is felt in all the arts: “This perfection of execution, of composition, or whatever, we would have lost it even without photography. Literature and music are bogged down in the same misery. People love Mozart and Glenn Gould because that’s exactly what new composers are no longer able to offer. But music hasn’t been replaced by anything comparable to photography.”6 This is, as Richter describes it, a change in consciousness: “It’s a matter of very definite, new, real facts that have changed our consciousness and our society, have overturned religion, and have thereby also changed the function of the State.”7 The loss Richter is evoking is something we may feel tempted to describe as the loss of “aura.” The argument we have seen Richter and Buchloh rehearse, after all, seems to have much in common with that set out, as we saw in my introduction, between 1935 and 1939 by Walter Benjamin, in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” and in his related writings about photography, film, and modern life. The well-­known thesis of the “Work of Art” essay is that, under the impact of new technologies of mechanical reproduction, the work of art has lost a particular quality Benjamin calls “aura” (of which one definition he gives is a feeling of distance, no matter how near the object may be).8 At first glance, Benjamin’s argument concerning the loss of aura appears to fit neatly in relation to Richter’s painting, especially because of the place that the earlier critic accords to portraiture. In “Little History of Photography” (1931), Benjamin makes the points that the people whom photography put most immediately out of business were portrait miniature

painters, and that the first large-­scale commercial success photography found was in the area of studio portraits.9 In the “Work of Art” essay a few years later, Benjamin speaks of aura as the source of art’s “cult” value, and describes portraits as the richest repositories for this.10 (Richter too speaks about portraits as an artist’s “devotional” work.11) Since representation of the human face has been one of the most significant casualties of the loss of aura, according to Benjamin, it may seem all too appropriate that Richter should have chosen a conspicuously failed portrait in which to make his most lyrical statement of what it is painting has lost. However, as I argued in my introduction, we should not be seduced into a reading of Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay as entirely nostalgic for aura. Neither, I think, should we succumb to an understanding of Richter’s painting practice as dedicated to mourning its loss. The question this chapter asks is how we can produce a truly Benjaminian reading of Richter’s work, one that employs the fully dialectical optic Benjamin offers us for understanding both the cost and the potential of the ways in which modern technologies mark and inscribe our culture? Benjamin’s writings on the subject of aura are famously ambiguous. In places he is lyrically elegiac, and the loss of aura is apparently mourned, in a way that might superficially seem to fit well with the tone of Richter’s painting. In other places, however, Benjamin appears to embrace the destruction of aura and the new technologically supported arts that replace it. Film becomes the location for Benjamin’s greatest media optimism and his greatest celebration of the nonauratic, mass-­consumed work of art, while photography is the site of his most elegiac mourning (as it would be for other writers after him, such as Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag). The two media are understood by Benjamin as inextricably connected, for he conceptualizes film as essentially photographic, as did other theorists of the 1920s and 1930s, including André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer. Benjamin describes film as implicit, or latent, within photography, and as intensifying its inherently progressive effect—­namely, to remake perception, via the shock of the swiftly moving discontinuous effect, in a quintessentially non-­or post-­ auratic mode. Benjamin links this remaking of perception more generally to modern urban conditions. His account of the physiognomic adjustments of the human body to modernity is well known: In the mid-­nineteenth century, the invention of the match brought forth a number of innovations which have one thing in common: a single abrupt movement of the hand triggers a process of many steps. A case in point is the telephone, where the lifting of the receiver has taken the place of the steady movements that used to be required to crank the older models. With regard to countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing and the like, the “snapping” of the photographer had the greatest consequences. . . . Haptic experiences of this kind were joined

Painting at a Standstill 187

by optic ones, such as are supplied by the advertising pages of a newspaper or the traffic of a big city. Moving through this traffic involves the individual in a series of shocks and collisions. At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy from a battery.12

Chapter Five 188

Altogether, Benjamin concludes, “technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training.”13 It is in this discussion of the invention of the match, the telephone, and photography that Benjamin makes most clear that the “apparatus” as a technology of image production (the photographic, the filmic apparatus) is intimately connected to the wider industrial “apparatus” of the means of production, and to the larger forms of socioeconomic organization that correspond to it. Here we have the sense of the “apparatus” discussed in my introduction at its plainest: a term used by German writers in the early twentieth century—­most notably, perhaps, by Brecht—­to signify both technological machinery and the wider industrial-­social formation that supports and is enabled by such technology. As we have seen, the art form for which this newly trained audience is best fitted, Benjamin argues, is film: “There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by film. In a film, perception conditioned by shock was established as a formal principle. What determines the rhythm of production on a conveyer belt is the same thing that underlies the rhythm of reception of film.”14 On this argument, the material technology of film is suited to the modern, physiognomically trained viewer because it replicates the movements of the assembly line. Film achieves the interpolation of the viewer’s body, articulating the viewer’s eye and cognition in gear with its own rhythmic montage. And yet the potential of film in this regard is not solely to repeat but to reconfigure the relation between the body of the viewer and new industrial technology. “The most important social function of film is to establish equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus,” Benjamin wrote.15 In this sense, the greatest potential of Benjamin’s theorization of film is, as Miriam Hansen has suggested, to address and attempt to resolve capitalism’s “failed . . . reception of technology.”16 The experience of this “training,” its representation in art, and the forms of aesthetic consumption it promotes appear to form the opposite pole to Benjamin’s description of the effects of aura. This is the “polytechnic,” “impoverished” “new barbarism” that in his account must come to replace the old, contemplative, and mystified experience of “aura” in the new age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art.17 At various places in his writing, Benjamin gives examples of artists and artworks that give expression to this new, post-­auratic aesthetic form. Building on the prior commentary of the French critic Jacques Rivière, for example, Benjamin points to “the subterranean shocks by which Baudelaire’s poetry is shaken; it is as though they caused words to collapse.”18 Another of his examples is Charlie Chaplin, whose “unique

significance” he describes as lying “in the fact that, in his work, the human being is integrated into the film image by way of his gestures. . . . Each single movement he makes is composed of a succession of staccato bits of movement. Whether it is his walk, the way he handles his cane, or the way he raises his hat—­always the same jerking sequence of tiny movements applies the law of the cinematic image sequence to human motorial functions.”19 In still another essay, he gives the more fantastic example of Mickey Mouse, whose ability to improvise with the materials around him, and so demonstrate a perfect, physically trained accommodation with the world, provides a fantasy of ease and expert ability, which Benjamin compares to a “dream,” for tired, working individuals: Painting at a Standstill

A dream to make up for the sadness and discouragement of the day—­a dream that shows us in its realized form the simple but magnificent existence for which the energy is lacking in reality. The existence of Mickey Mouse is such a dream for contemporary man. His life is full of miracles—­miracles that not only surpass the wonders of technology but make fun of them. For the most extraordinary thing about them is that they all appear, quite without any machinery, to have been improvised out of the body of Mickey Mouse, out of his supporters and persecutors, and out of the most ordinary pieces of furniture.20

In these passages it becomes clear that one of the key things at stake in the discussion of aura, and the character of the new aesthetic pleasures that arise in this situation, has to do with the reorganization of the body by technology to provide the basis for a new model of experience. This is made even clearer in the way Benjamin’s enthusiasm for film continues and expands upon his enthusiasm for what he sees as photography’s superior capacity both to analyze and to penetrate into the fabric of its material. In a famous passage he compares the new technological state of affairs with the processes and results of painting: Here we have to pose the question: How does the camera operator compare with the painter? In answer to this, it will be helpful to consider the concept of the operator as it is familiar to us from surgery. The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the magician. The attitude of the magician, who heals a sick person by a laying-­on of hands, differs from that of the surgeon, who makes an intervention in the patient. The magician maintains the natural distance between himself and the person treated; more precisely, he reduces it slightly by laying on his hands, but increases it greatly by his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse: he greatly diminishes the distance from the patient by penetrating the patient’s body. . . . Magician is to surgeon as painter is to cinematographer. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, whereas the cinematographer penetrates deeply into its tissue.21

189

Chapter Five 190

The use of surgical and physiognomic analogies in this passage is of a piece with Benjamin’s praise of Eugène Atget and August Sander in “Little History of Photography,” namely, that a more thoroughgoing penetration of reality has been achieved through the systematic organizing principles of the new image-­production methods. In Atget and Sander, this “machinery” was the archival form, enabling comparative classification, which made clear the essential propensity to knowledge-­production that, on this account, is essentially a feature of the photographic. In film, it is achieved by the total nature of film’s productive apparatus. However, what comes next in this same passage provides a surprise. Benjamin explains that while film is perhaps the most intensively technologically produced variety of contemporary image, involving not only cameras but lighting rig, microphones, crew, and all of the other equipment that together makes up the filmic apparatus, the view film actually offers is entirely free of any glimpse of this machinery: In the film studio the apparatus has penetrated so deeply into reality that a pure view of that reality, free of the foreign body of equipment, is the result of a special procedure—­namely, the shooting by the specially adjusted photographic device and the assembly of that shot with others of the same kind. The equipment-­free aspect of reality has here become the height of artifice, and the vision of immediate reality the Blue Flower in the land of technology. . . . Hence the presentation of reality in film is incomparably the more significant for people of today, since it provides the equipment-­free aspect of reality they are entitled to demand from a work of art, and does so precisely on the basis of the most intensive interpenetration of reality with equipment.22

Benjamin’s claim here seems close to suggesting that film is enabled, precisely by its technologically superior invasion of reality, to extend something like an auratic experience: a glimpse of the fulfillment of the aesthetic expectations people formed at a time when reality was “equipment-­free,” and which, he implies, even in the modern industrial age, they are still right to extend to works of art. Although elsewhere in his writings when he also makes use of the phrase “the Blue Flower,” Benjamin seems to doubt the possibility of its continuing to be extended by the technologically based arts—­“no-­one really dreams of the Blue Flower any longer,” or if they do then “they must have overslept”—­here he seems to insist on the possibility that something of aura survives or, perhaps, is even better enabled by film’s more thorough grasping hold of reality.23 The complexities and the surprise of this passage are well served by a deeper exploration of its central image. The “Blue Flower” is a reference to one of the central motifs of German Romanticism, invented by the celebrated German poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis. Among the audience for whom Benjamin wrote, he could be confident that the phrase would

have been immediately comprehensible. Novalis’s unfinished novel Heinrich von Öfterdingen, published posthumously in 1802, describes the eponymous hero’s quest for the blue flower that, at the start of the book, he glimpses in a dream. The sight of the flower fills him with great longing, which increases when he approaches the flower and finds, at its heart, within its “expanded blue corolla,” the image of a woman’s face. On waking, his father tells him that he also had a dream of a blue flower as a young man, accompanied by a vision of the woman who in time became his wife and the young hero’s mother. Shortly after this, von Öfterdingen sets out on a journey to his grandfather’s house. When he arrives there he meets a girl named Mathilde, whom he recognizes as the girl whose face he had seen at the center of the mysterious blue flower, and to whom he becomes betrothed. The story continues, returning to the motif of the blue flower at several points (in one instance, embodied in the person of a nymph named Cerulean). The blue flower is thus represented as the object of a heroic quest narrative, shaped around a young man’s journey to find and conquer, or unite with, a love-­object. Novalis’s presentation of the story suggests that this quest also represents, in some sense, a return to the subject’s origin, since the young man’s dream and subsequent quest are presented as recapitulating his father’s similar youthful dream and journey to find the woman who became his mother. (Indeed, the entire novel is preoccupied with structures of filiation, not just Heinrich’s quest but, implicitly, Novalis’s effort to position himself as poetic heir to Goethe, who is personified in the book.) This fundamental psychological investment finds symbolic expression in an image of a flower bestowed with a woman’s face: the natural world in the figure of a woman, “returning the subject’s gaze.” Benjamin expanded this account of aura in his 1939 essay on Baudelaire, where he again described it as the phenomenon of feeling things looking back at you. In the passage where he states this, Benjamin quotes a maxim from Novalis: What was inevitably felt to be inhuman—­one might even say deadly—­in daguerreotypes was the (prolonged) looking into the camera, since the camera records our likeness without returning our gaze. Inherent in the gaze, however, is the expectation that it will be returned by that on which it is bestowed. Where this expectation is met . . . there is an experience [Erfahrung] of the aura in all its fullness. “Perceptibility,” as Novalis puts it, “is an attentiveness.” The perceptibility he has in mind is none other than that of the aura. Experience of the aura thus arises from the fact that a response characteristic of human relationships is transposed to the relationship between humans and inanimate or natural objects. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us. 24

Painting at a Standstill 191

Chapter Five 192

We find in other writers of the Frankfurt School a similar usage of the idea of the artwork returning the beholder’s gaze. Theodor Adorno, in his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, in several places uses the idea of the artwork that “opens its eyes” to illustrate authentic aesthetic experience.25 As various commentators have noted, the reciprocity of gazes described here, in which the natural world appears to mirror and recognize the gaze of the human subject, seems well described in psychoanalytic terms as recapitulating the experience of the infant at the breast, whose mother gazes back at him or her, fundamentally reconfirming to the subject, “Yes, I see you” and “Yes, you are safe and loved.”26 On this account, the auratic experience symbolizes a fantasy of ideal (re)union with the mother’s body. How does such a model of aesthetic experience fit with the idea of a post-­ auratic aesthetics that Benjamin appears to envisage in the “Work of Art” essay: an aesthetics premised on shock and convulsion? The Blue Flower passage seems to present a regression to a more idealist form of aesthetics, and a notable divergence from Benjamin’s materialist praise of film at other points, for example in his celebration of Mickey Mouse or Charlie Chaplin, where he describes the articulation of the body by the apparatus as the source of film’s new, potentially enabling, politically emancipatory and nonauratic viewing pleasure.27 Indeed, a neat counterpart to (in fact a thorough reversal of ) the Blue Flower, in which a human face appears miraculously from within a flower, occurs in Benjamin’s essay on Surrealism, to exemplify the thorough interpenetration of the body and technology: “They exchange, to a man, the play of human features for the face of an alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds.”28 The possibility of these two inconsistent models of the aesthetic experience in the “Work of Art” essay was identified and addressed by the renowned scholar of Benjamin and cinema, Miriam Hansen, in an influential essay of 1987.29 Hansen acknowledges that what is at stake between these two readings might be understood as the loss of a full or authentic model of experience “in the emphatic sense” (characterized in German as Erfahrung rather than Erlebnis). She sees Benjamin’s more materialist writings as risking an endorsement of a new barbarism that “implicitly denies the masses the possibility of aesthetic experience” and the “Blue Flower” passage as representing a countervailing tendency: Benjamin’s hope that the technologized work of art could still extend some model of auratic experience.30 In the course of the article, however, Hansen draws out the idea that we should understand the “Blue Flower” passage not as entirely divergent from Benjamin’s more materialist arguments, but instead as extending the hope of a technologically based experience of aura—­ that is, representing a refounding of the auratic perception of the “returned gaze” in objects and things with an effect that is dissonant and shocking, rather than ideally harmonious and reassuring. Now based on “hidden correspondences in which even the dreamworld of commodities may ‘encounter us in the structures of frail intersubjectivity,’” she writes, building on prior commentary

by Jürgen Habermas, “such a return of the gaze, in the emphatic sense, would always involve a transgressive, unsettling moment.”31 Indeed, the psychoanalytic reading of the motif that I have proposed would support this, suggesting that the Blue Flower image in Benjamin’s essay functions to reveal “aura” as what has necessarily, always already, been lost, what can “no longer be dreamt of.” On this account, aura arises as a screen memory, back-­projected as a fantasy of the past, arising precisely at a moment of trauma, and intimately coupled with technology in its destructive aspect. The idea that technology has fundamentally altered us, after all, is something else that, we might be tempted to say, functions in Benjamin’s writing as a necessary fantasy. Adorno criticized Benjamin on this point, arguing that technique is and was always self-­alienating, rather than being a feature of modern technology in particular.32 Acknowledging this, we might put it that the moment of alienation represented by technology is always already within us: it has to do with a finding of ourselves as already “other.” (Benjamin indeed, in places, suggests as much, writing of “one’s own body” as “the most forgotten source of strangeness.”33) The fantasy that the crisis of alienation arises as a result of modern technology is precisely a fantasy of the machine age, which this book studies as such. Far from representing an ideal union with nature, after all, the moment in which the inanimate artwork “opens its eyes” to return our gaze must be understood as paradigmatically uncanny. (As we saw, indeed, in Benjamin’s account of the encounter with commodities in the shopping arcade, in chapter 2.) At its root, I suggest, it is an experience well described by Freud, in which we are confronted with the shock of the “long familiar” in new and unfamiliar guise (for which the paradigmatic case, Freud suggests, is provided by the mother’s body).34 The “cryptic puzzle” that Adorno described as at the heart of the post-­auratic artwork, confronted with which we “shudder” in mimetic convulsion, replicating the twisted knot of the work’s own fragmentary, intractable character, is, in this sense, precisely a confrontation with the truth that aura had always arisen from, in order to disguise.35 The post-­auratic aesthetic experience is characterized by dissonance and shock and so breaks with the harmony that is characteristic of Kantian aesthetics. But perhaps that was only ever a falsely idealizing and ideological doctrine: a “screen memory,” disguising from ourselves the full knowledge of our alienation from nature (which is to say, our own, already alien nature).36 In Frankfurt School terms, the truth from which we seek to screen ourselves is our constitution as both natural and historical subjects, for whom technology is the indispensable third term, mediating our relation to the world.37 To offer us this insight is perhaps the fullest potential of technology in its vivid, modern form. And yet the moment of the post-­auratic shudder should arguably be understood not simply as disenchanted but as itself deeply phantasmatic, founding a recognition of the new by means of its phantasmatic, mimetic transformation.

Painting at a Standstill 193

Chapter Five 194

The awakening prompted by the Surrealists’ “exchange . . . of human features for the face of an alarm clock” is surely only an awakening from one to another, yet more fantastic dream. In Benjamin’s praise of film, as in his account of the Chinese painter, there is something that goes beyond rational realization, demystification, or enlightened clarity, and that also exceeds Adorno’s characterization of post-­auratic aesthetic experience as based on dissonance and shock, producing a shudder of “revulsion and fear.”38 In our convulsions of laughter, responding to Chaplin and Mickey Mouse, or in the smile of the Chinese painter, or our sympathetic imitation of the words and objects in our environment, Benjamin points to a rising to meet the artwork and the world in our response, reprising and, in the process, differently cathecting its fragmentary and broken character. Although they are both theories of aesthetic response founded on mimesis, there is a difference in affective charge between Benjamin’s and Adorno’s accounts, albeit slender, comprised only of the intangible stuff of affect, and always ready to reverse into its opposite. Indeed, in a later essay on Benjamin’s theory of film, published in 2004, Miriam Hansen provides the means to help theorize this potential in the “Work of Art” essay (although she argues that Benjamin retreated from the possibility in his final version of the essay). Hansen suggests that the essence lies in the new model of the technologically reconfigured physis that film supplies, to which Benjamin was perceptively attuned.39 On this account, the potential of film, as seen, for example, in Chaplin’s mime, is not simply to unmask to the audience its own alienation. It may be understood, like our experience in play, as prompting a second “innervation” of the technology, the audience’s laughter charging it with a new affective energy and representing their “mimetic, visceral assimilation” of the new body presented onscreen.40 In this way, film, like other experimental cultural forms that Benjamin championed (such as animation or the proto–­science fiction of Paul Scheerbart), precisely in the responses it stimulates from its audience, extends the possibility of “an aesthetics that could combat, at the level of perception, the political consequences of the failed . . . reception of technology”—­a failure, I propose, of which the fantasy of “aura” is itself only a symptom.41 In this sense, a post-­auratic aesthetics is not a stripped-­ bare theory of experience without aesthetic possibility, but is transformational and fantastic, charged with new phantasmatic content and affect. To explore this potential and its implications for the wider argument of this book, I turn now to two films in which the problem of the commingling of the body with the apparatus, focused on the image of a woman’s face, receives a useful reinterpretation. These two returns to the theme were made almost exactly in the middle of the time between the 1930s, when Benjamin wrote, and the 1980s, when Richter painted Betty, and they offer us the potential to increase our understanding of the technological dialectics at stake in each. Once again, both stories are structured by a desiring relation toward a female figure; once again, phantasmatic investments underwrite a modernist account

of the fragmentation of experience and the image in the age of mechanical reproduction. But a second filmic body is smuggled into each story, which may serve to draw out further the dynamic buried within both Benjamin’s text and Richter’s painting.

The stilled and moving image

Chris Marker’s film La Jetée, of 1962, has been held up as a masterpiece of modernist filmmaking, mining from its pulp-­genre material an exemplary demonstration of film’s material base in the still photographic image, and transmuting its result into a beautiful and lyrical work of art. The work is twenty-­nine minutes long and composed of black-­and-­white still photographs except for one brief, famous sequence of moving-­image film near the middle. The plot is a sort of science-­fiction fable, set sometime in a ruined future, after a cataclysmic war.42 “This is the story of a man marked by an image of his childhood.” These words, the opening line of the film, appear in white type on a black screen at the same time as they are spoken by a man in voice-­over. Photographs follow that swiftly set the scene: the main pier at Paris Orly airport, a place, we are told, where parents used to take their children and where people went to watch the aircraft, “some time before the outbreak of World War Three.” The voice-­over lists three ingredients of the image the man remembers: “a frozen sun, a stage setting at the end of the pier, a woman’s face.” A photograph of a woman’s face fills the screen (fig. 5.3). She is blonde, half-­turned toward the viewer; she holds her hands to her face, her mouth half-­open;

Painting at a Standstill 195

5.3  Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. 16-­millimeter black-­ and-­white film, sound, 28 minutes. Film still. © 1963 Argos Films. Image © 1992 Urzone, Inc., Zone Books, New York.

Chapter Five 196

she looks scared and questioning. While her photograph is held for our prolonged contemplation, the voice-­over reasserts its opening linkage of images and marking, or visual recall and harm: “Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments. Only afterward do they claim remembrance, on account of their scars.” The voice-­over narration situates the action of the film that follows as taking place after the scene at Orly airport, sometime in a hypothetical future. Among the images of ruin we are shown are a number of broken statues: images in which a woman’s head has been entirely obliterated. The surface level of Paris is contaminated by radiation; a handful of survivors are living in tunnels underground. The survivors comprise “victors” and prisoners. The central character (given no name) is one of the prisoners; his captors speak German in whispered, half-­heard conversations. The Germans perform experiments on the prisoners, and our “hero” is selected for one of these: chosen, we are told, because he holds in his memory a particularly strong visual image from his past. The experimenters plan, by the use of drugs, to induce a kind of sleep or trance and, by hooking the man up to a machine they have constructed, to send him back in time to the scene he remembers, in the hope of perfecting time travel, so that the man can then be sent to the future, whence he can bring back help—­medicine, food, power—­to make it possible for humanity to survive. The experiment is performed, and succeeds. The man is thrown back to the time he remembers (although not, at first, to the precise scene of his visual memory). He is able to move about and interact in this world of the past. He searches among crowds of people for the face he remembers, and soon he finds it. This is the woman—­”he is sure she is the one. As a matter of fact, it is the only thing he can be sure of ” (fig. 5.4). The man and the woman meet and talk. They walk around together and visit a park. Photographs show them smiling and laughing. “Time builds itself painlessly around them.” But the “scientists” intervene. Having succeeded in sending the man backward in time, they now send him into the future, to request help there from any people who survive. The man is sent and returns with the help his jailers need. He is moved to a different part of the camp—­the experiments are over. He knows they mean to kill him now that he is no longer useful to them. But, apparently in a dream, the people from the future visit him and offer him the chance to escape by joining them. Instead, he asks to be sent back once more to the world of his past, this time to stay, and this request is granted. The end of the film comes swiftly. In this final return to the past, the man has been sent exactly to the scene at Orly airport. He walks down the pier—­he can see the woman waiting for him at its end. This is the scene of his original memory, the “image” that has marked him since childhood. As he gets nearer, he suddenly recognizes a prison guard from the camp. Just before the guard shoots him, and he falls to the ground, one arm outstretched—­in one of the

Painting at a Standstill 197

most iconic, most often-­reproduced images of the film—­he realizes “there was no way out of time and that this haunting moment he had been granted to see as a child was the moment of his own death.” The film ends. The technique of the film is perhaps its most striking feature: it is made up of a succession of still photographs. Of course, all films are made up of still photographs, which are run through the film projector at a speed—­usually twenty-­ four frames per second—­that helps create the illusion that we see moving images. But in Marker’s film, we see a succession of discrete still photographs. The structure thus exemplifies medium-­specificity: the displaying of a work’s formal structure as deriving from the material properties—­in this case, still photographs—­of the particular medium the work is in. Continually returning filmic illusion to its static, photographic base, La Jetée grounds its production visibly in that basic materiality. The peculiar technique of the film also works in the service of an essentially traumatic construction of memory. In Marker’s construction, what is remembered—­what is burned, imprinted, “marked” into the memory—­is only what “scars.” The traumatic character of memory in La Jetée is narratively doubly emphasized by the fact that the memory image the hero has retained since childhood turns out to exert such an inexorable hold over him because, at its root, it is the knowledge of his inevitable death. By virtue of the film’s technical construction of the memory image as a still photograph, this traumatic logic

5.4  Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. 16-­millimeter black-­ and-­white film, sound, 28 minutes. Film still. © 1963 Argos Films. Image © 1992 Urzone, Inc., Zone Books, New York.

Chapter Five 198

is further allied to a construction of photography. The photographic image is given the capacity to affect the subject like a blow. Still photographs have, of course, long been construed as a privileged repository or stand-­in for the indelible impact of a memory image, partly because the searing of light onto the photographic plate or negative to make the impression is so easily analogized to the searing impact of an indelible image in memory. Marker’s technique works to liken the still photograph as closely as possible to the memory image that burns or imprints itself upon the memory. The photographs pulse into vision and then fade, supplemented by sequences that dissolve, overlay, and superimpose images. Sections are bounded by black screens, like a slow blink, and some single images are also set off in this way (for example, the first sequence of scenes that the protagonist rediscovers in the past). These formations mimic varieties of visual recall, the filmic articulation taking on the mnemonic structure of our mind’s eye. The film reinforces this traumatic logic, associating photography, memory, and scarring by presenting another species of the seared-­in mnemonic image. As the man and woman walk around Paris together, we see their images against white chalked and scratched markings on surrounding walls. “Their only landmarks are the flavor of the moment they are living and the markings on the walls,” the voice-­over says, assigning the scarred and gouged walls the memorial function of monuments, granting to them something of the same physical purchase on time—­the quality of capturing the “there, then”—­that is typically assigned to photography. If images “mark” the memory, inscribing the subject, here the mnemonic image is presented to us modeled upon urban graffiti. Indeed, the photograph of graffiti produces its own visual scar, resurfacing again later in the film. Marker’s film thus visually models the action of photography as, like graffiti, an especially powerful mnemonic image—­one that marks or scars the screen. (Marker’s own name, a pseudonym, also perhaps suggests this action of the photographic or memory image.) Marker has reported that his unusual filmic technique derives materially from a proto-­cinematic device, or makeshift seeing machine, he played with as a child: the Pathéorama, which he describes as first producing in him the desire to make a film: It was a funny-­shaped object. A small tin box with irregularly rounded ends, a rectangular aperture in the middle and on the opposed side a small lens, the size of a nickel. You had to insert gently a piece of film—­real film, with sprockets and all—­in the upper part, then a tiny rubber wheel blocked it, and by turning the corresponding knob the film unrolled, frame by frame. . . . If you were rich you could lock that small unit in a sort of magic lantern and project it on your wall (or screen, if you were very rich). I had to content myself with the minimal version: pressing my eye against the lens, and watching. . . . Of all my school buddies, Jonathan was the most prestigious. . . . So it was natural that he was the first to

whom I wished to show my masterwork. . . . Jonathan managed to get me sobered up. “Movies are supposed to move, stupid,” he said. “Nobody can do a movie with still images.”43

Yet Marker redeems this failure. From this first “movie with still images,” a film is later born. The central sequence in La Jetée seems to symbolize the possibility that the material base can sputter and jump into (illusionistic) life. The woman is shown in bed, sleeping, in a tightly framed close-­up on her face and shoulders (figs. 5.5–­5.6). Successive still photographs fade over one another, showing her head on the pillow, in different positions as she stirs, turning in her sleep. It is in this, perhaps the most celebrated sequence of Marker’s film, that the only true sequence of moving-­image footage occurs, in the midst of the several still photographs, superimposed on one another. The successive overlayered photographs—­in a visual rhythm that seems to construct the images as overlapping petals or leaves—­begin to give an approximate visual impression of the moving image. Like a flower blossoming, from the ever more rapidly overlapping photographs of the woman sleeping, all at once, the sequence in true moving-­image film appears. The woman’s head lies on the pillow. Her face is presented almost straight on. There is an almost imperceptible shift of the image—­the outlines of her face blur and move a little—­and she opens her eyes, and smiles. Then the film shifts back again, to a still image of her face, smiling. This sequence is the most explicit derivation of film from the photograph. It is the work’s most “materialist” moment, but it is also the passage in which the illusionism of film is given to us most lyrically, won in true modernist fashion from an emphasis on the work’s materiality. It is in this sequence that

5.5  Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. 16-­millimeter black-­and-­ white film, sound, 28 minutes. Film still. © 1963 Argos Films. Image © 1992 Urzone, Inc., Zone Books, New York.

5.6  Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962. 16-­millimeter black-­and-­ white film, sound, 28 minutes. Film still. © 1963 Argos Films. Image © 1992 Urzone, Inc., Zone Books, New York.

Painting at a Standstill 199

Chapter Five 200

the “promise” of film obtains a momentary life: the promesse de bonheur that Stendhal said was the essence of the beautiful.44 The promise held out to us for a moment here, in line with Stendhal’s dictum, is that the material base can come to miraculous life and, momentarily, we can escape into a world of illusion. But the ultimate structure of the film shows the failure of that illusion, producing the inexorable return of the subject to his—­and to the film’s, and so to our—­materiality. Death, the “outside” of the order of the symbolic, is confirmed as that which cannot be woven into illusionism, or into consciousness. Film—­as based in still photography—­cannot mend or heal or transport the subject beyond this, Marker’s narrative construction tells us (and yet, his film suggests, this is implicitly its purpose). Bitter and renunciatory of illusion, but nevertheless held in illusionism’s thrall, La Jetée is materialist in its self-­evident structure but narratively structured in desiring relation to a woman’s face and, in particular, to that sequence in which the memory image of a woman is revivified and set into motion. Thus, La Jetée seems to redouble and expand on the form of reflexive denial that also apparently structures Richter’s Betty: the deliberate extending to the viewer of a glimpse of the illusionism of which this art form is capable, while at the same time insisting that it remain only a glimpse, held in check by emphasis on its materialist base. And just as in Betty, so in La Jetée, this traumatic structure and projective desire is bound to (the loss of ) an image of a woman’s face. That the desiring male gaze is the narrative motor of the film is made clear not just by its explicit pretext, of the male subject’s search for the woman whose face he so vividly remembers seeing as a child, but in the angle of the shots throughout—­for example, in the sequence describing the couple’s visit to the museum, which is accompanied by the most romantic music in the film (Trevor Duncan’s score at this point is reminiscent of Gustav Holst’s Venus from The Planets suite, 1914–­16) and which, for the first time, includes photographs of the woman laughing—­apparently, she is now relaxed and happy in the man’s company. Indeed, the voice-­over narration says that the woman now seems “tamed.” One photograph in this sequence recalls the physical intimacy of the previous sequence, when we saw her lying, apparently undressed, in bed; this photograph is also the first (and only) one to show the man taking a direct and apparently desiring visual interest in her body: The woman is standing with her back to the camera, looking into a glass case in the museum; with one arm, she is reaching back and pulling her hair to one side, swept halfway up her head, exposing her neck. The man is shown in profile view, to one side and slightly behind the woman, looking intently at her neck (again, recalling our view of Betty in Richter’s painting). And yet, although the woman’s image (as at one point the narration explains) was the “bait” the experimenters used to lead him back in time and, correspondingly, is used in the film as the lure that leads the narrative on, it turns out that this image—­the close-­up on her face—­was not the real meaning

of that scene. As the film’s narration makes explicit at the end, the “haunting” image that had been granted to him out of time “was the moment of his own death.” When the hero went back in time, he thought he was returning to the woman whose face he had seen on the jetty at Orly, but what he discovers over the course of the film is that he is “returning” and at the same time traveling forward to his death. The hero cannot bring to conscious memory this traumatic knowledge. Instead, he is doomed to repeat his exposure to the trauma, in the grip of the compulsion it exerts over him. What masks the trauma is a screen memory, frozen into a structure of disavowing, fetishistic desire. This is a more fixed, frozen, and fetishistic model of the screen memory than we have seen in previous chapters, its component parts an original trauma, the inability to bring to consciousness traumatic content, its consequent repression, the compulsion to repeat exposure to the original trauma, the fetishization of a woman’s image erected as a screen to cover over trauma, and finally the return of the repressed. We are shown the machinery that lies beneath the fetishistic image. When the nameless protagonist is first hooked up to the time machine, we see an image of the body penetrated by the apparatus (fig. 5.7). His suffering convulsions replicate the jerking movements Benjamin argued were typical of the mimetic bond between body and filmic technology, and the machine’s operations to derive images from his mind and synchronize its own image-­ productions with his psyche provide a grim image of what the film theorist Jean-­Louis Baudry was later to describe as the Plato’s cave of hooked-­up synchrony between viewing psyche and moving images on screen.45 This dark episode (which takes place in the cavelike underground vault of the scientists) and the image of the suffering body it produces are effectively overwritten, pushed back, and turned aside by the image of the turning female body that follows: that beautiful sequence of quickly overlapping stills, then miraculously moving images, in which we see the sleeping woman turning in her sleep, back and forth, and finally opening her eyes to gaze back at the viewer, and smile. What could better exemplify the illusion of an “equipment-­free reality” that Benjamin described as the “Blue Flower” moment of film? In the context of

5.7  Chris Marker,Painting La Jetée,at a Standstill 1963. 16-­millimeter black-­ 201 28 and-­white film, sound, minutes. Film still. © 1963 Argos Films. Image © 1992 Urzone, Inc., Zone Books, New York.

Chapter Five 202

what has gone before, where we are vividly and at every moment recalled to consciousness of the equipment from which a moving-­image film is made, this one short sequence of truly moving images demonstrates how redemptive and aesthetically restorative a glimpse of an apparently “equipment-­free” experience can be. It turns aside and sublimates our memory of what was shown to us earlier in the film, when the nameless protagonist was first hooked up to the memory machine. What is more, amid the images overlapping like the petals of a flower, we see at last a woman’s face: consistent with the stakes of Benjamin’s argument concerning aura, the crucial event in this sequence is the moment when she opens her eyes, returns our gaze, and smiles at us. And yet the experience is precisely and intensely uncanny: it is a moment simultaneously of hair-­ raising joy and of horror, as what was thought to be still, or sleeping, opens its eyes, moves, returns our gaze, and, indifferent to, unaware of, our shudder, smiles at us. We are convulsed. This moment, when the woman returns the viewer’s gaze, is something that Richter’s Betty denies us. Nevertheless, I would argue, we may see in Richter’s painting the same logic as in Marker’s film, supplying compensations for loss in the distracting superfluity of visual detail, which is spread across the canvas. The painting, like the film, thus erects a fetishistic screen memory, disavowing loss, even while loss is manifestly what it screens. This structure of loss is bound to a particular logic of the gaze, which is based around romantic longing directed toward a female figure. Yet at the same time, Richter’s painting makes visible the technology that has cost us the restoration of aura: the twist in Richter’s figure’s body, as I have said, also embodies a scar, enfleshing the action of the photographic apparatus, mimicking the action of the camera shutter that has clicked at exactly the moment the girl’s body swings away. The penetration of technology into the subject’s body is thus made as clear in this painting by Richter as it was in La Jetée. This duality, or a productive ambiguity, can be made clear by comparing Richter’s work with other paintings. Look at Richter’s Betty alongside the figure pictured, for example, in Jean-­Auguste-­Dominique Ingres’s Valpinçon Bather (1808) (fig. 5.8), in which the woman’s body is turned away at a similar angle, the two forming a symmetry, like butterfly wings, in relation to each other. The importance of fabric in the Ingres, and the knots repeated across the canvas—­in the woman’s turban, at her elbow, at her ankles, and in the rumpled bed sheets—­are remembered, perhaps, and condensed in the knot of Betty’s pose, her toweling jacket, and her knotted hair. Yet the photographic conceit that the figure has “just turned away” does not form part of Ingres’s figure’s logic, sustained as it is, instead, by the classicizing traditions of portrayal of the nude. Instead Ingres’s painting thematizes, we might think, the action of painting, finding a bragging mirror or model for the painting surface in the smooth, polished expanse of the woman’s back. Likewise we might recall Caspar David Friedrich’s Woman at a Window, of 1822 (fig. 5.9), only to be reminded that

Painting at a Standstill 203

5.8  Jean-­Auguste Dominique Ingres, The Valpinçon Bather, 1808. Oil on canvas, 57 × 38 inches (146 × 97 cm). Louvre Museum, Paris. © Musée du Louvre/RMN-­Grand Palais (Louvre)/Gérard Blot.

