Touching Surfaces: Photographic Aesthetics, Temporality, Aging. (Consciousness Literature & the Arts)

Touching Surfaces

#ONSCIOUSNESS ,ITERTURE THE!RTS

&



General Editor:

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe Editorial Board:

Anna Bonshek, Per Brask, John Danvers, William S. Haney II, Amy Ione, Michael Mangan, Arthur Versluis, Christopher Webster, Ralph Yarrow

Cover photo: Jacqueline Hayden, Ancient Statuary (1998). Courtesy of the artist. Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2513-4 ISSN: 1573-2193 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in the Netherlands

Touching Surfaces Photographic Aesthetics, Temporality, Aging

ANCA CRISTOFOVICI

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

In memoriam Aurora-Stela Anghel Aurora Anghel Daniel Cristofovici Carolina

Acknowledgements This book had its earliest beginning at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee, where I was a fellow in 1996-1997. My gratitude to Kathleen Woodward, its director at the time, for providing me with exceptional working conditions and a most inspiring intellectual dialogue. I wish to extend my heartfelt thanks to the staff of the Center, and especially to Carol Tennessen, associate director at the time, who assisted me in many ways. I also want to acknowledge the generous support of a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation that made my collaboration with the Center possible. In the absence of any other institutional support since then, I would like to express my gratitude to those who helped me, over the years and in diverse ways, to turn that project into a book. I am particularly pleased to thank my friends, Doris Kiely, Yolanda Lalu Levi, and Angela Jianu, who read fragments of the work in progress, Juliet Bates, who kindly read the entire manuscript in its final phase, Mark Carlson, Corrado Minervini and La Famiglia da Nizza, for helping me solve details in the layout of images, and Serge Della Monica, who, over time, showed me the light in the dark room. My special thanks to the photographers whose work has sustained this book, and in particular to those who generously accepted to grant me the reproduction rights and made useful comments on their work, to Christine Guibert for her permission to reproduce the photographs of Hervé Guibert, and to Agathe Gaillard, from the Gaillard Gallery, in Paris. I am also grateful to those who provided me with high definition images to be reproduced in the book: Kay Broker and Alexandra Batsford, from the Pace/MacGill Gallery, in New York; Dan Cheeck, from the Fraenkel Gallery, in San Francisco; Adam Harrison, from the Jeff Wall Studio, in Vancouver; Christina Horeau and Marie-Eve Beaupré, from the René Blouin Gallery, in Montréal; and Jonas Wettre, from the Steidl Verlag, in Göttingen. The library staff of La Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, my part-time home during the years when this book was being written, has been of great help. My thankful thoughts to all for

viii

Touching Surfaces

their competence, warm reception, humor, and to Henri Coudoux, in particular, for his genuine interest in my project. The first chapter of this book is an updated and revised version of my essay, “Touching Surfaces: Photography, Aging, and an Aesthetics of Change”, which first appeared in Figuring Age. Women, Bodies, Generations (Kathleen Woodward ed., Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), reproduced here by permission. I have presented fragments from the chapters on Jim Dine and Joyce Tenneson at the Annual International Conference on “Literature and Psychoanalysis”, in 2004 and 2005, that were published on-line in the proceedings of the respective conferences. I wish to thank Dr. Daniel-Meyer Dinkgräfe, the director of the Consciousness, Literature, and the Arts series at Rodopi, for his interest in my manuscript, which was to come out with another publisher in 2003 and then was mysteriously lost.

Paris, March 2008

Duration is to consciousness as light is to the eye.

Bill Viola, Statement 1989

It is a most recollected small painting. It thinks that only one thing is necessary & this is time. But this one thing is by no means apparent to one who will not take the trouble to look. Thomas Merton, on a painting Ad Reinhardt made for him

Contents Plates Opening

xiii 1

1 The Visible: Photographic Statements for an Aesthetics of Change Argument: Visualizing Different Age-Selves

17

1. A Huge Body in a Small Frame: Jeff Wall 2. Long Hair on Older Women: Jacqueline Hayden; Hervé Guibert 3. Images That Matter: Terry Pollack; Cindy Sherman 4. A Space to Hold the Gaze: Terry Pollack; Geneviève Cadieux

23 28 38 45

2 (In)Visibility: Photographs that Make a Change Argument: the Photographic Unconscious

57

Jim Dine 1. Mirroring Marginal Thought: an Aesthetics of Doctored Images 2. Editing, Composition and the Visual Reconstruction of Memory

