History, An arrangement of Pictures

History, An Arrangement of Pictures 

Or: The Event of The People or To Create Images is to Create Thought or Why I am so Afraid to Think but not Afraid to Make Images or Better done by a Machine or Algorithm or Breeding Pictures

‘The image is more than just ideas, more than just biography: it is an entire onto-cosmology, the very manner in which things are and come into the world.’ Making sense of Images, Daniel Coffeen

Today most pictures of contemporary art are abstract. I wonder why. Perhaps we are so inundated with depictive images in our media that from our contemporary art since cubism on, now over 100 years old, we want color, line, shapes and forms to be ‘free’. We want the sensation and the mystery of the abstract, the unsaid. 

By the end of the nineteenth century there were, roughly speaking, two ways the painter could decide what to paint. He could identify with the people and so allow their lives to dictate his subjects to him or he had to find his subjects within himself. By people, John Berger, tells us, as he describes the above, is meant the bourgeoisie. Berger goes on to say that those who identified with the people, Van Gogh or Gauguin, found new subjects and renewed in the light of the lives of those for whom they saw, old subjects.  Those who found their subjects within themselves as painters, Seurat or Cezanne, strove to make their method of seeing the new subject of their pictures.

Berger tells us, that contrary to the claim that subject matter is unimportant, a reaction against the excessively literary and moralistic interpretations of subject mater in the nineteenth century, the work of art begins with this selection. The painting begins with a selection and is finished when that selection is justified, (now you can see all that I saw and felt in this and how it is more than merely itself). Thus, for a painting to succeed it is essential that the painter and the public can agree about what is significant.

Not all artists fit neatly into this diagrammatic analysis of Berger’s, but there is certainly something here, something I’ve been experiencing in the last months as I have begun a new series of works which started with the idea of history paintings.

History brought me closer to the people, and the people as a concept, as a reality, made me very uncomfortable. Not as in people, one to one, but the idea of, all of us.  What interests me is the seeing of seeing, of recording as an event of various appariti and how we shape ourselves to them. The frame is the event, there are no people per se, but the people the event sees.  The people constituted by the event of their constitution through language, context and instrumentation.

We are all quite aware that we live in a highly atomized society. And for the most part we like this. Except of course when the collective, or political will, goes against what pleases us, or what we feel is just, or best.  We’re all pretty certain that the collective will is so politicized that there is no ‘collective will’ but rather the manipulation of the atomized to create a very skewed consensus, what then constitutes a majority, even if that supposed majority has voted against its best interest.

So history is complicated, not meaning we can’t be political but that identification with whom and for what is complex.

By the mid twentieth this divide between the people and how we see becomes for some artists the same project. Think of Jean-Luc Godard whose work continually asks, how do we see the political, how is it constituted in representation, in form and how does cinema constitute a world. The same can be said of the work of Harun Farocki, who also investigates archetypes and recurring patterns in film history, as well as cinemas technological determinants, and conditions of perception.

Though with Godard, Faroki and others Berger’s distinction comes together it is a good starting point to locate the artist project.  But to locate that project is to understand the context and condition in which work is made. For example,in film, distribution, funding, and technology, amongst other things, define the medium. For art it is collectors, fairs, exhibitions, biennales.

And what of the cultural context to understand the images, the works themselves? What is historical, what is political and how we read what we see is framed by our biography, our cultural condition and memory, the context in which something is shown and more. Yet with all these qualifiers there is often at the end of critique the desire that images can show us an alternative future, an image to live by. This is to say, as much as we find it impossible to believe in images we want them to show us a way to cope, to go forward, to ‘see’ things, to reimage and remake the world, to ‘see’ it anew.

I ask myself with access to all images from all over the world, how might I create an image larger than myself. This makes me think of the found google images artist Jon Rafman curated, from ‘google street view’. I was immediately struck by the point of view of the images, the angle of site, the machine that took the picture indifferent to the event in front of the lens. Yet the pictures are so very compelling. It was not an ‘I’ that created an image, this ‘larger image then myself’. It was an algorithm, a mechanical eye. A machine indifferent to what it sees. What’s does this tell us? That stepping outside, away from one’s biography, often produces the most compelling of pictures. This is why the deadpan, the indifferent often has more of charge than the explicit. Or it’s just looking at something completely different, as Michael Foucault did in identifying the prison, the asylum, factories, orphanages, schools, as the places of a new regime, a society of discipline.