5.9  Casper David Friedrich, Woman at a Window, 1822. Oil on canvas, 18 × 13 inches (45 × 33 cm). Old National Gallery, Berlin. Photo: National Gallery of the National Museums in Berlin. © bpk-­Berlin/Nationalgalerie, SMB/Jörg P. Anders.

another model for painting’s surface that Richter rejects, along with that of the mirror, is the window. A window, or at least a view, is what the heritage of the Rückenfigur, or back-­turned figure in German art, would lead us to expect. Richter’s substitution of an opaque monochrome surface for the expected view beyond is a further dimension to his painting’s denial of vision, even as it confirms that reference to the heritage of German Romanticism is deeply woven into his painting. A more absurd, startling, and alarming comparison that nags beneath the surface of Richter’s Betty, I think, is René Magritte’s The Rape, of 1934 (fig. 5.10). This is, surely, an obtuse comparison. The Magritte is fleshy, odious, crude. But the crudeness has the force of saying something unsayable—­which is perhaps precisely what the Richter leaves unsaid. Indeed, materially, at the level of facture and technique, although we might not like to think it, the Magritte is perhaps a closer comparison to Richter’s painting than the works by Ingres or Friedrich. And surely we must acknowledge that something of its

Chapter Five 204

5.10  René Magritte, Le Viol (The Rape), 1934. Oil on canvas, 29 × 21.5 inches (73 × 55 cm). Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Hickey-Robertson. © 2015 ADAGP, Paris/ DACS, London.

knot of flesh and hair has wormed its way into Richter’s composition. Above all, something about the terrible blindness of the Magritte—­the way its perverted anatomy embodies “eyes without a face”—­intensifies our sense that one thing at work in Richter’s painting is a fetishistic dynamic in which blindness is crucial. Altogether these comparisons help us understand our own shudder in reaction to Richter’s painting. They expose that it is a woman’s body that is at stake in the romantic notion of “aura,” and that aura is constructed through a traumatically based fetishistic disavowal of, yet simultaneous longing for, this body that relies upon constructing the female body as a support or screen for

the projection of the subject’s fantasy, and has the potential to freeze us in a regressive politics of the image. La Jetée exposes further that our longing for aura, in its regressive dimension, may be understood as driven by what Freud described as the death drive, tending toward our own dissolution or nothingness—­although fetishistically, we deny this, and disguise it through a screen memory of ideal, peaceful (re)union.46 Yet we should not believe that either Marker’s film or Richter’s painting entirely participates in such a construction, or that this is the only way to see them. For in rejecting both window and mirror as models for painting’s surface, in embodying blindness and so punishingly denying vision, yet at the same time enfleshing a deep, mimetic bond between body and image technology, Richter’s Betty, like La Jetée, also dialectically reveals the nature of our investment in the image, in the question of painting in relation to other technologies, and in the nature of the change in consciousness that the reception of these technologies has brought about. It enforces a mimetic shudder for the camera flash, in our reaction. As we have seen, the auratic “Blue Flower” moment is structured in Benjamin’s text, and in the cultural heritage that extends beyond it, by a particular politics of the image (a moment when aesthetic wholeness is restored because the woman’s image supplies imaginative restitution to the viewer), and to this extent, Benjamin’s account of aura, like La Jetée, is fetishistic. Nevertheless, Benjamin also employs technology to articulate and reveal this structure of the auratic, and to marshal a technological reaching beyond it, to craft an account of the way in which a utopian futurity is extended from the fragments of post-­auratic form. In his account of Chaplin, for example, or the miraculous animation of Mickey Mouse, he gives an account of a forcing into life of inanimate material that, in its affective charge, is somehow, miraculously, not uncanny, enforcing an emphasis on forward movement from the very site of our confrontation with alienation and nonbeing. To draw this out, however, and to begin to see how the technologized image can be constructed differently, it is necessary to supplement the optic I am constructing with one more film. Ten years after La Jetée, the example it offered concerning the potential of a time-­travel narrative to explore simultaneously the theme of memory, a medium-­specific meditation on film, and the question of our relation to the technologically mediated image was taken up by Andrei Tarkovsky in his film Solaris (1972). Another science-­fiction fable, this work may also be understood as preoccupied with the question of futurity, and the conflict produced by our longing for the past and our simultaneous, equally intense drive to leave it behind. Solaris was Tarkovsky’s third film, after Ivan’s Childhood (1962) and Andrei Rublev (1966; released in 1971). To many critics, Solaris seemed a strange departure after those more straightforwardly “classic” biographical films, based on the life stories of historical Russian figures. That it utilized the popular genre of science fiction and that its source was a novel (Stanislaw

Painting at a Standstill 205

Chapter Five 206

Lem’s book of the same name, published in 1968) set Solaris apart. Ironically, it may have been partly because of the lighter, more mass-­cultural genre of Solaris that Tarkovsky was able to get this film past the censors with fewer changes than any of his other films. Indeed, it has been suggested that this was one reason for his choice of a mass-­cultural form, after the many difficulties and five-­year delay he experienced in getting Andrei Rublev released.47 Solaris has sometimes been negatively compared with Tarkovsky’s other films, possibly because of this more “popular” genre, and perhaps for the same reasons Tarkovsky distanced himself from it in later years. Yet the film continues to fascinate contemporary audiences, and (aided by the Hollywood remake in 2003, directed by Steven Soderbergh) has become one of his better-­known works. Perhaps Tarkovsky’s sudden move to science fiction with Solaris becomes less surprising if we imagine that he saw Chris Marker’s La Jetée before making it. Certainly, we know that Tarkovsky watched other French New Wave films, and Marker and Tarkovsky later came to know each other. Indeed, Marker filmed Tarkovsky in the 1980s, and released a biographical portrait of Tarkovsky, made from this footage, in 1999, as the fifty-­five-­minute film One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevitch. (Interestingly, Marker’s film opens with a scene of reunion between Tarkovsky’s son and the boy’s mother, Lena, who with Tarkovsky had been exiled in the West and had not seen her child for five years.) But whether or not Tarkovsky saw La Jetée before making Solaris, Solaris, I want to suggest, provides a compelling comparison with La Jetée. The plot of Solaris is similar in its essentials, if not in some of its surface details, to that of La Jetée. A man is given the opportunity, it seems, to “travel back in time,” to return to the possibility of a past relationship with a woman he loved, who has died. The hero of Solaris, Chris Kelvin, is a psychologist, who is sent to investigate the causes of the apparent mental breakdown of the entire, three-­man crew of a space mission and, if possible, to secure their return. Like La Jetée, the film is set in some unspecified future time. The trip to the space station is passed over quickly; the film moves swiftly, effectively, from initial scenes at Kelvin’s home on Earth, to the situation on board the space station. He discovers that what has driven the crew almost mad is that the planet they are orbiting, called Solaris, has the power of bringing back to apparent life people they had once loved, but who now, on Earth, are dead. Most importantly, the figure of his own wife, Hari, who had committed suicide ten years before, appears, apparently alive, and unaware that “she” is dead. The main part of the film is taken up with the interaction between Kelvin and the apparition, or copy, of his wife—­his initial fear and panic, his first attempt to get rid of her, and then his change of heart, to an acceptance of the new Hari and the desire to remain on the space station with her, in an attempt to relive their relationship anew. This state of precarious equilibrium is increasingly threatened by Hari’s gradual recovery of “memories,” her learn-

ing of the real Hari’s death, and her gradual rejection of the identity of “Hari,” resulting in suicide attempts, which eventually succeed. The ending of the film is notoriously ambiguous; it is unclear whether Kelvin returns to earth or finds a recreation of earth on Solaris. The film ends with the narrator’s voice-­over expressing the hope “that the time of cruel miracles was not past.” Both Solaris and La Jetée tell stories of a man returning through time to a woman from his past, and a short while of his living with her there. Both use a science-­fiction pretext, treated more or less perfunctorily, to establish the narrative possibility of the situation; both use film to explore the longed-­for possibility that the past might be relived differently. Both have as narrative drives a male subject’s desire for the image of a woman: a memory image, in each case. Both use the power of this desire as the motor that turns back time and propels the story into motion. In Solaris, however, a piece of grit is introduced to this filmic machinery of desire: the woman’s difference from the memory image of her that has been constructed by the male subject. “I am not Hari,” protests the woman, eventually—­and when she says this, the film-­work stutters and illusion is shattered. She is not the woman Kelvin remembers, and she does not serve solely as the screen, or support, for his imaginative projections. There is a gap, a space, a difference, which she increasingly experiences between Kelvin’s memories of his wife, as they begin to flood her, and her experience of herself as a new, living subject.48 This, indeed, is her most painfully utopian aspect. This contrast with La Jetée is further brought out by comparison of a core sequence in each film: the overlapping images of the woman turning in her sleep and eventually waking up, in La Jetée, and the sequence in which Hari tries to commit suicide by drinking liquid oxygen, in Solaris. The two offer equally compelling performances of the derivation of the image of a body in filmic or “living” motion from the image of a body “stilled.” Marker’s derivation of moving images, or film, from successive still photographs of the woman sleeping is an epiphanic moment of the birth of film as a blossoming, in which photographic stills, like the wings of a butterfly or the petals of a flower, overlap into blurred movement. The woman’s opened eyes and her smile at the viewer are the visual yield or reward of this moment. Tarkovsky’s sequence is equally virtuosic but, by contrast, the impact is horrifying. Waking from sleep, Kelvin discovers Hari’s lifeless, corroded body lying on the floor, in a corridor (fig. 5.11). He knows she will rejuvenate, since he has seen this happen before, after an incident in which she tore through a metal door, producing lacerations on her arms and body that healed before his eyes, a surface of smooth skin effacing the marks. So he sits down to wait. Suddenly, the corpse begins to return to life (fig. 5.12). Blood and damage melt away, as Hari’s body is jerked in a sequence of horrifying, violent convulsions (figs. 5.13–­5.15). She coughs and retches and thumps around and eventually, like the woman in La Jetée, opens her eyes (figs. 5.16–­5.18). Kelvin and a fellow scientist, Snaut, stare in horror, before Snaut turns away. “I never get used to these eternal resurrections,” he

Painting at a Standstill 207

Chapter Five 208

5.11–5.18  Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris, 1972. 35-­millimeter color film with black-­and-­ white sequences, sound, 167 minutes. Film still. © FSUE Mosfilm Cinema Concern.

says, as he leaves. The differences between these sequences speak directly to the different constructions of the technologically supported image that each work offers. The women in both films, La Jetée and Solaris, may be seen as personifications of photography, in being reanimations of memory images. Hari herself is a “mechanical copy,” generated out of alien material by the planet Solaris, with

skin that is as smooth as celluloid: a perfect, reanimated image that supports the male character’s desiring projections. Like the photograph, she has a horrifying capacity to be reduplicated, endlessly, and as such may seem to be the embodiment of the “simulacral,” the copy without an original—­personifying the seductive beauty of illusionism, and the threat and horror posed by mechanical reproduction, often represented in mass culture by women’s bodies.49 (The planet Solaris doubles this capacity, bringing forth life on the spaceship that it holds in orbit, as if it were a mechanical womb.) In both La Jetée and Solaris, we see the flickering life of a woman brought into being by means of the harnessing of the body to an apparatus of mechanical reproduction. In Solaris the apparatus is the spaceship, bound to the planet it orbits, which apparatization produces flickering, living images from the memory images stored within the crew members’ minds. These images develop in the dark, like photographs, and like photographs have an endless capacity to be duplicated. In La Jetée the image-­apparatus, or seeing machine, is the literal machine to which the nameless hero is hooked up. We see him strapped into the chair, pads placed over his eyes, wires connected to his temples, as the scientists attempt to harness his strong, eidetic memory images as the final component of their time machine, which will be a compound of the man’s body and their technical instrument. It is this compound apparatization of the body that releases his memory images into a renewed, semi-­photographic life. But in La Jetée, this image of the filmic body is sublimated by the beautiful, tranquil image of the woman’s face, fully interpenetrated with the filmic apparatus, as her own turning movements in the bed become one with the overlapping images of the projection until the final perfect illusion of a moving image is achieved. As a result, the representation is fetishistic, and the trajectory of La Jetée is to sublimate, superimpose upon, or otherwise hide the suffering, technologically interpenetrated body. Like Benjamin’s Blue Flower, this representation works to restore the illusion of an “auratic” filmic object that “returns the viewer’s gaze”—­which can only be experienced now, however, with a shudder. By contrast, Tarkovsky’s image of the woman awakening, jerking back to life, is nightmarish, especially in comparison to the lyrical and beautiful passage in Marker’s film. It is nonfetishistic and nonauratic, refusing to supply an illusion of a non–­equipment-­based reality. Paradoxically, I want to suggest, this is precisely what makes the film more deeply and painfully utopian. Tarkovksy might be seen as condensing the two moments in Marker’s film (the moment when the sleeping woman awakes, and the jerking of the hero in the trance induced by the “scientists”) and thus fulfilling the Benjaminian account of film, in its shocking fragmentation of the image and the viewer’s body, providing the convulsion of aesthetic experience, now in a new guise. More than this, however, Hari speaks, in Solaris, and rejects the identity she has been given, or positioned to occupy, by Kelvin’s memories of his wife. This is an opportunity the woman in La Jetée is never given: the possibility of speaking and directly

Painting at a Standstill 209

Chapter Five 210

repudiating the mnemonic purchase of the photographic image, and the central male character’s desire, on her identity; the possibility of resisting the use of her image to “fix” a traumatic instant in the male subject’s history; and the possibility of pointing, instead, to the fluid, flickering differences woven into continuing, living experience from photographic and mnemonic fragments. Thus, the figure of Hari in Solaris might be understood as representing the possibility of an alternative account of photography’s impact on the texture of our experience, our memories, and the arts that are our means of articulating these things, and founding a sense of futurity in this fragmentation. For Tarkovsky’s Solaris puts the machinery of the image to work to articulate the point of view of the “other,” who is excluded from the modernist story arc (told in La Jetée in voice-­over from the point of view of a male narrator). Solaris deploys the filmic apparatus to split the image of this other, the beautiful woman, into fragments and to speak in the space that is thereby opened, while, at the same time, showing the cost to the female subject of setting her image in motion as the ideally beautiful “promise of happiness.” This cost widens to become the cost borne by all subjects, male and female, for a too-­insistent, regressive attachment to an image of the past. In Tarkovsky’s film, the technologically supported image, once set in motion, becomes the engine or dynamic for the destruction of myth and the beginning of different forms of speech; indeed, for the speaking of difference itself. It is this that is responsible for our response to the film having the quality more of a shock or thrill than a shudder—­the shiver of the possibility in which we hardly dare to believe, rather than the convulsed recognition of the dreadfully familiar, already known. In La Jetée, Betty, and Solaris we are presented with three visions of the body and the photographic apparatus interpenetrated. In La Jetée, photography’s impact on the body and the psyche is represented as a loss and identified with trauma. It may seem that this is the case in Betty too, for the representational schema, wedded to photography’s mnemonic capability, may seem to be positioned as firmly looking back, with the instant of the photographic click modeled as a traumatic blow. But in Solaris, we see the prospect of future change, which the apparatization of the body brings about. With the interpenetration of body and apparatus comes the opportunity for a new order of forward-­moving experience. Like Benjamin’s idea of the “expert,” the viewing subject is retooled for the new world order. This may be a “new barbarism” with a razor-­sharp edge, but it is an edge to which, Benjamin would suggest, we nevertheless must hold.50 And arguably it is a movement that may be understood as glimpsed, at least, in Betty: for the girl, after all, is caught in the act of turning around.

Pathos formulae

I want to explore, in conclusion, a methodological note. My procedure in

this chapter has been to follow the trail started by the figure of a young girl, arrested in swift and sudden motion. I have suggested that her appearance in Richter’s painting represents a knot made up of strands buried deep within the culture. I have unpicked the texts and objects braided into her appearance and found echoes of other female figures, whose status between stillness and movement is the central fact about their representation and the core secret of their emotional efficacy. I have shown that in La Jetée, Betty, and Solaris, we are presented with differing visions of a female body interpolated with an image-­or mnemonic-­apparatus and personifying the photographic image. In each case, this image of a female figure is presented halfway between a still and a moving image, and this halfway state, this confusion or condensation between stasis and motion, a kind of fluttering or blurring, is what enables the image to become even more eloquent of some intense state, of beauty and pain. This procedure and its results must remind us unavoidably of the work of Aby Warburg, one of the first art historians and a near-­contemporary and friend of Walter Benjamin. Warburg’s first published paper, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring” (1893), centered on his attention to what he called the “bewegtes Beiwerk” in these paintings, which in English is sometimes translated as “accessory forms in motion.”51 In Venus, for example, the figure’s waving hair, the curling waves, and the draperies blown by the wind all impart a sense of motion to and about the figure, although she stands still gazing out at the viewer. Through close study of the textual sources available to Botticelli, Warburg argued that it is in these features that the influence of the antique can be detected in the art of the Renaissance, a point he developed in later papers and summed up with the formulation that “the influence of antiquity on the art of the Renaissance led to an idealized style of intensified mobility.” This helped him build an argument he intended as a direct counter to Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s construction of classical art as representing a principle of calm grandeur and serenity.52 Gradually over the course of Warburg’s work, his interest in “accessory forms in motion,” supplying a suppressed sense of animation to a standing figure, expanded to include the figure of a woman walking or running, arrested in forward motion. In the fictitious correspondence on the subject of this figure that he began with his friend André Jolles in 1900, the two discussed Dominico Ghirlandaio’s fresco, The Birth of St. John the Baptist (1486–­90) (fig. 5.19), and in particular, pointed to the young woman running in from the right-­hand side of the painting.53 She does not belong in the picture—­who is this figure breaking in from outside? Warburg identifies her as the “ninfa,” which he elsewhere defined as the “Renaissance type of the young woman of Classical antiquity”—­a principle of the antique, invading the represented, Christian scene.54 And so the figure of the “nymph” or striding woman (“Miss Hurrybring,” as he called her in his notes) came to stand, in Warburg’s thought, for the central

Painting at a Standstill 211

Chapter Five 212

5.19  Dominico Ghirlandaio, The Birth of Saint John the Baptist (before restoration), 1486–­90. Fresco, Santa Maria Novella, Florence. © 2013 Photo Scala, Florence/ Fondo Edifici di Culto-­Min. dell’Interno.

problematic of his study, what he called “the renewal of pagan antiquity” (taking his lead from, but transforming the German art historian Anton Springer’s phrase “the survival of pagan antiquity”).55 The figure of the girl arrested in motion came to stand for the migratory image-­form itself, whose course he was to pursue across different settings and works and through time, down the centuries. Hence the place of the image of the walking woman within Warburg’s compilation of an art history without texts: the image-­boards composing the seeing machine he called his Mnemosyne Atlas, which he began in 1926 and continued until his death in 1929. The image of the girl arrested in motion became, in Warburg’s work, an exemplary instance of the dynamic force of “memory,” or of the persisting memory image (l’image survivante, as George Didi-­Huberman has called it): flickering, flourishing, intermittent; crackling across historical interstices, vividly flashing into life, across the photograph-­ studded surfaces of the Atlas panels.56 In the correspondence with Jolles, Warburg explicitly modeled the hunt for this migrating image-­form as a tale of romantic pursuit, supposedly motivated by a viewer falling in love with the figure of a girl (here the role of the infatuated lover is taken by Jolles, at Warburg’s direction). This correspondence bears a strong coincidental similarity with the plot of the German

author Wilhelm Jensen’s 1903 novel Gradiva, analyzed by Freud in his paper of 1907.57 The novel tells the story of a young man who falls in love with the figure of a walking woman he sees in an antique marble relief. The name the young man gives this figure, Gradiva, describes her particular motion, one sandaled foot flexed and poised after the other—­a motion the story describes as possessing a particular power to charm and captivate the hero. This conceit, of a contemporary man falling in love with the representation of a young woman from the past, was also used later in the century, as we have seen, by films such as La Jetée and Solaris, to enable their male heroes’ journeys, through the motif of the romantic pursuit of an image of a woman, back through time. My method here bears some similarity to these others: just as Warburg did, I have followed the track of a young girl, caught in motion or in the action of turning away, her arrested movement the impetus that sets a chain of images into motion. My purpose, however, has been not simply to utilize this topos of romantic pursuit, but rather to demystify it and uncover what it conceals. Utilizing the filmic image in particular has been integral to this purpose. For Warburg, this walking figure stood for his wider pursuit of the recurrence of particular image-­forms across time and media. Her movement through images became a figure for the traveling image-­form itself, her Eintritt making her a figure for the breaking-­in of the image from the past into works of other times. Above all, however, the image of the girl arrested in motion came to embody the promise of new technologies: first, that of print, as the platform supporting what Warburg suggested we might cease to describe, mystically, as the “Renaissance,” and instead come to recognize as the age of technologically enabled “internationally migrating images,” and latterly, that of photography, as the very condition of possibility for his own comparative method of study.58 And yet to understand the essential ambiguity of the personification, it is important to note the particular way in which Warburg modeled the mnemonic force of this figure. The nymph became one of what Warburg termed his “Pathosformeln” or pathos formulae: figures whose “emotive gestural language” bring “true, antique formulas of intensified physical or psychic expression into the Renaissance style.”59 More specifically, in his reconstruction of Warburg’s thought, based on Warburg’s unpublished notes, E. H. Gombrich has argued that the Pathosformeln were figures carrying an emotional charge because their present appearance concealed a twist or braid whereby the emotional state they originally conveyed had come to be converted into its opposite.60 In particular, those figures whose animation today is present in accessory forms, or in a particularly flowing movement of walking or stepping, were once figures expressive of a state of frenzy, whose gesture conveyed the most intense states of horror or fear. It is accordingly one of the accomplishments of the Renaissance to have converted these states into grave, mysterious forms of beauty, but their particular sweetness carries its charge because of the still-­felt undertow of pain.61 Hence the particular

Painting at a Standstill 213

Chapter Five 214

mnemonic power of such figures as the striding girl is founded in an original trauma. Once again, as we saw also in the case of Chris Marker, this is a theory of memory as a searing or branding of a particular image, except that here its receptive surface is posited as something more like a collective consciousness, or what Warburg terms the “empathetic pictorial memory” of the viewer.62 According to this account, the particular conversion that the nymph or striding woman represents is of the figure of a maenad, or woman carrying a head, who becomes a woman often carrying a bowl of fruit (as in Ghirlandaio’s Birth of St. John the Baptist).63 This buried or sublimated identification of the nymph as a head-­carrying girl links the image to the myth of Orpheus, who was torn limb from limb by maenads—­a death that seems to suggest the violent, vengeful return of the woman he had abandoned underground. What is so useful for my purposes in the analysis thus enabled by Warburg is precisely this oscillation: the nymph in suppressed or stilled animation, dialectically flickering between fruit-­bringer and head-­carrier. Just as the movement of the girl caught in midstep enabled her to become a symbol for Warburg of the movement of images through time, so the movement condensed into her figure—­the flickering of her identity between head-­carrier, symbol of barbarism, and fruit-­ bringer, symbol of civilization—­enables her to become a figure simultaneously embodying our anxieties about the loss of the past and a painful sense of hopefulness for the future. Is the progress enabled by technology a regression or an advance? Her double oscillation renders her motion precisely undecidable: is she moving forward or turning away? Warburg kept his obsessive focus on her suppressed animation not just for its expressive power, I want to suggest, but because, just as Klee’s Angelus Novus functioned for Walter Benjamin, the nymph’s movement enables her to embody the dangerously poised potential of a dialectical image: shedding gleams of light both forward and back, pressing on the questions both of what we have lost and of what may potentially be enabled by technological change. The potential cost of technology’s impact on our experience and our image-­making is made clear in Warburg’s project. Atlas displays pictures in precisely the sort of jumble that André Malraux, writing in the 1940s and influenced by Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay, would describe as the “museum without walls” or musée imaginaire, in which all kinds of false or merely morphological similarities can be posited in a virtual space, existing in a vacuum of history. Richter’s enterprise too (like Marker’s) is deeply structured by the mnemonic. The photo-­paintings, which “remember” painting’s once-­given task of imitation; the repertory of painting’s past styles that his work parades and thereby preserves as if in museal form; the practice of overpainting works (sometimes progressively obliterating figurative paintings with abstract gestural sweeps)—­in all these ways it may seem Richter has drawn the structure of “memory,” with its accompanying threat of forgetting,

deeply into his practice. In addition, beginning in 1962 (as we saw in chapter 3), Richter has compiled his own photographic collection that he exhibits on large boards and, like Warburg, calls Atlas. This functions as a vast memory machine for his painting practice, supplying compositional motifs and preserving photographs and drawings he will later use, as well as source materials relating to existing paintings. Yet Atlas contributes to the sense that each painting’s mnemonic or preservative function is negated, because even when one image is selected, saved from the flood, and preserved, it suggests, the senselessness of choosing to “remember” this one, by painting it, is accentuated by knowledge of its place within this background flood of images. While an individual image might be preserved, the reference point of every painting is, in the end, this vast, amnesiac image bank in which it is impossible to keep one’s place or remember the individual images one has seen. Indeed, Richter’s Atlas seems constructed more in line with Siegfried Kracauer’s famously expressed pessimism about photography, according to which, “the flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory.”64 In several essays, Benjamin Buchloh has discussed Richter’s Atlas in relation to Warburg’s, and suggested that Richter’s revival of the model of the picture-­ atlas represents a bleaker articulation of the form compared to the comparatively optimistic faith in memory he sees as driving Warburg’s project.65 I think, though, that Richter’s and Warburg’s positions, like Walter Benjamin’s, are more ambiguous, and the stakes of “optimism” or “pessimism” cannot be so neatly shared out across the pre–­and post–­World War II divide. Richter’s Atlas, after all, contains a number of drawings (not mentioned by Buchloh, who emphasizes the photographic element in the collection), in which museum rooms appear reimagined as spaceships or viewing machines, with gigantic windows offering dissected and cutaway views of paintings and photographs, often of the sky (figs. 5.20–­5.21). These drawings, resembling sketches for futuristic spaceships, their viewing windows looking out onto unknown galaxies, are reminiscent to me of Benjamin’s visionary enthusiasm for iron and glass construction and his descriptions of the way in which such architecture shapes our vision, functioning as an optical instrument or viewing machine, which he compares to the expert, surgically penetrative vision enabled by photography and film.66 Such an envisioning of the “shaping” potential of media, to re-­gear our perceptual faculties, and re­source a new configuration of aesthetic pleasure, is to be found in Richter’s painting, too—­or so I have proposed here, exploring its possibility in relation to his portrait of Betty. For my purposes, these drawings serve as a useful warning against the kind of relation to the past that, I suggest, a too-­fixed relation to aura (or to the idea of a medium) produces. Richter’s Betty, I think, represents this stasis, yet the alert viewer can also understand her as warning against it. The look backward that Richter’s figure models for us has the potential to rivet us into place as

Painting at a Standstill 215

Chapter Five 216

5.20  Gerhard Richter, Atlas—­Rooms, 1971. Two color photographs (mounted on sketches of rooms), 26 × 20 inches (67 × 52 cm). © 2013 Gerhard Richter.

5.21  Gerhard Richter, Atlas—­Rooms, 1971. Two color photographs (mounted on sketches of rooms), 26 × 20 inches (67 × 52 cm). © 2013 Gerhard Richter.

surely as the Gorgon’s head, yet Betty’s burnished hair shields us from her full face, as if blending the figures of Perseus and the Medusa in one (as, I argued earlier, she does Orpheus and Eurydice). This we might call her filmic function, and as precedent we might remember Siegfried Kracauer’s argument that the cinema screen has an apotropaic function, which he likened explicitly to Perseus’s shield (lent to him by Athena, goddess of wisdom), as a surface that captures and repeats moving images.67 Thus, in place of the frozen stasis that Betty’s pose might appear to model, I want, figuratively speaking, and have tried through my procedure in this chapter, to try to release her buried dynamism and restore her buried identity as rushing nymph or striding woman. I have sought to use Betty and the women in La Jetée and Solaris—­all turning figures, undecidably poised between turning forward and turning back—­to represent the dialectical edge of photography, and technology more widely,

within culture. My aim has been to see in Richter’s work the possibility of a buried filmic or technological aesthetic, rather than a great “masterpiece” of painting, seductively mourning the loss of the “perfect” image, and thus to avoid letting myself become frozen into horror by what Frederic Schwartz has called the “Medusa-­stare” of the auratic work of art when it returns in the age of late capitalism.68 To this end, I have compiled my own “atlas”—­tracing the recurrence of a particular figure, the nymph, arrested in motion—­in order to produce knowledge and to undo myth. Unpicking the braid means uncovering the full dimensionality of the intermedia space within which the figure of this girl is painted, and allowing the nymph to turn, to be set in motion once again, and to speak differently to us of alternative futures and technologies. The artists I have studied model the apparatus of mechanical reproduction variously as a planet orbited by a spaceship; a time machine hooked up to the eidetic traces within a subject’s psyche; and the archive, utilized as a painting machine by Gerhard Richter. Each case has produced the image of a woman made into a walking photograph or speaking likeness (recalling Bellmer’s doll in chapter 2, also staged as a seeing machine for a male artist). My argument has aimed to explore the complications of the gendering of the technological image and mass culture, and to reveal the psychoanalytical stakes of the nostalgia that is buried within certain forms of modernism. In my final chapter, I take examination of some of these questions further by turning to a female artist’s excavation of the machinery of film, to produce a revision and transformation of the film machine, as the ur-­model of the apparatus itself.

Painting at a Standstill 217

Chapter Five 218

6.1  Tacita Dean, Kodak, 2006. 16-­millimeter color and black-­ and-­white film, optical sound, 44 minutes. Film still. © Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

6.2  Tacita Dean, Kodak, 2006. 16-­millimeter color and black-­ and-­white film, optical sound, 44 minutes. Film still. © Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

The film machine

Tacita Dean’s forty-­four-­minute film Kodak (2006) takes place in a Kodak factory in France that, when it existed, produced 16-­millimeter film. At the time she filmed there, it was slated to close, and indeed, the building has since been demolished (fig. 6.1).1 Kodak opens with a close-­up on the machinery, filmed in black and white, and as it progresses we see shots of technicians and workers, sometimes attending the machinery and sometimes, as in one shot, just sitting in the canteen eating lunch. The focus of the main body of the film, however, is the machinery, which in extended sequences we are shown in operation, winching and rolling large sheets of polyethylene through a series of chemical processes. The film switches to color at a certain point, and vivid splashes, in particular a lurid, spectral violet, erupt, seeming to shimmer out beyond the bounds of the steel-­gray machinery and reels that harness it (fig. 6.2). This color, this light, which we are given to understand is the body or matter of film itself (in French, la pellicule), appears to be the love interest of the work, the main point of which seems to be to record its joyous leaps, or “irrational exuberance,” its sheer excess producing an aestheticized spectacle that seems simultaneously to derive from and to surpass the conditions of its manufacture.2 The film appears to follow the progress of a working day, and as it draws to a close, increasingly we are shown empty rooms and corridors, machinery switched off and inactive.

219

Chapter Six 220

This structure makes a point: we are being shown a scene of manufacture and of decline, both the beginning and the end of film. (A companion piece to Kodak makes the point even more self-­reflexive: Noir et Blanc, 2006, is a short work Dean filmed using the last five rolls of black-­and-­white film she was able to buy before the company ceased manufacture of this stock.) Furthermore, in Kodak we are shown, almost didactically, the difference between film and a material substitute: for unexplained reasons, at one point in the manufacturing process polyethylene is replaced with brown paper on the spools and reels.3 We see the moment when the opaque paper replaces the translucent, light-­ filled, colorful film: the last reel of film whirls off the spool and then—­darkness, “closure,” “end,” as the wheels keep turning but only inert paper rolls through, and the dialectical fireworks are over. This demonstration seems to sum up the business of Kodak: showing heavy, industrial machinery, visibly operated through wheels and spools, producing evanescent and seemingly magical effects, and so laying bare a construction that has been pervasive throughout twentieth-­century film criticism and theory. This is an understanding of film as a combination of technical apparatuses, harnessed cunningly to physiological features and psychological propensities to produce effects of illusion that enthrall and seduce spectators; a combination of machinery and magic that is summed up in the characteristic, slightly oxymoronic phrases and descriptions that proliferate in film history, such as “dream factory,” or “fantasy machine.”4 It is this way of imagining film that makes the scene of a factory seem almost a primal scene for film itself, and which in turn suggests the reason film may provide such useful ground on which, at the close of this book, to reappraise the question of technology and its relation to modernism. Indeed, we might understand film as the quintessential machine of the machine age, providing a certain kind of model for what a machine is and encapsulating a machinic imaginary that became fundamental to modernism. (As we saw in my introduction, it was heralded as such by experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton, who in the early 1970s called film the “Last Machine.”5) The finest kind of woven, fine-­spun cloth, produced on the nineteenth century’s most accomplished loom, of all modernist inventions, film represents most powerfully and clearly a brute stitching of material with immaterial substance. Film’s visible workings—­wheel, sprocket holes, motor—­are shared with other, iconic examples of nineteenth-­century machinery, such as steam engines and spinning looms, yet the material it harnesses—­first, of course, the pellucid strip of celluloid, but more visibly and palpably, light—­rivals even the steam that was pictured by Édouard Manet, for example, in Le Chemin de fer (1873), in its capacity to stand for the more immaterial functions of imagination and fantasy that, I have tried to show in this book, the machine age simultaneously harnessed and unleashed.6 Thus, film offers a spectacle of production that (like Klee’s oil-­transfers, as we saw in chapter 1) readily offers itself for interpretation as phantasmatic: a condensed and operational model for the psyche.

Furthermore, film’s audible workings, the clank and whirr and rattle of its parts, together with the speed with which it assembles multiple units into something that appears seamless, also helped join it, in modernist imaginings, to factory production: early twentieth-­century accounts define film in terms of “an assemblage of individual units” in “rapid succession,” producing a “rationally ordered succession of actions.”7 Such descriptions helped to establish an understanding of film as not a single but a compound machine; an assemblage of numerous different technical apparatuses (for recording images and for projecting them; for recording sound and replaying it in synch; for controlling the context of viewing, placing viewers at an appropriate distance and regulating light conditions). Thus aggregative, and assembled in parts, film was understood not only as a scene of collective labor, joining together the skilled work of many distinct technicians and practitioners, but also a work producing a new kind of collective reception, because it is, unlike painting or sculpture, durational, and because it shapes and structures what the viewer can at any point attend to, semi-­coercing emotional or affective responses from him or her and joining the audience into one body almost physically via their shared and enforced physiological reactions to film editing and the succession of events unfolding in the diegesis. The machinery of film, as Stephen Heath has pointed out, was in its earliest days part of the spectacle that audiences paid for; sometimes it was the film machine itself, rather than individual films, that was advertised on playbills as the main attraction.8 The importance of the film machine to Tacita Dean is clear too: she usually insists on including the 16-­millimeter projector in the exhibition space, close to the projection surface and the audience. Its clatter and whirr accompanies and mixes in with the soundtrack she has made for the film, real machine sounds thus combining with more immaterial and representational sounds to weave the space of the room into a web combining immediate physicality and a location “elsewhere.” At a figurative level, within the work itself, Dean also makes reference to the film machinery: early on, the self-­referentiality in Delft Hydraulics (1996) was spotted by the American critic Roberta Smith, who grouped Dean with “several young artists [whose] involvement with film . . . [is] extensive and diverse and often quite self-­referential. For Tacita Dean . . . a short loop of what appears to be a wave machine shows the shimmering surface of a tank of water undulating until it begins to suggest an autonomous ribbon, perhaps of film.”9 For Jeremy Millar, also commenting on this film, “the surface of the water increasingly [suggests] the gelatinous ribbon that twists around the spools and loops through the projector,” and for Laura Cumming, “the waves . . . ribbon through their glass tank as ceaselessly as the spooling film.”10 Thus, through formal reference to the filmic apparatus in the way she treats architectural forms, machines, or even sunsets, Dean’s works characteristically develop a structure of medium-­specificity.