67 78

xii

Touching Surfaces

3 The In-visible: Spectral Visions, Transformative Perceptions Argument: Photography and Perception. Thierry Kuntzel; Janice Tanaka Duane Michals 1. The Fixation of Unstable Fields: Movement, Change, and Temporality 2. Optical Thresholds: Thresholds of change Thresholds of movement Thresholds of the visible 3. Of Pictures & Words: Flashes of Consciousness

87

95 101 109 115 118

4 Photographic Aesthetics and the Fabric of the Subject Argument: The Inner Statue. Jacqueline Hayden

125

Joyce Tenneson 1. Transformations of the Self: Motion, Emotion, Repose 2. Photographic Diversions, Forms of Consciousness 3. Aesthetics and Cosmetics

135 146 151

5 Performing Corpo-realities Argument: The Spectrum of Aging. Francesca Woodman; Donigan Cumming

157

Francesca Woodman 1. Photographic Ambiguities and Formal Growth 2. Photography, Time, and the Body in Space

167 183

Coda Works Cited Index

193 203 213

Plates

1.

Jacqueline Hayden. 1998. Ancient Statuary Series, “IX Mixing Bowl”. Platinum/palladium print, 6.5 x 4.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

2.

Jeff Wall. 1992. “The Giant”. Color; transparency in lightbox, 15.1/4 x 18.3/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

3.

Jacqueline Hayden. 1991. Figure Model Series (2A). Unique silver gelatin print, 84 x 52 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

4.

Hervé Guibert. 1979. “Suzanne”. Courtesy Christine Guibert.

5.

Hervé Guibert. 1979. “Louise”. Courtesy Christine Guibert.

6.

Terry Pollack. 1992. From the series Homage to Käthe Kollwitz. Sepia; kallitype print on rice paper, 6.1/2 x 4.1/2 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

7.

Terry Pollack. 1987. “Death Mask”. Color; large format Polaroid print, 20 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

8.

Geneviève Cadieux. 1990. “Blue Fear”. Color cybachrome print, 73 x 116 inches. Photo: Louis Lussier. Copyright Geneviève Cadieux. Courtesy Galerie René Blouin, Montréal.

9.

E. J. Bellocq. Ca. 1912. “Storyville Portrait”, Plate 41. Copyright Lee Friedlander. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

10. Jim Dine. 1999. “Heart’s Door”. Digital pigment print, edition of three, 68.3/4 x 48.1/4 inches. JD52 D. Courtesy of the artist. 11. Jim Dine. 1999. “North Crescent”. Digital pigment print, edition of three, 48 x 68.1/2 inches. JD57D. Courtesy of the artist.

xiv

Touching Surfaces

12. Jim Dine. 1999. “Nuptials”. Digital pigment print, edition of three, 66.3/4 x 48 inches. JD59D. Courtesy of the artist. 13. Jim Dine. 1999. “The Veronica”. Digital pigment print, edition of three, 68.3/4 x 48.1/4 inches. JD77D. Courtesy of the artist. 14. Duane Michals. 1972. “The True Identity of Man”. Four gelatin silver prints each paper, 8 x 10 inches. DMI.S.243. Copyright Duane Michals. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York. 15. Duane Michals. 1978. “Now Becoming Then”. Gelatin silver print with hand applied text paper, 16 x 20 inches. DMI.104. Copyright Duane Michals. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York. 16. Duane Michals. [1980] 1997. “My Old Age”. Five gelatin silver prints with hand applied text each paper, 5 x 7 inches. DMI.S.431. Copyright Duane Michals. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York. 17. Jacqueline Hayden. 1997. Ancient Statuary Series, “IV Torso of Boy”. Platinum/palladium print, 7 x 4.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist. 18. Jacqueline Hayden. 1998. Ancient Statuary Series, “V Aphrodite, Hellenistic”. Platinum/palladium print, 8.5 x 6 inches. Courtesy of the artist. 19. Duane Michals. 1966. “The Woman is Frightened by the Door”. Five gelatin silver prints each paper, 5 x 7 inches. DMI.S.27. Copyright Duane Michals. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York. 20. E.J. Bellocq. Ca. 1912. “Storyville Portrait”. Plate 67. Copyright Lee Friedlander. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. 21. Jacqueline Hayden. 1993. Figure Model Series (3B). Unique silver gelatin print, 84 x 52 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

1. Jacqueline Hayden, Ancient Statuary Series, “IX Mixing Bowl”, 1998. Platinum/palladium print, 6.5 x 4.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Opening I’m looking for a way to play this part where age doesn’t make any difference. Age isn’t interesting; age is depressing, age is dull, age doesn’t have to do anything with anything. Myrtle Gordon in Opening Night