History is not at all images, its systems, capital flows, genetics, medical research, trading platforms, labor conditions, diseases, borders, populations, on and on and on.  If we want to find such images look at the work of Gurksy or Burstyn. This is to say much of everything isn’t and can’t be made visible. And what is made visible or audible including, data as in data visualizaton, has always a certain limit. To see is to see the limit, that which is not seen to show us what is seen.

All images and sounds and data become the grist for other images, sounds and date.  As code, which they all, they are fluid, viral, infectious, malleable, erasable, moving easily in and out of a wide variety of indifferent contexts.

At the same time images once rooted in specific places in circulation in in differing sociohistorical context are read or misread in very specific ways

In the US ‘political life and debates are often significantly framed by terms like multiculturalism, inclusion, special interest groups, entitlement, and so on. Such terms may have no resonance or a very different weight outside of the US. Without an understanding of the terms of cultural productions from abroad, we tend to subject those productions to the same form of analysis as US productions.

If we apply the same criteria, critics, academics, and all spectators run the risk of misappropriation, misidentification, or perhaps worse for foreign filmmakers, nonrecognition.

As an artist whose subject is the varied apparatus of imaging I wanted to look not this time only at the archeology of images, that is as technical artifacts, but those that specifically were called history paintings.

But how to make these – they would turn on the reconstruction of found (often familiar) images, reestablishing the order, space, and time of those images.

his reestablishing of context invites the viewer to reexamine the familiar, to understand the image in a larger context of production. The reality of the image is both asserted and disrupted.

I like looking at something as it is being presented to me. And then I make the picture appear a little bit different from how it wants to be seen, to perform a small alteration as we know it from pop art.

I had always been taken by Manet's Execution of Maximillian and only learned at the outset of my project that what Manet had created and abandoned as a painting was also an event that was photographed. Manet's take on the event is very unique and in conversation with Goya's painting Third of May and Goya was in conversation with Ruben’s and Ruben’s, Leonardo.  So though at first my interest was in history paintings over time it became the history of painting and with that the history of photography, and I suppose a history of image.

This led me to think of images, in their many modes and many genres, across time and to create conversations with images. I began to imagine new images, to see new things, new thoughts often times by simply placing one image on another, or layering images and cutting them out. Yes these images pointed to something, difficult to discern but there was always a something. 

Images in their traces, in their histories, carry forward their techniques, their textures, their surfaces and armatures, their politics. They enfold the world they come from and in conversation I imagined they could present new worlds. 

Images, of figures and events past, of specific places and representations, even with strong cultural memory, outside their cultures and time, become lost to us, or for most of us, were never known. 

Where images once were the preserve of national archives, ubiquitous digital transmission today is global and each of us has become our own archivists. As to what is, and is not in the archives, and there are a host of them, from a wide variety of transnational corporate search engines and social network services, that is something to discuss elsewhere.  

As to history paintings, the very subject of history has become, in the best sense problematized - indicting from some point of view real world evils and misdeeds - they are both contested collective histories and evaporating memories. And soon everything in the image seems a strange elsewhere.  The only thing we can know is that yellow or green or blue or pink, that black and white. An arrangement of pixels, that’s the whole of it. Or is it?

Is there something to be seen in images besides the image made? The event not recorded in the image. The event of its imaging.  One strategy in post internet art is to give images, any image really, an object hood, a thingness, such that image is simply another material, a physical thing of color, form or shape. It sort of doesn’t really matter what the image is.

Printed on any number of papers, aluminum, glass, then scrunched up, presented in huge rolls or part of a design element, here image becomes a substance, beyond representation, it becomes a material and the once photograph, becomes the materiality of photography sculpted and shaped into a new material form. The impoverished image, the internet image, forever degrading in circulation is transmuted and brought back to corporal form not as an image per-se but a thing used now as a patterning, part and parcel of its armature. Simply there is no longer a photograph in a frame but the collapsed image-now-object all commingled into one thing, a presence unto itself.

The turn from the high resolution camera imaging of the post Benchers photographers and the larger than life-size pristine if not heroic photograph taking its cues from history is seen now seen as an obscene insistence that there is something in the image besides paper and ink behind glass. There is there an insistence that indeed there is an image in the object of the photograph to be seen. In post Internet art there is only the photograph pointing to itself and its material condition. In post Internet art this condition of photography or writing with images becomes, writing not digitally nor transmitted virtually, but a new materially that points to several things, including making physical the virtual.

The image now is a file format, a mutable file, and a set of possible modulations. The image now is not so much light, but any possible values, who values can only be believed in the instance of their ruin, there decay. Struggle as we may to see the image in the photograph we can't, even though paradoxically it's right there in front of us. Ah, but it isn't it.  There is no image in the photograph. 