Farewell to the Machine Age? 221

Chapter Six 222

And yet, while medium-­specificity is a structure found in many of her films, Dean also transforms it: in Bubble House (1999), for example, where the oblong windows of the globular, space-­age building, opening onto the sky and the sea outside, are mapped, over the duration of Dean’s long takes, onto the cinematic apparatus, coming to figure the aperture of the camera, the frames of the filmstrip, and the “window” of the screen itself. Or in the barred and divided windows of Fernsehturm, also from 1999, which resemble a filmstrip and move around in a slow but continuous horizontal slide. In both cases, found physical structure is overlaid with the materials of film in an almost Surrealist, chance operation which has the rigor of modernist self-­reference but subtly warps it by bending it to meet visibly decaying objects. In other cases, the medium-­ specificity Dean’s work performs has been seen as referring to archaic devices and materials belonging to the prehistory of film: the echoing of Cinemascope frames of the windows in Bubble House; the resemblance of the circular chamber in Fernsehturm to “the slot-­pierced outer drum of a zoetrope”; or the likeness between the circular, 360-­degree depiction of landscape in Fernsehturm and that in such proto-­cinematic devices as the panorama.11 The medium in these cases figures as a set of technological objects and apparatuses, outmoded toys and gadgets, comprising a store of artifacts to be mined. Medium-­ specificity is thus understood in a way that is subtly different from how it is sometimes presented, not so much as a rigidly physical self-­mapping, as an exercise in mismatch to different physical devices, producing a gap or fissure within the films, opening the work to the past. Medium-­specificity in this more expanded and historical sense is something seen to great effect in Disappearance at Sea (1996), the work in which Dean’s mature aesthetic was first and most decisively established (figs. 6.3–­ 6.4). A film of a lighthouse, the glass lamp-­chamber shot in close-­up as it turns, Disappearance at Sea develops a formal structure of medium-­specificity by using the lighthouse as a light-­projecting device, its rotation, the shadows it casts, and the flicker it produces reperforming the filmic apparatus. But the way Dean films the lighthouse also encapsulates and telescopes a certain history of visual forms and provides a long historical view. The sequences of Disappearance at Sea that focus on the lighthouse machinery establish a parallel to László Moholy-­Nagy’s 1930–­32 film Lightplay: Black, White, Gray (fig. 6.5).12 Lightplay is comparable to Dean’s film in being a complex visual spectacle of turning machinery and changing light. However, the structure that Moholy-­ Nagy filmed was a light-­projecting device he had constructed, the Light-­Prop for an Electric Stage (1929–­30) (fig. 6.6), a kinetic sculpture designed to rotate, casting patterns of light and shadow about itself. Moholy-­Nagy intended his film to be projected in the same room as the rotating sculpture, and the film was a key document in his wider project, a technologist uniting of the arts, harnessing new technologies to stimulate the human sensorium to the maximum. Its aim was to achieve a transformative and euphoric cognitive-­visual experi-

6.3  Tacita Dean, Disappearance at Sea, 1996. 16-­millimeter color anamorphic film, optical sound, 14 minutes. Film still. © Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; Marian GoodmanFarewell Gallery, to the New York/Paris.

Machine Age? 223

6.4  Tacita Dean, Disappearance at Sea, 1996. 16-­millimeter color anamorphic film, optical sound, 14 minutes. Film still. © Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

6.5  László Moholy-­Nagy, Lightplay: Black, White, Gray, 1930–­32. 35-­millimeter black-­and-­white film, silent, 5 minutes, 15 seconds. Film stills. Museum of Modern Art, New York/ Moholy-­Nagy Foundation. © 2013 Hattula Moholy-­Nagy/ DACS, London.

6.6  László Moholy-­Nagy, Light-­Prop for an Electric Stage, or The Light-­Space Modulator, 1929–­30. Metal, plastics, glass, paint, and wood, with electric motor, 59 × 28 × 28 inches (151 × 70 × 70 cm). Harvard Art Museums/Busch-­Reisinger Museum; Moholy-­Nagy Foundation. © 2013 Hattula Moholy-­Nagy/ DACS, London.

Chapter Six 224

ence and to reimagine, or realize more fully, the utopian potential of a contemporary technological-­industrial form. “Lightplay” (Lichtspiel) was a term used for cinema in Germany at the time, and Moholy-­Nagy’s Light-­Prop is a clumsy mimic-­version, a seeing machine, or material reconfiguration at smaller scale, constructed in order to materialize and reperform cinematic spectacle. Dean reprises but also stands at an angle to this modernist dream, employing a found object from the everyday world rather than a new, utopian form of sculpture. She uses color, sound, and implied narrative in the film’s temporal structure, passing from morning to sunset, to rework and transform the modernist aesthetic of the earlier work. Thus, in Disappearance at Sea, as elsewhere in her oeuvre, we see Dean probing the sedimented layers of modernism, stirring around the embers to see what flickering images, what narrative possibilities, might be released today by modernism’s most utopian visual documents. The body of film that she excavates, as we shall see, is not Moholy-­Nagy’s purely formal, light-­shedding kinetic spectacle. Exploring and dismantling the buried narratives within modernist technological enthusiasm, Dean reexamines the question of film and how the experience it provides might reconfigure the contemporary viewer. In the use she makes in all her works of the implicit diurnal narrative—­a day passing from morning to night—­and in other narratives, such as the story of Donald Crowhurst, which she explores in texts positioned as “asides,” at the margins of the film-­work, Dean’s aesthetic is also literary, narrative and theatrical.13 Above all, Dean opens a temporal gap with modernism even as she reconnects to it, exposing a radically historical perspective on her chosen forms and objects. The buried phantasmatic spaces within modernism are further released and explored in Dean’s work via the way she constructs film as a site of projection. Her attention to the specificity of the cinematic apparatus thus operates not so much to “materialize” the filmic object, as seen in 1970s structural and structural-­materialist film, as to emphasize the sense of empty space produced by the parameters of mechanical equipment, camera, light beam, screen, speakers, and viewers.14 In keeping with this articulation of film, many of Dean’s works investigate the interiors of large, hollow architectural spaces, an interest she has developed in particular through her exploration of the soundscapes of these interiors. Gellért (1998), for example, exploits the acoustic resonance of a marble-­tiled, women-­only bathhouse in Hungary. The rushing noise of water and the echoing voices create an atmosphere of dense and constant, muffled noise that accompanies the images of women walking, wading, floating, or climbing the long marble steps in and out of the baths—­so much so that watching the film is dreamlike, hypnotic, like being underwater. The hissing sound of water deadens one’s awareness of time passing; as the women pass to and fro, the whole film’s duration seems to extend indefinitely. Such mapping of the filmic apparatus over a hollow architectural shell is something Dean also explored in Bubble House the following year (where

the sea and a rainstorm are witnessed outside the structure, through the windows), but in Gellért the sense of the filmic apparatus that emerges is given added physical specificity by being filled with women’s bodies. Through the women’s movement, their echoing voices, and the splashing sounds they make in the water, they physically and audibly materialize the space they occupy so that it comes to read almost synecdochally as a vessel shaped by curves and liquids, holding living bodies within it. At the same time there is an audible and visible “lack of fit” between any too direct mapping of body onto space (since the bodies and voices do not fill the space but only expose its surrounding emptiness), and it is the technology of Dean’s jointed recording apparatus that receives and supports this leakage. Dean’s work is useful at this critical juncture, then, not just because it returns to and incorporates older, modernist structures and forms but also because it seems to offer such an exemplary musing upon the failures of modernist technological and political utopias, and the modernist aporias around narrative and emotion. At its best, Dean’s work offers us a history of technological forms, cast back and projected from the present, as if her film-­work were a historical prism; and indeed, Dean’s work shows us, this is the particular, projective capability of film, and the best reason for foregrounding it as an exemplary mechanism when constructing a history of twentieth-­century art. But the sense that what her work offers is (as with Richter’s Betty) a glance cast backward, and so shaped by being cast from a different temporal point, and the imbrication she achieves between the technology she uses and the materiality of the different, chosen bodies in which she metaphorically embeds it, are, I think, precisely what also allows Dean’s work to introduce an alternative perspective on the material she examines: drawing out the phantasmatic and bodily spaces that modernism tended to repress, and palpably articulating the material difference that her angle of view makes to the past. To say as much is already to begin to differ, subtly, from existing critical accounts of Dean’s work, which collectively emphasize, it is true, Dean’s preoccupation with the past, but tend to account for this in terms of the age of the objects and the technology she uses, as mining energies of “obsolescence,” developing a structure of the “archive,” or employing the affective tropes of “nostalgia,” whether “critical” or otherwise.15 The romance of ruins, the pathos of lost objects, or long-­ago aspirations recuperated for the present—­the critical potential here is all seen in the objects themselves, as if Dean’s work were simply to capture, retrieve, or record them. This is not my understanding of the interest or potential invested in Dean’s long look back. Instead, what interests me is Dean’s reconfiguration of the history of machine and technological aesthetics to support her particular concerns, one of which, I think, is inheritance. Dean, perhaps preeminently among artists working with the projected image today, visibly and palpably invests in the materiality and functional operations of her technology. It is these that shape

Farewell to the Machine Age? 225

the view her lens adopts, the light her work casts, and the projections her work forms, even as she uses these things to produce a temporal fabric of gaps and rupture within the film-­work. What is at stake in this particular version of a machine aesthetic? Why foreground the machinery of film in such a way as to expose it to time-­lag? What, after all, is the object—­film—­to which Dean holds so tenaciously and yet works so insistently to metaphorize and transform? And what does Dean’s articulation of the historicity of film suggest about the ways in which film might continue to shape new forms of the projected image today, and continue to inform our sense of bodies, time, and vision in what is already a postfilm age? Chapter Six 226

Mechanical ballets

To begin to explore these questions I will focus on the particular form of the “mechanical ballet,” through which the longer historical perspective that Dean brings to modernist visual histories, and the particular rendering of them she performs, may helpfully be analyzed. Borrowing the phrase from the title of Fernand Léger’s 1924 film, I use “mechanical ballet” here to describe a form of bodily mimesis in which machinery is turned into dance, productive work repurposed into aesthetic form, and the routines and actions of industrial making made abstract and mined for their qualities of lightness, rapidity, and rhythm. The term emphasizes the question of machine technology’s relation to the body: ballet, after all, is a form devised upon and articulated through the body, even as it submerges and transforms the body into a more idealized, more “machinelike” and corporate or collective version of itself. We have already seen versions of this form in Dean’s work, in Disappearance at Sea and again in Kodak, in the spectacle of light and color dancing above and surpassing the productive mechanical operations pictured in each. One of Dean’s most recent works, however, focuses specifically on dance, and the formally self-­ reflexive, historically complex, and visually arresting projective structures she develops in this piece makes it an apt closing study for this book and a way to review the history that I have constructed: from Duchamp, through postwar neo–­avant-­gardes, to contemporary art, each set of forms and practices nested in the other and compressed via the long lens through which Dean’s work casts and reviews it. Craneway Event (2009) is a 108-­minute film showing the late American dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham rehearsing his dancers (figs. 6.7–­6.8). The work for which the company is shown preparing, also called Craneway Event, is one of a series of “Events” that Cunningham made alongside his other dance pieces throughout his career, each commissioned for a special, unconventional venue. This particular piece was designed for the space shown in Dean’s film: a disused Ford car assembly plant in Rich-

Farewell to the Machine Age? 227 6.7  Tacita Dean, Craneway Event, 2009. 16-­millimeter color anamorphic film, optical sound, 108 minutes. Film still. © Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

6.8  Tacita Dean, Craneway Event, 2009. 16-­millimeter color anamorphic film, optical sound, 108 minutes. Film still. © Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

mond, California, overlooking the San Francisco Bay. When it was suggested to Cunningham that he make an Event in this place, Cunningham himself invited Dean to become part of the project.16 The building shown in Dean’s film is called the Craneway Pavilion. Designed by industrial architect Albert Kahn in 1930, it is a beautiful, spare encapsulation of a certain industrial aesthetic. The large pavilion area we see in the film was used, as its name suggests, for hoisting cars and tanks onto waiting ships in the period of its industrial heyday, but it is hardly surprising to learn that it was also used briefly as a film set in the immediate postwar period.17 Floor-­to-­ceiling windows with gridded panes—­designed to maximize daylight and so increase working productivity—­now make of the space something exceptionally well suited to visual art, and perhaps especially to film, since it is a complex cage of glass

Chapter Six 228

6.9  Tacita Dean, Craneway Event, 2009. 16-­millimeter color anamorphic film, optical sound, 108 minutes. Film still. © Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

panes, readily readable as lenses, framing both outside scenery and the space within. Regularly spaced pillars and a ceiling-­hung tracery of metalwork divide the hall into gridlike zones. The longest outside wall fronts directly onto the bay, looking out on what is still a working port. We see also the cantilevered ironwork of the Oakland Bay Bridge, which meshes with the gridded windows, adding to the machine aesthetic of the architecture. The window thus separates land from sea, which are shown to be zones of different kinds of labor. Within, we watch dancers rehearse, their bodies engaged in purposive yet purposeless work, repetitive and arduously physical, yet aestheticized and quintessentially unproductive. Without is a scene of large-­scale industrial labor, the machinery of ships and bridges, pulleys and hoists, counterpointed by a number of pleasure boats and smaller yachts, which, white-­sailed, mimic the smaller, lighter bodies of the dancers, flitting in and out among the industrial tugs and trawlers (fig. 6.9). The view through these windows supplies a constantly moving architecture of glass and metal, as geometries of masts and ships and boats slide past, meshing with the gridded windows and interior skeletal structures of the building to form elegant new abstract compositions. Bodies supply a second mechanical ballet, as they, too, are integrated into the wider scene: bodies imitating machine movements are shown operating in small groups, interacting like cogs and wheels, altogether appearing as moving parts within a larger machinery (fig. 6.10). The bodies of the dancers are integrated by Dean’s camerawork into the architecture, measured out against its pillars, for example, as in the image used for the exhibition poster when the work was shown in London in spring 2010 (fig. 6.11). The resemblance to Paul Strand’s 1915 photograph Wall Street (fig. 6.12) is striking: in each image human bodies are measured out against the regular structures and symmetry of an architectural facade, the figures shown as enmeshed in the larger structures of power, capital, and labor that these architectures signify.

6.10  Tacita Dean, Craneway Event, 2009. 16-­millimeter color anamorphic film, optical sound, 108 minutes. Film still. © Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

6.11  Tacita Dean, Craneway Event, 2009. 16-­millimeter color anamorphic film, optical sound, 108 minutes. Film still. © Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

6.12  Paul Strand, Wall Street, 1915. Platinum print, 9.8 × 12.7 inches (25 × 32 cm). © Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive.

Chapter Six 230

6.13  Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–­23. Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels, 109 × 70 × 3.4 inches (278 × 179 × 9 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier, 1952. © 2013 Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/ DACS, London.

There is, however, another artwork to which Dean’s film bears arguably a deeper relation and which may be used here as a critical instrument, providing a lens through which to see both Dean’s work itself and, more subtly, her reframing of Cunningham’s piece. This is the large work on glass (examined in chapter 2), made by Marcel Duchamp between 1915 and 1923, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, commonly called the Large Glass (fig. 6.13). This may at first seem an unlikely proposition—­Dean’s is a durational, film-­based work, while Duchamp’s is static and two-­dimensional—­yet the Large Glass, when used in this way, helps us to see both how Cunningham’s work speaks to the themes of mechanical ballets and machine aesthetics in twentieth-­century art and how Dean’s own work rearticulates these themes. Furthermore, as a scene describing the phantasmatic projection and “cinematic blossoming,” as Duchamp described it, of a female body, and depicting a mechanized rendering of sexual reproduction (or its failure), the Large Glass also helps bring into focus the question of the place of women artists in relation to the legacies of the historic and neo–­avant-­gardes, particularly as these may be articulated in film.

As is very evident when you’re watching Dean’s film, the figures are shown dancing on three sprung stages, one in the foreground (in the most common camera angle), one in the center, and one toward the back. The result is that groups of dancers appear to operate in several distinct areas, just like the figures in the different zones of the Large Glass. The dances performed by each group seem to describe discrete functions and sets of relationships, which operate both on the dancers in the immediate vicinity and in counterpoint with the other groups. A walkway joins the three stages, and dancers are often shown running along it, moving into new groups, bringing some dynamic “cause” into action to produce some new “effect,” like ball bearings rolling round a Farewell to the Machine Age? 231

6.14  Tacita Dean, Craneway Event, 2009. 16-­millimeter anamorphic film, optical sound, 108 minutes. Film still. © Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

6.15  Tacita Dean, Craneway Event, 2009. 16-­millimeter anamorphic film, optical sound, 108 minutes. Film still. © Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

6.16  Tacita Dean, Craneway Event, 2009. 16-­millimeter anamorphic film, optical sound, 108 minutes. Film still. © Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

Chapter Six 232

pinball machine. At other times, individual dancers and groups maintain considerable autonomy, seemingly ignoring the others’ movements—­something that may strike us as even more machinelike, since it serves to intensify the nonexpressiveness, nonnarrative sequence, and separability of parts that govern the dance overall. The whole comprises a ballet of fantastical moving parts that is very comparable, I think, to the elaborate comedy of cause-­and-­effect machinery figured in Duchamp’s Glass. Craneway Event was filmed over three days, and three times we witness the light waxing and waning from morning to evening. As each day wears on, the dancers appear increasingly as backlit silhouettes, increasingly anonymous, like the faceless workers in Strand’s photograph, or like the uniformed bachelors in the Glass (figs. 6.14–­6.16). However, the device also serves to shape our view of the dancers’ work and the avant-­garde history it represents through the passage of time, repeatedly calling our attention to the temporal distance that separates us from them. The contrast between Merce Cunningham’s aging body, confined to a wheelchair, and the young, agile bodies of his dancers is a condensed version of this trope, like a photographic “still,” a poignant temporal marker held within the film. Furthermore, there is a spatial axis to Dean’s positioning of Cunningham’s work and, beyond it, Duchamp’s: a very particular angle of view on the Glass is suggested by the oblique corner-­shot, looking down the length of the hall, which is Dean’s most common camera position in this film. The dancers seem held within the depth of the high-­ceilinged building, through which light pours, as if the whole were the Large Glass tipped on one side, as in the famous photograph of the work taken in Duchamp’s studio by Man Ray, Dust Breeding (1920). In Dean’s film, the fallen dust in that photograph is replaced by the golden light that slowly settles over the scene as each day progresses, but the sense that the work is implicitly positioned as a site of desuetude is retained. As we saw in chapter 2, Duchamp’s interest in the mechanization of the human figure dates back to his reaction against Cubism and formed part of the wider Dada interest in mechanizing human figures, and sexual relations in particular, during the 1910s and 1920s. The eroticized mechanicity of these works puts them in the realm of what has been termed “bachelor machines,” engaging not only in the armoring of male bodies after the shock of war—­in a belated, post-­traumatic effort to protect against that trauma—­but also the mechanization of sexual relations, thereby manifesting and enacting, but also forestalling and protecting men against, that other, psychic wound represented to them by women’s bodies (in the visual regime of sexual difference described by Freud), as well as usurping their reproductive capacity. The term “bachelor machine” comes from Duchamp’s own description of the ensemble of figures in the lower half of the Large Glass, but in ensuing decades was extended in the hands of various writers to describe a sadistic, punitive, and coercive machinery for achieving “reproduction,” in the sense both of writing, or making “copies,” and

of sexual reproduction, without women, through the inscription by a machine in the body of a man.18 Understood as such, the idea of the bachelor machine became important in 1970s France for describing the reproductive machineries of capitalism in a number of senses, including the ideological interpellation and reproduction of the subject via the harnessed system of what Louis Althusser called “ideological state apparatuses.”19 In film theory, it was invoked to describe the coercive enthrallment of the spectator by the cinematic apparatus, especially as this involved an enforced position of heteronormative desire, projected toward an image of a woman, whose position was thus established in the realm of the image—­present “to-­be-­looked-­at,” in Laura Mulvey’s phrase, but absent as a subject of desire or production.20 The evocation of the Large Glass by Dean’s film-­work, then, brings a further layer of filmic self-­reference and specificity to the operations of her work and the machineries she brings to view, and makes explicit the way in which her work excavates and analyzes the film machine, to put the question of “mechanical reproduction” at stake. The interest in rendering the body’s movements mechanical and machinelike, and in engaging with the human body as fragmented by filmic and photographic processes, was also a wider current running throughout early twentieth-­century avant-­garde movements. The Bauhaus master, Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet, which premiered in Stuttgart in 1922, was one of the best-­known works of modern dance during the 1920s, touring widely throughout Europe; Schlemmer’s ideas were also influentially explored through the theater workshops he led at the Bauhaus in this decade.21 Schlemmer’s desire was to conjoin the world of machines to a world of ideal forms (represented by pure geometrical figures and pure colors) to produce a harmonious synthesis: simultaneously a “spiritualization” of machine forms and a “purification” of the human, in a way that is typical of the distinctive blend of motivations behind the Bauhaus’s founding philosophy.22 Such idealizing fantasies arose, and arguably were necessary, precisely because, as we have seen through our study of Walter Benjamin’s essays of the 1920s and 1930s in chapter 5, the effort to visualize and represent the human body in conjunction with the machine was fraught with such dystopian anxieties. Duchamp also explored the mechanization of the human figure in the 1920s through his involvement in contemporary dance and, more specifically, with mechanical and cinematic ballets. In 1924, he appeared briefly, almost naked, playing the part of Adam in a tableau of Adam and Eve—­the original human “parents,” no less—­in the Dadaist ballet Relâche, which had music by Eric Satie and sets designed by Francis Picabia. This ballet was apparently inspired by André Derain’s and Satie’s desire to create “a parody of the Cinema,” with dancers imitating the mechanical movements and processes of film.23 In the intermission to this ballet, a short film by René Clair, Entr’acte, was screened, in which Duchamp also appears, playing chess with Man Ray, in scenes that are intercut with scenes of puppets, busy city roads, and a pirouetting ballerina.

Farewell to the Machine Age? 233

Chapter Six 234

6.17  Proof copy of invitation flyer for the Basil Dean/ ReanDean Theatre Company’s production of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R.(Rossum’s Universal Robots), St Martin’s Lane, London, April 1923. Reproduced by courtesy of University Librarian and Director, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester.

The fantasies at stake in transforming the body through mechanical means, examples of which we see in the work of Duchamp and Schlemmer, also fed into contemporary visual and literary representations of robots, seen famously in films such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis of 1927 but also in theatrical productions, such as Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R., or Rossum’s Universal Robots (the original source of the word robot, derived from a Czech word meaning “slave” or “manual worker”). As has been amply critically discussed, both Metropolis and R.U.R. work through anxieties concerning women’s bodies and sexual as well as mechanical reproduction in ways that were typical of the time.24 The reception history of these works is one in which Dean’s own family has played a part: her grandfather, Basil Dean, produced the first stage version of R.U.R. in Britain, at the St. Martin’s Theatre in London, in April 1923 (fig. 6.17). It is also a history to which Duchamp is connected: when R.U.R. was performed in Berlin the same year, the Austrian theater designer Frederick Kiesler made the set, an astonishing, flat, “electromechanical” wall of machine-­parts, through and across which actors moved laterally, rather than receding in depth, as in a

6.18  Frederick Kiesler, Farewell set to the design for Karel Čapek’s Machine Age? R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), Berlin, 1923. 235 © 2013 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Private Foundation, Vienna.

traditional proscenium space (fig. 6.18).25 As we saw in chapter 2, Kiesler later became friends with Duchamp and contributed to the American reception of Duchamp’s work, writing the first essay in English on the Large Glass, published in the special issue of View magazine devoted to Duchamp, in 1945, and illustrated with Kiesler’s extraordinary foldout collage, which overlaid parts of the transparent Glass onto photographs of Duchamp’s studio, translating these everyday objects into elements of the Glass’s machinery. Merce Cunningham’s aesthetic likewise forms part of the reception history of these early twentieth-­century avant-­garde forms, and an interest in machines, technologies, and the mechanical were an important part of this. Not only was Cunningham, throughout his career, committed to exploring the most up-­to-­date technologies and utilizing their effects onstage, from radio transmitters to motion-­capture computer software; his dance was also shaped in part by mechanization and modern, urban environments—­acknowledging and celebrating, as Roger Copeland has described, “the speed, fragmentation, simultaneity of stimuli and peculiar perceptual demands unique to the contemporary city.”26 A retrieval of the formal vocabulary of ballet was important here, in helping Cunningham overturn the expressive heritage of Martha Graham–­era modern dance in which he had trained, and indeed, ballet itself might be described as an industrial-­aesthetic form: born of the machine age, using bodies so drilled and trained as to become quick, light, strong, and capable of regularized, reliable, repetitive functioning.27 So too was the legacy of Bauhaus dance experiments extended through workshops at Black Mountain College, where Cunningham spent the summers of 1948, 1952, and 1953, as well as the influence of John Cage, whom Cunningham met in the 1930s and with whom he collaborated for the rest of his life.28 The work Cage and Cunningham developed was characterized by the use of chance procedures, the eschewal

Chapter Six 236

6.19  Oscar Bailey, curtain call of Walkaround Time, Upton Hall Auditorium, Buffalo, New York, March 10, 1968. Left to right: Carolyn Brown, Marcel Duchamp, and Merce Cunningham. © Estate of Oscar Bailey. Courtesy of Merce Cunningham Trust.

of narrative, the decentering of space onstage, the embrace of contemporary technologies, and the separation of dance from any reliance on music, making all elements (music, dance, and design) equal and autonomous in a collaborative mixing of media. Altogether, as we saw in chapter 3, this amounts to an aesthetic of anti-­expressivity that Branden Joseph has described with the term “transparency,” citing Cage’s account of how the transparency of Duchamp’s Large Glass in particular was important in helping him develop the idea of “silence” that he explored in 4’33” (1952), and aiming at what Copeland has called a new “politics of perception.”29 It was, perhaps above all, the shared recovery of Duchamp that linked Cage and Cunningham to artists such as Johns and Rauschenberg, and it was Duchamp’s anti-­authorial, anti-­authoritarian aesthetic that lay behind many of their innovations. All these elements can be seen in the work that perhaps links Cunningham’s work most closely to that of Duchamp, and to the Large Glass in particular, namely Walkaround Time, from 1968 (fig. 6.19). This piece had a set designed by Johns, from Richard Hamilton’s drawings of the Large Glass, comprising seven large, inflatable, translucent vinyl blocks, reinforced with aluminum rods, placed on stage and suspended in the air (fig. 6.20). Apparently at the request of Duchamp, as the dance progressed, the pieces of the set were arranged to form the whole design of the Glass.30 The score, by David Behr-

Farewell to the Machine Age? 237

6.20  Jasper Johns, set elements for Walkaround Time, 1968. Plastic, paint, dimensions variable. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2000 Art. © 2013 Jasper Johns. Licensed by DACS, London/ VAGA, New York.

man, was called . . . for nearly an hour . . . , recalling Duchamp’s smaller glass work To Be Looked At (from the Other Side of the Glass), with One Eye, Close To, for Almost an Hour, of 1918; the piece also had an intermission, or entr’acte, recalling Relâche.31 The interest in contemporary technologies is reflected in the very title of the dance, Walkaround Time, which came from computer jargon, referring to the time it took the massive, slow-­r unning computers of those days to complete a process, during which the programmer could do little more than walk around.32 And yet this up-­to-­date reference is shot through with the irony and satire of the Dadaist interest in faulty and nonfunctioning machines: “walkaround time” is precisely the sort of idle, superfluous, “purposeless movement,” as one commentator described it, that is generated in the human body as a reaction to being forced into harness with the functioning of a machine.33 The focus of Dean’s Craneway Event is thus not simply an old man, or an obsolescent form of industry, or modern dance (as critics who focus on the idea of obsolescence or nostalgia might have it). Through the particular way in which she films Cunningham’s company rehearsing, Dean’s lens become a telescope, in a manner that recalls Benjamin’s description of his method as a “telescoping of the past through the present”: catching up and condensing the

Chapter Six 238

histories of visual form to which these figures belong, and providing a new perspective on them, and excavating from within these histories questions concerning the body in relation to technology, sexual, and mechanical reproduction, and film-­work.34 We saw in chapter 2 that Duchamp’s form of mechanical ballet contributed to the historical avant-­garde’s destruction of artistic mediums and tradition, and in chapter 3 that Cunningham’s represented the reconfiguration of the human body and movement for the postwar period and the development of an anti-­expressive aesthetic. This is the site on which Dean pitches her own reconfiguration of the avant-­garde tradition that supports her, and it should be understood, I want to insist, as a reconfiguration, rather than an act simply of preservation or homage. For to Duchamp’s bachelor machines, and to Cunningham’s development of a mechanically enabled, decentered, and open transparency, to bodies like machines, and to the abstract structures of modernist architecture integrated with the moving parts of shipping, Dean adds a new machinery and a further form: a complex, moving dialogue of camerawork and editing, in relation to which the slowly swinging and sinking sun shining through the building’s glass windows becomes an allegory for the filmic apparatus, mimicking the machinery of light and lens, and imitating the camera’s swing and rotation. What new meanings does Dean’s own form of mechanical ballet, which is to say, her film-­work, bring to the scene of twentieth-­century technological aesthetics?

Dean’s telescope

As we have seen, Craneway Event is not Dean’s first filmic “mechanical ballet”—­that title belongs to her earlier work Disappearance at Sea, which shows the lamp in a lighthouse turning, in an abstract ballet of machinery that I have compared to László Moholy-­Nagy’s short film Lightplay: Black, White, Grey, which similarly supplies a visual feast of metal and glass, struts, and light-­ dazzle.35 Like that film, I would argue, Craneway Event poses the question of what it might mean to inherit a certain 1920s and 1930s machine aesthetic and a certain form of modernism. To the modernist scene in Moholy-­Nagy’s Lightplay, however, as also in Craneway Event, Dean introduces both lurid color and a sense of time passing, with the passage of a day toward evening. In the case of Craneway Event, there is an added dimension, for, as I have already indicated, the Large Glass is far from being a neutral “ground” on which to work. On the contrary, it is highly charged, specifically in ways that reframe the question of avant-­garde lineages and inheritance through the lens of sexual politics. Dean herself has spoken of Craneway Event as posing the question of the inheritance of the 1960s avant-­garde, writing of Cunningham’s death in 2010 that “his death is a rupture; the end of something irretrievable—­a lost contact with the American avant-­garde, and the generation who stretched back

to touch Dada and Surrealism.”36 It is easy, I think, especially in light of quotes such as these, to see Craneway Event and Dean’s aesthetic more generally as nostalgic—­with everything filmed in the “golden hour” before twilight. Viewed in such a light, everything in Dean’s work would appear benign, her film-­work a pure act of homage to Cunningham (and certainly many of Dean’s own statements lend support to such a view). But to take this view is to overlook the distinctive form of mimesis that Dean’s work performs in its own right, and the specific form of slightly off-­beam and anamorphic inheritance that she proposes. And it also means not seeing what I want to term Dean’s ambivalence, suggested, for example, in her positioning Cunningham’s dance-­work obliquely, as viewed through the Large Glass and, more specifically, through its positioning via Dust Breeding.37 It should be acknowledged that Dean’s work shares a number of elements in common with Cunningham’s aesthetic, notably, the hyperattention that both artists’ works solicit and demand, a requirement for prolonged looking and acutely sensitive attentiveness; the stillness, in Dean’s long takes, and a constant level of fluttering, micro-­movement that means a take is never simply “still.” As a result, Dean’s works, like Cunningham’s, are full of moments that seem empty of anything but the most ordinary scenery and yet indiscernibly fill as we watch, to the point almost of brimming over with color, richness, and detail. Both artists, moreover, are concerned with the materiality of their medium: Cunningham with bodies, Dean with film machinery. This means that Dean’s aesthetic, unlike Cunningham’s, is materially embedded in the specificity of film and is fundamentally concerned with light, time, and projection. Furthermore, what we are shown in Craneway Event is not Cunningham’s finished work; rather, we see dancers rehearsing and repeating their rehearsals, and Dean fragments these yet further, filming over the course of three days, so that the company’s work is shown in pieces, not adding up to a whole. While one might interpret this as continuing the radical, Duchampian, anti-­authoritarian openness of Cunningham’s model, to accept this view entirely would be to neglect to notice that we are shown a finished work by Dean, articulated through the cuts and editing she chooses to make. Her camera work, though unobtrusive, shadows Cunningham so closely as to offer, beyond an homage to his work, a doubling of his figurative footsteps, a second footfall, as if to render them limping; thus, she usurps his authorship, recasting the whole scene through her own lens. Craneway Event is one of a number of works in which Dean explores the figure of an older, male artist—­men who are old enough to be her father. There is, for example, an earlier companion piece, effectively a six-­part portrait of Cunningham: Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in Three Movements) to John Cage’s Composition 4’33” with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (Six Performances; Six Films), 2008 (2008) (fig. 6.21). This is the work that began her association with Cunningham, when she was asked to make a

Farewell to the Machine Age? 239

Chapter Six 240

6.21  Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham Performs STILLNESS (in Three Movements) to John Cage’s Composition 4’33” with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (Six Performances, Six Films), 2008. Six 16-­millimeter color films, optical sound, approx. 5 minutes each. Location photograph. © Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

work for the Manchester International Festival in April 2007. She has said she “wanted to introduce a moment of silence in what I could see was shaping up to be a cacophonous lineup.”38 So she invited Cunningham to perform to John Cage’s “silent” piece, 4’33”. The resulting work comprises six short films, each showing Cunningham striking three different poses, one for each movement of Cage’s work, as timed for him by dance manager Trevor Carlson. Each film is shown on its own screen, the six screens forming a complex cage of lenses, a projected “architecture” of images that unfolds like an opened-­out glass chamber through which the viewer must pick her way, as if performing her own stop-­start dance, responding to Cunningham’s movements and stillness onscreen.39 Dean herself has, on occasion, explicitly positioned the old men who fill her film-­works as “fathers.” Mario Merz, her film of 2002, was occasioned, she has said, by a “destabilizing” glimpse of Merz’s resemblance to her own father. Her film was made as a way of draining off this unsettling resemblance. After making the film, she said, she could no longer perceive the similarity—­as if the filmmaking had been a sort of exorcism or a way, perhaps, of making her father disappear.40 Dean has also spoken of wanting to make a film about Oedipus. But it is a very specific part of the story that interests her: the unwritten interstice between the first and second Theban plays, when Oedipus’s sisters/daughters lead their blind father/brother through the wilderness to Colonus, reversing

the usual direction of parental guidance and inheritance.41 In the absence of this as yet unmade film, based on an unwritten story, we might look back to Dean’s early collage drawings, thinking of them as anticipatory off-­cuts perhaps, in relation to the larger body of film-­works. There is one titled Oedipus, Byron, Bootsy (1991), for example, which provides a lineage—­or “footage,” in a pun on filmic language—­of distinguished males (“Bootsy” was a family friend, her sister’s godfather, and a supposed illegitimate descendant of the British royal family). The lineup here contrasts neatly with the collage drawing called My Feminist Foot (1991), showing a single foot; its aloneness on the page seems to pose the question of whether the artist belongs with the others, whether she stands alone, sui generis, without need of their support—­or whether, as the title suggests, she is gently sending them up.42 And so while one fantasy at work in Craneway Event is a certain model of ideal, fraternal, artistic collaboration—­indeed, Dean has described her work on this film, both during filming and, after Cunningham’s death, when she worked alone in the editing room with the record of his form and voice, as a kind of cross-­temporal collaboration, a benign and benevolent experience of artistic cooperation—­we should also recognize, I think, another, more ambivalent dynamic at work in the film, namely, Dean’s projection onto Cunningham of an Oedipal fantasy, the devoted discipledom of this projection enabling the simultaneous masking and articulation of a desire to usurp artistic “fathers.”43 The cross-­cutting of these two fantasies, together with their full dynamics of ambivalence, produces an inherently unstable situation for the viewer, which at first may be difficult to perceive, but which shapes the film with its fluctuating, quiet tension. The filmic specificity of her own “mechanical ballet” in Craneway Event, I suggest, enables Dean to do two things. First, through her cutting together of three days so that the occurrence of the sunset is visually emphasized and reiterated, she situates Cunningham’s work so that it visibly casts a shadow, and filming the figures orthogonally, against the light, she appears to cast his choreography through the lens of the Large Glass, so that we can see stretching back behind it the shadows of those other bachelors, Duchamp and Picabia. Projecting an Oedipal fantasy onto Cunningham’s work, these avant-­garde figures are presented as a lineage, the three stages receding back each from the other, readily reading as receding in time. Furthermore, cast in the raking light of the projections Dean establishes from her sharply orthogonal angle of view, these “father figures” are presented as not just old but archaic, the sun setting on that scene. Even as the spectral corps of avant-­garde bachelors is made to “rise up” from this “glass,” their legacy is tested and posed as a question, through the use of the form of the rehearsal: again and again we watch the choreography enacted by younger bodies, measured against the failing body of the “master.” In these ways, Dean’s film-­work is structured by a dynamic of ambivalence that she sets in motion to undercut traditional structures of authority and author-

Farewell to the Machine Age? 241

Chapter Six 242

ship (in so doing, of course, continuing Cunningham’s own tradition in the best possible sense). Second, however, Dean constructs an aesthetic that is quite different from Cunningham’s, and engages with or retrieves a very different bodily trace, one deeply embedded within the machinery of image-­making that she employs. One of the most marked differences between the two artists is that while Cunningham embraced the most up-­to-­date technology—­including digital technology—­Dean, famously, rejects it. Throughout her work, Dean positions herself at a distance from Cunningham’s and earlier modernists’ utopian faith in new technologies. And indeed, in holding on so tenaciously to the material apparatus of 16-­millimeter film, and in insisting that the body of the machine itself, the projector, be included in the space of each installation of her films, Dean finds, I want to suggest, something enabling in the very archaicism of this machinery. The distortion of Cunningham’s dance-­work, which Dean first casts through the Large Glass, viewing it from the raking orthogonal angle she most commonly uses, and then embeds in the machinery of her camera work and cuts, represents an articulation of that technological body, her apparatus, as an instrument of projection and a means of changing shape over time: her film-­work a vessel that holds, shapes, and distends the avant-­garde lineage even as it preserves it. We might see in this a gesture toward the reproductive capacity of the female body, mining and reconfiguring the character of film as a reproductive technology in these bodily and gendered terms. In this way Dean would be understood to perform a mimetic reception of the fundamental reproductive capacity of the film machine that, in Benjaminian spirit, transforms even as it reproduces.44 Such a reading could be strengthened by pointing to a third work Dean made based on glass, completed in the same year as her first portrait of Merce Cunningham. Prisoner Pair (2008) is a short film of pears growing in glass bottles, a custom in the historically contested Alsace-­Lorraine region, where the preserved fruits are used to make a special alcoholic liquor (figs. 6.22–­6.23). This film, like her portrait of the German translator Michael Hamburger, shown picking and storing apples (Michael Hamburger, 2007), evinces a dedication to the work of preservation and cultural transmission; viewed this way, both films can seem somewhat conservative and, again, dedicated to respectfully recording the work of one’s elders. But the extraordinary way in which Dean films the pears, encased in glass, speaks, I believe, against this view. Filmed in close-­up, Dean’s anamorphic lens redoubling the curves and distortions produced by the glass, the film suggests a more ambivalent dynamic of confinement—­a word that is relevant, perhaps, in more than one sense: being imprisoned (perhaps by the past), but also (especially remembering that the German word for “amniotic sac” is Fruchtblase, or “fruit bubble”), the now archaic sense meaning a woman’s period of pregnancy, when for a while she holds within her own body another developing body. Prisoner Pair is a markedly uterine film.