Spelling out the subject of cross-disciplinary research is always problematic because one mostly has to start with what the book is not about in order to bring into focus such notions as contact zones, relation, appropriation. I would therefore like to say from the outset that this book is not about the consciousness of old age from a psychological perspective in so far as the photographic work on which it is based covers a much wider scope than that of elderly subjects. Nor does it claim to present any conclusive definition of such complex processes as consciousness and aging, but rather considers the varied ways in which such processes are visualized in the field of art photography. In his book ironically entitled Questions Without Answers, photographer Duane Michals briefly defines consciousness as “how we experience being”. How we experience becoming is, by extension, central to the photographic material that has come to my attention over the past fifteen years and prompted me to relate aging to consciousness, temporality, and subject construction. And it is paradoxically the aesthetic, as a rule at odds with representations of aging, which has helped me articulate theoretical questions inspired by the work of contemporary photographers. For what we learn from writers and artists in this respect is that in trying to serve or use the imagination one trusts in the organizing powers of inner life, namely in the possibilities of form and structure to channel consciousness toward direction and shape. Direction and shape is what our lives are about, when we come to think of it, in time. This question is embedded in the main concern of the book since I believe that part of the contribution of studies in such fields as consciousness, aging, and

2

Touching Surfaces

the arts lies in measuring our theories and conjectures by “how we experience being” in order to redefine the domain of the humanities, and, in the process, to suggest conceptual frameworks adapted to new realities. Awareness of aging has come to public attention with the demographic changes in Western cultures at the turn of the twentyfirst century. It seems to have taken cultural and social mediators by surprise. This sudden interest in the old age fact marks a dramatic leap from the youth culture of the 1960s to realities of old age that have lacked appropriate cultural representations. Until very recently the contrast between the visible signs of aging and the absence of their representations in visual culture was striking. Hence the need for models able to generate, as Kathleen Woodward puts it, “alternative futures for ourselves as we live into lives longer than we had imagined for ourselves, if we had even previously thought consciously about aging at all – and many of us have not” (1991: 155). One of the initiators of studies in aging, Woodward wonders about the form these models might take. It is precisely such potential models coming from the field of art photography over the past decades that the present book explores. These models are not prescriptive but reflective. They invite us to look closer into experiences of aging, to think of the many – often contradictory – ways in which we relate to them, to consider aging not only as an extension of our lives in time, but also as an extension of our understanding of who we are and of how we relate to the others. Significantly, my photographic material comes from the field of art photography or, as it is also sometimes called, speculative photography*. Instead of testimonies, these works present us with fictions. Or rather – because of photography’s adherence to the real – * Speculative photography has more recently come to name the category of photographs whose intent is neither documentary, nor utilitarian. It refers to photographs intended as artistic representations. Speculative photography concerns the visualization of internal and fictional worlds, or the perception of certain realities. It is distinct from “speculative photography” in the commercial sense. The term testimonial photography is used here for all other categories of photographs (documentary, family, archival) with a direct, specific referentiality. Testimonial photography concerns the representation and/or exploration of the real world, of objects, of people; although such works can be presented in the space of the museum (as it is the case more and more), they have not been conceived intentionally for artistic purposes.

Opening

3

with conjunctions between the real and the fictional, between perception and convention. Instead of trying to find in these works what old age looks like (which covers a wide spectrum of manifestations in any event), I bring into focus the photographers’ gaze projected on the photographed subjects. And I also bring into focus the responses these photographs call for. This aspect covers an even larger spectrum of perceptions, some of which we have been aware of, others that surface in the process of looking at them, and also in the extended time of reflection. In the late 1980s and 1990s, a few but decisive studies opened up the exploration of aging, a category which had been ignored in previous studies of difference devoted to race, ethnicity, or gender. Works such as those of Kathleen Woodward (1986; 1991), Anne Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen (1993), or Marilyn Pearsall (1997) highlight the “invisibility” of aging in Western culture and in the domain of cultural studies. They explore complex psychological, social, and cultural implications of aging and its representations against both “negative” and “positive” stereotypes.1 These studies are based on literary texts that incorporate representations of, or tropes for aging in a variety of ways. That they mostly address the field of literature is itself significant for the scarceness of images of old age in the visual culture of the preceding decades. With one exception devoted to painting (Covey 1991), it is only in the late 1990s that a small number of works considered representations of aging in the visual arts,2 none of them however devoted exclusively to a theorization of the relationship between photography and aging. 1 For a more complete bibliography on the issue of aging from a feminist

perspective and from that of the social construction of age, cf. a recent issue of the NWSA Journal (The National Women’s Studies Association) (Marshall: 2006). 2 These works include: a volume dealing with various forms of corporeal difference, from obesity to aging in contemporary painting and photography originating in a Channel Four program (Townsend and Coulthard: 1998); a study devoted to theater (Basting: 1998); a seminal collection of studies on aging in literature and the arts (photography and performance included) (Woodward: 1999) and an overview of historical, psychological, and social aspects related to aging in American culture (Featherstone: 1995). “Time of Our Lives”, a show devoted to representations of aging was presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, in 1999, curated by Founding Director Marcia Tucker with Curatorial Associate Anne Ellegood (all art

