Here: The Arrangement is the Picturing

Yesterday I spent the entire day sending psd files back and forth with Laumont Labs for printing selections of a new series of works, PICTURES for the upcoming Select Art Fair here in New York. If the fair or exhibition was in Shanghai we would and have been printing there.

This was the case with the picture you see below from the series Anatomy of Pictures. It's titled, Uncovering Rock Crystal Skull, Date Unknown, and standing next to is curator, gallerist and long time friend Mathieu Borysevicz who founded and runs Bank in Shanghai.

To make this work and others in the series (a word I want to talk about in another post) I used photography but it's not about photography. I simply used photography to take the picture of what I had done, placing elements of shell and crab on this work with an unknown author. The idea of the work of art in the making of this skull most likely had no meaning whatsoever. This is a work that you can think of in terms of Walter Benjamin's aura. All that this work was about, its use, beauty (to me, this term), its meaning is lost.

It all started when I found the book Voices of Silence in the Wellfleet library in Cape Cod. Below is its author Andre Malraux standing amidst all the reproductions int book.

The images in this book were silent to me. I could not see them with my eyes and so I went about to place on over a hundred of the reproductions natural elements.

The works collected by Malraux and presented in his book, he thought of as an Imaginary Museum, a museum without walls.

I could not read the book. I read it but it alluded. So I had to touch it with the sensate part of me.

Malraux would arrange his pictures again and again and again. I know this all too well and made my own museum without walls called The Esthetes.

A museum is as telling for what's not there as much as what is there. I like the image of absence of things.

Here, a set of images stating everything about this post.

Below an image of an idea that has alway intrigued me. It's an image of a system to arrange and to see the surface of two dimensional space that presents images, texts, any elements on a page on a screen. The single image demarcating fig or figure followed by a number comes from the brilliant poet and artist Marcel Broothaers. I turned it into nine images in rows and columns.

and into a film.

It's made from photographs. For a period I made a good many films from photographs. You may recognize some of the images. And some I write about in another post.

A picture is an arrangement of elements. The arrangement is the picture. These are photographs of such arrangements. Photography has the great utility to be a sort of Xerox machine, a copying machine. There is nothing here particular about light. It's really about copying or recording an event that happened elsewhere to possibly become everywhere. That's what's at the heart of mechanical reproduction. We would call this today, the desire to 'share'. To record, to disseminate, to share.

Not now, but in another post, I want to talk/write about how to make an image speak. And how the method of the figure you see above in the image and system of Broodthaers can do that.

The figures. Think of the figures as those elements, a fantastic word in itself, and how they are arranged to make an image. Figures all in the same image.

This is one of those files I was sending back and forth to Laumont today. Where Malraux is montaging his images, placing one next to another in sequence, I am layering my images, placing them in one picture plane. This layering is an arrangement in depth. It's a seeing through time. An accretion of time. Not one moment and then the next. But a moment becoming a next, begetting the next. It's odd because its done with digital but its very analogue.

Here the image is not an instant in time by the arrangement of varying times.

Perhaps the most iconographic image of contemporary art today are the Spot Paintings by Damien Hirst. And so dots and this beautiful reproduction of an Icon from a time long forgotten, an aura far-far away.

Above an image of Buddha with two versions of the Last supper, the Dance of Life and the anonymous mask of Guy Fawkes as shown in the Bank Gallery last month in Shanghai.

The arrangement of pictures in depth and transparency gives us a different figure of the image than montage. It is not so much collage nor side by side but a window through time seeing one thing through another and another.

Just as Malraux arranged his images, so that he could see them, one next to another and then another and then this one, next to this one and then that one, next to that, on and on and on, endlessly, we arrange ours not so much side by side though we do that, but one on top of another and one behind another, arranging time, arranging pictures, arranging our perceptions.

The image is no longer on the substrate of a negative, but a digital file, more ephemeral than ever, yet more ubiquitous then ever. Such images are accessible instantaneously; copy, paste, layer. Everyday what was once the poor image, the low-res image is being res'd up, but where do they come from, what are their titles, their meaning, authorship, context. These images are free floating and unnamed, splice into new networks of meaning, re-inventinved, becoming something entirely other and yet carrying something forward to be recognized through some unintended contact.

The Anatomy of Pictures was a tactile search for the materiality the objects and images Malraux has collected, a desire to better sense the silence of the reproductions in his book by bringing to them everything that was organic.

To understand or communion with them by touch.

PICTURES was working with pictures, a desire to bring pictures in conversation with others pictures.,not images of objects but images made to function as pictures.

The idea of an atlas of pictures, like Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas or more recently Gerard Ricther's, Atlas, bringing pictures together to form an ongoing imaging of the world is what all of us are do today.

But of course each of our arrangements is a different sense of the world. What is in all these books.