Farewell to the Machine Age? 243

6.22  Tacita Dean, Prisoner Pair, 2008. 16-­millimeter color film, silent, 11 minutes. Location photograph. © Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

6.23  Tacita Dean, Prisoner Pair, 2008. 16-­millimeter color film, silent, 11 minutes. Location photograph. © Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

Chapter Six 244

To adopt this reading would be to understand the work in terms of a historical, and not an essentialist, construction of film as bodily metaphor.45 The écriture feminine Dean constructs, on this view, is based in the histories I have briefly traced, of film as a “bachelor machine” or “writing machine,” substituting for, supplanting, and conjuring the female body in phantasmatic absentia. Taking up these metaphors, and casting or projecting the capabilities of the female body into the machine of the film apparatus, so that they skew the histories she re-­presents, Dean thereby derives the means to inscribe her own authorship into the histories of the visual forms she recasts. We see this in the way she works with sound, transforming the openness to sound that was Cage’s model of “silence” into a highly artificial sound-­envelope through her careful editing of soundtracks and the crafting of foley sound effects, creating what Briony Fer has termed a soundscape of buzzing jetsam, a sensitized environment constructed from found scraps.46 It is also illustrated, as I discussed earlier, by the echoing, resounding envelope of sound created in Géllert, in which the water-­filled environment of a women’s bathhouse comes to seem synecdochally modeled on the women’s bodies that populate it, through the acoustic lag captured by her recording apparatus. We see and hear something similar in Boots (2003), her three-­part film of a limping, Oedipus-­like elderly man, in which distant sounds of traffic and nearer sounds of birdsong are invited into an empty house through its open doors and windows: nature and culture intermixed, pulled through these apertures like a handkerchief through a ring. In Dean’s work, every material body she pictures is at the same time reconfigured as a technological body, grounded in the histories of mechanical reproduction—­much as Andrei Tarkovsky in Solaris, as we saw in chapter 5, deployed the female form (and, as a model of that form, the planet Solaris and its orbiting spaceship) to embody the futurity-­bearing condition of “mechanical reproduction.” To understand Dean’s work thus is to see it as a work of natural history, as Adorno described it, in which “the elements of nature and history are not fused with each other, rather they break apart and interweave at the same time in such a fashion that the natural appears as a sign for history, and history, where it seems to be most historical, appears as a sign for nature. All being . . . transforms itself into allegory.”47 What is at stake in such work? Why and how may it matter to us? Perhaps the most emblematic answer is supplied by an early piece, The Green Ray (2001) (figs. 6.24–­26). One of Dean’s simplest and shortest films, The Green Ray harnesses the operations of filmic projection to the natural phenomenon of a sunset viewed at sea, the sun slipping rapidly down behind the waves over its brief duration. The film’s original installation design made the mapping of apparatus onto natural phenomenon clear: the viewer pressed a button mounted on the projector to start the two-­and-­a-­half-­minute film, and the image of a sun appeared on the wall, nature conjured by “industrial light and magic.”48 When the brief minutes were up, and the sun had vanished beneath

6.24–27  Tacita Dean, The Green Ray, 2001. 16-­millimeter color film, silent, 2 minutes, 30 seconds. Film still. © Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

Chapter Six 246

the horizon, the film ended, the clattering whirr of the projector ceased, and its light winked out, leaving the viewer to listen to the sound of the reel automatically rewinding in the darkness. Once the reel had rewound (which owing to its brevity, didn’t take long), the viewer could restart the work and it would begin all over again. Few other projected image works in the gallery have so insistently foregrounded the analogue materiality of film: the images are given in this length of celluloid, which takes this long to process through the gate at projection speed and this long to wind back. Light from this bulb is shone through the celluloid, and the images are held at this distance to appear in focus when projected onto this blank wall opposite. Yet the simple content of the images works insistently, if apparently effortlessly, to metaphorize this materiality: the projector bulb becomes the sun; the vertical motion of the celluloid through the projector is the sinking of the sun in the sky; the circularity of the whole filmic process figures our own cosmological orbit which returns us at the end of each day, to a new beginning. In the process, Dean deftly unhinges “analogue” from implying authenticity or fidelity, exposing instead its phantasmatic and transformative potential to make one thing like another (however unlike it, it may seem).49 Thus, the work operates not to make film appear “natural,” in a version of the “naturalizing” operation that is quintessentially ideological, but rather the opposite: what we are presented with, after all, is a machine that mechanically reproduces a sunset at the press of a button. Like Walter Benjamin’s account of mimesis, this is “the world distorted in the state of similarity”: a making-­like that makes strange, and that refounds the natural world in our own techniques of imitation.50 And yet, this work also dramatically reveals the element in Benjamin’s analysis of aesthetic experience that exceeds mimesis. This element is color. As Esther Leslie points out, Benjamin’s essay “A Glimpse into the World of Old Children’s Books” (1926) has an epigraph describing “a green shimmer in the evening red.”51 In this essay, Benjamin continues the elaboration of mimesis as the basis of his aesthetic theory, again tying the phenomenon to children’s play, but also discusses the limitations of mimesis, since as he points out, the human body cannot produce or imitate color. Our aesthetic response to color is then described as a product of “pure imaginative contemplation,” from which arises “the colored glow, the colored brilliance, the ray of colored light”—­just as we also saw it arise in Kodak, at the moment when the film stock switched from black-­and-­white to color.52 Dean’s film is in fact dedicated to the capture of a visual phenomenon—­a “flash” of green light—­that for her became visible only when inscribed or captured in her technological apparatus. Dean set out to film a sunset in order to try to record the legendary “green ray,” reportedly glimpsed at sea, winking out, at the point when the sun finally slips below the horizon. The subject of numerous visual and literary representations, including a film by Eric Rohmer, a novel by

Jules Verne, and even a small assemblage constructed by Frederick Kiesler to Duchamp’s instructions for the Surrealist exhibition in Paris in 1947, the green ray offers what we might see as a complementary, slightly kitschier countertradition to that of the Blue Flower.53 In the event, Dean says, she didn’t see anything at the time, and it was only afterward, when she developed and projected the film, that she caught a glimpse of it. It was the apparatus that afforded her the “flash” of illumination, thus exemplifying what I have argued across this book is characteristic of Benjaminian technological aesthetics: understanding the capacity of technology as being to produce a revelatory form of aesthetic experience, precisely via its embedding in the technological apparatus. Thus, I understand the significance of Dean’s work—­or perhaps the significance we should take from it—­not as concerning the virtues of analogue media per se, nor as proclaiming a simple attachment to the past. Rather I see in it a drawing out of the deep potential for mimetic and playful engagement with technology that Walter Benjamin theorized. Benjamin, in the second version of his “Work of Art” essay, describes technology as the organs of the collective, to which we convulsively conjoin and with which we reach out, “just as a child . . . stretches out its hand for the moon.”54 Dean’s use of film demonstrates something similar: a framing of technology within our own bodies, with which we simultaneously take hold of the world and reach beyond it. In her particular articulation of film, Dean exposes the historicity of this technology and its capacity to support our projections of utopian futurity, in a flash of illuminating light. As we have seen in each of the preceding chapters, a similar work of rearticulating the body and the natural world via transformative technological mimesis has been part of the tradition of the art of mechanical reproduction, from Klee’s spare and diagrammatic reordering of the human figure through conceptual art’s drilling through of the experience of “nature” to systematically drain it and, at the same time, release new aesthetic effects both of richness and of desolation. Other artists continue to work with these legacies in different ways, in new media technologies. Such work may often be technologically hybrid, utilizing the legacies of the projected image via nonfilmic means of production. It may properly be termed post-­medium, or postcinematic, but nevertheless the histories of machines and technologies, some of which I have traced in this book, remain relevant, continuing to shape and frame the ways in which contemporary art bases itself in questions of mechanical reproduction.

Film machines after film

The Irish artist John Gerrard produces a very different but, I think, complementary rendering of the apparatus to that which we see in the work of Tacita Dean. His works Sow Farm (near Libbey, Oklahoma) (2009) (fig. 6.27),

Farewell to the Machine Age? 247

Chapter Six 248

6.27  John Gerrard, Sow Farm (near Libbey, Oklahoma), 2009. Simulation, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of Thomas Dane Gallery. © The artist.

Grow Finish Unit (near Elkhart, Kansas) (2008) (fig. 6.28), and Grow Finish Unit (Eva, Oklahoma) (2008) are simulated, moving-­image representations of large-­scale pig farms in America’s Midwest. Together they depict the world of industrial farming and the mechanisms of hyperefficiency and hyperproduction it entails. The facilities shown in these works, which Gerrard spent months visiting and documenting in video and digital photographs, are entirely automated; no human beings are involved in their day-­to-­day operation. Indeed, in several weeks photographing at one location, Gerrard reports, he met only one person: a Mexican worker who drove up and, seeming nonplussed and alarmed to find Gerrard there, confronted him before driving away again.55 The scale of these operations is enormous: ten thousand pigs are housed in the installation shown in Grow Finish Unit (near Elkhart, Kansas), for example, a thousand in each shed. Their feed is delivered via timed, mechanical chutes. In Sow Farm (near Libbey, Oklahoma), twin grain silos appear attached to each aluminum shed, like ministering, alien breasts. The sheds are “plugged into” the silos as if in a constant suckling operation, the cycle of consumption and expulsion completed by the smooth, glittering lakes we see in the foreground: “vast lakes of excrement,” as the artist’s website puts it.56 Every six to eight months, trucks come to collect the “finished” animals and to deliver more. The world depicted here is a true nightmare of dehumanized industry, technological mechanization replacing traditional tasks of animal husbandry

Farewell to the Machine Age? 249

in the name of maximizing “productivity” and cost-­efficiency. The ruthless logic underwriting the creation and maintenance of such institutions is the logic of capitalism; we recognize it, and yet, as so often when we are made to confront the economic reality of our own society, its face appears both distorted and distorting, familiar yet unfamiliar, brutish yet somehow intimately known. The other logic we may recognize in these works is that of the bachelor machine: the skeletal, precise, spare lineaments of the works reminding us of the bachelor machines depicted by Duchamp. The memory of these diagrams persists like an after-­effect in the architecture of this world, reinvesting Gerrard’s works, too, with the phantasmatic articulation of the logic driving technological progress and the fears and anxieties this arouses in us when brought into proximity with our bodies. We are shown a single-­sex, segregated unit of automated productivity, a self-­sufficient, hyperproductive unit enacting the sadistic inscription of the machine’s purpose on living bodies, incorporated and articulated via a technology of moving images and thus inheriting the particular cultural load attaching to film and photography in their histories of involvement with mechanization and industry.57 But Gerrard’s work is not produced using film. Indeed, it might arguably be said to be both post-­medium, in its unplaceability and the hybridity of its technological base, and postfilmic, in its apparent continuity with the history of that particular form. In fact, the technology Gerrard uses is Realtime-­3D,

6.28  John Gerrard, Grow Finish Unit (near Elkhart, Kansas), 2008. Simulation, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of Thomas Dane Gallery. © The artist.

Chapter Six 250

computer software used mainly in the gaming industry. The simulation presented in each work is composed of computer-­generated imagery, recreated from photographs and topographical satellite data. Where figures appear, they are generated using motion-­capture photography of a particular individual. The information gathered and generated in these ways is processed by a team of computer programmers and “texture artists,” working in the painstaking way that is common to the commercial, increasingly indistinguishable film and animation industries. These techniques of animation produce an alienating and alienated quality in the image, a distinct unreality that distances the work from film and positions its visual texture perhaps closer to painting. Indeed, a media archaeology of the forms and precedents that seem encoded within Gerrard’s visual style would include the precise hyperreality of some Surrealist painting (the work of René Magritte has been mentioned by critics and seems appropriate), as well as the precisionist paintings of Charles Sheeler, which captured an earlier period of American machine aesthetics and industrial architecture. (“It’s my illustration of what a beautiful world it would be if there were no people in it,” Sheeler is reported to have said, a remark to which we might think Gerrard’s work puts a grimmer, more sinister twist, unless we think that Gerrard only draws out what was already grim and twisted in it.58) The precisionist unreality of Gerrard’s style gives his images a glow and quality of “glamor” in the old sense of the word, meaning an illusion or semblance that settles on things, masking their real appearance. Gerrard’s work, however, uses its technological sheen not to mask but as a device of revelation: to heighten and produce a qualitative awareness of the technological infrastructure of our lives. The sense of unreality is also contributed to by the insistent silence in Gerrard’s work. Gerrard’s is a technological, inhuman silence, which is intensified and enhanced by the absence of human figures in his works and, indeed, by the lack of a sense of how human figures could even enter the buildings, let alone be housed by them, or use them (their scale is too vast). The nonnaturalism of our location “within” the pieces—­the point of view is in constant, aerial, swinging rotation, producing no sense of physical location—­means that we cannot even imagine what sort of sound we might hear in our nonposition. And yet the works—­especially when viewed in galleries—­do seem to emit, if not sound exactly, something like the ears-­ringing phantom of sound. A sort of vicious, technological hum or buzz comes off the pieces, something impersonal and constant, like the drone of a refrigerator compressor. It’s not so much that one hears it; rather one feels it, as if it were at the brink of auditory perception, or as if it were the memory of a sound, in a reconfiguration of Cagean silence that is like the after-­effect of a shock. All of Gerrard’s works are structured around the cycle of a day, from dawn to dusk, as Dean’s are, although in Gerrard’s case it is to very different effect—­ producing a sense of repetition, not of narrative, since the cycle of each day

seems simply to return us, like the rotation of the “camera,” to the point where we began. This harnessing of the movement of the “camera” to the rising and falling, circular cycles of the sun seems a cinematic after-­effect in Gerrard’s work, continuous with the formal structures that in Dean’s 16-­millimeter work are devised to cast meteorology and camerawork as if together they comprised an allegorical cinematic framework, the scene and its machinery of reproduction composing one giant film-­work. And yet a further, and very nonfilmic, feature enabled by Gerrard’s chosen technology is that each work is constructed as a computer “program,” with changes to the depicted scene built into a predetermined schedule, or lifespan of the work. So, for example, in the two Grow Finish Unit works, the six-­to eight-­month cycle of the transport trucks’ visits is depicted within the works a­ t this actual, lengthy interval. In addition, the dawn-­to-­dusk cycle is synchronized with the time of day at the place where a work is installed, as are the positions of the stars and the sun in the sky (which, as in the real world, change slightly with each new “day”). Each of Gerrard’s works thus compresses at least three temporal cycles: first, the twenty-­four-­hour diurnal cycle; second, the 365-­day annual cycle; and finally, the lifespan of the piece—­the period during which its programming ensures that the work will change.59 And yet within each work’s constant movement are static elements, which refuse to change and which grow ever stranger in their contrast with the wheeling cycle of days and the camera movement around them. The weather doesn’t change, for example: it is perpetually sunny in all three farming pieces, and indeed, in all of Gerrard’s works. And when figures are shown, they don’t age. This sense of frozen static elements, held like photographic stills within the moving “film” of the works further heightens the unreality and anti-­naturalism of each piece, producing a definite sense of the uncanny. Even the fact that the works operate as programs that change in real time, as if filled with their own automated “life,” can come to seem uncanny. Gerrard’s works, like Richter’s Betty or Chris Marker’s La Jetée, discussed in chapter 5, produce a shudder in the beholder, who confronts in them the authentic abstractness of our contemporary reality, visualized in aesthetic form. It is for this reason that the question Gerrard is sometimes asked—­why doesn’t he simply photograph, film, or otherwise document these industries?—­seems misplaced. Gerrard uses his technology to construct, seemingly, another world: a second world, into which the industrial forms of our own world are placed. The resulting work has a specific aesthetic effect on us, as we both recognize our world and see it as alien. This is the value of the mimetic function of the artwork that Benjamin pointed to and that was also prized by Adorno. “Perceptions must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light,” Adorno wrote, in words that echo Benjamin’s and that seem well-­suited to Gerrard’s work.60 This mimesis is responsible for the deeply felt, visceral quality of our

Farewell to the Machine Age? 251

Chapter Six 252

response to the work, and for the ineradicable character of what it reveals to us. Its truth seems implanted into our physis, because it enforces a mimetic shudder in response from us. The works discussed so far all come from a particular cycle within Gerrard’s production, arguably the first in his mature period; they are united by being tied to a particular landscape (the plains of the American Midwest) and by their concern with agribusiness and the economy of oil.61 The struggle for oil arguably also underlies the second phase of Gerrard’s work, which he has recently begun. This new cycle focuses on a different aspect of the history and formation of the technology he uses: the fact that the Realtime-­3D software “was effectively born in a military context”; its origins, then, lie in military research and development, and now it is utilized primarily in computer games, to simulate warfare for entertainment.62 Gerrard has so far made two key works in this new phase, both of them based on a photograph he obtained via the website for the Defense Video and Imagery Distribution System (DVIDS), a “US military media interface site.”63 The first is Live Fire Exercise (Djibouti), 2011 (2011), a twenty-­five-­minute digital animation that Gerrard made as a backdrop for a new dance-­work of the same name, choreographed by Wayne McGregor to a score by Michael Tippett and premiered by the Royal Ballet in spring 2011. I shall focus on the second piece, Infinite Freedom Exercise (near Abadan, Iran), 2011 (2011) (fig. 6.29), an independent moving-­image work screened on an outdoor LED display as a public commission for the Manchester International Festival in summer 2011. Infinite Freedom Exercise is Gerrard’s first work based on the human figure since his early portrait works. For this piece, he asked a trained dancer, Davide di Pretoro, of the Wayne McGregor/Random Dance company, to recreate certain key movements and poses from the original DVIDS training-­ ground photograph, creating, in collaboration with McGregor, a swinging, constantly moving choreography that ensured a fluid transition from one pose to the next. The dance was thus created by putting together many individual poses captured in an original photographic “base,” as if the figure himself were incarnating a kind of film, or sequence of photographically based moving images, representing in his own body a very precise kind of mechanical or filmic ballet. Rather than photography or film, however, motion-­capture technology was used to map di Pretoro’s figure and his movements into the computer program. What we witness is, again, a spectacle with a considerable degree of abstraction: the figure’s movements are rendered abstract not only by being performed as a dance but by being removed from any immediate narrative context or apparent causal trigger. The dancer rehearses these movements in the midst of an otherwise deserted landscape: there is only an empty road, stretching away in front of and behind him, and a few apparently desolate barns a few meters away. Otherwise all is empty desert, stretching to the horizon, as shown

Farewell to the Machine Age? 253

in Gerrard’s customary 360-­degree pan. Few works do a better job of picturing the futility of recent Western military engagements (to which the title of Gerrard’s piece gestures, condensing the US code names Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Infinite Justice) than this lone soldier, repeating to infinity his gestures and postures of defense against an invisible enemy, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings. But there is another level of revelation at which this work operates, which once again derives from the work’s abstraction. For the figure is obviously and alienatingly generated by computer animation. This ultimate level of technological abstraction helps to remove the work from the possible affective load it might otherwise have carried, through visual continuity with war documentary photographs and footage and the complex synthesis of pity and fear that provides our readymade and automatic reactions to such imagery. The high level of abstraction in this work helps it instead to become a tool that excavates and makes visible the technological and economic logic underpinning recent conflicts. Gerrard’s work thus offers a rich and nuanced digital update on the form of the “mechanical ballet” that I have traced in this chapter. In a sense, all of Gerrard’s works represent a kind of mechanical ballet, in that a “dance” around the building is how each visual piece works; his commission for the

6.29  John Gerrard, Infinite Freedom Exercise (near Abadan, Iran), 2011. Simulation, dimensions variable. Photographed as installed at Manchester International Festival, 2011. Image courtesy of Thomas Dane Gallery and Manchester International Festival. © The artist.

Chapter Six 254

Royal Ballet only confirms this intrinsic direction. With regard to Infinite Freedom Exercise in particular, however, the figure depicted represents in his own person a synecdoche of the form, the mechanicity of his movements and the visibly invaded technological texture of his flesh reprising similar features of the 1920s “mechanical ballet” and the anxieties and fears it articulated. The inexhaustibility of the body of Gerrard’s figure is frightening: his movements absolutely never tire. Each repetition of a movement is as perfect as the first. Under the pitiless sun and, still, as darkness falls and eventually the next day’s sun rises, this alien piece of technology, a fabric of stitched-­together pixels and data, performs and will reperform his action. His flesh is visibly as imbricated with his technological apparatus as Chaplin’s, in Benjamin’s account, and yet our reaction to him is not laughter but horror. In this sense, Gerrard’s work might seem not to release any utopian flash and so to belong, not to the Benjaminian tradition I have sought to identify in this book, but to a more dystopian strain. Nevertheless, the work’s interaction with the real people who surround the screen is interesting. Gerrard has spoken in another context of wanting to address precisely the ordinary urban crowd, the “hurrying, blind” consumers and commuters who populate city streets and transport terminals.64 The context for this remark was the year-­long installation of his work Oil Stick Work (Angelo Martinez/Richfield, Kansas) (2008), at Canary Wharf tube station, that most machinic and technologically sublime of all London’s tube stations. This work, through its thirty-­year program-­time, is directly linked to the projected expiry date of oil production in the United States. In its setting at Canary Wharf, the artist further envisaged the painstaking daily labor of the figure depicted in it, painting a square of the aluminum barn each day, as mirroring the ceaseless activity of the city workers and stock markets above ground at this location. This harnessing of the work, and the work it depicts, to the labor undertaken at the specific site of its installation was further articulated through its placement and engagement with the bodies around it: Oil Stick was installed so that it could be seen by commuters processing down the giant escalators of the station; again, we might think of Paul Strand’s 1915 photograph Wall Street, in which human figures are made minute by comparison to giant structures of modern architecture, and are shown visibly harnessed within and integrated into the strategies of production that undergird those structures. In the case of Infinite Freedom Exercise, as installed in Manchester, the glowing man onscreen looked a little like an alien figure landed among the ordinary flesh or “meat” bodies of the human beings around him—­reminiscent of the Terminator, suddenly landed in an ordinary shopping street, perhaps (or an angel in our midst). As I witnessed it, the common reaction to the work was, first, a sense of uncanny wonder, enacted in a double-­take as viewers walked past the screen, followed by laughter, as people mimicked the alien body in

their own form of open-­air mime, often staging it for friends to photograph. Our mimetic reaction to the work thus reprises Benjamin’s account of our aesthetic response to mechanical reproduction, which I explored in chapter 5. A media archaeology is excavated in the dialogue between the work and the viewers’ responsive gestures, the two together composing a long lens through which is telescoped the kind of communal outdoor gymnastic displays of the 1920s and 1930s theorized as the “mass ornament” by Siegfried Kracauer, in which, he argued, the “aesthetic pleasure” taken by the crowd and participants “is legitimate.” “The masses organized in these movements come from offices and factories; the formal principle according to which they are molded determines them in reality as well,” Kracauer wrote.65 In Benjaminian terms, we might say our participation recathects with laughter the dominant economic mode to which we are subject. Here, in Gerrard’s work, the technological law that is on display is military, as it soon would be in Kracauer’s Germany, anticipated by the forms of collective physical display that he described. Even Benjamin, in his final, 1939 version of the “Work of Art” essay, pulled back from suggesting that any redemption of military technology, as the most nakedly destructive ordering of present industrial capacity, could be possible or desired. And yet the dialectic that I have been tracking in this book, between what Benjamin called “natural substance” and its “historical filter,” that is, between life, the substance that propels, renews, and is transformed, and history (represented by the present historical state of technological development), still flickers, even within and in relation to the military-­industrial regime.66 As Gerrard shows, we, in our own bodies, are the site of this dialectic. Which is to say, within the catastrophe that Adorno so often described, and that marked historical progress, as described in Benjamin’s account of the Angelus Novus, we are still living; we are still in motion. Life still rises up in us, grasps and transforms the technological order to which it is subject. We may seem to have traveled a long way from early twentieth-­century, Moholy-­Nagyian techno-­euphoria, yet what that moment promised is still embedded here: the hope that engaging directly with contemporary technologies of production, fusing structures of the work of art and the aesthetic deeply within them, may produce the most deeply dialectical form of aesthetic response. One final, short work confirms this, even as it again shows the distinctive flavor of Gerrard’s digital aesthetic. Daylight Fan (Orbital Camera) (2009) (fig. 6.30) is a short piece, almost in the genre of the still life (although it is made in moving image). It offers a kind of digital update on Moholy-­Nagy’s Lightplay, except that the effect is hardly jubilatory or euphoric. In it we watch a small rotating fan, of the sort sometimes used in offices, whirr and turn in a 180-­degree pan, repeating the movement from left to right and back, over and over, ad nauseam. The fan only whirrs into life in daylight hours, however, so again the kind of “lightplay” that is performed is at a cosmological scale, using

Farewell to the Machine Age? 255

Chapter Six 256

6.30  John Gerrard, Daylight Fan (Orbital Camera), 2009. Simulation. Edition of 12. Image courtesy of the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery. © The artist.

the alternating “light” and “dark” of the sun as if in a slow-­motion, flashing sequence. The work is in color, but the palette is almost entirely monochrome: the fan is silver, it sits on a white floor, and the only other colors are the muted palette of the sky and buildings seen just outside the window, which is visible sometimes, as the “camera” orbits slowly round the fan. The abstract geometries of the form on display are as perfect and beautiful as those in Moholy-­Nagy’s work and produce a comparable optical dazzle and blur, the thin wire spokes of the fan and its petal-­shaped metal blades performing a complex “mechanical ballet” within the circular form of the fan. The fan is not without a certain kind of anthropomorphic, alien life, yet the object is prosaic and readymade:

Farewell to the Machine Age? 257

6.31  Aleksandr Rodchenko, Hanging Construction, no. 9, 1920–­21. Painted plywood. Unknown photographer. Photo: Howard Schickler Fine Art. © 2013 A. Rodchenko and V. Stepanova Archive, Moscow/DACS, RAO.

neither a technologist-­utopian “sculpture,” like the Light-­Prop constructed and filmed by Moholy-­Nagy, nor a narrative device, like the lighthouse in Dean’s Disappearance at Sea, but something like a desk-­top executive toy, perhaps. Its form is reminiscent of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Hanging Construction no. 9 (1920–­21) (fig. 6.31), an abstract sculpture designed to be hung from the ceiling (recalling Duchamp’s stagings of his readymades and Picasso’s display of his 1924 Guitar), and yet its quotidian recognizability deflates any possible utopian aesthetic claims that might be made for the work, reducing aesthetic appeal to a monotonous (unheard) background hum. Nevertheless, in the very act of reperforming these forms, Gerrard’s work might seem to release a glimpse that recalls and illuminates their histories.

Chapter Six 258

Even as the desktop fan turns, its absurdist, deadpan, uninflected rendering of Moholy-­Nagy’s more intensely utopian exultation in the age of machines makes us laugh and releases the memory of that optimism as a kind of utopian “flash.” (A further twist is provided by the many videos of fans uploaded on YouTube by fan enthusiasts, anticipating Gerrard’s own film in a more earnest and fetishistic vein and testifying to the continuing, abstract yet compelling appeal of the fan’s domesticated form of machine aesthetics.) In this way, while Gerrard’s work may be “post-­medium,” it is deeply embedded in modernist histories of machines and technologies, revealing, indeed, that the technological was always the substrate beneath “medium.” His work exposes that our era does not stand apart from modernism or the machine age but instead offers an intensified and virtualized descriptive vocabulary for current conditions, testifying to, exposing, and making us viscerally feel the particular qualities of life lived under and within this economic order. Like Dean and the other artists discussed in this book, Gerrard makes works that articulate and bring to a kind of exemplary visibility the particular technology he employs, as well as visibly inscribing those technologies in their historical situation and showing how they are connected to longer histories in visual culture. These deeper histories, fantasies, and anxieties—­concerning machines, bodies, memory, vision, inheritance, reproduction, and futurity—­weave through this book. In this chapter, I have tried to show the ways in which they haunt and inflect the history of film and continue to shape moving-­image work, even where the technology used is postfilmic. While drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and film have been utterly reconfigured over the past century, works of art are not thereby cut loose either from artistic tradition or from their ability to engage with wider conditions of production and consumption. The history of the machine age—­of machines and technologies in visual culture—­is ongoing, even as we move into a supposed postindustrial culture, postmachine age, and postfilm cinema. Under these conditions, the work that matters is that which finds visual form for and so exposes, whether in a revelatory aesthetic shudder or in an exultant flash, the deeper machinery of continuing technological production and the economic order underpinning our apparently unreal times.