4

Touching Surfaces

Yet, when we think of visual representations of aging, photography naturally comes to mind as a device for “arresting” a certain moment in time. A photograph is commonly thought of as an object that triggers off memories, captures a state, one that documents various stages of life. While in the 1980s photography was entering academia in the field of cultural studies – mostly under the paradigms established by the essays of Susan Sontag (1977) and Roland Barthes (1980) – it was also growing more and more visible in the art world, namely by reinforcing its place and role in museums and galleries – in the United States, and developing it – in Europe. Progressively, photography came to be part of a new paradigm of art history. By the late 1980s, photographers such as Robert Mapplethorpe or Cindy Sherman became well known both in the art world and in academia for challenging the binary visible-invisible and established role models. Both photographers have used cultural stereotypes in quite intriguing ways to create powerful images of difference that document aspects of race and gender without however being documentary. In the mid-1990s, at a time when youth was still the norm in the media, other works from the field of art photography came to my attention. Without taking aging as a major theme, these works were exploring its wide range of realities. Photographs such as those discussed in this book by Jeff Wall or Geneviève Cadieux, Jacqueline Hayden or Terry Pollack, derive aesthetic strategies from the paradoxical dynamic of attraction and repulsion that we inevitably media, from painting and photography to video as well as images in the media, such as television commercials, were represented in this show). Jacqueline Hayden’s work appeared in an exhibition devoted to the nude in contemporary art at the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Ct., in 1999. The exhibition catalogue highlights the variety of approaches to the nude as well as the fact that the aging body is no longer such a taboo (Philbrick et al., 1999). Phototherapist Rosy Martin in collaboration with Kay Goodbridge presented their work on stereotypes of the aging woman in the show “Outrageous Agers”, at Focal Point Gallery, Southern On-Sea, UK, 2001. In 2008, La Panera Art Center, in Lleida, Spain, presented the exhibition “The Gift of Life”, devoted to photographic and video works representing aging and curated by Juan Vincente Aliaga. The millennium has certainly brought the reflection on time into attention with another important exhibition, one which did not however thematize aging but rather movement and temporality as captured by photographs: “Photography and Time” at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (Haworth-Booth: 2000).

Opening

5

associate with bodies marked by time or disease, instead of simply documenting them. Other photographers – as, for instance, Joyce Tenneson – engage the viewer, through emotional impact, into reconsidering both art history models and representations of aging in commercial photography. Unlike photographers who have addressed the issue of aging frontally,3 in the works discussed in this book the question of age is part of artistic projects of wider scope. A variety of problems of representation are at the core of these projects: the articulation between images and time; the metaphoric dimensions of photographic techniques; or the temporality of perception, in a context of predominant concern with time and the corporeal at the turn of the twenty-first century. In compelling ways, these works lay stress on a dynamics of change and becoming in which time is not only an element of progressive degradation but also a formative category as well as a source of creativity, a recategorization which shifts the focus of aging from the condition of being old to a dense network of perceptions and visualizations of change, movement, and temporality. From the perspective of this shift in how we relate to time patterns, the apparently obvious association between photography and aging turns out to be more than meets the eye. Aging is commonly thought of as a state, and, consequently, photography as a means of recording it. However, what I have found remarkable in the work of these artists is that the strategies they use are largely transformative instead of reproductive. To the extent to which they transform conventions of photography, they invite viewers to reflect on how these images relate to both identity and diversity. They also let us see how varied layers of time can be articulated with the experience of the present. This aspect is particularly meaningful for my argument here, since, together with the problematic implications of exposing the changing body, it addresses the question of the possibilities and limits of representation in photography. Such photographic works visualize aspects of aging by other means than simply documenting the realities of older bodies in crude or sentimental ways. In them, perceptions of aging are turned into resonant visual patterns. In the process, the physical realities of aging 3 John Coplans (1987; 2003), Nicholas Nixon (1988; 1991), Donigan Cumming (1995; 1996), or Mario Giacomelli (1995), and, in very poignant series of portraits of their parents in their old age, Richard Avedon (1993), or Nan Goldin (2004).

