How has it effected our everyday perception, and interaction with others, how does it construct events? What does the camera think that nothing else can think and how do we begin to be tethered to the camera that we look to the world, to our being in the world, as constructed for the camera to produce a recording. Such pictures we are all too familiar with, from the news and commercial media.
They construct events for the camera for our consumption. John Berger tells us as much in his Ways of Seeing. This is the camera event of look, this is me, this is us. or look at this.
But there is something else. I want to talk about, another kind of relationship with the camera. And that it is something I am always saying and that is seeing the camera see or me seeing the camera seeing, which is not necessarily constructing images, because the construction of images far exceed cameras. Maybe it is a way of constructing image. But I want to say it comes before the image, or it comes with the image, or it comes with imaging.
In these two pictures, what I am seeing is the light. And in this picture, you're seeing something only a camera can vision. I don't think we can call it seeing exactly.
It always amazed me to see these because they were simply effects of the camera. Not effects as in presets, but things you get the camera to vision. Things outside my sight. Outside my perceptual realm.
This is one of the reason that as I told you in the first class depiction is not resemblance. What we call resemblance in pictures in art history has been called naturalism or realism or illusionism.
The camera by no means can only resemble. And yet the eye is always trying to find resemblance. In the regime of representation or mimesis the aim of depiction is to resemble.
You begin to feel you recognize something.
And at some point you do arrive at an image that accords to something familiar.
Now there is a place between the two, that intertwines the two. Where the image event visions something we recognize see but which we can't ordinarily see. In the below series of pictures resemblance disappears.
We've dissemble recognition.
What do you see in the above picture? I will leave that to another post on history and its disappearance.
Here you see the mechanics of this visioning, a picture of Chinese scholar Gao Shiming electronically altered in the monitor in front of the picture and a closer resemblance beyond.
Gao curated the Shanghai Biennale in 2010. And I am going to leave you in this post with a quote of his. And I want you to think of the image event in terms of the camera as way of rehearsal or being in the the world as he describes his idea of rehearsal below.
Exhibitions can be about more than releasing artworks into the wilds of the public domain; rather they can be about the creation of a situation in the sense that Guy Debord intended, ‘to construct situations aimed to produce new social relationships and thus new social realities.’ The exhibition’s modality can be compared to theatre. In many critical writings, exhibitions are often claimed as a spectacle of artists, artworks, and the audience. What I intend here is something different—that the exhibition can become simultaneously theatre and ‘anti-theatre.’
After Brecht and Artaud, the theatre as a stage for representation all but collapsed. Where theatre collapses is the place where ‘rehearsal’ starts. ‘Rehearsal’ is not a formal performance. It is repeatable and ephemeral experiment; rehearsal can turn any social space into a theatre and vice versa. During rehearsal, the theatre is no longer the domain of seeing and being seen, or a performance space that excludes real life reality. It is rather a space subjected to constant self-immersing, interruption, and deconstruction. Rehearsing finds itself in the transfer station between the onstage and offstage, theatre and real life. (1)
I want you to think of the camera as something that does much more than take pictures. I want you to think of it as a way of being in the world and not to get stuck on images, but on its perceptions of vision. Think of it as stage, a plane of sight. as being both theatre and anti-theatre as a kind of assembling/dissembling, a territorialization/deterritorialization.
Think of the camera seeing or how the camera may let you see other, not simply to resemble the world but dissemble it. Does it have the salutary effect of emancipation or a derive, I'm not sure. But see the camera seeing to see yourself in the world.
Rehearsal, or, Art without Artwork: a presentation by Gao Shiming with a response by John Rajchman
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