References to Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press) are abbreviated as follows: SW1

Vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (1996)

SW2.1

Vol. 2, pt. 1, 1927–1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (1999)

SW2.2

Vol. 2, pt. 2, 1931–­1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (1999)

SW3

Vol. 3, 1935–­1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (2002)

SW4

Vol. 4, 1938–­1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (2003)

Introduction 1 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940), trans. Harry Zohn, in SW4, 392. 2 Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty” (1933), trans. Rodney Livingstone, in SW2.2, 733. 3 Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” (formerly known as “A Small History of Photography”) (1931), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, in SW2.2, 508. 4 See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-­Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (1974; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

259

Notes to Introduction 260

5 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Third Version)” (1939), trans. Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott, in SW4, 264. 6 The first English translation, by Harry Zohn, was published under the title “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Wold, 1968), and republished in SW4, as cited above. This was based on the third version of the essay, unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime, on which Benjamin worked between 1936 and 1939. An English translation of the second version of the essay, composed in Paris between 1935 and 1936, and published in French in 1936 as “L’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mecanisée,” is published in SW3, 251–­83. In what follows references are to the “Third Version,” unless otherwise stated. 7 Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 252. 8 Ibid., 254. 9 László Moholy-­Nagy, quoted in Sibyl Moholy-­Nagy, Moholy-­Nagy: Experiment in Totality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 28. 10 Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 508. 11 Ibid., 510. 12 Bertolt Brecht, “The Threepenny Lawsuit” (1931), in Brecht on Radio and Film, ed. Marc Silberman (London: Methuen, 2000), 161. 13 Ibid. The German word used by Brecht is Apparat. 14 On the book clubs that sprang up in Weimar Germany, particularly for the education of workers and women, see, e.g., Erich Knauf, “Book Clubs” (1929), in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 515. 15 Brecht, “Threepenny Lawsuit,” 162. 16 Ibid., 163. A similar point is made by Theodor Adorno (referring to the work of Paul Klee in particular): “In many authentic modern works industrial thematic material is strictly avoided out of mistrust of machine art as a pseudomorphism. But . . . the industrial returns with a vengeance, as in the work of Paul Klee. . . . Art is modern when, by its mode of experience and as the expression of the crisis of experience, it absorbs what industrialization has developed under the given relations of production.” Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-­Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 34. 17 On the wider meanings of Technik in German thought at this period, suggesting not simply a form of technology but the network of social relations produced by a particular form of technology, see Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto Press, 2000), xii-­xiii. 18 Key essays for Greenberg’s formulation of the idea of the medium and his theory of medium-­specificity include “Avant-­Garde and Kitsch” (1939), “Towards a Newer Laocoon” (1940), “Abstract Art” (1944), “The Crisis of the Easel Picture” (1948), “The New Sculpture” (1949), “Sculpture In Our Time” (1958), and “Modernist Painting” (1960), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols., ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986–­1993). Key essays by Fried are “Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella” (1965), “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons” (1966), “Morris Louis” (1966), and “Art and Objecthood” (1967), in Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 19 Relevant essays by Rosalind Krauss include “. . . ‘And Then Turn Away?’ An Essay on James Coleman,” October, no. 81 (Summer 1997), 5–­33; “Re-­Inventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry, no. 25 (Winter 1999), 289–­305; A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-­Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999); “First Lines: Introduction to Photograph,” in James Coleman, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1999); “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Museum of Modern

Art, 1999), 155–­79; and “The Rock: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection,” October, no. 92 (Spring 2000), 3–­35. See also the essays collected in Rosalind Krauss, Perpetual Inventory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). For further discussion of Krauss’s arguments, see my review “Under Perpetual Inventory,” Oxford Art Journal 36, no. 1 ( January 2013): 153–­56. 20 Benjamin’s remarks on play are scattered throughout his writings. The essays on toys are collected in SW2.1: “Old Toys,” 98–­102; “The Cultural History of Toys” (1928), 113–­16; and “Toys and Play” (1928), 117–­21. In the same volume, see “Children’s Literature” (1929). In SW1, see “Old Forgotten Children’s Books” (1924), 406–­13; “A Glimpse into the World of Children’s Books” (1926), 435–­43; and “One-­Way Street” (1923–­26), trans. Edmund Jephcott, 444–­88. In SW3, see “Berlin Childhood around 1900” (1932–­38), trans. Howard Eiland, 344–­413. (Except as noted, the above essays were translated by Rodney Livingstone.) Some of Benjamin’s most important remarks on play, connecting this theorization to his account of the revolutionary potential of new technologies, and film in particular, are found in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version)” (1936), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in SW3, 101–­38, esp. 107–­8. 21 See Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Room-­for-­Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October, no. 109 (Summer 2004), 3–­45; and the slightly expanded version of this essay in her book Cinema and Experience: Sieg fried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 183–­204. See also Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-­Gardes (New York: Verso, 2002), 105, and Leslie, Overpowering Conformism, 144, 154–­55. 22 Benjamin, “Work of Art (Second Version),” 107. 23 Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty” (1933), trans. Edmund Jephcott, and “Doctrine of the Similar” (1933), trans. Michael Jennings, in SW2.2, 720–­22, 694–­98. For commentary on Benjamin’s theory of mimesis, indicating the direction of my account in what follows, see Jürgen Habermas, “Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-­ Raising or Rescuing Critique” (1973), trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, in Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, vol. 1, ed. Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 2005), 122–­23; Susan Buck-­Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 262–­70; Shierry Weber Nicholson, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 137–­80; Leslie, Flatlands, 272–­73; and Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-­Century Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 205–­34. For discussion of Adorno’s theory of mimesis, which bears commonalities with Benjamin’s, as “a relation of adaptation, affinity and reciprocity” with the world, involving “a non-­objectifying interchange with the Other and a fluid, pre-­individual form of subjectivity,” see Miriam Hansen, “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer,” New German Critique, no. 56 (Spring–­Summer 1992), 52–­53. 24 Mimesis has this potential for Benjamin, we might speculate, because it appears to be a “natural historical” category: itself a “natural form,” as a basic human faculty of reproduction (albeit one that changes with historical development), now called to a particular usefulness or new importance by the rise of a technological faculty of reproducibility, which mirrors our faculty for mimesis and is reciprocally mirrored by it. Mimesis thus enables Benjamin’s complementary conceptualizations of nature as fundamentally historical and technology as a “second nature,” which prompted his own method of analysis as a “natural history.” See Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (1925; London: Verso, 2003), 166, 177–­79, and notes in the Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1999). The idea was developed by Adorno in his 1932 lecture “The Idea of Natural History,” trans. Bob Hullot-­Kentor, Telos, no. 60 ( June 1984), 111–­24, and described by him as the essence of Benjamin’s

Notes to Introduction 261

Notes to Introduction 262

thought in “A Portrait of Walter Benjamin” (1950), in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 233. For commentary on the idea of “second nature” and natural history in Benjamin and Adorno, see Susan Buck-­Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (London: Harvester Press, 1977), 52–­ 58; Buck-­Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 68–­70; Leslie, Overpowering Conformism, 6–­7, 155–­62; and Hansen, “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic,” 52–­53. 25 “Since the child’s mimetic reception of the world of things centrally includes technology,” as Miriam Hansen points out, deploying a judicious selection of quotations from Benjamin’s Arcades Project in her exegesis, play “elucidates the way in which ‘each truly new configuration of nature—­and at bottom, technology is just such a configuration’—­is incorporated ‘into the image stock of humanity.’” She concludes by quoting Benjamin: “‘By the interest it takes in technological phenomena, its curiosity for all sorts of inventions and machinery, every childhood binds the accomplishments of technology to the old worlds of symbols.’” See Hansen, “Room-­for-­Play,” 7. See also Buck-­Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 270. 26 Here I am in agreement with Esther Leslie’s summary of Benjamin’s position: “The socially decisive function of contemporary art is that it exists potentially as a zone of practice in a cooperative game between the three terms, humanity, nature, technology, due to its capacity to encourage the aspect of play.” Leslie, Overpowering Conformism, 159–­60. 27 See for example Benjamin’s remarks on picture puzzles in “Glimpse into the World,” 436–­37. For a different, more pessimistic account of Benjamin and testing see Schwartz, “The Eye of the Expert,” in Blind Spots. 28 D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” (1953), in Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1986), 1–­30. 29 For a related study of the ways in which small optical devices, devised as scientific equipment but also sold as popular toys, helped prepare the way for but also exceeded the capabilities or imaginative parameters of industrialized technological forms such as photography and cinema, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 97–­136. 30 Benjamin, “Old Toys,” 98. 31 See Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” 732–­33, and “Bert Brecht” (1930), trans. Rodney Livingstone, in SW2.1, 69–­70. These issues are discussed further in chapter 5. 32 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1999), 471. 33 Hollis Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses” (1971), in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 135. 34 Indeed, the idea that some new stage of technological development has rendered or will soon render machines obsolete is a persistent fantasy of the machine age. At root, I suggest, it might be understood as the fantasy that technological development will do away with the need for labor—­basing this on the historic and etymological identification between the machine and the figure of the manual worker. For more on this connection, see Steve Edwards, The Making of English Photography: Allegories (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2006), 132–­34. 35 See Walter Benjamin, Denkbilder (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994), and, for commentary, Karoline Kirst, “Walter Benjamin’s Denkbild: Emblematic Historiography of the Recent Past,” Monatshefte 86, no. 4 (1994): 514–­24. 36 “It is not surprising that something so large could utterly engulf and digest the whole substance of the Age of Machines (machines and all), and finally supplant the entirety with its illusory flesh,” Frampton writes. “Having devoured all else, the film machine is the lone survivor.” Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film,” 137. 37 Susan Buck-­Morss, “Aesthetic and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October, no. 62 (Fall 1992), 3–­41.

38 On the significance of the different versions of Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay, see Hansen, “Room-­for-­Play,” and Leslie, Overpowering Conformism, 130–­67. 39 On Benjaminian optics, see Esther Leslie, “Walter Benjamin’s Optic: The World as Thing and Image,” Militant Esthetix, http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk/waltbenj/ opticwb.html (accessed July 17, 2013); Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, 62–­66; and Detlef Mertins, “Walter Benjamin and the Tectonic Unconscious: Using Architecture as an Optical Instrument,” in The Optic of Walter Benjamin, ed. Alex Coles (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1999), 196–­221. 40 See Benjamin, Arcades Project, 151, where he describes the iron structure of Austerlitz Bridge as transformed in the “lightning flash” of dialectical illumination into “an emblem of the dawning technological age,” and other remarks in this work, e.g., 473, 462–­63; and Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 390–­91. For critical commentary see Buck-­Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, esp. 219–­21.

Notes to Chapter 1

Chapter One 1 This chapter is developed from an article first published in the Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 1 ( January 2008): 75–­95. Thanks to Oxford University Press for permission to republish this material here. 2 For Benjamin’s remark, see his “On the Concept of History” (1940), trans. Harry Zohn, in SW4, 392. Greenberg’s comment is reported in Carolyn Lanchner, “Klee in America,” in Paul Klee, ed. Lanchner (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987), 102. 3 In his 1943 “Review of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection,” where Klee’s paintings were hung with a large collection of Surrealist works, Greenberg approved of the way Klee’s works were displayed in specially designed peep shows and view-­boxes, for the reason that “Klee was almost alone among the more abstract artists to maintain the fictive nature of the world within the picture frame.” Greenberg, “Review,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 141. The peep shows and view-­boxes were constructed by Frederick Kiesler, as I discuss in chapter 2. 4 Klee, in general, did not use the term Ölpause, but rather variations on a word that, like the oil-­transfer technique itself, he had coined: Ölfarbezeichnung, literally, “oil-­ paint (or color)-­drawing.” 5 Christian Geelhaar, Paul Klee and the Bauhaus (Bath: Adams and Dart, 1973), 88. 6 The oil-­transfer process can be traced back to Klee’s early experiments with tracing and transfer techniques, and its immediate inspiration found in Klee’s work in lithography (a transfer paper is often employed in lithography to avoid the mirror-­ reversal of the end result). For Klee’s early experiments with a red-­chalk transfer technique, see Jürgen Glaesemer, Paul Klee: Handzeichnungen, vol. 1 (Bern: Kunstmuseum, 1973), 77n23; for a discussion of how the oil-­transfers developed from Klee’s involvement with lithography, see Jim Jordan, “Introduction to the Exhibition,” in The Graphic Legacy of Paul Klee, ed. Jordan, exh. cat. (Annandale-­on-­Hudson, NY: Edith C. Blum Art Institute, Milton and Sally Avery Centre for the Arts, Bard College Centre, 1983), 38. For an overview of the oil-­transfer technique, see Jordan’s “Klee’s Prints and Oil-­Transfer Works,” in the same catalogue. 7 Glaesemer, Handzeichnungen, 1:260. (All translations from this source are my own unless otherwise specified.) 8 Altogether, Klee made a total of around 350 oil-­transfers, the distribution of which is as follows: 1919 (the first year in which such works are recorded), 36; 1920, 41; 1921, 55 (the highest number recorded in one year); 1922, 38; 1923, 52; 1924, 37; 1925, 22; 1926, 6; 1927, 9; 1928, 11; 1930, 12; 1933, 7; 1934, 1; 1939, 8. No oil-­transfers were reconded for 1929, 1931–­32, 1935–­38, or 1940 (the year of Klee’s death).

263

Notes to Chapter 1 264

9 This figure is given in Ann Temkins, “Klee and the Avant-­Garde,” in Lanchner, Paul Klee, 33. 10 Glaesemer, Paul Klee: Handzeichnungen, vol. 2 (Bern: Kunstmuseum, 1984), 14–­16. 11 See Geelhaar, Klee and the Bauhaus, 87, and Felix Klee interviewed by Sabine Rewald, in Rewald, Paul Klee: The Berggruen Klee Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988), 27. See also Klee’s letter of 1905 to Lily Stumpf: “Every little remainder of my drawings I want to put by, nothing should be left over. The waste-­paper basket must be shown the door”; quoted in Wolfgang Kersten and Osamu Okuda, Paul Klee: Im Zeichen der Teilung (Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-­Westfalen, 1995), 12 (my translation). Felix Klee echoed this letter when he recalled, “I have never seen him tear up any work. He had no use for wastepaper baskets”; quoted in Rewald, Paul Klee, 29. 12 Rewald, Paul Klee, 27. 13 No reproduction of Ancient Demon is known, but the authors of the catalogue raisonné have tentatively identified it with an oil-­transfer bearing no title or work number on its mount, but dated by other means to 1919, and related to a drawing from 1918, Ghost of a Hero (1918, 203), which the unnamed oil-­transfer reverses. 14 O. K.Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–­1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 180. In Absorption the artist is not shown drawing, but in its original context of reproduction, the Münchner Blätter in September 1919, the work was accompanied by a text that purported to describe Klee’s method of creation in drawing: “Take the most sharp-­edged pencil in your hand and the tenderest brushes, do not move, but wait, wait, until your hand moves by itself.” Quoted in Werckmeister, Paul Klee’s Career, 199–­202. 15 Will Grohmann, Paul Klee: Drawings, trans. Norbert Guterman (London: Thames and Hudson, 1960), 9–­10. 16 Quoted in Glaesemer, Handzeichnungen, 2:159. Christian Rümelin has argued that the fact Klee did not sell or much exhibit his drawings should be understood as signifying the low esteem in which he held them; as should be clear here, I take the opposite view. Rümelin, “Klee’s Interaction with His Own Oeuvre,” in Paul Klee. Selected by Genius, 1917–­1933, ed. Roland Doschka (Munich: Prestel, 2001), 24. 17 See Felix Klee, Paul Klee: His Life in Documents (New York: George Brazille, 1962), 204–­5. 18 See O. K. Werckmeister, “Paul Klee’s Memory in Exile,” in Memory and Oblivion: Proceedings of the XXIXth International Congress of the History of Art, ed. Wessel Reinink and Jensen Stumpel (Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), 929–­35. 19 The photograph is reproduced in Stefan Frey and Josef Helfenstein, Paul Klee: Verzeichnis der Werke des Jahres 1940 (Bern: Paul Klee Stiftung, 1991), 19. 20 In support of my reading the workings of the stack as a technology of drawing, it is worth noting that Klee made several Kohleabklatsch, or charcoal-­imprint drawings, so the form developed an independent usefulness in his practice. See, for example, First Drawing for Exotic Harmony (1930, 3); Mediation (1930, 61); Further Study in Three Dimensions (1930, 117). That Klee perceived the techniques of Kohleabklatsch and oil-­transfer to be connected is suggested by the entry he made for Brigitte (1928, 91) in the oeuvre-­catalogue: it is listed first as “Ölfarbezeichnung,” but this is crossed out and replaced with “Kohlezeichnung.” The work does indeed look like an oil-­ transfer, and has smudges and marks across its surface, like an oil-­transfer. 21 While oil-­transfer is related to established techniques used by artists to avoid the reversal of a composition in transfer and print processes, a feature of Klee’s use of the method seems to have been an interest in these effects, since he would often experiment with using oil-­transfer to reverse as well as to reproduce unreversed an original drawing. For example, Thinking Artist reverses the direction of the original drawing, so that where the drawing shows the artist drawing with his right hand, the oil-­transfer shows him drawing with his left.

22 The complexities of the oeuvre-­catalogue are of great interest; see Osamu Okuda, “Paul Klee: Buchhaltung, Werkbezeichnung und Werkprozess,” in Radical Art History: International Anthologie, Subject O. K. Werckmeister, ed. Wolfgang Kersten (Zurich: Interpublishers, 1997), for a fuller discussion of these. However, the oeuvre-­ catalogue is neither the first nor the only example of Klee’s bookkeeping. Klee’s son, Felix, reports that “even as a child he had kept a work catalogue that listed 300–­ 400 works and he discontinued it only when he left Bern in 1898. This book does not exist anymore.” Quoted in Rewald, Paul Klee, 27. As a student, meanwhile, he through-­numbered the drawings in his sketchbooks and kept an ongoing catalogue of them; see Glaesemer, Handzeichnungen, 1:21, and Okuda, “Paul Klee: Buchhaltung,” 376. Even in his housekeeping Klee maintained a “very precise book-­keeping system,” recording all receipts and expenses every day, even down to the purchase of a 20-­pfennig pencil; see Rewald, Paul Klee, 26. 23 Felix Klee, quoted in Rewald, Paul Klee, 26. 24 Quoted in Glaesemer, Paul Klee: The Colored Works in the Kunstmuseum Bern, trans. Renate Franciscono (Bern: Kornfeld & Cie, 1979), 300. 25 See Rewald, Paul Klee, 40. 26 See, for example, Prince (1930, 247) and Prince (1930, 249), or Entwined in a Group (1930, 256) and Entwined in a Group (1930, 257). 27 As Osamu Okuda writes in his study of the complexities of the oeuvre-­catalogue, “The oeuvre-­catalogue had for Klee, above and beyond its practical function, a meaning as, so to speak, a part of the whole artistic creative processes and artistic myth.” Okuda, “Paul Klee: Buchhaltung,” 375 (my translation). 28 Klee was invited to teach at Stuttgart Academy in 1919 (an appointment he did not take up) and that same year signed a contract with the art dealer Hans Goltz. In May and June 1920, a major exhibition of his work was held at Goltz’s gallery in Munich, where 362 works were shown. In October 1920, he was appointed to the Bauhaus at Weimar (he began teaching there in 1921), and also in 1920, his first essay, “Creative Credo,” was published. 29 Klee substantially revised his diary entries, it is estimated, in three separate, intensive sessions: in 1904, between 1911 and 1913, and in 1919–­20. See Christian Geelhaar, “Journal intime oder Autobiographie? Über Paul Klees Tagebücher,” in Paul Klee: Das Frühwerk 1883–­1922, exh. cat. (München: Stadtische Galerie im Lebenbachhaus, 1980), 246–­60. See Kersten and Okuda, Im Zeichen der Teilung, 35–­38 for an analysis of the way in which Klee catalogued his childhood drawings, between 1911 and 1915. 30 See Rümelin, “Klee’s Interaction with His Own Oeuvre”; Kersten and Okuda, Im Zeichen der Teilung; Okuda, “Paul Klee: Buchhaltung”; and Wolfgang Kersten, “Paul Klee: Kunst der Reprise,” in Brancusi, Léger, Bonnard, Klee, Fontana, Morandi, ed. Dieter Schwarz (Düsseldorf: Kunstmuseum Winterthur und Richter Verlag, 1997), 105–­35. 31 Geelhaar, “Journal Intime.” 32 See Karen Edis Barzman, “Perception, Knowledge and the Theory of Disegno in Sixteenth-­Century Florence,” in From Studio to Studiolo: Florentine Draftsmanship under the First Medici Grand Duke, ed. Larry J. Feinberg (Oberlin, OH: Allen Memorial Art Museum, 1991), 37–­48; Francis Ames-­Lewis and Joanne Wright, Drawing in the Italian Renaissance Workshop (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1983); and David Rosand, “Remembered Lines,” in Reinink and Stumpel, Memory and Oblivion, 811–­15. 33 See Will Grohmann, Paul Klee (London: Lund Humphries, 1957), 376; Grohmann, Paul Klee: Drawings, 40. 34 Quoted in Christian Geelhaar, “Die Zeichnungen Paul Klees,” in Geelhaar, Klee—­ Zeichnungen: Reise ins Land der besseren Erkenntnis (Köln: M. Du Mont Verlag, 1975), 7. 35 Quoted in Rosand, “Remembered Lines,” 812. Leonardo, however, goes on to warn the apprentice that he should not allow the hand to become too practiced, for fear

Notes to Chapter 1 265

Notes to Chapter 1 266

that otherwise, when drawing, he will lapse into repeating accustomed forms—­ seemingly the very opposite of anything Klee feared. 36 Ibid. 37 Esther Leslie also suggests a comparison between Klee’s drawings and the Mystic Writing Pad, although she does not develop the idea. See Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-­Garde (London: Verso, 2002), 60. Although it proceeds differently, Leslie’s discussion in her book of Klee’s work and its reception by Benjamin complements my own argument here, in its emphasis on Klee’s futurity and nonnaturalism, and Leslie’s remark that “for Benjamin, Klee was the only gratifying modern painter . . . precisely because . . . it was unclear whether he was a painter or a drawer” (39), reads helpfully in relation to my focus on oil-­transfer in particular, as a method that reconfigures both painting and drawing. 38 Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing” (1966), in Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 200. 39 Ibid. 40 Sigmund Freud, “A Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad” (1925), in vol. 19 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 227. 41 Ibid., 228. 42 Ibid., 228–­29. 43 Ibid., 229. 44 Ibid., 230. 45 There are of course dissimilarities between the two, the chief one being that oil-­ transfer is a system that uses the imprint in conjunction with a carbon sheet, and thus the character of the “permanent mark” that is achieved is that of a deposit and not simply an indentation. The indented line appears instead on the original drawing. Nevertheless, in both cases the technology of the mark making is the imprint. As Freud himself remarks, “The small imperfections of the contrivance have, of course, no importance for us” (229)—­the implication being that one cannot hope for everything from an analogy such as this. 46 Freud, “Mystic Writing Pad,” 227. 47 Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” 226. 48 Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament” (1927), and “The Little Shop-­Girls go to the Movies” (1927), in Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 75–­86, 291–­304. 49 Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800–­1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 326, 216. 50 Ibid., 87. 51 Geelhaar, Klee and the Bauhaus, 129. 52  The Diaries of Paul Klee, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), entry number 760, 198. 53 Kittler, Discourse Networks, 328–­29. 54 Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Childhood around 1900: 1934 Version” (1932–­34), trans. Howard Eiland, in SW3, 390. 55 The watercolors are entered in the catalogue raisonné as numbers 62, 63, 65, 66, and 69 for the year 1930—­in the last of these Klee appears to employ an imprint of the page in just the same way as he does in the oil-­transfers, and achieves an effect of “beading” that may be the weave of the imprinted paper. The lithographs include, for example, Tightrope Walker (1923, 138) and Hoffmannesque Fairy-­Tale Scene (1921, 123). Precedents for the “tonal” qualities of the ink marks in the oil-­transfers are to be found in some pen drawings from 1911, e.g., Nude, Right Hand to Mouth (1911, 93) and Nude Sitting on a Coat (1911, 95). 56 Klee varied the way he used the page, however, to achieve different effects. In both City in the Intermediate Realm (1921, 25) and Mountain Formation (1924, 123),

the tacky oil-­painted sheet has been laid square on, and Klee uses the imprint of its straight edges and, in particular, a clear print of at least one of the right-­angled corners of the paper, to enclose the transferred drawing in a second, inner “frame,” within the larger space of the work as a whole. In Dance of the Moth (1923, 124), however, he integrates the printed edge of the “carbon” sheet with the figuration of the transferred drawing. The straight edge of the paper is clearly visible, printed diagonally behind the figure, giving the appearance of an implied pair of wings and contributing to the impression of upward movement. Further, in this work, beside the lower vertical edge of the imprinted paper—­at about the level of the drawn figure’s shins—­a second imprinted “edge” is visible, as though Klee had moved the paper slightly outward before achieving a second impression. An interesting example of the same technique occurs in Room Perspective with Inhabitants (1921, 24), in which two “inner frames” have been created using the imprinted outlines of two differently sized “carbon” sheets. That multiple impressions of oil-­painted sheets were made is also indicated by the higher density of ink and more confused textural markings over the area of the inner rectangle in this oil-­transfer work. All these uses of the imprint of the “carbon” page indicate the care Klee employed to achieve it and the importance he attached to this feature of the oil-­transfers’ appearance. 57 The main interpretation that has been advanced of the oil-­transfers to date is that by Jim Jordan. Jordan holds that the achievement of the oil-­transfers is in holding line and color separate, in keeping with Klee’s artistic theory of the time; see Jordan, “Klee’s Prints and Oil-­Transfer Works,” 98. The argument I advance here differs from this interpretation. First, my account stresses that the quality of line in the oil-­ transfers is novel to this technology and does not represent “line” in itself, as a “polar element,” transplanted here after being “perfected” in previous drawings, as Jordan argues. Second, my claim is that—­because of the marks that reconstitute the whole surface of the imprinted page—­it is “drawing” that is re-­presented in the oil-­transfers, not “line,” which is simply presented, as a perfected graphic element. 58 Werckmeister, Klee’s Career, 180. 59 Kittler, Discourse Networks, 195. 60 Ibid. 61 László Moholy-­Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947), 206. 62 Although photography did not become part of the instruction offered by the Bauhaus until the school moved to Dessau in 1927, Lucia and László Moholy-­Nagy experimented with photograms and other photographic techniques at the Bauhaus from around 1923 on. 63 Charles Baudelaire, “Salon of 1859,” in Baudelaire, Art in Paris, 1852–­1862: Salons and Other Exhibits, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1965), 154. 64 Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” (1927), trans. Thomas Y. Levin, Critical Inquiry, no. 19 (Spring 1993), 429. 65 Ibid., 432. 66 Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism” (1981), in Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-­Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 116. 67 The catalogue of Klee’s library at the Paul Klee Stiftung in Bern records a copy of this book. 68 László Moholy-­Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film (1925), trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1969), 27. Benjamin quotes the passage in “Little History of Photography” (1931), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, in SW2.2, 523. See also Benjamin’s similar discussion in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version)” (1936), in SW3, 118n31. This is a more progressive, forward-­looking theory than it is sometimes presented as being. The point is that the creative potential of the new is revealed in a superseded form, not that the obsolescent form or technology releases a glimpse of its own former utopian

Notes to Chapter 1 267

Notes to Chapter 1 268

potential. Furthermore, the potential described in the passage is to read from one technology across to another, rather than to read more deeply into the specificity of one medium. 69 André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema” (1946), in Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. and ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 17–­22. 70 On Klee’s keeping his studio private, see Felix Klee, Klee: His Life in Documents, 180–­ 81. On his taking up spray-­painting, after Moholy-­Nagy introduced it, see Geelhaar, Klee and the Bauhaus, 110n1. 71 Marcel Franciscono quotes this letter from Klee to his wife, in Paul Klee: His Work and Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 256n47 (my translation). Geelhaar discusses these drawings and constructions in Klee and the Bauhaus, 147. 72 Moholy-­Nagy, quoted in Geelhaar, Klee and the Bauhaus, 110n1. 73 Marcel Duchamp, quoted in Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-­Garde (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1976), 29; my emphasis. 74 Molly Nesbit, Their Common Sense (London: Black Dog, 2000); Rosalind Krauss, The Picasso Papers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998). 75 Walter Benjamin, “Toys and Play” (1928), trans. Rodney Livingstone, in SW2.1, 120. 76 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-­Garde and Kitsch” (1939), in Greenberg: Collected Essays, 1:9. 77 Stanley Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It” (1965), in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 221; Richard Wollheim, “The Work of Art as an Object,” in On Art and the Mind (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 122; Rosalind Krauss, “Re-­Inventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry, no. 25 (Winter 1999), 296.

Chapter Two 1 Information about the panorama device is taken from Bellmer’s own note, in Bellmer, The Doll, ed. Malcolm Green, trans. Alexander Koval (London: Atlas Press, 2005), 42, and Peter Webb with Robert Short, Hans Bellmer (London: Quartet Books, 1985), 30. 2 Therese Lichtenstein also describes the doll as a “primitive cinematic machine,” in her book Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 40. 3 Weihsmann, quoted by Janet Ward, in Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 142; Frederick Kiesler, “Building a Cinema Theatre,” New York Evening Post, February 2, 1929, in Frederick Kiesler: Selected Writings, ed. Siegfried Gohr and Gunda Luyken (Ostfildern bei Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hadje, 1996), 16–­17. 4 For details of this cinema design by Kiesler, see Laura M. McGuire, “A Movie House in Space and Time: Frederick Kiesler’s Film Arts Guild Cinema,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 14, no. 2 (Spring–­Summer 2007): 45–­78. 5 A French translation of the first book, Die Puppe, was also published between these two publications, as La Poupée, in 1936. 6 See Rosalind E. Krauss and Jane Livingston, L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art; New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), 86; Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Therese Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors; and Sue Taylor, Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 7 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, xx. 8 Here I am following Carol Duncan, “Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-­

Century Vanguard Painting” (1973), in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, ed. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 293–­313. 9 Compare Bellmer’s 1934 photographs of hands, for example, with Jacques-­André Boiffard’s photographs of clenched toes (1929), or Bellmer’s use of negative photography and lace fabrics, in the first Doll series, with Man Ray’s similar imagery of 1923, 1929, and 1930. Bellmer’s Idol (1937) appears imitative of Man Ray’s Tomorrow (1924); note the inward-­turned pairs of feet and the way the “eyes” of Bellmer’s idol echo the inner pair of nipples in the Man Ray. Similarly, Bellmer’s Untitled (1946) appears to reference Man Ray’s La Prière (1930). In their exhibition catalogue of Surrealist photographs, Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston reproduce one of Bellmer’s photographic studies for Bataille’s L’Histoire de l’Oeil (1946) opposite André Kertész’s Distortion # 102 (1933), to which it bears a striking likeness (L’Amour Fou, 68–­69). 10 See Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Other commentators have also noted this point; see, for example, Webb, Hans Bellmer, 68. 11 Webb, Hans Bellmer, 38. 12 Ibid., 29. 13 Jean Brun, “Techniques de la Désoccultation” (1952), quoted in Webb, Hans Bellmer, 29. 14 Bellmer, “The Father” (1936), reprinted in Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, 177. 15 Juliet Mitchell, Siblings (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003). 16 D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” (1953), in Playing and Reality (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1986), 1–­30. 17 See Melanie Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-­Depressive States,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 16 (1935): 145–­74. For background on object-­relations theory, see Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 18 Winnicott, “Transitional Objects,” 6. 19 Ibid. 20 Winnicott, “Playing: A Theoretical Statement” (1971), in Playing and Reality, 47. 21 Winnicott, “Playing,” 55. 22 Ibid., 48, 60. 23 Ibid., 54. 24 For Bellmer’s meeting with Pritzel, his reading of Rilke, and other sources of inspiration for the doll, see “Chronology,” in Michael Semff and Anthony Spira, eds., Hans Bellmer, exh. cat. (Munich: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung; London: Whitechapel Gallery; Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 2006), 231–­32. 25 Rainer Maria Rilke, “Some Reflections on Dolls (Occasioned by the Wax Dolls of Lotte Pritzel)” (1914), in Rilke, Selected Works, vol. 1, Prose, trans. G. C. Houston (London: Hogarth Press, 1954), 44–­45; my emphasis. For useful commentary on Rilke’s essay, see Eva-­Maria Simms, “Uncanny Dolls: Images of Death in Rilke and Freud,” New Literary History 27, no. 4 (Autumn 1996): 663–­77. 26 “The doll, which lived solely through the thoughts projected into it, and which, despite its unlimited pliancy could be maddeningly stand-­offish.” Bellmer, Doll, 40. 27 See Benjamin, “Berlin Childhood around 1900” (1938), trans. Howard Eiland, in SW3, 375, and Shierry Weber Nicholson’s commentary on this essay, in Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 64. Compare also the similar passage in Benjamin, “One-­Way Street” (1923–­26), trans. Edmund Jephcott, in SW1, 465. 28 Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, 15. 29  Vogue 66, no. 5 (September 1, 1925): 42–­43. For Léger’s discussion of shop window displays, see his essay “The Machine Aesthetic: The Manufactured Object, the Artisan and the Artist” (1924), trans. Alexandra Anderson, in Functions of Painting, ed.

Notes to Chapter 2 269

Notes to Chapter 2 270

Edward F. Fry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 55–­56. 30 See Ward, Weimar Surfaces, 217, for this particular display, and 206–­29 for a discussion of Weimar shop windows in general. Other useful literature on the shop window includes Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Sherwin Simmons, “Ernst Kirchner’s Streetwalkers: Art and Luxury and Immorality in Berlin, 1913–­16,” Art Bulletin 82, no. 1 (March 2000): 117–­48; and Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein, eds., Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture (Ostfildern-­Ruitz: Hatje Cantz, 2002), especially Katharina Sykora’s essay in this volume, “Merchandise Temptress: The Surrealistic Environments of the Display Window Dummy,” 130–­35. 31 See “Chronology,” in Semff and Spira, Hans Bellmer, 235–­37, and also Marielle Crété, “Biographie,” in Bellmer (Paris: Centre national d’art contemporain, 1971), 92. 32 For information on the laborious work of hand-­coloring the Doll photographs, see Webb, Hans Bellmer, 207. 33 Krauss, L’ Amour Fou; Ian Walker, City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). 34 Abigail Solomon-­Godeau, “Winning the Game When the Rules Have Been Changed” (1983), in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (New York: Routledge, 2003), 155. 35 André Salmon, quoted in Anne Umland, Picasso: Guitars, 1912–­14 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 27. 36 See Anne Baldassari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror, trans. Deke Dusinberre (Paris: Flammarion, 1997). 37 For the Kandinsky story—­which is perhaps the ur-­story for this theme in modernism—­see Wolfgang Kersten, “Paul Klee: Kunst der Reprise,” in Brancusi, Léger, Bonnard, Klee, Fontana, Morandi, ed. Dieter Schwarz (Düsseldorf: Kunstmuseum Winterthur und Richter Verlag, 1997), 121. For the Ernst anecdote, see James Johnson Sweeney, Eleven Europeans in America, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 13, nos. 4–­5 (1946): 16. Moholy-­Nagy says “a picture could be standing on its head and still provide a sufficient basis for an assessment of its worth as a painting,” in Painting, Photography, Film (1925), trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1969), 13. 38 Baldassari, Picasso and Photography, 19. 39 André Breton, “Picasso in His Element” (1933), in Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002), 101. 40 Anne Baldassari points out that in this instance it is unclear whether the shadowy image of Picasso is the result of the “superimposition of two negatives or the outcome of a deliberately short pose in front of the lens.” Baldassari, “Picasso as Photographer,” Aperture, no. 145, “Surface and Illusions” (Fall 1996), 6. 41 Jeffrey Weiss, “Fleeting and Fixed: Picasso’s Fernandes,” in The Cubist Portraits of Fernande Oliver, ed. Weiss, Valerie J. Fletcher, and Kathryn A. Tuma (New York: Princeton University Press; Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2003), 35. 42 Baldassari, Picasso and Photography, 19. 43 Each of these photographs is reproduced in Baldassari, Picasso and Photography. 44 On the importance of the Guitar to the development of Cubism see Yve-­Alain Bois, “The Semiology of Cubism,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), 169–­208. 45 See Christine Poggi, “Picasso’s First Constructed Sculpture: A Tale of Two Guitars,” Art Bulletin 94, no. 2 ( June 2012): 274–­98; Umland, Picasso: Guitars. 46 Umland, Picasso: Guitars, 23. 47 Reproduced in Zelevansky, Picasso and Braque, 126. 48 Quoted in Baldassari, Picasso and Photography, 16. 49 Breton, “Picasso in His Element,” 105. 50 Charles Baudelaire, “A Philosophy of Toys” (1853), in The Painter of Modern Life and

Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press), 198–­99. 51 A further complexity connected to the two-­and three-­dimensional play in this photograph is reported by Baldassari: namely, that Picasso originally made two photographs of the assemblage, “with a slight lateral shift between viewpoints, as though creating a ‘stereoscope’ image that would virtually convey the volume of the studio.” Baldassari, Picasso and Photography, 116. 52 Pepe Karmel suggests this joke in discussion, in Zelevansky, Picasso and Braque, 83. See also Edward Fry, “Convergence of Traditions: The Cubism of Picasso and Braque,” in ibid., 302. 53 This photograph is reproduced in Umland, Picasso: Guitars, fig. 6. 54 Baldassari, Picasso and Photography, 116. 55 Jean Paulhan, La Peinture Cubiste (Paris: Le Cercle du libres precieux, 1970). The description was further elaborated in Pierre Daix and Joan Rosselet, Picasso: The Cubist Years, 1907–­1916, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979). Both Paulhan and Daix use the term to describe the function of the papiers collés as compositional testing grounds, and thus, as an extension of the “seeing machine” possibilities of the sketch. It should be clear that I am developing the description in a rather different direction here. 56 Breton famously described Picasso as the creator of “tragic toys for adults” in his essay “Surrealism and Painting” (1928), in Surrealism and Painting, 6–­7. Neil Cox has recently discussed the idea in Picasso’s “Toys for Adults”: Cubism as Surrealism (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2009). Also relevant to my discussion here, given the proto-­photographic and cinematic character of Bellmer’s doll and Picasso’s Guitar, is the idea of a “philosophical toy” as discussed by Annette Michelson in “On the Eve of the Future: The Reasonable Facsimile and the Philosophical Toy,” October, no. 29 (Summer 1984), 3–­20. 57 Breton, “Picasso in His Element,” 109. See also Cox, Picasso’s “Toys for Adults,” 32. 58 Winnicott, “Playing,” 60. 59 See Louis Aragon, “The Challenge to Painting” (1930), in The Surrealists Look at Art, ed. Pontus Hulten (Venice, CA: Lapis Press, 1990), 17–­72. 60 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Picasso Papers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998). 61 On the idea that Picasso’s Cubist experiments from 1911–­12 were devised as if addressed to a collective, comprising himself and Braque (“as if the two of them were enough of a community of users”), see T. J. Clark, “Cubism and Collectivity,” in Farewell to an Idea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 169–­223. 62 Robert Rosenblum, “The Typography of Cubism” (1965), in Picasso in Retrospect, ed. Roland Penrose and John Golding (London: Granada, 1973). Edward Fry, citing Rosenblum’s article, extends this reading in his article “Picasso, Cubism and Reflexivity,” Art Journal 47, no. 4 (Winter 1988), and again in his paper “Convergence of Traditions,” in Zelevansky, Picasso and Braque. See also Molly Nesbit, Their Common Sense (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2000), 260–­66. 63 Elizabeth Cowling, “‘Proudly We Claim Him as One of Us’: Breton, Picasso, and the Surrealist Movement,” Art History 8, no. 1 (March 1985): 96n72. 64 Ibid., 96. 65 Baudelaire, “A Philosophy of Toys,” 202–­3. 66 See Bellmer, “Memories of the Doll Theme” (1934), in The Doll, 35–­40. 67 Fry, “Convergence of Traditions,” 302; Picasso, quoted in Werner Spies, Picasso: The Sculptures. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculptures (Ostfildern-­Ruitz: Hatje Cantz, 2000), 77. 68 Frederick Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display (London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1930), 17. 69 See Breton, “Pablo Picasso: 80 Carats . . . with a Single Flaw” (1961), in Surrealism and Painting, 116; Aragon, “The Challenge to Painting.” 70  Minotaure, no. 1 (February 15, 1933), 8–­27.