6

Touching Surfaces

captured by the camera have been transformed not with an aim to conceal them but to make them visible in significant ways. These works explore, imaginatively, I would say, the possibilities of the photographic medium not to delude but to construct visual analogs of psychic space and inner experiences and thereby illuminate the reciprocal relations between photography and aging. Significantly, aging is not considered in these works as a fixed situation in time (documented by the photographic image), but as a process of growth, one that I read in relation to photography’s ability to record process along with state, and therefore also in relation to subject construction. Like aging, photography is inevitably associated with various time dimensions.4 As a depository of private and collective history, it prompts associations between the actual present of perception and a fleeting moment in the past, which we mostly think of as fixed, arrested within the frame of a photograph. Photography has long been considered within the present versus past binary, which is, indeed, a valid distinction for family or documentary photographs. However, because of their ambivalent relation to the referent, speculative photographs accommodate heterogeneous perceptions of time by disturbing conventions in order to visualize different layers of time or levels of perception. It is therefore the variety of the resulting associations – and not the fixation of one specific moment – that accounts for the rich figurative potential of these photographs. Artists who make use of the photographic medium insist precisely on the possibility of capturing or recreating images that are not directly visible to the eye, but rather part of more or less remote areas of consciousness. It is along these lines that consciousness relates intimately to my approach of the subjective and introspective dimensions of photographs that represent the body as a site for varied perceptions of the self. In such works, the physical body becomes either a signifier of interiority or an instrument for exploring borderline zones between the physical and the psychic. Through this very transcendence of the physical, aging can be read in these photographs as an organizing 4 Symbolically, it is a way of measuring time (as in individual or family

portraits). But even before the invention of the photographic camera, the camera obscura was used in the fifteenth century to structure space in monocular perspective, and the pinhole appeared in sundials as a device of measuring time by way of the passage of light.

Opening

7

principle of the consciousness of the self. My focus on formal analysis and parameters of perception calls attention to the possibilities of composition to shape our consciousness of form in ways that relate to subject construction. In this respect, consciousness connects to vision from the perception of a shape or series of shapes to the progressive perception of correlations that make up a larger picture, one that corresponds to each artist’s personal idiom and reverberates in the beholder’s experience. The field of consciousness has, like that of a photograph, a focus and a peripheral constellation of shapes. In certain photographic images discussed in the following chapters, the center is not always easy to distinguish from the margins, the form from the ground, or the sharp image from the blurred. From a perceptual point of view, these images relate to certain states of semi-consciousness, a fact which brings to light the tenuous separation between the conscious and the unconscious in the creative act. Some of them correspond to optical misperceptions, which are nonetheless keenly visualized and can be associated with various degrees of consciousness. From the perspective of fictions or fables of the self that photography can create, multiple-focus images or images out of focus say something about the motion of the subject in space and time, about displacements, some of which are imperceptible, others dramatic, many inherent to growth. How consciousness of form resonates in us as consciousness of identity is a question that has nourished my exploration of photographic works. However, like aging itself, consciousness resists theorization (as commonly understood in cultural studies, and certainly not in the specialized approaches of philosophy, psychology, cognitive sciences, or neurobiology). Perceptions of change in Duane Michals’ photographs, for instance, or perceptions of inner experiences in Francesca Woodman’s work, are as many ways of looking at consciousness not as “a” state (a mental or photographic image of a moment in time), but as a process that defines the living self. Similarly, photographic equivalents of the unconscious, such as we find in the work of Jim Dine, do not represent the unconscious in the Freudian sense of specific repressed information of specific symbolic scope, but rather as part of life experience accumulated in layers of images (and time) made accessible through techniques deviating from mimetic conventions. “What we are less and less as we sink gradually down into dreamless sleep […] and what we are more

