From Depiction to Event, From Posed to Unposed and Back

A thrust of contemporary art can be described as unbounded by the reign of depiction and marked by continued openness; to forms, materials, situations and contexts. In this sense the art practitioner works to situate the possibility of art, to invent its possibility, to put under the aegis of art, all forms and situations.  Her role is to produce the very event of art. 

Where and when does art happen? How do artists understand that they are inside the event of art, that indeed they are making art?  

In his essay, Depiction, Object, Event Jeff Wall gives a very exacting and concise history of the reductive program of conceptual art that then leads perhaps surprisingly to an extraordinary opening to the possibilities and forms of art. 

I hope to give you a sense of how to read or take pleasure in some of these practices by seeing them as setting up the very event of art.  But such an event must create a memory for itself. 

Images give us a complex of clues to begin to explore this idea of art as event. For these images are not the work of art themselves. They're simply documents and documents can be anything but simple. 

Numerous artists will use the photograph as documentation of actions. The are not constructing the event of a picture, but using photography to document an event.  

There is no interest per se in light, in the inherent nature of the optics of the camera, but the action in front of the camera. The camera is like a mobile stage. It delimits any space for action. It turns everything into performance. 

When I spoke about the post conceptual image, it was with this idea of the image that situates itself, and its making in the expanded realm of art that comes from understanding of the advance of the readymade and the second avant gardes of minimalism and conceptual art. It knows that the possibility of art is everywhere and that is art is creating the event. 

There is in this a modality of being in the world where life forms and art forms intersect each other, become each other. 

Photography here is performance, a body in space, in the social, in the realm and discursive of the everyday photographic. A sculpture of chance, indeterminacy, instructions, restraints and repetition,  a kind of happening.

Art is an event of materials, audiences, institutions, cultural practices, representations – and artists situate, displace and refigure all of these to create the event of art.

Contemporary art is an event of thought and practice and the pleasure of it is taking that event with you in life. This is not to say that the realm of depiction and objects does not still rule the the global art market but that the self-critique of art used in your experience of the world opens self and social understanding. 

The artist moves between maker and conceiver of situations, from the creation of objects or tableaux, to instructions to be carried out by visitors, the performance script as an art form, instructions for fabrication, the trace and its supplement, exhibition as instructions and objects. Depiction and events. 

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. 

What will these paints paint. 

What do these photographs tells us.

What is love, art, life.

1

Malraux 

2.

Broodhaers

The Image Event and the Dissembling of the Senses

How does the camera place us in the world. How do we become in the world with this extraordinary optical device.

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. 

1.

Rehearsal, or, Art without Artwork: a presentation by Gao Shiming with a response by John Rajchman