Notes to Chapter 2 271

Notes to Chapter 2 272

71 See Umland, Picasso: Guitars, 29n55. 72 Quoted in Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Duchamp (New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2000), 111. André Breton was the first to suggest a comparison between Duchamp’s Coffee Mill and Picasso’s Guitar in his essay “Lighthouse of the Bride” (1935), in Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, trans. George Heard-­Hamilton (London: Trianon Press, 1959), 90. Lebel develops the suggestion in his own text (35). 73 See “Chronology,” in Marcel Duchamp, ed. Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art; Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973), 13. 74 See Carsten-­Peter Warncke, Pablo Picasso 1881–­1973, trans. Michael Hulse, ed. Ingo F. Walther (Köln: Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1994), 286; Krauss, Picasso Papers. 75 Giorgio Agamben, “Mme Panckoucke; or, The Toy Fairy,” in Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. M. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 56–­57. 76 See Schwarz, Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, 588; and George Heard Hamilton, “Radio Interview with Marcel Duchamp” (1959), in Duchamp: Passim: A Marcel Duchamp Anthology, ed. Anthony Hill (Amsterdam: G & B Arts International, 1994), 76. 77 Georgia O’Keeffe remembers a piece of mirror stuck in the bicycle wheel in her contribution to “A Collective Portrait of Marcel Duchamp,” in d’Harnoncourt and McShine, Marcel Duchamp, 213. 78 Benjamin made this note as an addendum to the second version of the “Work of Art” essay, transcribed in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, bk. 3, ed. Rolf Tidemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Franfurt-­am-­Main: Suhrkahmp Verlag, 1974), 1045–­46 (my translation). It is tempting to wonder whether this may have been prompted by Benjamin’s visiting the Surrealist Exhibition of Objects, at the Charles Ratton Gallery, Paris, in May 1936, where a number of Duchamp’s readymades were displayed (discussed further below). Benjamin had become acquainted with the Surrealist group Contre-­Attaque, led by Breton and Georges Bataille, through the assistance of the translator of his “Work of Art” essay, Pierre Klossowski, in January 1936; see “Chronology,” in SW3, 426. He attended an exhibition opening with Breton in March 1939; see Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 14. The editors of the recently published, definitive edition of the different versions of the “Work of Art” essay, plus Benjamin’s manuscript notes, suggest that Benjamin’s mention here of Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even, which he calls a “portfolio work” (Mappenwerk), refers to Duchamp’s Green Box, published in Paris in September 1934. See Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, ed. Burkhardt Lindner, Simon Broll and Jessica Nitsche (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2013), 513. 79 For an interesting discussion of the studio photographs and Duchamp’s studio in general, see Herbert Molderings, “It Is Not the Objects That Count, but the Experiments: Marcel Duchamp’s New York Studio as a Laboratory of Perception,” in Re-­Object: Marcel Duchamp, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Gerhard Merz, ed. Eckhard Schneider, exh. cat. (Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz; Köln: Walther König, 2007), 146–­64. 80 Man Ray recounts in his autobiography that this photograph was supposed to be matched with one taken by Duchamp of Man Ray standing behind the device, but that when he was posed, standing in place, the machine suddenly broke, sending glass disks spinning into the air and almost killing him. See Man Ray, Self-­Portrait (London: Bloomsbury, 1988), 60. 81 See discussion of this photograph in Étant donné Marcel Duchamp, ed. Paul B. Franklin (Paris: Association pour l’Étude de Marcel Duchamp, 2006), 7, and in T. J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 118–­19.

82 Benjamin, “Berlin Childhood around 1900: 1934 Version” (1932–­34), trans. Howard Eiland, in SW3, 393. Benjamin also told this story in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Third Version)” (1939), trans. Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott, in SW4, 268. The motif is discussed further below, in chapter 4. 83 Umland, Picasso: Guitars, 25n38, also makes this suggestion, crediting the idea to Jeffrey Weiss in a conversation of 2010. See also Spies, Picasso: The Sculptures, where he compares the setup in Picasso’s studio not only to Duchamp’s arrangement of readymades in his studio but to “the Surrealist fascination with dolls” (79, 88, 90). 84 These photo-­collages by Picasso are illustrated in Baldassari, Picasso and Photography, 118–­21. 85 Christine Poggi points this out and suggests that this work on glass was Picasso’s response to Braque’s The Portuguese (1911), which she argues depicts a scene as if seen through the glass of a shop window. She adds, “This painting on glass from 1912 predates Duchamp’s related experiment with glass as a ground in the Large Glass.” See Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism and the Invention of Collage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 68–­73, and 70n36. 86 “I drew on the wall of my studio with a pencil the final shape, the exact shape of what the Glass would be, with all the measurements and the placement of all these things with perspective. . . . It all came to me, idea after idea, between 1913 and 1915, and all of the visual ideas were in that drawing on the wall of my studio, so that from 1915 on, I was just copying.” Duchamp, quoted in Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-­Garde (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1976), 35. 87 Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, 1994), 21–­22. 88 Compare Benjamin’s account of the childhood collection, in which there are “prickly chestnuts that are spiky clubs, tinfoil that is hoarded silver, bricks that are coffins, cacti that are totem poles, and copper pennies that are shields,” in “One-­Way Street” (1923–­26), trans. Edmund Jephcott, in SW1, 465. 89 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1999), 537–­42. 90 Kiesler’s book was reprinted in 1939, owing to its great success. Architectural Forum, in March 1939, called it a “pioneering study” and “still useful as a guide to action”; quoted in Frederick Kiesler: Selected Writings, ed. Siegfried Gohr and Gunda Luyken (Ostfildern bei Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hadje, 1996), 140. 91 Kiesler, “Notes on Designing the Gallery” (1942), in Gohr and Luyken, Kiesler: Selected Writings, 42. 92 The viewer was required to turn a wheel and peep through a hole in order to view the rotating contents of the Boîte; a design that is reminiscent in this context of Bellmer’s rotating design of the panorama device in the abdomen of the doll, which itself recalls a diagram of a shop-­mannequin with mechanized interior wheel illustrated in Kiesler’s book (37). This exhibition was approvingly reviewed by Clement Greenberg in 1943, particularly for its technique of exhibiting works by Paul Klee, as noted in chapter 1. 93 Kiesler, “The Ideology of the Shop Window” (1928), in Gohr and Luykens, Kiesler: Selected Writings, 1996; Lisa Phillips, “Environmental Artist,” in Frederick Kiesler, ed. Lisa Phillips (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/W. W. Norton, 1989), 114. 94 Kiesler’s idea was for a gallery, the walls of which would be “receptor-­screens” for TV images. See “Chronology,” in Phillips, Frederick Kiesler, n.p. 95 Ibid. 96 For example, Kiesler helped Duchamp organize material for Breton’s Surrealist exhibition held in Paris in July 1947, and the two also codesigned the front cover of the new Surrealist magazine VVV in March 1943. Ibid.

Notes to Chapter 2 273

Notes to Chapter 2 274

97 Kiesler’s essay was “Design-­Correlation: Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass” (1937), reprinted in Hill, Duchamp: Passim; Breton’s essay was published in Minotaure, no. 6 (Winter 1935), 45–­49. 98 Kiesler, “Design-­Correlation,” 110–­18. 99 Ibid., 113. 100 See, for example, Duchamp’s interview with Michel Sanouillet, 1954; quoted in Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp: The Portable Museum; The Making of the Boîte-­en-­Valise de ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Sélavy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 174. 101 For the story about the chocolate grinder, see Tomkins, Bride and the Bachelors, 29. For speculation on dry cleaners and shop mannequins, see Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, 31, and Bradley Bailey, “The Bachelors: Pawns in Duchamp’s Great Game,” Tout-­Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Online Journal 1, no. 3 (December 2000), http://www.toutfait. com/issues/issue_3/Articles/bailey/bailey.html (accessed May 3, 2013). 102 Two other photographs of Brancusi’s Leda among Duchamp’s papers in the Philadelphia Museum of Art archives show the sculpture alone and taken from outside the building, indicating that Duchamp was aware of (and had possibly directed) the positioning of the sculpture just outside the window, where it could be seen through the Large Glass. For details of Duchamp’s art dealing activities, see Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), and the invaluable online resource compiled by Tony Marcus, “Marceleconomics,” http://www.galeriesimpson.com/userfiles/marcelpdf(1).pdf (accessed August 22, 2013). 103 Calvin Tomkins discusses Duchamp’s relationship with Maria Martins in Duchamp: A Biography (366) and the siting of the Large Glass (389). It is not clear whether the statue by Martins was on view at this time; see Francis Naumann, Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 183, 183n17. 104 This photograph is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art archives, MDP, Box 27, folder 13. 105 Jennifer Gough-­Cooper and Jacques Caumont, “Frederick Kiesler and the Bride Stripped Bare,” in Frederick Kiesler 1890–­1965, ed. Yehuda Safran (London: Architectural Association, 1989), 65–­66. 106 For details of three shop window displays Duchamp designed between 1943 and 1945, see “Chronology,” in d’Harnoncourt and McShine, Marcel Duchamp, 23–­24. 107 Marcel Duchamp, À l’infinitif: A typotranslation by Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk of Marcel Duchamp’s White Box, trans. Jackie Matisse, Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk ([England?]: Typosophic Society Northend Chapter, 1999), 5–­6. 108 The Green Box was first published by Duchamp in 1934; I am quoting here from The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even: A Typographic Version by Richard Hamilton of Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box, translated by George Heard Hamilton (Reykjavik: Edition Hansjorg Mayer, 1976), n.p. 109 Molly Nesbit, “Readymade Originals: The Duchamp Model,” October, no. 37 (Summer 1986), 61–­63. 110 Helen Molesworth also draws attention to Duchamp’s display of his readymades in his studio, and suggests a shift of emphasis in critical interpretation from their disruption of production to practices of consumption, in “Rrose Sélavy Goes Shopping,” in The Dada Seminars, ed. Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witkovsky (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005), 173–­89. 111 Alongside the replica of the Large Glass in the central panel of the box we see Paris Air (1919), in the region of the Bride’s blossoming; the typewriter cover, Traveller’s Folding Item (1916), likened by some authors to the Bride’s skirt, in the middle; and the urinal, Fountain (1917), in the bachelor’s domain at the bottom. This arrangement was repeated in a number of exhibition installations overseen by Duchamp, for example, the 1963 exhibition of his work at the Galerie Buren, Stockholm, and subsequently at the Pasadena Art Gallery in California. See Bonk, Duchamp: The Portable Museum, 185–­86.

112 R. Meringer with C. Mayer, Versprechen und Verlesen: Eine Psychologische-­ Linguistische Studie (Vienna, 1895), quoted in Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), vol. 6 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001). 113 Ibid., 57. 114 Rosalind E. Krauss, “Where’s Poppa?,” in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 456. 115 Hans Bellmer, “A Brief Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious; or, The Anatomy of the Image” (1957), in The Doll, 157. 116 Kiesler himself suggested a fusion of the shop window and the television screen, when he argued that the surfaces of shop windows might function dually as screens to broadcast news flashes to passersby, in Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, 121. 117 Information about the Hall of Mannequins is taken from Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvellous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí and the Surrealist Exhibition Installations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 44–­45. 118 The Guitar included in this exhibition was Picasso’s large painted sheet-­metal construction from 1924 (Spies, Picasso: The Sculptures, cat. 63); it was hung from the ceiling cornice, as can be seen here in fig. 2.23. Works by Duchamp at this exhibition, as listed in the brief catalogue, included Bottle-­Rack (1914), The Brawl at Austerlitz (1921), and Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy? (1921); see Exposition Surréaliste d’objets (Paris: Charles Ratton, 1936). For the question of whether Benjamin may have visited this exhibition, see note 78 above. 119 Hans Bellmer, Hexentexte (1954), in Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, 174–­75. 120 On anaclisis, see Jean Laplanche and J.-­B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-­Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (London: Karnac Books/Institute of Psycho-­ Analysis, 1988), 29–­32. On the relation of the transitional object to burbling and to the breast, see Winnicott, “Transitional Objects,” 4, 6–­7, 11–­14. 121 Bellmer, “The Ball Joint” (1937–­45), in The Doll, 63–­64. 122 Peter Webb has observed that another of Bellmer’s sculptures, Machine Gunneress in a State of Grace (1937), resembles Picasso’s Woman Sitting in a Red Armchair (1932). I would further point out its similarity to Duchamp’s Bride, of 1912. 123 “Letter to Katherine Dreier, March 5, 1935,” and “Letter to Katherine Dreier, May 20, 1935,” in Affectionately, Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk, trans. Jill Taylor (Ghent: Ludion Press, 2000), 197, 201–­2.

Chapter Three 1 Ellsworth Kelly, quoted in John Coplans, Ellsworth Kelly (New York: John Abrams, 1971), 36. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 33. 4 For the photograph and information regarding the work’s first exhibition, see Patterson Sims and Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Ellsworth Kelly: Sculpture (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1982), 45. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh suggests the comparison to Duchamp’s readymades in a footnote to his essay “Kelly’s Matrix: Administering Abstraction, Industrializing Color,” in Ellsworth Kelly: Matrix (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2003), 13n7. 5 Buchloh, “Kelly’s Matrix,” 22. 6 This photograph is reproduced in E. C. Goossen, Ellsworth Kelly (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 24.

Notes to Chapter 2 275

Notes to Chapter 3 276

7 This photograph is reproduced in Sims and Pulitzer, Ellsworth Kelly: Sculpture, 19. 8 See Goossen, Ellsworth Kelly, 38. 9 Kelly’s Guggenheim proposal was rejected, but the book has since been published as Ellsworth Kelly, Line, Form, Color, with additional essay by Harry Cooper (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 1999). 10 James Meyer, Ellsworth Kelly: Sculpture for a Large Wall, 1957 (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1998). Meyer compares the photograph discussed below to the La Combe series, 38n42. 11 Cited in Henry Geldzahler, “Introduction,” in Diane Upright, Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper (New York: Harry N. Abrams; Fort Worth, TX: Fort Worth Art Museum, 1987), 5. 12 Maria Morris Hambourg, Paul Strand Circa 1916, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Harry N. Abrams, 1998). 13 See for example, in relation to Strand’s Winter, Central Park, Kelly’s Pine Branch and Shadows (1950), and in relation to Strand’s Telegraph Poles, Texas, Kelly’s Board and Shadow, Long Island (1968). Kelly’s photographs are reproduced in Diane Waldman, Ellsworth Kelly: Drawings, Collages, Prints (Greenwich, CT: Paul Bianchini Books, 1971). 14 Hambourg, Paul Strand, 34. 15 Ibid., 39. 16 John Cage, “45’ for a Speaker,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 161. 17 Nathalie Brunet, “Chronology, 1943–­1954,” in Yve-­Alain Bois et al., Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 1948–­1954 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1992), 191. 18 John Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work” (1961), in Silence, 108. 19 Ibid., 102. 20 László Moholy-­Nagy, quoted in Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo–­Avant-­Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 36. 21 The Happening was Theater Piece No. 1 (1952), at which at least one of Rauschenberg’s White Paintings was shown. See Walter Hopps, Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s (Houston: Menil Collection; Washington, DC: Houston Fine Art Press, 1991), 65–­66. 22 See Yve-­Alain Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly in France: Anti-­Composition in Its Many Guises,” in Bois et al, Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 14; Roberta Bernstein, “Ellsworth Kelly’s Multi-­Panel Paintings,” in Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective, ed. Diane Waldman (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1996), 41n8; Joseph, Random Order, 78n9. The latter two cite Bois’s arguments in rejecting the comparison. 23 Kelly, quoted in Brunet, “Chronology,” 187–­88. 24 Rauschenberg, letter to Betty Parsons, October 18, 1951, quoted in Hopps, Rauschenberg: The Early Fifties, 230; Kelly, letter to John Cage, September 4, 1950, quoted in Brunet, “Chronology,” 187–­88. 25 See Rosalind E. Krauss, “Notes on the Index,” parts 1 and 2, in The Originality of the Avant-­Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 196–­ 219, for her well-­known analysis of indexicality as a register of sign distinct from the traditional painted mark, linked to both Duchamp and photography, in the course of which she distinguishes Kelly’s painting from an indexical tradition. 26 Brunet, “Chronology,” 189. 27 Carl Andre, in Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton: 12 Dialogues 1962–­1963, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Halifax, NS: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1981), 91. 28 Goossen, Ellsworth Kelly, 57. 29 The sketchbook is published in facsimile as Ellsworth Kelly: Drawings on a Bus, 1954 (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery; Göttingen: Steidl, 2007). 30 Johanna Burton’s recent, lyrical description of this episode draws out its sensual aspects well; see her essay, “Ellsworth Kelly: Changing Parameters,” in Ellsworth

Kelly: Diagonal (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2009), n.p. 31 Other commentators have suggested further links between the drawings in this sketchbook and specific paintings, confirming what a rich source this small collection of drawings is for Kelly’s art. See Johanna Burton, “Changing Parameters,” and Roberta Bernstein, “Red Green Blue: Distillations of Memory in Ellsworth Kelly’s Art,” in Ellsworth Kelly: Red Green Blue, ed. Julie Dunn (La Jolla, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2002), 23. 32 This meeting is recorded by Brunet, in “Chronology,” 187, and discussed by Branden Joseph in Random Order, 73–­75. 33 See Kirk Varnedoe, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 125n89. 34 The photographs were published in Cy Twombly: Photographs (Munich: Schirmer/ Mosel, 2003). On the dating of Panorama and the related series, and by extension, the studio photographs, to late 1954, see Kirk Varnedoe, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 22. 35 See Varnedoe, Cy Twombly, 84. 36 Ibid., 22. 37 Rauschenberg later sold many of the best-­loved works from his collection, including Panorama, to fund his new foundation, ROCI. See Robert S. Mattison, Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 229. 38 See, for example, Nicholas Serota ed., Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 57. 39 See Varnedoe, Cy Twombly, 23. 40 Thomas Crow, “Southern Boys Go to Europe: Rauschenberg, Twombly and Johns in the 1950s,” in Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collection, ed. Stephanie Barron and Lynn Zelevansky (Los Angeles: County Museum of Art/ Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 60–­61. 41 Varnedoe, Cy Twombly, 21n86. 42 Robert Pincus-­Witten, “Learning to Write (Cy Twombly)” (1968), in Eye to Eye: Twenty Years of Art Criticism (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984), 87. 43 The first to use the word “blackboard” in connection with Twombly’s dark-­ground paintings was Max Kozloff, in “New York Round-­Up,” Artforum 6, no. 4 (December 1967): 54. The description was picked up and developed by Robert Pincus-­Witten in two essays: “Learning to Write (Cy Twombly)” and “Cy Twombly” (1974), both reprinted in Eye to Eye, 87–­91 and 93–­100, respectively. Rauschenberg used the description “blackboard” in an interview with Barbara Rose in 1987, suggesting its easy acceptance in Twombly’s circle; see Rose, An Interview with Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), 36. 44 This feature is also commented on by Varnedoe in Cy Twombly; Pincus-­Witten in “Learning to Write”; and Yve-­Alain Bois, “‘Der Liebe Gott Steckt im Detail’: Reading Twombly,” in Bois et al., Abstraction, Gesture, Ecriture: Paintings from the Daros Collection, exh. cat. (Zurich: Alesco; New York: Scalo, 1999), 68. 45 Roland Barthes, “The Wisdom of Art” (1979), in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 193. Barthes’s second essay on Twombly, “Cy Twombly: Works on Paper,” is also reprinted in this book, 157–­76. 46 Varnedoe, Cy Twombly, 21–­22. 47 Ibid., 19. 48 Brunet, “Chronology,” 182. 49 Bois, “Kelly’s Trouvailles: Findings in France,” in Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948–­55 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museum, 1999), 23. 50 Kelly, Fragmentation and the Single Form, exh. cat., “Artist’s Choice” series (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1990), n.p. See also Brunet, “Chronology,” 185–­86. 51 Kelly, quoted in Brunet, “Chronology,” 193. 52 Bois explicitly rejects a connection between these two works in “Anti-­Composition,”

Notes to Chapter 3 277

Notes to Chapter 3 278

27. 53 Pincus-­Witten, “Learning to Write,” 89; my emphasis. 54 See Charles Stuckey, “Rauschenberg’s Everything, Everywhere Era,” in Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, ed, Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson, exh. cat. (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997), 33. 55 Rauschenberg, quoted in Rose, Interview with Rauschenberg, 46. 56 See, for example, Kelly’s remarks that “I wanted to give up easel painting, which I felt was too personal” (“Notes from 1969,” 30), and “I wanted to make a less personal art” (quoted in Brunet, “Chronology,” 184). 57 Bernstein, “Ellsworth Kelly: Multi-­Paneled Paintings,” Artstudio, no. 24, special issue, “Ellsworth Kelly” (Paris, 1992), 86; Johns quoted in Vivian Raynor, “Jasper Johns: ‘I Have Attempted to Develop My Thinking in Such a Way That the Work I’ve Done Is Not Me,’” Artnews 72 (March 1973): 20–­22. 58 Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 96. Rauschenberg is, of course, referring to his Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). 59 This is also noted by Yve-­Alain Bois, in Bois and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “A Conversation,” in Ellsworth Kelly: “Tablet” 1948–­1973, ed. Catherine de Zegher, Drawing Papers, no. 29 (New York: Drawing Center, 2002), 5. 60 For Rauschenberg’s visit to de Kooning, see Hopps, Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s, 71. 61 Marcel Duchamp, “Infra-­Mince,” in The Duchamp Book, ed. Gavin Parkinson (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 155. 62 See Nancy Ring, New York Dada and the Crisis of Masculinity: Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp in the United States, 1913–­1921 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1991), 195–­97. 63 In turn, the overlapping “exposures” of Duchamp’s painting have been seen as a response to Étienne-­Jules Marey’s technique of “chronophotography,” although Muybridge’s work is also suggested, since the subject of a body descending a staircase is one he photographed. 64 Rauschenberg credits the phrase “clock of the room” to John Cage, in Rose, Interview with Rauschenberg, 65. For the longer quote, see Tomkins, Bride and the Bachelors, 203. 65 Caroline A. Jones, “Finishing School: John Cage and the Abstract Expressionist Ego,” Critical Inquiry, no. 19 (Summer 1993), 648–­49. In this important essay, to which I am indebted, Jones argues for a distinction between this bodily aspect of Rauschenberg’s aesthetic and John Cage’s more technological ideas: “Cage described them [the White Paintings] as ‘airports for the light, shadows and particles,’ characteristically transposing Rauschenberg’s semiotics of a tender, almost invisible, but deeply sensate body into a technological metaphor for communication from the external world” (649–­50). As will become clear, however, my purpose is to suggest that we might understand these two as not strongly opposed, but instead linked by the formation of the “technologized body.” 66 Cage told this story in a number of places. One of the earliest is the lecture “Experimental Music,” which he gave in Chicago in 1957 and which is reprinted in his book Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 8. While some commentators place the date of Cage’s visit in 1951, Cage’s biographer, David Revill, dates it to 1952, after his stay at Black Mountain College; see Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage, a Life (London: Bloomsbury, 1992), 161–­62. This date is supported by Cage’s own account in “Autobiographical Statement,” in John Cage, Writer: Previously Uncollected Pieces, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Press, 1993), 243. 67 Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg,” 98. 68 Helen Molesworth, “Before Bed,” October, no. 63 (Winter 1993), 72.

69 Jones, “Finishing School,” 656. In a series of articles published since 1996, Jonathan D. Katz has further developed this account of Cage’s aesthetics of “silence,” arguing for an understanding based on silence as a “readerly relation” that activates or “queers” the viewer. These quotes come from Katz, “Performative Silence and the Politics of Passivity,” in Making a Scene, ed. Henry Rogers and David Burrows (Birmingham: ARTicle Press, 1999), 97–­103; but see also Katz, “Passive Resistance: On the Success of Queer Artists in Cold War American Art,” L’Image 3 (Winter 1996); Katz, “Identification,” in Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, ed. Moira Roth and Katz (Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, 1998), 49–­68; Katz, “John Cage’s Queer Silence or How to Avoid Making Matters Worse,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5, no. 2 (April 1999); and Katz, “The Silent Camp: Queer Resistance and the Rise of Pop Art,” in Visions of a Future: Art and Art History in Changing Contexts, ed. Kornelia Imesch and Hans-­Jorg Heusser (Zurich: Swiss Institute for Art Research, 2004). Nicholas De Villiers takes a similar approach in Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes and Warhol (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), which reads the refusal of fixed, public naming or identification in the work of these writers as “distinctly queer strategies, strategies of opacity, not necessarily of silence or invisibility” (3). 70 Jones, “Finishing School,” 650. 71 Reported in Tiffany Bell, “Looking at Kelly’s Paintings Now,” Artstudio, no 24, special issue, “Ellsworth Kelly” (Paris, 1992), 173. 72 Kelly, “Notes from 1969,” 34. 73 Coplans, Ellsworth Kelly, 63. 74 Sims and Pulitzer, Ellsworth Kelly: Sculpture, 99. 75 Kelly, “Notes from 1969,” 30. 76 For an account of cruising in relation to modernist visualities, see Mark W. Turner, Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London (London: Reaktion Books, 2003). 77 Roland Barthes, “Soirées de Paris,” in Incidents trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 59. 78 Ibid., 66–­68. 79 Barthes, “Incidents,” in Incidents, 13. Subsequent page references to this essay are given in brackets in the main body of the text. 80 Pierre Saint-­Amand, “The Secretive Body: Roland Barthes’s Gay Erotics,” in Same Sex/Different Text, ed. Brigitte Mahuzier, Karen McPherson, Charles A. Porter, Ralph Sarkonak, Yale French Studies, no. 90 (1996), 153. Subsequent page references to this essay are given in brackets in the main body of the text. 81 D. A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), quoted in Saint-­Amand, “Secretive Body,” 166. 82 Jones, “Finishing School,” 652. See also the thoughtful discussion of the merits and demerits of reading Cage’s and other artists’ work for a “queer aesthetic” in Joseph, Random Order, 67–­68, 67n85, 67n87–­89. 83 Saint-­Amand, “Secretive Body,” 155. 84 Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes, 18. 85 Jones, “Finishing School,” 631–­33. 86 Cage, “How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run” in A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968), 134. 87 Described by Bois in Bois and Buchloh, “A Conversation,” 8. 88 Myers, Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco, 76. 89 Buchloh, in Bois and Buchloh, “A Conversation,” 4. 90 Freud, “Screen Memories” (1899), in vol. 3 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 320. 91 Freud, “Screen Memories,” 320. Freud gives a fuller account of the latter type of

Notes to Chapter 3 279

Notes to Chapter 3 280

screen memories in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), vol. 6 of the Standard Edition, 43–­52. While Freud’s theorization is sometimes heralded as cinematic, a reading encouraged by the English translation of Deckerinnerungen (literally, “covering memories”) as “screen memories,” any parallel is probably coincidental, or perhaps anticipatory, since in 1899, cinema was still in its infancy. For further discussion of the point, see Sharon Packer, Movies and the Modern Psyche (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 17–­19, 33–­36. 92 Johns’s famous remark that he uses “things the mind already knows” in his painting is discussed by Kirk Varnedoe in his introduction to Jasper Johns: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 16. 93 Brian O’Doherty, “Robert Rauschenberg: The Sixties,” in The Voice and the Myth: American Masters (New York: Universe Books, 1988), 198. 94 Kozloff, “New York Round-­Up,” 54. 95 See Sarah Rich’s discussion of Kelly’s “test[ing] the success of his pictures against the urban environment” in her essay, “Attention! Ellsworth Kelly’s Reliefs,” in Ellsworth Kelly: Relief Paintings, 1954–­2001 (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2001), 22–­23. 96 Alfred Pacquement relates the story in his essay “Jours de fête,” in Bois et al., Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 49. 97 Robert Smithson, “A Cinematic Atopia” (1971), in Robert Smithson: Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 138–­42. 98 André Breton, “As in a Wood” (1951), in The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writing on the Cinema, ed. Paul Hammond (Edinburgh: Polygon Press, 1991), 80–­85.

Chapter Four 1 In 1945, 25,695 patents were granted; in 1965, 62,857. See Alfred E. Eckes Jr. and Thomas W. Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 159. 2 Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: Architectural Press, 1960). 3 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects” (1965), in Donald Judd: Complete Writings, 1959–­1975 (Halifax, NS: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 2005), 181; Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2” (1966), in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 15. 4 Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12, no. 2 (February 1968); Rosalind E. Krauss, “First Lines: Introduction to Photograph,” in James Coleman, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1999), 18. 5 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-­Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 2. 6 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage (Harmondsworth, Middlesex; New York: Penguin, 1996), 8, 12, 20. 7 Lawrence Alloway, “Network: The Art World Described as a System” (1972), in Network: Art and the Complex Present (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984), 3–­15; Information, curated by Kynaston McShine at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970; Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetics” (1968), in Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of Post-­Formalist Art (New York: George Braziller, 1974). 8 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (1968), trans. James Benedict (New York: Verso, 1996), 118; Baudrillard, “Beyond the Vanishing Point of Art,” in Post-­Pop Art, ed. Paul Taylor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 173. See also Baudrillard, “After the Orgy,” in The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (1990), trans.

James Benedict (New York: Verso, 1993), 9–­11. 9 On neo–­avant-­garde repetitions, see Hal Foster, “Who’s Afraid of the Neo–­Avant-­ Garde?” in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 10 Benjamin describes this phenomenon in “Little History of Photography” (1931), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, in SW2.2, 523. As noted in chapter 1, Benjamin is quoting from László Moholy-­Nagy’s 1925 book, Painting, Photography, Film, at this point. 11 McLuhan and Fiore, Medium Is the Massage, 150–­51, 76–­77. 12 See Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1988). 13 See James Meyer, “The Second Degree: Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art,” in the facsimile edition of Working Drawings (Genève: Cabinet des estampes du Musée d’art et d’histoire, 1997), 5–­18. 14 Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 136. Alberro’s book, in particular, the chapter called “The Xerox Degree of Art,” led the way for my chapter here in focusing on conceptual artists’ uses of the photocopier in the 1960s and the cultural enthusiasm that then surrounded this new generation of copying machine. Alberro, however, reads the work conceptual artists produced as fulfilling Baudrillard’s claim that Xerox represents “the zero degree of art,” exploding the aesthetic altogether, rather than reading Xerox dialectically, as I do here, to describe a new mode of technological aesthetics that survives its destructive reconfiguration by mechanical reproduction. 15 Seth Siegelaub in conversation with Daniel McLean at the Expanded Conceptualism symposium, Tate Modern, London, March 18–­19, 2011. 16 Alberro also makes this point in Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, 148. 17 David Owen, Copies in Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2004), 12, 63–­75. 18 Ibid., 12. 19 Ibid., 135. 20 Chester F. Carlson, “Electrophotography,” United States Patent Office, no. 2,297,691, patented October 6, 1942; incorporating serial no. 265,925, application April 4, 1939. 21 Owen, Copies in Seconds, 247. 22 McLuhan and Fiore, Medium Is the Massage, 123. 23 McLuhan and Fiore, Medium Is the Massage, 50; Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Third Version),” trans. Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott, in SW4, 251–­83. 24 McLuhan and Fiore, Medium Is the Massage, 122. 25 Smithson, in “Four Conversations between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson (1969–­1970),” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 208. 26 Smithson, “Conversation in Salt Lake City,” interview with Gianni Pettena (1972), in Smithson: Collected Writings, 298–­99. 27 Smithson, “Four Conversations,” 208. 28 Tacita Dean, “A Conversation with Tacita Dean,” in Tacita Dean, ed. Roland Groenenboom, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2001), 82. 29 Krauss “First Lines,” 16–­18. 30 Mel Bochner, “Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism” (1967), in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 92–­102. 31 See the essays by Eva Cockcroft, Max Kozloff, Serge Guilbaut, and David and Cecile Shapiro, in Pollock and After, ed. Frances Frascina (London: Harper and Row, 1985), and Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

Notes to Chapter 4 281

Notes to Chapter 4 282

32 Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media” (1964), in Enzensberger, Dreamers of the Absolute (London: Century Hutchinson Ltd, 1988), 24–­25. 33 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1948). 34 Jasa Reichardt, ed., Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts (New York: Studio International/Frederick A. Prager, 1969) (the flyleaf text appears only in the hardback edition). 35 “We are now in transition from an object-­oriented to a systems-­oriented culture.” Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 16. 36 Ibid.,15. 37 Ibid.,16. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid.,17–­18. 40 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148–­72. 41 Peter Osborne, ed., Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon Press, 2002); Donna De Salvo, ed., Open Systems: Re-­Thinking Art c. 1970 (London: Tate Publishing, 2005). 42 See Simon Penny, “Systems Aesthetics + Cyborg Art: The Legacy of Jack Burnham,” Sculpture Magazine 18, no. 1 ( January/February 1999); Michael Corris, Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Matthew Rampley, “Systems Aesthetics: Burnham and Others,” Vector (e-­zine), January 2005; Luke Skrebowski, “All Systems Go: Recovering Jack Burnham’s ‘Systems Aesthetics,’” Tate Papers (Spring 2006); Frances Halsall, Systems of Art: Art, History and Systems Theory (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008); Matthew Rampley, “Art as a Social System: The Sociological Aesthetics of Niklas Luhmann,” Telos, no. 148 (Fall 2009), 111–­40. 43 Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” 17. 44 Ibid., 16. 45 Ibid., 17. 46 Ibid., 24. 47 Skrebowski, “All Systems Go,” 2. 48 Armand Mattelart, Networking the World, 1794–­2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 49 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art, 1962–­1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions” (1990), in October: The Second Decade, ed. Rosalind E. Krauss et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 50 Caroline A. Jones, The Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 51 For examples of McLuhan’s comments on the road, see his Forward through the Rearview Mirror, ed. Paul Benedetti and Nancy DeHart (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 153. For Smithson’s comments on McLuhan, see “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (1968), in Smithson: Collected Writings, 101, and “Four Conversations,” 210. 52 Smithson, “The Crystal Land” (1966), in Smithson: Collected Writings, 9. “Slurb” is a word used by Smithson to describe sites of suburban sprawl, hinterlands or frontiers out beyond the residential areas of the city used as dumping grounds for the city’s waste. See “Conversation in Salt Lake City,” 299. 53 Other commentators have noted the prevalence of maps and the operations of mapping in conceptual work. See, for example, Robert Storr, Mapping, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994). 54 Robert Hobbs, “Chronology” in Robert Smithson: Sculpture, ed. Hobbs, with contributions by Lawrence Alloway, John Coplans, and Lucy Lippard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 235.

55 Robert Smithson, “Atlantic City (H-­13)” (1966), in Smithson: Collected Writings, 332. 56 Ibid. 57 Huebler, in Marianne Van Leeuw and Anne Pontégnie, Origin and Destination: Alighiero e Boetti, Douglas Huebler (Bruxelles: Société des expositions du Palais des beaux-­arts, 1997), 126–­27. 58 “Interview with Robert Smithson” (1970), ed. Paul Toner and Robert Smithson, in Smithson: Collected Writings, 234. 59 “Interview with Robert Smithson for the Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution” (1972), conducted by Paul Cummings, in Smithson: Collected Writings, pp. 290–­91. 60 Smithson speaking at “Earth” symposium, White Museum, Cornell University (1969), in Smithson: Collected Writings, 177–­78. 61 Huebler, “Statement,” in Van Leeuw and Pontégnie, Origin and Destination, 127. 62 Smithson, “Earth” symposium, 177–­78. 63 Ibid., 178. 64 Ibid., 181. 65 “Interview with Robert Smithson for the Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institute,” 295. 66 “Fragments of an Interview with Patsy Norvell” (1969), in Smithson: Collected Writings, 193. 67 Smithson, in Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell eds., Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, Weiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 128. 68 Smithson, “Interview with Paul Cummings,” in Hobbs, Smithson: Sculpture, 115. 69 Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty” (1972), in Smithson: Selected Writings, 151. 70 Smithson, “Four Conversations,” 200. 71 Smithson, in Alberro and Norvell, Recording Conceptual Art, 134. 72 See Smithson’s comments on Ehrenzweig in his essay “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (1968), in Smithson: Collected Writings, 103. 73 Smithson, “Earth” symposium, 178. 74 Hobbs, Smithson: Sculpture, 14. 75 Smithson, in Alberro and Norvell, Recording Conceptual Art, 131; my emphasis. 76 “Interview with Robert Smithson for the Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institute,” 295. 77 Smithson, “Earth” symposium, 181. 78 Smithson, “Four Conversations,” 226–­27. 79 Mel Bochner, “The Serial Attitude,” Artforum 6, no. 4 (December 1967): 28. Bochner is describing the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge. 80 Frédéric Paul, ed., Douglas Huebler: Variable, etc (Limouges: FRAC Limousin, 1993), 35. 81 See, for example, Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark, eds., At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 82 Penny, “Systems Aesthetics + Cyborg Art,” 3. 83 J. G. Ballard, “Myths of the Near Future” (1982), in J. G. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories (New York: Flamingo, 2002), 1077. 84 Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” in Computer Media and Communication: A Reader, ed. Paul A. Mayer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 23–­36. The essay was reprinted shortly afterward in Life magazine, in September 1945, where it was accompanied by a number of illustrations, including the diagram reproduced here. 85 Ibid., 33. 86 Ibid. 87 One of the by-­lines in the original magazine publication of Bush’s essay was “Building ‘trails’ of thought on the Memex.” 88 Bush, “As We May Think,” 34–­35.