8

Touching Surfaces

and more, as the noise tardily arouses us”, the frequently quoted definition of consciousness that George T. Ladd gave at the turn of the previous century, epitomizes the visual and cognitive qualities of the photographic works discussed in this book. Although my corpus comes from speculative photography, I have tried to avoid speculative sources to draw mostly on approaches of photography by art historians or theoreticians of the visual arts (such as Rosalind Krauss or Max Kozloff), and by scholars who have more recently discussed photography within the wider context of the history of ideas and visual representation (such as Geoffrey Batchen, Patrick Maynard, or François Brunet). Although Rudolf Arnheim’s Visual Thinking (1969) – which has recently come to its 50th edition – and his other studies in the psychology of perception are not quoted directly, what I have learned from them in my formative years has determined my understanding of visual art as a form of thinking, and of composition as an instrument of structuring it. Given the prominent role of new technologies in image-making today, the phenomenology of perception has become indispensable to the reading of visual works. Without elaborating extensively on theories of perception, I have given priority to close readings of the photographs, to the understanding of their visual logic, and to the ways in which they may act on the viewer.5 Instead of placing the focus on the affective relation that we establish with photographs generically, I highlight emotional processes alluded to in the making and the perception of photographs. The phenomenological perspective, that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in particular, seemed therefore the most apt to explore these processes. The central role the body plays in Merleau-Ponty’s investigation of the relations between the visible and the invisible, for instance, calls attention to its status as both acting subject and object of observation, an ambivalence which resonates with the photographs discussed in the book. Other notions from psychoanalysis, from object relation theories in particular, connect to such running themes in the 5 This approach has primarily been that of French photography critics, Jean-Claude Lemagny (1994), for instance, or Régis Durand (1994) who places his readings within the framework of a critical phenomenology of the photographic image.

Opening

9

book as real and imaginary spaces, the corporeal, or the role of visual works in the elaboration of subjectivity. Few studies in current visual culture critique focus, when we think of it, on the aesthetic quality of cultural representations as a carrier of meaning. Paradoxical as it may seem, the association between aging and photographic aesthetics enlightens the varied ways in which our understanding of visibility, the visible, and vision have been redefined by art photography. Instead of sentimentalizing or merely documenting it, a perspective informed by photographic aesthetics can, I argue, contribute to a creative thinking of aging. Reciprocally, because of the zones of time engaged in the process of aging, the exploration of aesthetic dimensions illuminates aspects of temporality and subject construction intrinsic to photographic representation and to our readings of photographs. The following chapters unfold the steps of this journey from the visible to visibility, from vision to interiority, and then to the becoming of the subject in photographs that foreground what I call an aesthetics of change. Each chapter is introduced by an argument which connects a question of representation with a technical problem or with a series of aesthetic strategies that subvert mimetic expectations conventionally associated with photography. The issues outlined in each argument then implicitly guide the readings of the photographs in each chapter. The chapters connect through references from one work or question to another, and mostly through associations that are striking, either by way of likeness of purpose and form, or by contrast. A particular progression evolved in the writing of the book, one which is intently discontinuous – like our consciousness of aging itself, and like our perception of photographs, for that matter –, yet one which reveals a certain coherence of the subject. The search for a coherent image of the self, in which change and time are inherent, shows through all the photographs here as a moving image: constantly eluding us yet persisting in our peripheral vision. The first chapter sets the ground for the subsequent sections of the book by presenting the scope of questions related to the visualization of aging in speculative photography. Here I set in opposition the invisibility of aging in the visual culture of the 1980s and 1990s with photographic works that place realities of aging on various levels of visibility and reveal a wide spectrum of modalities

10

Touching Surfaces

by which art photographs can formalize consciousness of aging. I use alternatively the term speculative photography to emphasize precisely the fact that these photographs meditate (speculate) on the becoming of the self and present the viewers with an internal mirror (a speculum): a visual echo of their own perceptions, recognitions, and, in privileged moments, revelations of unfathomed spaces. The emotional dimension of these photographs – which either avoids sentimentalism, or uses it demystifyingly – creates such imaginary spaces that come with life transitions and hold the gaze, metaphorically, or, metonymically, the body itself, as in the case of Geneviève Cadieux’s “Blue Fear” or in the photographs of Jacqueline Hayden that address a wide range of emotions related to aging and also illuminate its unexplored creative potential. While the photographs considered in the first chapter challenge limited notions of “the visible”, the works discussed in the subsequent chapters belong to artists who explore and extend it along with varied understandings of the invisible, to begin with the unconscious, for which photography has provided metaphors since its early days. In these artists’ specific uses of techniques of visualization, I see the possibilities of photography to enlighten, modify, or enrich our understanding of the unconscious as a continuation of these early associations. From the domain of the visible, I therefore turn to the visibility of internal spaces, from “an aesthetics of change” to “photographs that make a change” in our understanding of photography as index. In these works, the unconscious material is considered – like memories – as inaccessible consciousness or, in Jim Dine’s words “as a source of power and information about one’s own self” (Dine 2003, vol. 4: 4). From this assumption, I analyze photographic strategies through which the unconscious can be visualized and thereby become accessible as formalized consciousness, and I focus on Jim Dine’s exploration of such areas as the unconscious, memory, and aging. Memory is in more than one way associated with loss. And disappearance or effacement can be considered as major anxieties related to aging. Significantly, in a context in which many deplore the excess of images in Western cultures, an important number of photographers and video artists today are engaged in a meditation on the transience of material as well as of mental images. This particular aspect, discussed in the third chapter, intersects my exploration of