In this condition, I wanted to make a go at seeing if images could still represent something to us.  Of course this brings forward a whole set of problematic issues because all images are culturally seen. (We’ll get to that soon enough.)

Suffice it to say that in this new work I would no longer put the apparatus before what was seen but I would try and sense what was being seen or depicted as well as how it was seen. Not that the two can be separated.  With this access to the world's images, I wanted to see them, to sense their thoughts, to look at them with other images. I wanted to engage them in conversation, in the conversation of images. And this as I said might be another part of post internet art. And I suppose this is what any remixer does.

Let’s step back for a moment and think about images and where they come from, both personal and collective. Think about your iphone, google and other search engines and think about all this electronic data, everywhere, including your credit card transactions, your train pass swipes, all those cameras, all the data and images you take and are taken of you all on a daily basis. Where do they all go?

Once perhaps they went into an archive, well certain images and records.

The word "archive" derived from the Greek Arkheion, a house, or the residence of the superior magistrates. Images and documents were kept in the houses of the powerful. As such the archive more often preserves the history of the victors, while presenting such history as reality or scientific truth. The archive is a realist machine, a body of power and knowledge, and it sustains itself by repetition. More precisely, the authority of traditional archives controls and regulates the reproduction of their items. (Jacques Derrida, Hito Steyerl, 'Politics in the Archive)

As much as certain governments try to contain image and information circulation, we are all well aware that this control of circulation has gone and access to the world's images is pervasive. With digital technologies and network culture, images are always already in a constant state of copying, degradation and remixing. As Eduardo Navasse argues in Remix Theory

'The reason for this is that the possibilities of cultural production, both popular and elitist have reached an efficiency based on increasing compression of material, that has superseded the postmodern period. And it is the compression of content, the obsession of condensing material for faster consumption and assimilation that gives Remix public legitimation.

In other words, the remix, the representation and pervasive circulation of images gives them no grounding, no context, no meaning outside the event of their presentation.

So what to do with all these images? What do we want with them? Perhaps it is to see ourselves, to see what we cannot see, to see beyond human perception. Perhaps we want to see how we see. I will say it again, to see how we see. That would be my usual turn, to see the seeing of seeing.

But then I asked myself what would it be like to create a picture of one's education, one's national history, one's cultural memory, ones connoisseurship ones global aspiration, as a work of art. Why a work of art? Perhaps better said under the aegis of art. Why?  Perhaps, it is to free the work from having any said meaning and rather to interrogate the construction of meaning itself. 

To make a picture that is at the same time narrative and against narrative or perhaps shows its complication. I found and still find this, let’s call it representation, awkward and difficult.

Why is this? 

Perhaps my discomfort is that a picture of representation reveals too much of me. Or just plainly, reveals too much. But after all, isn’t it simply a picture, an image. Yes and no, I have great ambivalence toward them, images.

This is precisely why modernity abandons the history painting. Leave history to photography. From impressionism, to cubism and on perception becomes the project of the image. To see seeing.

So accustomed are we to the inanity of mass medias over determined images, so exhausted by them, in the project of art we want something else. The pure pleasure of color or the infra ordinary or banal or inane or the structure that reveals, or just that big sculpture of Playdoo, yes, that's about all I can take. And thank goodness. Perhaps that's why we like surveillance cameras, it’s just a machine seeing, seeing blindly, it does not insist on seeing in any particular way, it just sees. It gets out of its way. It has no history just pure sight, disconnected to memory. It is without a history. Yes of course it has instrumentality and is anything but dumb. But its machineness is its aesthetic. That’s the point.  

And why this word, history? History that leads to biography, place and culture.

Consider for a moment the great sociologist, Stuart Hall, who established the field of Cultural Studies, often using his own experience as a Jamaican-raised part Scottish, part African, part Portuguese Jew to make his point, Hall's central argument is that a person's identity is continually shaped by surrounding forces. All knowledge is embodied, spatially and culturally situated.

And so are images. Or are they? Thinking about this gives me reserve. It is in a sense a kind of prohibition. It makes me terribly self-conscious. Does it matter that I am also a Spanish Jew, a French Catholic Canadian, an American, today a New Yorker. Who am I in the narrative? Who speaks? Who has power? What is power?  What does that have to do with images? And are there other questions other ways to see and understand images?

I found these questions very difficult, even to the point of feeling abject. Yet this abjection urged me to make works in this genre of history, at least as I understand or wanted to take it on. Of course history is not always just, not at all.