Notes to Chapter 4 283

Notes to Chapter 4 284

89 Paul A. Mayer, “Introduction,” in Mayer, Computer Media and Communication, 11. 90 Bush, “As We May Think,” 33; my emphasis. 91 Lucy Lippard, “Douglas Huebler’s Everything about Everything” (1972), in Douglas Huebler, exh. cat. (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 1979), n.p. 92 Huebler, Variable Piece no. 4, New York City, May, 1969, in Software: Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art, ed. Jack Burnham (New York: Jewish Museum, 1970), 35. 93 Rosalind Krauss, “Conceptual Art and the Reception of Duchamp” (1994), in The Duchamp Effect, ed. Martha Buskirk and Migon Nixon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 211. 94 For a different discussion of conceptual art in relation to Romanticism, see Jörg Heiser, ed., Romantic Conceptualism, exh. cat. (Nürnberg: Kunsthalle; Bielefeld/ Leipzig: Kerber Verlag, 2007). 95 For analyses of the Romantic aesthetic as simultaneously ideological (a disciplinary institution of a particular model of bourgeois subjectivity, emphasizing individuality and interiority and serving the needs of the capitalist economy) and functioning dialectically, to produce the self and the experience it nevertheless describes as impossible, see Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Jonathan Arac, Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); and Don H. Bialostosky, Wordsworth, Dialogics and the Constitution of Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 96 In Beckett’s plays, “a second world of images springs forth, both sad and rich, the concentrate of historical experiences. . . . This shabby, damaged world of images is the negative imprint of the administered world.” Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tidemann, trans. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 30–­31. 97 Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Childhood around 1900: 1934 Version” (1932–­34), trans. Howard Eiland, in SW3, 392. 98 Shierry Weber Nicholson, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 216–­17. 99 Siegfried Kracauer also employed an example drawn from Chinese art to make a similar point at around this time, comparing the abstraction of nature in Chinese painting to the denaturing effect on the subject of her absorption and integration into the mass ornament. See Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament” (1927), trans. Thomas Y. Levin, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 83. Kracauer’s account is discussed further in chapter 6. 100 Lev Manovitch, “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life,” Critical Inquiry, no. 35 (Winter 2009); Boris Groys, “Conceptual Art in the Expanded Context,” Expanded Conceptualism symposium, Tate Modern, London, March 18–­19, 2011.

Chapter Five 1 Richter’s own notes on photography suggest he sees its condition as abject: “Perhaps because I’m sorry for the photograph, because it has such a miserable existence even though it is such a perfect picture, I would like to make it valid, make it visible, just make it (even if what I make is worse than the photograph).” Richter, “Notes, 1964–­ 65,” in The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings, 1962–­1993, ed. Hans-­Ulrich Obrist (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 33. The ambition of Betty in particular, yet its simultaneous condition as a conscious failure, are also acknowledged by Richter in

an interview: “In the Betty portrait or the Ema nude. . . . These works tend towards the masterpiece, and if they aren’t masterpieces, it’s just because I know that that just won’t do; it’s only ever like a quotation of a masterpiece, perhaps.” “Interview with Hans-­Ulrich Obrist, 1993,” in Richter, Daily Practice, 260. 2 “Gerhard Richter: The Day Is Long: Interviewed by Robert Storr,” Art in America 90, no. 1 ( January 2002): 73. 3 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Interview with Gerhard Richter,” trans. Stephen P. Duffy, in Roald Nasgaard, Michael Danoff, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, ed. Terry A. Neff (London: Thames and Hudson; 1988), 21. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 22. 6 Ibid. This point is repeated by Richter in a later interview; see “Interview with Jonas Storsve, 1991,” in Richter, Daily Practice, 227. 7 Buchloh, “Interview with Gerhard Richter,” 22. 8 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Third Version)” (1939), trans. Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott, in SW4, 255. 9 Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” (1931), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, in SW2.2, 507–­30; see also Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935), trans. Howard Eiland, in SW3, 35. 10 Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 257–­58. 11 Richter, “Notes, 1964–­65,” in Daily Practice, 31. 12 Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), trans. Harry Zohn, in SW4, 328. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version),” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in SW3, 117. 16 Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Room-­for-­Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October, no. 109 (Summer 2004), 6. 17 Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty” (1933), trans. Rodney Livingstone, in SW2.2, 735, 732; Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 262. 18 Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 320. 19 Benjamin, “The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression” (1935), trans. Edmund Jephcott, in SW3, 94. 20 Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” 734–­35. 21 Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 263. 22 Ibid., 263–­64. 23 Benjamin, “Dream-­Kitsch” (1925), trans. Howard Eiland, in SW2.1, 3. 24 Benjamin, “On Some Motifs,” 338. See also Benjamin’s related discussion of the actor facing the inhuman gaze of the film camera, in “Work of Art,” 259–­60. 25 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tidemann, trans. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 27, 350. 26 Miriam Hansen suggests this derivation of the phenomenon of aura from the maternal gaze in her important essay, to which I am indebted, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’” New German Critique, no. 40 (Winter 1987), 215. Shierry Weber Nicholson also suggests a reading of the “reciprocal gazing” account of auratic experience in terms of “the baby’s rapturous gazing at the mother’s mirroring face while nursing,” in her book Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 188, 190. Neither author, however, pursues the suggestion as I do here. For a contrasting and non–­psychoanalytically based reading of the motif of the artwork returning our gaze, see Diarmuid Costello, “Aura, Face, Photography,” in Walter Benjamin and Art, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Continuum, 2006), 164–­84. 27 On idealist aesthetics, see Benjamin’s discussion in “The Significance of Beautiful Semblance” (1935–­36), trans. Edmund Jephcott, in SW3, 137. In valuing only the

Notes to Chapter 5 285

Notes to Chapter 5 286

achievement of a “beautiful semblance,” Benjamin says, idealist aesthetics forgot the deeper character of mimesis, in which “the two aspects of art: semblance and play” are “tightly interfolded like cotyledons.” In the machine age, it is the playful aspect of mimesis, and so the work of art as play, that is drawn forth. 28 Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929), trans. Edmund Jephcott, in SW2.1, 217–­18. This contrast may be instructively compared to Benjamin’s discussion of the “face of nature” (seen in symbolic art as idealized) and the “face of history” (seen in allegory as a death’s head) in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), 166. 29 Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience,” extended in her book Cinema and Experience: Sieg fried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 30 Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience,” 186. 31 Ibid., 192–­93, 210. Hansen is quoting from Jürgen Habermas’s essay, “Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-­Raising or Rescuing Critique” (1972), trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, in Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, vol. 1, ed. Peter Osborne (London: Routledge, 2005), 107–­36. 32 “There is an obvious qualitative leap between the hand that draws an animal on the wall of a cave and the camera that makes it possible for the same image to appear simultaneously at innumerable places. But the objectivation of the cave drawing vis-­ à-­vis what is unmediatedly seen already contains the potential of the technical procedure that effects the separation of what is seen from the subjective act of seeing. . . . That in his dichotomization of the auratic and the technological artwork Benjamin suppressed this element common to both in favor of their differences would be the dialectical critique of his theory.” Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 33. 33 Benjamin, “Franz Kafka” (1934), trans. Harry Zohn, in SW2.2, 810. 34 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919), in vol. 17 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 217–­56. See also Hansen’s discussion of the uncanny element in Benjamin’s account of aura in “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience,” 213–­15. 35 See Adorno’s comment on the “frisson” that Arthur Rimbaud bestowed on poetry: “The shudder is a reaction to the cryptically shut, which is a function of that element of indeterminacy. At the same time, however, the shudder is a mimetic comportment reacting mimetically to abstractness.” (In Adorno’s account, abstractness characterizes and arises from the conditions of capitalism.) Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 20. For commentary on the relation between Benjamin’s and Adorno’s theories of mimesis, see Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 195–­204; Hansen, “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer,” New German Critique, no. 56 (Spring–­Summer 1992), 50–­54, 70; Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 154; and Nicholson, Exact Imagination, Late Work, 137–­80. 36 See, for example, Adorno’s discussion of birdsong as fundamentally alien from us, because it is natural, in Aesthetic Theory, 66: “Something frightening lurks in the song of birds precisely because it is not a song but obeys the spell in which it is enmeshed.” 37 See Adorno, “The Idea of Natural History” (1932), trans. Bob Hullot-­Kentor, Telos, no. 60 (1984), 111–­24. 38 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 12. 39 Hansen, “Room-­for-­Play,” 17. See also Leslie’s commentary on “physis” in Benjamin, in Overpowering Conformism, 22–­23. 40 Hansen, “Room-­for-­Play,” 26. See also Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, 89. 41 Hansen, “Room-­for-­Play,” 6. 42 Science fiction supplied a useful framework for Marker, whose oeuvre contains a number of examples of science-­fiction fables, including 2084 (1984) and The Embassy (1975). For background on Marker and his work, see Catherine Lupton, Chris

Marker: Memories of the Future (London: Reaktion Books, 2005). 43 Chris Marker, essay in the booklet accompanying the DVD edition of La Jetée (Argos Films/Nouveaux Pictures, 2003), n.p. 44 “Beauty is only the promise of happiness.” Stendahl, On Love (1822), trans. Vyvyan Holland (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928), 44. 45 Jean-­Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus” (1975), in Apparatus: Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings, ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (New York: Tanam Press, 1980), 41–­62. 46 Laura Mulvey reads the enthralled gaze of the cinema spectator at the screen in terms of the nursing infant’s gaze at the mother in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 840, and more recently has developed a theorization of cinema spectatorship that we might see as related, in terms of the death drive, in her book Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). In relation to La Jetée, such a reading has recently been proposed by Victor Burgin, in The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 91, 101, and Griselda Pollock in her essay “Dreaming the Face, Screening the Death: Reflections for Jean-­Louis Schefer on La Jetée,” Journal of Visual Culture 4, no. 3 (December 2005): 287–­305. 47 See Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 98–­99. 48 “I don’t know myself—­I don’t remember. I close my eyes and I can’t recall my face. Can you?” Hari asks Kelvin in one scene, making plain the growing sense of dislocation she feels between her own sense of herself as a subject and the identity she occupies as “Hari.” Hari’s painful struggle toward recognition of herself is brought out even more clearly in the Steven Soderbergh version of the film, in which the female character, called Rheya, articulates her rejection of her identity more explicitly and her feelings are explored at greater length. 49 See Andreas Huyssen’s illuminating discussion of this problematic in “The Vamp and the Machine: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis” (1981), in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 65–­81. 50 See for example, Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” 735. 51 Aby Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring: An Examination of Concepts of Antiquity in the Italian Early Renaissance” (1893), in Aby Warburg: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, ed. Kurt W. Forster, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 104. For discussion of the German phrase “bewegtes Beiwerk,” see Forster, “Introduction,” in this volume, 13n54, and E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: Warburg Institute, 1970), 58. 52 Warburg, “The Emergence of the Antique as a Stylistic Ideal in Early Renaissance Painting” (1914), in Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 271, 273; see also Warburg, “Botticelli’s Birth of Venus,” 117, 141, “Dürer and Italian Antiquity” (1905), 553. 53 These letters are published in German in Aby Warburg; Werke in einem Band, ed. Martin Treml, Sigrid Weigel, and Pertidat Ladwig (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010), 198–210. The correspondence is discussed by Gombrich in Aby Warbug, 107–8, who expands his exegesis with quotes from related notes and fragments. The manuscript letters and notes are held in the Warburg Institute Archive, WIA, 111.55.1–10. 54 Warburg, “The Theatrical Costumes for the Intermedi of 1589: Bernado Buontalenti’s Designs and the Ledger of Emilio de’Cavalieri” (1895), in Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 379. 55 The phrase “Miss Hurrybring” is quoted from Warburg’s notes by Gombrich in Aby Warburg, 297; for the influence of Anton Springer on Warburg see Forster, “Introduction,” 6n22. 56 Georges Didi-­Huberman, L’Image survivante (Paris: Les edition minuit, 2002).

Notes to Chapter 5 287

Notes to Chapter 5 288

57 Sigmund Freud, “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva” (1907), in vol. 9 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 2–­95. The similarity between Warburg’s notes on the “ninfa” and Jensen’s novel as analyzed by Freud is also noted by Philippe-­Alain Michaud in Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 69n5. See also Forster’s discussion of similar motifs in the writings of John Ruskin and Marcel Proust, in his “Introduction,” 19. 58 Warburg, “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia Ferrara” (1912), 586. Warburg expresses a similar idea in the final paragraph of his “Dürer and Italian Antiquity” (1905), 558, and in “Pagan-­Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther” (1920), 622. 59 Warburg, “Dürer and Italian Antiquity,” 554–­55. Warburg expresses a similar idea in the concluding “Four Theses” to his paper “Botticelli’s Birth of Venus” (144), though his expression there introduces certain additional complexities. 60 Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 248–­49; also discussed in Forster, “Introduction,” 15n62. See also Adorno on the fundamentally “contradictory” character of mythic elements, in “The Idea of Natural History” (1932), 123. 61 See for example Warburg’s discussion of Dürer’s Melancholia in “Pagan-­Antique Prophecy,” 644. Benjamin’s theory of mimesis is similarly phylogenetic, describing an original mimetic faculty, with religious and magical functions, that eventually finds expression in language, in “On the Mimetic Faculty” (1933), trans. Edmund Jephcott, in SW2.2, 720–­22. 62 Warburg, “Pagan-­Antique Prophecy,” 650. 63 Gombrich quotes notes from 1929 by Warburg to this effect, 287; see also Kurt W. Forster, “Introduction,” 15, n. 60. 64 Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” (1927), in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 58. 65 See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Atlas/Archive,” in The Optic of Walter Benjamin, ed. Alex Coles (London: Black Dog Press, 1999); Buchloh, “Warburg’s Paragon? The End of Collage and Photomontage in Postwar Europe,” in Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing and Archiving in Art, ed. Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzen (New York: Prestel, 1998), 50–­60; and Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive” (1993), in Gerhard Richter Atlas: The Reader, ed. Iwona Blazwick and Joanna Graham (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2003), 99–­120. 66 Benjamin quotes Siegfried Giedion’s description of the Eiffel Tower as a “thin net of iron” that shapes the objects that “stream” through it and alters our view of the city in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1999), 459; he compares the perception of architecture to that of film in “Work of Art,” 265–­66. These passages are discussed by Detlef Mertins, who develops a compelling account of Benjamin’s discussion of architecture as an “optics” in “Walter Benjamin and the Tectonic Unconscious,” in Walter Benjamin and Art, ed. Andrew Benjamin (New York: Continuum, 2005), 148–­63; see also Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-­Century Germany (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2005), 55. 67 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton; NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 305. 68 Schwartz, Blind Spots, 73.

Chapter Six 1 This chapter develops material previously published in my essay “The Bride Stripped

Bare by Her Bachelors, Even: Tacita Dean and the Large Glass as Film Machine,” in Artistic Production and the Feminist Theory of Art: New Debates IV (Vitoria-­Gasteizko, Udalak: Montehermerso Cultural Center, 2011), 286–­95. Thanks to the Montehermerso Cultural Center for permission to republish this material here. 2 The phrase “irrational exuberance” was coined in 1996 by Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States, to describe the behavior of financial markets that overvalued technology companies during the period before the market slump in the late 1990s. The phrase was revived a decade or so later, again to describe market valuations in excess of their “conditions of manufacture,” during the recession of the late 2000s. 3 See Dean’s description of this demonstration in her short text “Analogue,” in Tacita Dean: Analogue: Drawings, 1991–­2006, ed. Theodora Vischer and Isabel Friedli (Göttingen: Steidl, 2006), 9. 4 See C. W. Ceram, Archaeology of the Cinema (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), 14. 5 Hollis Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses” (1971), in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce Jenkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 131–­39. The idea that the 1960s marked the end of the machine age, or at least of a first machine age, was a popular one at that time, as we saw in chapter 4, but Frampton’s essay is distinctive in linking this idea to film. 6 See T. J. Clark’s discussion of this painting in “Modernism, Postmodernism and Steam,” October, no. 100 (Spring 2002), 154–­74. 7 Walter Panofsky, quoted in Ceram, Archaeology of the Cinema, 14. 8 Stephen Heath, “The Cinematic Apparatus: Technology as Historical Knowledge,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (London: Macmillan, 1980), 1. 9 Roberta Smith, New York Times, June 17, 1997. 10 Jeremy Millar, “Messieurs les inventuers d’epaunes” in Cahier H-­7 (Witte de With), June 1998, 9; Laura Cumming “It’s All Done with Sound-­Mirrors,” Observer, March 4, 2001. 11 Virginia Button and Charles Esche, Intelligence. New British Art 2000, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 2000), 43. All three examples (the filmstrip, the panorama, the zoetrope) are mentioned in the article “Tacita Dean at Tate Britain,” Vertigo 2, no. 1 (Spring 2001), n.p. (no author given). 12 See also my longer comparison of these works in “Lack of Fit: Tacita Dean, Modernism and the Sculptural Film,” Art History 31, no. 3 ( June 2008): 368–­86. On the dating of Lightplay, see Noam M. Elcott, “Rooms of Our Time: László Moholy-­Nagy and the Stillbirth of Multi-­Media Museums,” in my edited book Screen/Space: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 40n53. 13 Dean’s texts on the story of Donald Crowhurst are collected in her book Teignmouth Electron (London: Book Works, 1999). This artist’s book, like the many other texts Dean has published, sits to one side of her film production, exceeding and supplementing it, puncturing any sense of self-­contained medium-­specificity in her films. Dean’s term for these supplementary texts is “asides.” 14 For more on the materialism of structural film, see my introduction in Trodd, Screen/ Space. 15 See Hal Foster “An Archival Impulse,” October, no. 110 (Fall 2004), 3–­22; Mark Godfrey, “Photography Found and Lost: On Tacita Dean’s Floh,” October, no. 114 (Fall 2005), 90–­119; Brian Dillon, “Back to the Future: Tacita Dean and the New Nostalgia,” Modern Painters ( June 2006), 77–­79; Dillon, “Catastrophes to Come,” Guardian Saturday Review, February 18, 2012, 18. 16 Tacita Dean, “Merce’s Last Dance,” Guardian, April 28, 2010, 20–­21. 17 Craneway Pavilion website, http://www.craneway.com/Venue/History (accessed March 15, 2012).

Notes to Chapter 6 289

Notes to Chapter 6 290

18 Michel Carrouges is the originator of the theory, in articles published in 1946 and 1954 and extended in his book Les machines célibataires (Paris: Chêne, 1976). One of the most interesting things about the book is the drawings, commissioned from a professional draftsman, Alexandre Jihel, to illustrate the schematic mapping of elements of the Large Glass onto the plots of various works of literature. See also the exhibition catalogue inspired by Carrouges’s work, Le Macchine Celibi/The Bachelor Machines, ed. Jean Clair and Harald Szeemann (New York: Rizzoli, 1975), which includes essays on the theme of bachelor machines by leading French intellectuals of the day, including Michel de Certeau and Jean-­Francois Lyotard. 19 See Louis Althusser “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1969), in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), 121–­73, where the term “apparatus” (l’appareil) is introduced with the explanation that the state is “a ‘machine’ of repression,” systematically harnessing together in relations of expropriation the working and the ruling classes (131). 20 See Jean-­Louis Baudry’s essay, “The Apparatus” (“Le dispositif,” 1975), in which cinema is compared to Plato’s fable of the cave, where again bodies are harnessed and enchained in relations that are necessarily mystifying. This essay is reprinted, together with Baudry’s earlier essay “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” (1970; here the French word used is l’appareil) in Apparatus: Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings, ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (New York: Tanam Press, 1980); see also Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier (1975), trans. Celia Britton and Annwyl Williams (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). Laura Mulvey’s famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) employs a similar analysis of the cinema as a machinery for ideological indoctrination, arguing in particular that the machinery operates systematically to enforce a view of woman as “object” and heterosexual male as “subject” of the gaze; this essay is reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 833–­944. Annette Michelson, in “On the Eve of the Future: The Reasonable Facsimile and the Philosophical Toy,” October, no. 29 (Summer 1984), 3–­20, offers a comparable, but methodologically distinctive literary archaeology of film as a machinery that enforces a particular structure of desire, founded on the phantasmatic representation of a woman’s body. On the relation of bachelor machines to apparatus theory and film, see also Constance Penley, “Feminism, Film Theory and the Bachelor Machines,” in The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 57–­80. 21 See Juliet Koss, “Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls,” Art Bulletin 85, no. 4 (December 2003): 736n63. 22 See Schlemmer’s essays in The Theater of the Bauhaus (1925), ed. Walter Gropius, trans. Arthur S. Wensinger (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press; London: Eyre Methuen, 1961). 23 Jacques Herbetot to Rolf de Mare, describing Derain’s and Satie’s pitch to him, July 13, 1921; quoted in Felicia McCarren, Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 118. 24 See Andreas Huyssen, “The Vamp and the Machine: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 65–­81. 25 Kiesler himself called this an “electromechanical” set; see Barbara Lesák, “Visionary of the European Theatre,” in Frederick Kiesler, ed. Lisa Phillips (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 40. 26 Roger Copeland, Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 3. 27 For the importance of ballet to Cunningham, see Copeland, Merce Cunningham, and Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-­Garde (Har-

mondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1976). 28 Alexander (Xanti) Schawinsky, who had studied and taught with Oskar Schlemmer at the Bauhaus, taught at Black Mountain College from 1936 to 1938; see Marry Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 20, 40. 29 See Branden W. Joseph, “John Cage and the Architecture of Silence,” October, no. 81 (Summer 1997), 84–­85, 92. On Cunningham’s “politics of perception” see Copeland, “Merce Cunningham and the Politics of Perception” (1979), in What Is Dance?, ed. Copeland and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 307–­24. For a reading of Cunningham’s work in relation to queer theory (to which, in Merce Cunningham, Copeland explains he is opposed), see Ramsay Burt, “Dance, Masculinity and Postmodernism,” in Postmodernism and Dance: Discussion Papers from the Postmodern Dance School (West Sussex: Institute of Higher Education, 1991), and for a similar argument in relation to Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, see Moira Roth, “The Aesthetics of Indifference,” Artforum 16, no. 3 (November 1977): 46–­53; see also Roth’s update to this essay and dialogue with Jonathan Katz in Katz and Roth, Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Duchamp and John Cage (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1998), and my discussion of these arguments in chapter 3. 30 Vanessa Kam, “Merce Cunningham in conversation with John Rockwell,” Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities, http://www.Prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/Cunningham (accessed July 22, 2013); see also Noel Carroll and Sally Banes in “Cunningham and Duchamp,” Ballet Review 11, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 77. 31 David Vaughan, “‘Then I thought about Marcel . . .’ Merce Cunningham’s Walkaround Time” (1982), in Merce Cunningham: Dancing in Space and Time, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (London: Dance Books, 1992), 69. 32 Ibid., 68. 33 Greg Allen, blogspot, posted December 5, 2010, http://greg.org/archive/2010/12/05/ johns_merce_duchamp_walkaround_time.html (accessed February 28, 2012). 34 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1999), 471. 35 See Trodd, “Lack of Fit.” 36 Tacita Dean, Film Works with Merce Cunningham (Steidl: Sprengel Museum Hannover, 2010), n.p. 37 On the difficulty of perceiving and culturally inscribing women artists’ ambivalence, see Mignon Nixon’s essay “The She-­Fox: Transference and the ‘Woman Artist,’” in Women Artists at the Millennium, ed. Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 275–­303. “The father-­daughter relationship stunts ambivalence rather than cultivating it,” Nixon writes (278). 38 Dean, “Merce’s Last Dance,” 20. 39 The work was shown in this form in New York on the day of Robert Rauschenberg’s funeral, and Jasper Johns and Merce Cunningham both came to the opening. Dean, “Merce’s Last Dance,” 20. 40 Dean, “Mario Merz,” in Selected Writings (Paris: ARC/Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 2003), n.p. See also my lecture “Tacita Dean: Fathers and Feminism,” delivered at the Henry Moore Institute in September 2011, available at http://www. henry-­moore.org/docs/file_1360770790262.pdf. 41 Tacita Dean, “Zen and the Art of Film-­Making,” Guardian, G2 (supplement), October 15, 1997. 42 This work of appropriating and restaging the work of great male artists is seen in the very first film included in Dean’s catalogue raisonné, The Story of Beard (1992), in which she restages Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe with live actors, one of whom, playing the nude woman at the center of the tableau, wears a false beard. This film is followed in the catalogue by Sixteen Blackboards (1992), its themes related to the

Notes to Chapter 6 291

Notes to Chapter 6 292

collage drawings I have mentioned, including Oedipus, Byron, Bootsy and My Feminist Foot. These works, and their consecutive presentation in the catalogue raisonné, strengthen the reading I propose in this chapter of Dean’s work as contributing to the tradition of feminist art that meditates on the question of how women artists can position themselves in relation to the canon. For some of the complexities raised by this issue see Mira Schor, “Patrilineage,” Art Journal 50, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 58–­63. Thanks to Vicky Horne for this reference. More generally, on Dean’s work with feet, see Marina Warner, “Footage,” in Tacita Dean: Seven Books: Grey (Göttingen: Steidl, 2011). 43 Dean, “Merce’s Last Dance,” 21; Dean, Film Works with Merce Cunningham, n.p. 44 On Benjamin’s and Adorno’s sense of mimesis as transformational, see Susan Buck-­ Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1977), 85–­87. 45 For a similar argument, see Carol Armstrong, “This Photography Which Is Not One: In the Gray Zone with Tina Modotti,” October, no. 101 (Summer 2002), 19–­52. 46 See Briony Fer, “‘I was of three minds, like a tree in which there are three blackbirds,’” in Fer, Rina Carvajal and Tacita Dean, Tacita Dean: Film-­works (Charta/ Miami Art Central, 2008), 19–­23. 47 Theodor Adorno, “The Idea of Natural History” (1932), trans. Bob Hullot-­Kentor, Telos, no. 60 ( June 1984), 121. 48 Industrial Light & Magic is the name of George Lucas’s special effects company, founded in 1975. 49 For Dean’s own sense of the meanings of analogue, which differs somewhat from the interpretation I offer here, see the exhibition catalogue, Tacita Dean: Analogue, and Dean’s essay in Film, ed. Nicholas Cullinan (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 15–­ 33. Margaret Iversen’s essay, “Analogue: On Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean,” Critical Inquiry, no. 38 (Summer 2012), 797–­819, also develops a different theorization of analogue than the one I propose, founded in indexicality. 50 Walter Benjamin, “On the Image of Proust” (1929), trans. Harry Zohn, in SW2.1, 240. 51 See Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-­ Garde (London: Verso, 2002), 267. 52 Benjamin, “A Glimpse into the World of Old Children’s Books” (1926), trans. Rodney Livingstone, in SW1, 443. For more on Benjamin and color, see Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, 263–­78, and Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Color of Experience (London: Routledge, 1997). 53 Rohmer named his film The Green Ray (1986) after Verne’s novel of the same name, which was first published in 1882, and represented the first popularization of the phenomenon. Duchamp designed the peep-­show installation The Green Ray for the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris, in 1947; it was constructed according to his instructions by Kiesler. The viewer was invited to peer through a hole in a partition wall at a photograph of a seascape, “intermittently illuminated along the horizon by a green light emanating from a neon tube,” as described by Arturo Schwartz, in The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2000), 788–­89. The installation is no longer extant, but Kiesler’s study-­ diagram for it is held in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The “green ray” tradition is perhaps also referenced, in deadpan fashion, in Duchamp’s early readymade Pharmacy (1914), which replicates the glimmer of green and red bottles in a pharmacy window and was inspired, according to one story Duchamp told, by a view of winking lights from the window of a moving train. See “Interview with Marcel Duchamp by Colette Rebus” (Spring 1963), transcript in Philadelphia Museum of Art archives, MDP, Box 3, folder 4, page 3. A further twist on the tradition is given in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, where the motif figures in slightly transformed guise as the green jetty-­light across the bay toward which Gatsby gazes, and to which the famous last lines of the novel refer (“the green light, the orgastic future

that year by year recedes before us”); Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1963), 188. In all these cases, the green ray, like the Blue Flower, emblematizes romantic longing, but for the future rather than past, and serves to propel a journey forward. 54 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version)” (1936), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in SW3, 124n10. 55 Bryan Appleyard, “A Portrait of Human Folly,” Sunday Times: Culture, March 14, 2010. 56 See artist’s website, http://www.johngerrard.net/index.php?sub1=2&wid=32 (accessed February 21, 2012). 57 In this sense, Gerrard’s art updates the filmic logic of the “bachelor machine,” taking it more in the direction theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as a mechanism describing intensified, late-­capitalist production. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-­ Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Continuum, 2003), 1–­38. 58 Quoted in Robin Mackay, “Speculative Liter[e]alism,” in John Gerrard (London: Ivorypress, 2011), 43. 59 See Jasper Sharp, in “Pause and Continue: A Conversation between Linda Norden and Jasper Sharp,” in John Gerrard: Animated Scene, ed. Sharp (Vienna: Schlebrügge, 2009), n.p. 60 Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (1951; London: Verso, 2005), 247. This passage is quoted by Esther Leslie, whopoints out that here Adorno “ventriloquize[s] . . . Benjamin’s revolutionary dialectic of redemption”; see Hollywood Flatlands, 300. 61 As Gerrard has explained, it was oil that drove the plows that “broke the plain” of the American Midwest, creating the famous “dust-­bowl” storms, and it is oil-­derived nitrogen fertilizer that grows the corn that feeds the pigs in units such as those shown in Sow Farm and the Grow Finish Unit works, making these in essence, as the artist says, “oil-­derived pigs.” Artist’s website, http://www.johngerrard.net/index.php?sub1=2&wid=17 (accessed February 21, 2012). 62 Gerrard, quoted in Mark Sheerin, “Slow Burner: John Gerrard Talks about His Monumental Oil Stick Work at Canary Wharf,” Culture 24, August 5, 2010, http://www. culture24.org.uk/art/art81867 (accessed February 21, 2012). 63 Arist’s website, http://www.johngerrard.net/index.php?sub1=2&wid=43. 64 Gerrard, quoted in Sheerin, “Slow Burner.” 65 Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament” (1927), trans. Thomas Y. Levin, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 79. 66 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1999), 864 (O˚, 80); quoted in Susan Buck-­Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 59.