Opening

11

temporality in this book in a striking way, since it displaces the focus from the common fear of seeing metamorphoses of the body recorded in a photograph to more disquieting anxieties related to the effacement of images as signifiers of identity. In the third chapter, “The In-visible: Spectral Visions, Transformative Perceptions”, I focus therefore on photography’s potential to enlarge our perceptual and imaginative field by extending the limits of the visible to capture the passage of time in an image. The concern with movement, change, and temporality defines Duane Michals’ photographic work discussed in this chapter. Early in his career, Michals became concerned with aging as change, that is, as a series of transformations related to the becoming of the self and not to the state of being old. While Dine reconfigures common representations of the past by means of photographs, Michals insists on the present. In his work I read an invitation to reconsider our attachment to photography as a signifier of the past, a challenge to Roland Barthes’ nostalgic view of photography. From this perspective, the loss of the index value of the photographic image is seen as a gain in perception and also as an enlargement of photography’s potential to expose a continuum of identity in the very discontinuity of perceptions of change. The last two chapters are more directly related to paradoxes that articulate questions of aging with questions of aesthetics. Joyce Tenneson, for instance, presents, instead of an ironic vision of subject construction, a meditative one. In the fourth chapter devoted to her work, we return to the ambiguous relation between aesthetics and aging addressed in the opening sections. By contrast with the overexposure of the body in commercial photography, the artists I have chosen to discuss in this book represent the body as a visual metaphor that reveals the subject’s positionings (and displacements) in time and space. Tenneson’s working in both fields, artistic and commercial, and the very progress of her vision over time bear out more recent turns taken by relations between photography and aging in the two fields that tend to diverge less than they did two decades ago. Within the logic of my argument, which relocates the notion of aging from “being old” into “growing older”, the last chapter is devoted to a young photographer who did not take the time to age, or to come to old age (Woodman committed suicide when she was

12

Touching Surfaces

twenty-two). The discussion of her work allows me to develop the hypothesis presented in the first chapter: that of aging as change and process. Her work echoes in some respects that of Hervé Guibert, whose photographs of his old aunts (evoked in the first chapter) I read as a moving projection in future. Woodman’s photographs represent indeed a strong argument for an extended understanding of time in photography, namely, its relation not only to the past, but to the present, and as I point out, to the future as well. The notion of a subtle continuum of aging discussed in the first chapter acquires here new dimensions since Woodman also places her work in a continuum of artistic generations (Michals was one of her models). She transforms aesthetic visions, reflects on technical ambiguities, and extracts from them new metaphors for individual artistic growth. Since the visual integration of realities of old age into an aesthetic circuit is a running theme in the book, the close-readings of her work allow me to return to the quality of the aesthetic and to place the issue of aging in the larger context of the construction of subjectivity (and of the subject), or of what I call the fabric of the subject, in time. By challenging readings of her works which have focused on the physical body and on signifiers of social or cultural inscriptions, I intend to displace the attention from the domination of the corporeal to the interpretation of the body as a metaphorical site for the consciousness of the self.

This book project was in many ways inspired by John Cassavettes’ film “Opening Night”, released in 1978, a time in which aging was not yet an issue in academia. In the film, Myrtle Gordon (played by Gena Rowlands), a middle-aged actress, is experiencing an aging crisis as she is unable to perform the role of an older woman in a play suggestively titled “The Second Woman”, and written by a sixty-five-years-old woman. Myrtle Gordon’s crisis reveals however a larger spectrum of perceptions related to aging and creativity. In spite of her being the protagonist, Cassavettes also unfolds the complexities of growing older through her relationships with the other characters (the male crisis, for instance, is subtly suggested in the roles played by John Cassavettes himself and Ben Gazzara). Many running themes in this book were first addressed in a paper on that film, “Imagining the Older Woman”, which I delivered in 1996 at the Conference “Women, Bodies, Generations” at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at