I felt like the character and I imagine the filmmaker of Birdman, whose work wants to critique Hollywood and celebrity but knows how absolutely useless it is. The film calls its critique a virtue, a virtue of ignorance. Ignorance as in, what can I possibly say, you know how it is, like the Leonard Cohen song, Everybody Knows.

Everybody knows the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

That's how it goes

Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking

Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling

                                                  Like their father or their dog just died

To say what everybody knows, that ‘seeing is not neutral, that an act we assume to be mechanical and neutral — the eyes just see — is in fact run through with ideology. Everybody knows this.

I like many others was taught the book, John Berger’s, Ways of Seeing in the context of Marxist-feminist critique. And while ideology critique is an important way to see the world, it has a tendency to look over the head of the image all-together in order to see what’s behind it. The image once again becomes a symptom of a societal disease that’s out there.  You don’t really see the image; you see the system that produced the image.’ (Making Sense of Images, Daniel Coffeen)

I resist this, and so had to continually remind myself that these works were not ‘a symptom but part and parcel of the going of the world, that the politics do not happen elsewhere’

Never the less, like the character in Birdman I felt to speak I must efface myself.  I know that feeling.

‘In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s essay, “Cézanne’s Doubt”, he has a quote “Thus it is true both that the life of an author can teach us nothing and that — if we know how to interpret it — we can find everything in it, since it opens onto his work.”  With this statement, I felt self-conscious again.

As Luc Botanski says in his JEQU interview, ‘ultimately a critique of the system makes no sense. Either you are making a critique to improve things, so that it flows a little faster, or that the critics are not really the good ones, etc. But if you are really critical, you are outside the system.’

History then is very loaded, because it only wants to hear itself heralded. Then again any critique I did have was entirely a repositioning, a remixing of my education. And I felt not particularly original. My history was, is, the culture at large. Never the less I told myself these works are not symptoms of something else but they are worlds themselves — worlds we live in, worlds I live in.

In these constructed pictures I aim for something not mimetic but digestive: a way of processing the world.

So let’s return to this complicated issue of history and images and not only how we see but what we see. But let’s start first with new condition of the networked archive.  As art collector, Stefan Simchovitch said in interview', 'I thought that the Internet was a very important thing in changing the way we see art and how we experience art and also how we experience history—how an artist today can go online and travel from medieval art to 17th-century Florentine art to contemporary and back in the same moment, because everything is present on a flat surface, as opposed to in the past where you would have to sequentially go through the Met century by century.’

This quote asks the question how might we re-imagine our collective and global archive of images, their histories and depictions, their styles and circulation, as a new kind of network of images. In its own right a new image.

Before we do that, let’s think about our capacity to create images and why. Simply, to create images, is to create thought.  

This capacity to produce images is our capacity to think outside and beyond the present, to go backwards and forwards in time. 

Perhaps this is the desire to create an image larger then myself, outside myself deep within myself, to make foreign myself to myself. To be present to the present.

Perhaps it’s to raise the banners of singularity, autonomy, and freedom to search out new routes for subversion. Could that be?

Perhaps it’s as ‘Deleuze maintains, with Artaud, that real thinking is one of the most difficult challenges there is. Thinking requires a confrontation with stupidity, the state of being formlessly human without engaging any real problems. One discovers that the real path to truth is through the production of sense: the creation of a texture for thought that relates it to its object. Sense is the membrane that relates thought to its other.’

Yes maybe that’s it. To find myself spliced into the archive in the sense of the Third Mind or to find the ready made.

Perhaps it’s being an agent of this cosmic flow of matter, of image, a slow and incomplete process.

With these new images I want to re-imagine, reinvent time, to see it as a physical dimension, to create an object of the image, that doesn't obliterate it, but teases out and retraces trajectories before burning its self up in an overexposure or at the speed of transmission. 

That’s the excitement of art, which is learning to see again, or to see anew, to see our seeing and going of things.

Shaped by the vagaries of search engine logic and personal recollection, there is both an archeology and a new concatenation of the networked image repertoire. Scissored, layered, cut up, folded into each other, these photo constructions, these remixes, these sculptural assemblages, find a play with the tension, not just the colors black and blue but the black and blue bruises of images as well. 

All right but why take these varied pictures and make them one picture? Why not show each picture unto itself in a sequence all at once. Why not arrange them chronologically, or by color, or by the elements in them, by authorship and so forth.  Or why not write a computer program that would take each of the elements, each of the pictures, so they could be endlessly arranged outside the logic or sentiment of my biography? This mise-en-scene, becomes another and then another.  The variations are endless.

References:

Hito Steyerl

Daniel Coffeen

Leonard Cohen

Timothy Morton

Luc Botanksi

Gilles Deleuze