Notes to Chapter 6 293

abstract art, 19, 41, 63 Abstract Expressionists, 9, 101, 111, 123 Adorno, Theodor, 175–76, 178, 186, 244, 251, 255, 260n16, 261n24, 286n32, 286n35; Aesthetic Theory, 192; on birdsong, 286n36; post-auratic shudder, 193–94 aesthetic experience, 10, 176, 246, 255; and gaze, 192; and technology, 247 Agamben, Giorgio, 76 age of machines, 12, 262n36. See also machine ages Alberro, Alexander, 145, 281n14 Alloway, Lawrence, 143 Althusser, Louis, 233; apparatus, as term, 290n19 Andre, Carl, 112, 145 Anzieu, Didier, 131 Apollinaire, 75, 83 apparatus, 4, 10, 14, 104, 194, 220, 254; and Benjamin, 188, 192, 247; and Brecht, 5, 12–13, 158, 188; of film, 8; as filmic, 190, 192, 209–10, 221–22, 224–25, 233, 238, 242, 244, 246; film machine, as ur-model of, 12; and Freud, 32–34; and Klee, 31; and mechanical reproduction, 209, 217; and medium, 45; and memory, 32; oil-transfer as, 33–35, 39, 41–42, 44; panorama device as, 47; and technology, 188 Aragon, Louis, 46, 71; “The Challenge to Painting,” 75, 92; Paris Peasant, 81 Arensberg, Louise, 84 Arensberg, Walter, 84 Arp, Jean, 91, 103, 120 Artforum (magazine), 156 artistic practice, 4–6, 96, 178; in relation to mechanical

reproduction, 9; in relation to peers, 13; as testing-space, 8 Art News (magazine), 117 Art of This Century (exhibition), 83 Atget, Eugène, 190; Boulevard de Strasbourg, 73; Magasins du Bon Marché, 82; photography of shop windows, 82 aura: destruction of, 5, 10–11; idea of, 5, 149, 186–89, 191, 193, 202; longing for, 205; loss of, 186; romantic notion of, 204–5 avant-garde, 15, 18, 60–61, 75, 89, 238; and bodily movements, as mechanical, 233, 235; deskilling drawing, 44; experimentalism, 10; and photography, 74; and shop windows, 82 bachelor machines, 232–33, 238, 244, 249, 289–90nn18, 293n57 Baldassari, Anne, 62–63, 65, 70, 270n40, 271n51 Ballard, J. G., 168 Banham, Reyner, 141 Barry, Robert, 171–72 Barthes, Roland, 119, 131–33, 187; “Incidents,” 130; “Les Soirées de Paris,”129 Bataille, Georges: L’Histoire de l’Oeil, 272n78 Baudelaire, Charles, 40–41, 68, 73, 188, 191 Baudrillard, Jean, 143, 163, 172, 176, 281n14 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 201, 290n20 Bauhaus, 4, 9, 35, 43, 101, 104, 125–26, 233, 235, 265n28, 291n28; photography at, 40–42, 267n62; and technology, 44

295

Index 296

Bazin, André, 42, 187 Beckett, Samuel, 175, 284n96 Behrman, David, 236–37 Bellmer, Fritz, 54–55 Bellmer, Hans, 14, 45, 48, 56, 71, 78, 217, 273n92; Ball-Joint, 92, 94; “A Brief Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious; or, The Anatomy of the Image,” 88–89; Doll photographs, 7, 17, 46, 49–55, 57, 60–61, 73–74, 81, 88, 90–95, 269n9; Idol, 269n9; Les Jeux de la Poupée, 49, 54, 75, 93; “Memories of the Doll Theme,” 47, 57; and panorama device, 47–48; photographs and shop windows, link between, 58–60; Picasso, imitation of, 91–92; Self-Portrait with the Doll, 79; The Spinning Top, 93; and Surrealists, 91; Untitled, 269n9; wordplay, affinity for, 93 Benjamin, Walter, 1–2, 12, 19, 92, 143, 144–45, 158, 178, 195, 211, 215, 233, 237, 242, 251, 262n26, 266n37, 286n28; aesthetic theory of, 246–47, 285–86nn27, 286n32; Arcades Project, 17, 81, 262n25, 288n66; aura, idea of, 5, 149, 186–89, 191, 193, 202; and avant-garde, 3; “Berlin Childhood around 1900,” 176; Blue Flower, 190, 192–93, 201–2, 209; Chaplin example, 188–89, 192, 194, 205, 254; Chinese painter anecdote, 79, 176, 194; Denkbilder (thought-pictures), 13; dialectical images, 17–18; expert, psychology of, 14; film, theorization of, 187–90, 194; “A Glimpse into the World of Old Children’s Books,” 246; “Little History of Photography,” 4, 15, 42, 176, 186–87, 190; mechanical reproduction, 3; Mickey Mouse example, 189, 192, 194, 205; mimesis, 8, 35, 246, 261n24, 285–86nn27, 288n61; “new barbarism,” 11, 188, 192, 210; on play, 8, 44, 57; and readymades, 77; and the returned gaze, 191; on shop windows, 81–82; technology, 4, 187–88, 247; and toys, 9–10; “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 3–6, 8, 14–15, 186–87, 192–94, 214, 247, 255, 272n78 Bernstein, Roberta, 121 Betty (Richter), 11, 181–83, 185–86, 194–95, 200, 202–3, 210–11, 215, 225, 251, 284n1; aura, romantic notion of, 204–5; as “failed” painting, 184; Orpheus, symbolism of, 184, 216; as poised between representation and abstraction, 184 Black Mountain College, 101, 110, 115, 235, 278n66, 291n28 Blue Flower, 11, 190–92, 201–2, 209; green ray motif, compared to, 247, 292–93nn53 Blumenfeld, Erwin, 89 Bochner, Mel, 139, 145–46, 149–52, 154–55, 161–62, 166 body: as “seeing machine,” 9, 132–33; transforming of, 234; robots, artistic representations of, 234. See also female body Boiffard, Jacques-André, 269n9 Bois, Yve-Alain, 110 Botticelli, Sandro, 211 Brancusi, Constantin, 45; Bird in Space, 84; Leda, 85, 274n102 Braque, Georges, 45, 65, 73–74, 76; The Portuguese, 273n85

Brassaï, 75 Brecht, Bertolt, 4, 6, 34; and apparatus, 5, 12–13, 158, 188; warning against “utter fatalism,” 14 Breton, André, 46, 60, 63, 68, 71, 91, 93, 138, 271n56, 272n78, 273n96; “Lighthouse of the Bride,” 83, 272n72; “Picasso in His Element,” 75 Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, The (Duchamp). See Large Glass, The Brun, Jean, 54 Buchloh, Benjamin, 102–3, 133, 158, 185–86, 215 Buck-Morss, Susan, 14 Burgin, Victor, 287n46 Burnham, Jack, 143, 162, 171, 177; systems theory, 156–57 Bush, Vannevar, 169–70 Cage, John, 9, 101, 109–11, 115, 121–22, 127, 131, 133, 278n65, 278n66; anechoic chamber anecdote, 125–26, 132, 139; on cast shadows, 108; Cunningham and chance procedures, 235–36; 4’33”, 125, 236, 240; prepared piano, development of, 132; use of silence, 125–27, 132, 236, 244, 250 Čapek, Karel: R.U.R., or Rossum’s Universal Robots, 234 Cardano, Girolamo, 94 Carlson, Chester F., 146–48 Carlson, Trevor, 240 Carrouges, Michel, 289–90nn18 Caumont, Jacques, 85 Cavell, Stanley, 45 Certeau, Michel de, 289–90nn18 Cézanne, Paul, 45 Chandler, John, 142 Chaplin, Charlie, 188–89, 192, 194, 205, 254 cinema. See film Clair, René: Entr’acte, 233 Coburn, Ralph, 120 Cockcraft, Eva, 154 Cold War, 141, 154–55 collage, 50, 63, 65, 71–75, 95–96, 118, 120–21 computer art, 143 conceptual art, 6, 11, 139, 142, 144, 150, 156–58, 162, 165, 168, 169, 175, 177, 179; and aesthetic experience, 176; dialectical structure of, 176; incorporating photocopier, 10, 281n14; and picture field, 171; in relation to Internet, 171, 177–78 Concours Lépine (trade and inventors’ fair), 93 Constructivism, 82 Contre-Attaque, 272n78 Copeland, Roger, 235–36 Coplans, John, 127, 133 Cowling, Elizabeth, 73 Crow, Thomas, 118 Crowhurst, Donald, 224, 289n13 Cubism, 65, 75–76, 80, 84, 87, 92, 107, 232 Cumming, Laura, 221 Cunningham, Merce, 227, 230, 232, 238–41, 291n39; and Bauhaus dance experiments, 235; Cage and chance procedures, 235–36; compared with Dean, 239, 242; How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run, 132; influenced by mechanization, 235; and technology, 242; Walkaround Time, 236–37

cybernetics, 155, 157, 162; and Internet, 156 Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts (exhibition), 143, 156 Dada, 60, 76, 232, 233, 239; doll theme, 49; interest in nonfunctioning machines, 237; use of term montage, 54 Daix, Pierre, 271n55 Dean, Basil, 234 Dean, Tacita, 12–13, 150, 233–34, 250–51, 258; and artistic “fathers,” 240–41; avant-garde, reconfiguration of, 238; Bubble House, 222, 224–25; Craneway Event, 226–28, 230–32, 237–39, 241; compared with Cunningham, 239, 242; Delft Hydraulics, 221; Disappearance at Sea, 222, 224, 226, 238, 257; Fernsehturm, 222; film as site of projection, 224; filmic apparatus, mapping of, 224–25; Gellért, 224–25, 244; The Green Ray, 244, 246; inheritance, concern with, 225; Kodak, 219–20, 246; Mario Merz, 240; mechanical ballet, 226, 230, 238, 241; medium-specificity, 221–22; Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS . . ., 239; Michael Hamburger, 242; mimesis, 239; modernism, 224–25, 238; My Feminist Foot, 241, 291–92nn42; natural history, as work of, 244; Noir et Blanc, 220; Oedipus, Byron, Bootsy, 241, 291n42; Oedipus myth, interest in, 240–41; past, preoccupation with, 225; Prisoner Pair, 242; Sixteen Blackboards, 291n42; sound, work with, 244; The Story of Beard, 291n42; and technology, 242, 247; Teignmouth Electron, 289n13 Debord, Guy, 14 Defense Video and Imagery Distribution System (DVIDS), 252 de Kooning, Willem: Woman II, 123 Deleuze, Gilles, 293n57 dematerialization, 142 Derain, André, 233 Derrida, Jacques, 32, 34 De Salvo, Donna, 156–57 Didi-Huberman, George, 212 di Pretoro, Davide, 252 Doll photographs (Bellmer), 7, 17, 46, 50, 54, 73–74, 81, 88, 90–92, 95; ball-joint, as breakthrough, 93–94; dolls, as “seeing machines,” 61; fantasy, models of in, 57; female figure, assault on, 49; first series of, 51–53, 60–61, 269n9; play, idea of in, 55; second series of, 49, 93 Dreier, Katherine, 83, 85, 94 Duchamp, Marcel, 44, 46, 92, 102, 108, 226, 234, 247, 272n80, 273n96, 278n63; Anémic Cinéma, 138; bachelor machines, 232–33, 238, 249; Boîte-en-Valise, 78–79, 83, 87, 273n92; Bottle-Rack, 275n118; The Brawl at Austerlitz, 275n118; The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (a.k.a. The Large Glass), 7, 9, 80–81, 83, 86–90, 93, 95, 230–33, 235–36, 238–39, 241–42, 272n78, 273n85, 273n86, 274n102 274n111, 289–90nn18; cast shadows, 112– 13; Coffee Mill, 76, 272n72; Cubism, abandonment of, 76; Fountain, 274n111; glass, works on, 80–81,

83–85; Glider Containing a Water Mill (in Neighboring Metals), 84–85; Green Box, 86, 272n78; The Green Ray, 292n53; human figure, mechanization of, 233; infra-mince system, 123; mechanical ballet, form of, 238; Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 76, 86, 112, 123; Paris Air, 274n111; Pharmacy, 292n53; Picasso, similarity between, 79; precision optics projects of, 112, 138; readymades of, 50, 76– 79, 86–88, 95, 110, 112, 257, 272n78, 273n83, 274n110, 292n53; Rotary Demisphere, 112, 138; Rotary Glass Plates, 78, 80; Rotoreliefs, 91, 93–94, 138; Shadows of Readymades, 112; and shop windows, 81, 86–88, 90; studio photographs of, 78–81, 112–13; To Be Looked At (from the Other Side of the Glass), with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour, 80, 237; Traveller’s Folding Item, 274n111; Tu m’, 112–13, 118, 138; Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy? 275n118; wordplay, affinity for, 93 Duncan, Trevor, 200 Ehrenzweig, Anton, 163–64 Einstein, Albert, 148 Eisenstein, Sergei, 54 electrophotography, 148 Eliosofon, Eliot, 123 Eluard, Paul, 60, 75, 91 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 155 Ernst, Max, 46, 63 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs, 58 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, 292n53 female body, 7, 47, 49, 73, 201, 204, 211, 230, 244; picture-space, association with, 81; reproductive capacity of, 242. See also body Fer, Briony, 244 film, 4–5, 8, 13–14, 42, 188, 189, 190, 194, 242, 258; as bachelor machine, 233, 244; as bodily metaphor, 244; as collective, 221; factory production, akin to, 221; film machine, 12; film theory, 187, 220; as machinery of, 221, 290n20; machinery and magic, as combination of, 220; perception, remaking of, 187 first machine age. See machine ages Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby, 292–93nn53 Fluxus, 158 Fortune (magazine), 148 Frampton, Hollis, 12–13, 112, 220, 262n36, 289n5 Frankfurt school, 15, 176, 192–93 French New Wave, 206 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 35, 49, 57, 95, 138, 193, 205, 212–13, 232, 266n45; apparatus, theorization of, 34; Mystic Writing Pad (Wunderblock), 32–34; “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” 32; Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 13, 88; screen memories, 133–36, 279–80nn91; slips of the tongue, 88 Fried, Michael, 6, 149; “Art and Objecthood,” 156 Friedrich, Caspar David: Woman at a Window, 202–3 Fry, Edward, 73 Fuller, Buckminster, 126 Futurists, 76

Index 297

Index 298

Galbraith, J. K., 156 game theory, 155 gaze: and aesthetic experience, 192; as backward, 12; of beholder, 191–93; of cinema spectator, 287n46, 290n20; as contemplative, 80; of female, 202; in Great Gatsby, 292–93nn53; logic of, 202; of male, 200; as maternal, 192, 285n26; as reciprocal, 285n26; as returned, 192–93, 202; of subject, 191; as vernacular, 137; of viewer, 47, 89, 201–2, 209 Geelhaar, Christian, 20, 31 German Romanticism, 11, 203; Blue Flower, as central motif of, 190 Gerrard, John, 12, 257; abstraction, use of, 252–53; and bachelor machines, 249, 293n57; Daylight Fan (Orbital Camera), 255; Grow Finish Unit series, 248, 251; human figures, use of, 252–53; Infinite Freedom Exercise (near Abadan, Iran), 252, 254; Live Fire Exercise, 252; mechanical ballet, 252–54; Oil Stick Work (Angelo Martinez/Richfield, Kansas), 254; Realtime-3D software, use of, 249–50, 252; repetition, 250–51; silence, use of, 250; Sow Farm (near Libbey, Oklahoma), 247–48, 293n61; technology, use of, 250–52, 258; uncanny, sense of, 251, 254; work of, as postfilmic, 249; work of, as post-medium, 258 Ghirlandaio, Dominico: The Birth of St. John the Baptist, 211, 214 Giedion, Sigfried, 113, 288n66 Glaesemer, Jürgen, 21–23, 37 Goltz, Hans, 23, 265n28 Gombrich, E. H., 213 Goossen, E. C., 113, 115 Gough-Cooper, Jennifer, 85 Graham, Martha, 235 Grandville, J. J.: Interplanetary Bridge, 17 Greenberg, Clement, 6, 13, 19, 41, 45, 149, 154, 263n3, 273n92 green ray motif: The Green Ray (Dean), 244, 246; The Green Ray (Duchamp), 292n53; The Green Ray (Rohmer), 292n53; The Green Ray (Verne), 292n53 Greenspan, Alan, 289n2 Grohmann, Will, 24 Groys, Boris, 178 Guattari, Félix, 293n57 Guggenheim, Peggy, 83 Guilbaut, Serge, 154 Haacke, Hans: Norbert: “All Systems Go,” 157 Habermas, Jürgen, 193 Hambourg, Maria Morris, 106, 108 Hamilton, Richard, 236 Hansen, Miriam, 8, 188, 192, 194, 262n25 Happenings, 110, 168, 276n21 Heath, Stephen, 221 Hesse, Eva, 145, 150 Hobbs, Robert, 164 Holst, Gustav: The Planets, 200 Huebler, Douglas, 139, 159, 165, 168–69, 176–78; Duration Piece #5, New York, April, 1969, 174–75; Duration Piece #13, North America–Western Europe, 171; Location pieces, 162, 166, 171–72, 174; maps, im-

portance of to, 160; real space, use of, 160–61; Site Sculpture Project #5 . . . , 142 Site Sculpture Project pieces, 161; Variable pieces, 166, 171 Huffer, Elizabeth, 101 Hulten, Pontus, 143 indexicality 110–13, 276n25, 292n49 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 203; Valpinçon Bather, 202 International Exhibition of Modern Art, 83 Internet, 169; conceptual art, in relation to, 171, 177–78; and technology, 155–56, 170 Irigaray, Luce, 130 Jean, Marcel, 85 Jensen, William: Gradiva, 212–13 Jetée, La (Marker), 11, 206–7, 210–11, 213, 216, 251, 287n46; aura, longing for in, 205; central sequence of, 199–200; female gaze, 202; fetishistic screen memory, 201–2; the gaze, 202, 209; male gaze, 200; medium-specificity of, 197; memory image in, 197– 98; photography, modeling of, 198; plot of, 195–96; technique of, 197; woman in, and photography, as personification of, 208–9 Jihel, Alexandre, 289–90nn18 Johns, Jasper, 9, 101, 110, 116, 118, 131, 137, 236, 280n92, 291n39; Flag, 121 Jolles, André, 211–12 Jones, Caroline, 125–27, 131–32, 159, 278n65 Jordan, Jim, 267n57 Joseph, Branden, 109–10, 236 Judd, Donald, 141, 145, 160 Kafka, Franz, 176 Kahn, Albert, 227 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 27, 66–67 Kandinsky, Wassily, 45, 63; On the Spiritual in Art, 40; Point and Line to Plane, 104 Karp, Ivan, 117 Keats, John: “Ode to a Nightingale,” 175 Kelly, Ellsworth, 9–10, 13–14, 97, 116, 118–19, 130–31; Atlantic, 115; automatic drawing, 120–21, 134; Automatic Drawing series, 120; Awnings, Avenue Matignon, 120; Bar, 127; Black and White, 115, 127; “camera-eye” of, 108, 132; as “camera-seeing,” 127, 217; cast shadows, interest in, 101–3, 110, 112; cinematic resonance in work of, 138; Cité, 103–4, 106, 111; collage, use of, 120–21; Colors for a Large Wall, 104; La Combe series, 101–4, 108–10, 112–13, 119–23, 125, 134, 138; Curve, 127; Cutout in Wood, 103; Drawings on a Bus, 121–22; and Duchamp, 112; “flicker,” interest in, 104; Green Curves, 127; Horizontal Nude, 128; Line, Form, Color, 103–4; and mobile viewing, as “cruising,” 129; Model for Sculptural Screen No. 4, 106; Model for Sculptural Screen No. 5, 106; multicolor grid paintings of, 104; multipanel units, 121; Nude Reclining, 127; Palm, 127; pencil drawings of, 113–14; photography, borrowings from, 110, 127; Pine Branch, 120; Rauschenberg, comparison with, 110–12; Rebound, 127; Red Yellow, Blue

White, 120; Reflections of Trees in the Seine, 120; and screen memory, 136; sculptural maquettes, as seeing machines, 106; Sculpture for a Large Wall, 104, 139; Sculpture Model, 106; Seine, 104; sensuality of, 127–29, 132; seriality, use of, 108, 120; Seven Sculptural Screens, 104; Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance I–VIII, 104; Stacked Tables, 120; and Strand, 106; studio photographs, distinctive form of, 137; Study for Rebound, 127; Swim Suits, 127; Tablet, 122, 133–34, 136–39; Tennis Court, 138; Toilette, 101; Untitled (Empire State Building), 128; visual language of, 108; White Sculpture I, 127; Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 101; Window V, 101, 103–4; Wood Cutout series, 103 Kersten, Wolfgang, 30–31 Kertész, André: Distortion #102, 269n9 Kiesler, Frederick, 15, 48, 83, 85–86, 89, 234–35, 247, 263n3, 273n96, 275n116; Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, 75, 82, 84 Kittler, Friedrich, 35, 40, 143; “obsessional cursivizing,” 34 Klee, Felix, 23–24, 29, 264n11, 265n22 Klee, Paul, 10, 13–14, 61, 76, 104, 137, 214, 247, 260n16, 263n3, 263n4, 264n11, 264n16, 265n22, 273n92; Absorption, 24, 264n14; After the Drawing 1919, 75, 24; Ancient Demon, 24, 264n13; Angelus Novus, 1–3, 19, 214, 255; and apparatus, 31; archiving practices of, 27–30, 34; Around the Fish, 83; automatism, 35, 44; at Bauhaus, 42–44, 265n28; The Bay, 22; Brigitte, 264n20; childhood drawings, 30; City in the Intermediate Realm, 22, 266–67nn56; Creating Artist, 24; “Creative Credo,” 23, 265n28; The Creator, 29–30; Dance of the Moth, 37, 266–67nn56; diaries of, 30–31; Distillation of Pears, 37; as draftsman, 24; and drawing, 7, 31, 36–39, 44–45; Drawing for 1925, 30; Drawing Knotted in the Manner of a Net, 39; drawings of, 22–23, 24, 27, 32; drawings of, as memory-bank, 27, 34; Feeling Artist, 24; Fine Work, 42; handwriting exercises of, 34–35; Hoffmannesque Fairy-Tale Scene, 266n55; Kohleabklatsch system, 39, 264n20; lithographs of, 266n55; Mountain Formation, 22, 37, 266–67nn56; Mystic Writing Pad, 266n37; Nude, Right Hand to Mouth, 266n55; Nude Sitting on a Coat, 266n55; oil-“carbon” sheets, 38–39, 266–67nn56; oil-marks, 37–39; oil-transfer system, 3, 7, 17, 19–24, 27–28, 30–31, 35–37, 39–40, 42, 45–46, 220, 263n6, 263n8, 264n21, 267n57; oil-transfer system, and memory, 41, 44; oeuvre-catalogue, 28–31; The Pathos of Fertility, 22; Pedagogical Sketchbook, 23, 104; Persevere! 27–28; Pondering Artist, 24; psychic economy of, 23; Room Perspective with the Dark Door, 38; Room Perspective with Inhabitants, 22, 266–67nn56; self-portraits, 24, 30; Small Fool in a Trance 2, 22; Spirit Chamber with the Tall Door, 38; stylus, use of, 32; Thinking Artist, 24, 264n21; “thrift” of, 23; Tightrope Walker, 266n55; transfer method of, 23–24; Twittering Machine, 19; The Ugly Woman, 22; Veil Dance, 22; watercolors of, 266n55; working process of, 29–31

Klein, Melanie, 55–56 Klossowski, Pierre, 272n78 Kozloff, Max, 137, 277n43 Kracauer, Siegfried, 34, 41, 187, 215–16, 255, 284n99 Krauss, Rosalind, 44–45, 60, 72, 76, 88, 171, 176, 269n9; and “camera-seeing,” 41; and post-medium condition, 6, 142 Lang, Fritz: Metropolis, 234 Lange, Dorothea, 159 Large Glass, The (Duchamp), 7, 9, 83–88, 90, 93, 95, 230–33, 235, 238–39, 241–42, 273n85, 273n86, 274n102, 274n111, 289–90nn18; iconography of, 80–81; Picasso, studio photographs of, 81; transparency of, 236; on Vogue cover, 89 Lautréamont, Comte de, 71; Les Chants de Maldoror, 65 Lebel, Robert, 86, 123, 272n72 Léger, Fernand, 58, 226 Leslie, Esther, 246, 262n26, 266n37 Lem, Stanislaw, 205 Leonardo da Vinci, 31, 265–66nn35 LeWitt, Sol, 150 Lichtenstein, Therese, 58 Life (magazine), 123 Lippard, Lucy, 142, 171 Little, Sam, 84 Livingston, Jane, 269n9 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 289–90nn18 machine ages, 12, 220, 258; and aesthetics, 12; apparatus, as term, 290n19; fantasy of, 193; first machine age, 141, 143, 289n5; second machine age, 141. See also age of machines Machine as Seen at the End of the Machine Age, The (exhibition), 143 Magritte, René, 250; The Rape, 203–4 Mahler, Gustav: Das Lied von der Erde, 176 mail art, 158, 168 Malet, Léo, 91 Malevich, Kazimir, 110; White on White, 109 Malraux, André, 214 Manchester International Festival, 240, 252 Manet, Édouard: Bar at the Folies-Bergères, 183; Le Chemin de fer, 220; Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 291n42 Mangold, Robert, 150–51 Manovitch, Lev, 178 Man Ray, 58, 78, 233, 272n80; Dust Breeding, 93, 232, 239; La Prière, 269n9; Tomorrow, 269n9 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 42, 278n63 Marker, Chris, 8, 214; The Embassy, 286n42; La Jetée, 11, 195–202, 205–11, 213, 216, 251, 287n46; 2084, 286n42 Martin, Agnes, 103 Martins, Maria, 85 Matisse, Henri, 45 Mattelart, Armand, 158 Mayer, Carl, 88, 170 Mayer, Paul A., 170 McGregor, Wayne, 252 McLuhan, Marshall, 10, 15, 126, 143–44, 148–49, 156,

Index 299

Index 300

159; The Medium Is the Massage, 144 McShine, Kynaston, 143 mechanical ballet, 14, 226, 230, 238, 241, 252–54 mechanical reproduction, 2, 8, 12, 101, 151, 186, 209, 233–36, 238–42, 246, 255, 281n14; age of, 6–7, 9, 11, 15, 194–95; art of, 13, 18, 247; apparatus of, 209, 217; artistic practice, in relation to, 9; cultural inheritance, threat to, 7; and futurity, sense of, 3, 244; photocopy, as model of, 10; and photography, 44 medium, 6, 96, 160–61, 165; as apparatus, 45; idea of 149, 215; post-medium condition, 143, 152, 247, 249, 258; medium-specificity, 152, 154–55, 159, 178, 197, 205, 221–22; and photocopiers, 149 Memex, 169; as precursor to Internet, 170 memory, 138, 197, 205; and apparatus, 32; and consciousness, 32; memorization, and reinscription, 36–37; Mystic Writing Pad, as model of, 34; oilmarks, as sign of, 37; oil-transfer system, in relation to, 34, 39, 44; and permanent trace, 32; photography, association with, 40–41; psychic function of, 34; screen memory, 133–36; stylus, and memorization, 32 Meringer, Rudolph, 88, 170 Mertins, Detlef, 288n66 Merz, Mario, 240 Meyer, James, 106 Michelson, Annette, 271n56, 290n20 Millar, Jeremy, 221 mimesis, 57, 82, 160, 239, 246, 251–52, 261n24, 285– 86nn27, 288n61 Minimalism, 160, 162, 165, 177, 179 Minotaure (magazine), 51, 53–54, 59–60, 75, 83, 93 Miró, Joan, 45 Mitchell, Juliet, 55 mnemotechnics: contour and outline, 31; tracing, practice of, 31 modernism, 3, 13, 15, 136–37, 217, 224–25, 258; and machine aesthetics, 238; modernist art theory, medium, as term in, 6; and technology, 220 Moholy-Nagy, László, 10, 14, 63, 110, 113, 125, 149, 256, 258, 267n62; and “camera-seeing,” 126; De La Warr Pavilion spiral staircase, photograph of, 15–17; deskilling strategies of, 44; Lightplay: Black, White, Gray, 222, 238, 255; Light-Prop for an Electric Stage, 222, 224, 257; The New Vision, 156; Painting, Photography, Film, 4, 42, 144; spray-painting technique of, 42–43; techno-euphoria of, 255; Vision in Motion, 40 Moholy-Nagy, Lucia, 267n62 Molesworth, Helen, 126, 274n110 Mondrian, Piet, 45 Morris, Robert, 142, 156; Card File, 158 Mulvey, Laura, 233, 290n20, 287n46 Muybridge, Eadweard, 42, 123–24, 278n63 Namuth, Hans, 103 Nesbit, Molly, 44, 86 Newman, Barnett, 101 New Vision, 40–41, 106, 108

New Yorker (magazine), 148 Nicholson, Shierry Weber, 176, 285n26 Novalis, 11, 190; Heinrich von Öfterdingen, 11, 191 object-relations theory, 55–56 O’Doherty, Brian, 137 oil-transfer works, 34, 266n45; as apparatus, 33–35, 39, 41–42, 44; and black marks, 39–40; and drawing, 40; and Klee, 3, 7, 17, 19–24, 27–28, 30–31, 35–37, 39–42, 44–46, 220, 263n6, 263n8, 264n21, 267n57; mechanization, in relation to 40; memory, transformation of, 39; and photography, 41; processing character of, 23; reinscription, technique of, 36–37, 45; and reproduction, 41; as “seeing machines,” 41; tactility, sense of, 39; Wunderblock, similarities to, 33 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 272n77 Okuda, Osamu, 31 Olson, Charles, 126 Open Systems: Re-Thinking Art c. 1970 (exhibition), 156–57 Operation Enduring Freedom, 253 Operation Infinite Justice, 253 Osborne, Peter, 156 Owen, David, 146–48 Parsons, Betty, 111 Paul, Frédéric, 166 Paulhan, Jean, 70, 271n55 Penny, Simon, 168 performance art, 158, 168 phenakistoscope, 42, 47 Phillips, Lisa, 83 photoconceptualism, 171, 178 photocopiers, 147–48, 152, 154–55, 177; conceptual art, use in, 281n14; medium, in relation to, 149; and photography, 145–46, 149. See also Xerox photography, 4, 6, 11, 14, 66–67, 79, 96, 110, 126–27, 143, 177–78, 184, 187, 189, 198, 216; avant-garde, uses of 74; cast shadows in, 106–8; collage, 63, 72; electrophotography, 148; and mechanical reproduction, 44; memory, association with, 40–41; as new vision, 40; oil-transfer system, in relation to, 41; painting, as break from, 61, 73, 185–86; and photocopiers, 145–46, 149; picture-space in, 64–65, 95–96; as pragmatic instrument, 60; and shop window, as picture-space, 61; use-value of, for artists, 61, 74, 95; Photo-Secessionists, 106 Picabia, Francis, 233, 241; Relâche, 233, 237 Picasso, Pablo, 7, 44–46, 78, 83, 89–90, 102, 270n40, 271n51, 271n56, 273n83, 273n85; The Blue Studio, 62–63; Au Bon Marché, 70, 73–74; Bottle and Guitar, 75, 82, 84; Bottle of Vieux Marc, 71; collages of, 50, 65, 72–75, 95; Composition with Butterfly, 63; Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 65; Duchamp, similarity between, 79; glass, painting on, 80; Glass of Absinthe, 91–92; Guitar (1912), 41, 65, 74, 103, 272n72; Guitar (1924), 257, 275n118; Guitar (1926),

71–72, 92, 94; oil painting, and beaux-arts tradition, breaking away from, 73; papiers collés works, 65–66, 68–71, 73, 76, 79, 81; Photographic Composition with “Guitar Player” and “Violin,” 68, 73–74, 79; picture-space, 73, 76, 81; Self-Portrait in the Studio, 62, 64, 71; Self-Portrait with “The Smoker,” 65; shop windows, 81; Still Life, 68, 75, 92; Still Life with Chair Caning, 65; Still Life with “Guitar,” 69–71, 74; Still Life with “Guitar” and Bottle, 67, 75; studio photographs of, 62–71, 73–76, 80–81; and Surrealism, 75; and symbolic violence, 74; Violin, 69, 75; Violin and Newspaper, 80; Two Women at a Bar, 62–63; wordplay, affinity for, 93 picture-field, 61, 63, 65, 80, 87, 118, 121, 125, 177–78; artist within, 64; in conceptual art, 171; self, staging in, 88 picture-space, 9, 58, 7–68, 72–74, 76, 79, 86–87; female body, association with, 81; and glass, 80; and photography, 64–65, 95–96; self, staging in, 88; and shop windows, 61, 81–82 Pincus-Witten, Robert, 120–21, 277n43 Plato, 201, 290n20 play, 55, 194; and collage, 71; and fantasy, 56–57; functions of, 55; sibling and peer relations in, 55; and studio photographs, 71; toys, 73, 95; transitional zone of, 56–57 Poggi, Christine, 273n85 Pollock, Griselda, 287n46 Pollock, Jackson, 9, 119 Pop Art, 177 poststructuralism, 6 Pritzel, Lotte, 56–57 radio art, 158 Random Dance company, 252 Rauschenberg, Robert, 9, 14, 101, 112, 116–17, 127, 131, 138, 236, 277n37, 277n43, 291n39; Automobile Tire Print, 121–22, 124; “Black Paintings,” 111, 121; Cy + Roman Steps, I, II, III, IV, 122–25; Erased de Kooning Drawing, 137; multipanel units, use of, 121; This Is the First Half of a Print Designed to Exist in Passing Time, 121, 124; transfer drawings of, 118; vernacular gaze in, 137; White Paintings, 109–11, 115, 121, 124– 25, 276n21, 278n65 readymades, 6–8, 257; as “seeing machine,” 77, 79–80; as toys, 76–78 Reichart, Jasia, 143 Renaissance, 31–32, 211 Revill, David, 278n66 Révolution Surréaliste, La (magazine), 73, 82 Richter, Gerhard, 12, 187, 202–5, 216–17, 251; Atlas, 133, 137, 215; and aura, loss of, 186; Betty, 11, 181–86, 194–95, 200, 202–3, 210–11, 215, 251, 284n1; and memory, 214–15; photography, impact of, 184–86; Table, 184 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 56–57 Rimbaud, Arthur, 286n35 Rivière, Jacques, 188 Roché, Henri-Pierre, 78 Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 108; Hanging Construction no.

9, 257 Rohmer, Eric, 246; The Green Ray, 292n53 Romanticism, 174–76 Rosand, David, 32 Rose, Barbara, 277n43 Rosenblaum, Robert, 73 Rosselet, Joan, 271n55 Rothko, Mark, 101, 138 Royal Ballet, 252, 254 Rümelin, Christian, 30, 264n16 Ruscha, Ed, 160, 177; Royal Road Test, 159; Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 159 Saint-Amand, Pierre, 130–31 Sander, August, 190 Satie, Erik, 233 Schawinsky, Alexander (Xanti), 291n28 Scheerbart, Paul, 194 Schlemmer, Oskar, 234, 291n28; Triadic Ballet, 233 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 154 Schwartz, Arturo, 292n53 Schwartz, Frederic, 217 screen memories, 13–14, 193, 279–80nn91 second machine age. See machine ages “seeing machines,” 7, 8, 17, 86, 95, 198, 209, 212, 224; body as, 9, 132–33; dolls as, 49–50, 61, 81, 217; oil-transfer system as, 41; paintings as, 103–4; papiers collés as, 70–71, 271n55; photography as, 40, 123; readymades as, 77, 79–80; sculptural maquettes as, 106; toys as, 73–74, 94 Sheeler, Charles, 250 shop windows, 84, 86–87, 91–92, 94–95, 136, 178; contemporary art, displays in, 82–83; and dolls, 58; model of the mind, comparison to, 88; as picture-space, 61, 81–82; as projection screen, 89; utopian potential for, 82 Siegelaub, Seth, 155; “Xerox Book,” 145 Skrebowski, Luke, 157 Smith, Roberta, 221 Smith, Tony, 156 Smithson, Robert, 138–39, 145, 168, 177; Asphalt Rundown, 163; “Art and the City” talk, 161; “Atlantic City H-13,” 160; Concrete Pour, 163; Glue Pour, 163; A Heap of Language, 150; mapping, 160–65; Map of Quicksand and Stones with Two Snakes, 163; Nonsite, Site Uncertain, 163; Partially Buried Woodshed, 163; readymade parts, use of, 159, 161; reciprocal drain, 163; scanning and decentering, as themes, 164; Site/Nonsite, 151, 158, 164–65; slurb, as term, 282n52; Spiral Jetty, 163; systems aesthetic of, 159, 162–63; and time travel, 163 Soderbergh, Steven, 206, 287n48 Software: Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art (exhibition), 143, 171 Soirées de Paris, Les (journal), 75, 79 Solaris (Tarkovsky), 11, 211, 213, 216, 244, 287n48; memory, theme of, 205–7; plot of 206–7; woman in, and photography, as personification of, 208–10 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 61 Sontag, Susan, 187

Index 301

Index 302

Springer, Anton, 212 Steiglitz, Alfred, 106–7 Stendahl, 200 stereoscopy, 42 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 166 Storr, Robert, 184 Strand, Paul, 107; Abstraction, Twin Lakes, Connecticut, 106; Morningside Park, New York, 106; Porch Railings, Twin Lakes, Connecticut, 106; Porch Shadows, 106; Telegraph Poles, Texas, 106; Wall Street, 228, 254; White Fence, 108; Winter, Central Park, New York, 106 studio photographs, 7, 10, 51, 56, 62, 65, 76, 78, 80; and fantasy, 95; and play, 71, 79; staging of, 95 Stumpf, Lilly, 264n11 Surrealism, 35, 46, 57, 65, 71, 73, 75, 77, 80, 91, 95, 192, 194, 222, 239, 247, 250; and Cubism, 92; dolls, fascination with, 49, 273n83; and photography, 60–61; and shop windows, 81–82 Surrealist Exhibition of Objects, 272n78 systems theory, 157–58, 162, 177; Minimalism, association with, 156 Tarkovsky, Andrei: Andrei Rublev, 205–6; Ivan’s Childhood, 205; One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevitch, 206; Solaris, 11, 205–11, 213, 216, 244, 287n48 Tatlin, Vladimir: Monument, 163 technology, 3, 4, 9, 10, 14, 171, 177–78, 189–90, 193–94, 214, 216, 242; and apparatus, 188; art, as threat to, 143, 145; and Bauhaus, 44; and Benjamin, 188, 247; and body, 192, 201–2, 205; and drawing, 45, 120; electronic, 143; film as, 12; Internet, 155–56, 170; and modernism, 3, 4, 220; new technology, 148, 154, 169; and photography, 45; problem of, 11; as system of production, 27, 34; technicity, cult of, 141; techno-euphoria, 141, 143; technologized body, 113, 122, 125–27, 139, 278n65; as term, 15 Tippett, Michael, 252 Tretiakov, Sergei, 58 Tudor, David, 125 Twombly, Cy, 9, 14, 101, 115, 120, 122–23, 127, 129, 131, 138; Academy, 117–18; blackboard works, 118–19, 137, 277n43; Castle, 118; collage-like work of, 118; cream-ground paintings of, 117–18; dark-ground paintings of, 116, 118, 121; The Geeks, 117–18; Leda and the Swan, 118; Night Watch, 124; Nine Discourses on Commodus, 118; Panorama, 116–19, 277n37; School of Fontainebleau, 118

Umland, Anne, 66 Vaché, Jacques, 138 van Bertalanffy, Ludwig, 157 Varnedoe, Kirk, 117, 119, 280n92 Verne, Jules, 247; The Green Ray, 292n53 View (magazine), 85, 89, 235 Vogue (magazine), 89–90 von Hardenberg, Friedrich. See Novalis von Helmholtz, Hermann, 40 VVV (magazine), 273n96 Walker, Ian, 60 Warburg, Aby, 215; “accessory forms in motion,” theory of, 211; and memory image, 212, 214; Mnemosyne Atlas, 212, 214; nymph, use of, 211–14; pathos formulae, 213; “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 211 Ward, Janet, 58 Warncke, Carsten-Peter, 76 Webb, Peter, 54 Weihsmann, Helmut, 48 Weiss, Jeffrey, 64–65, 71, 273n83 Werckmeister, O. K., 24, 27, 40 Wiener, Norbert, 155 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 211 Winnicott, D. W., 8, 55–57, 71 Wollheim, Richard, 45 “Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, The” (Benjamin), 3–6, 186–87, 194, 214; Blue Flower image in, 192–93; second version of, 8, 15, 247, 272n78; third version of, 14, 255 Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art (exhibition), 145, 150, 161, 177; medium-specificity in, 152, 154; pentimenti in, 151; photocopier, use of, 149, 152, 155; solipsism in, 154–55 Xerox, 10, 145, 169, 281n14; as brand name, 148; Cold War politics, role in, 148, 154–55; photography and printing press, as synthesis of, 149; and technology, 146, 154. See also photocopiers zoetrope, 42