Opening

13

the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. These were themes such as: the generational continuum outliving generation conflicts; the importance of physical and psychic holding; the role of images that accompany transitional phases throughout one’s life; the difficulty of aging with women and men; the relationship between aging and creativity, between aging and photography. “When I was seventeen, I could do everything. It was so easy. My emotions were so close to the surface. I find it harder and harder to stay in touch …” runs the “epigraph” of the film. Myrtle Gordon’s conflict is dramatized by her being caught between the image of a younger woman (Nancy, one of her fans run over by a car after a brief exchange with her idol) and what in her is still a latent image of aging, a dormant image that waits to be developed (for which Sarah, the author of the play, who watches the younger actress’ crisis with condescending comprehension, stands as a standard that Myrtle cannot identify with). Eventually, Myrtle overcomes her crisis precisely by coming to terms with the younger – lost – self, embodied by several violent apparitions of the dead girl, as many visualizations of her younger self with which she is actually struggling to get back in touch. “When I was eighteen my emotions were so close to the surface…”, Myrtle says later in the film, “… I could feel anything easily …”. Progressively (and paradoxically, through a series of selfdestructive acts), she manages to integrate that younger perceptual body in her present, to connect with it. At the end of the film (and of her journey through the night), she regains indeed her younger self, once the loss has been exorcised (in a literal way, by her appealing to a professional exorcist in order to liberate herself from the violent visitations of the dead girl). From this haunting image that comes unbidden to her mind, she reaches a perception of her self as a whole in a moment of her life in which the fear of aging is, in fact, outdone by her anxiety of losing her creativity (and of being stuck in the role of an older woman: “I am looking for a way to play this part where age doesn’t make any difference”, she says). Figuring the younger body that haunts the older one helps her bring back that younger self creatively, that is not as a contrasting image but as part of what she has become. Upset and disturbed by a text with which she cannot identify, Myrtle does not want to look younger or to be young again, but to stay in touch with her younger self beyond conflict. In order to cope with the realities of aging, she has to regain the emotional

14

Touching Surfaces

impetus of the teenager. At the same time, for her to accomplish the passage, she has to be free, to sever the ties with adolescent traces of incertitude, hesitation, revolt. She needs the young woman’s emotions, which are “so close to the surface”, in order to invent the older woman. Following the hint in the title, the film has sometimes been read as the night of aging opening up for Myrtle. However, her remarkable performance at the opening night of the play at the end of the movie – when humor and improvisation exceed both the original text and the crisis engendered by it – shows, I would suggest, quite the opposite, namely the potential that can open up in a different stage of one’s life. The process of mourning the loss of the younger body implies Myrtle’s integrating the image of the girl in a generational continuum represented by all the women in the film. From that image she extracts, instead of pain, creative energy (“… she is so open … on top of everything emotionally …”, Myrtle says about Nancy). The loss of that contact and the conflict with the younger self, at the origin of her crisis, equals with a loss of meaning in the logic of the self. Only when that emotional logic has been reestablished is she able to play the role of the older woman in an authentic way. In her book Motherless Daughters, Hope Edelman has described such need for an encompassing consciousness of the self in the special case of daughters whose mothers’ early death determines their coming of age without a mirror image of the older mother and, thus, remain suspended in time, as it were, in a gap between ages: “Sometimes I want nothing more than the ability to spread my arms and grasp fortytwo [the age when her mother died] with one hand and seventeen with another [her age at the death of the mother], and then to pull both ends in tight, until they meet somewhere in between” (1994: 54). Myrtle’s problem with the text of the play “The Second Woman” is that it deals with aging in too literal a way and she will only be able to play it when she has found the metaphorical access to it. Similarly, this book has been inspired by works in which models of aging are not literal (as they are in documentary photographs), but figurative. In my readings of these works, I also have often appealed to tropes in order to grasp realities for which an excessively theoretical vocabulary seemed rather reductive. “Touching Surfaces”, the metaphoric title of the book, plays on an ambivalence inherent in photography as well as in our relationship to aging. In the sense of

Opening

15

moving, “touching” relates to the emotional work involved in the creation and reception of the particular images of aging discussed here. In the verbal sense, “touching” refers to the artists’ interventions on photographic captures or photographic impressions that locate older body textures into new imaginative spaces. In Jacqueline Hayden’s photograph from her Ancient Statuary Series, where she transforms the stone portraits of a woman and a man that have outlived temporal and spatial displacements (1), I found a most appropriate visual metaphor for what photographs have brought to my understanding of aging over time. For as it turns out, there is much more to surfaces when we take the time to look at them. More that helps us stay in touch.

1

The Visible: Photographic Statements for an Aesthetics of Change Argument: Visualizing Different Age-Selves Just before the rain it seemed the body lingered transparent, had carried one out under the firs, set one free under the rotating spheres. Now flesh was a constant breath at one’s ear, intoning its litany of limitations. Yet how far the body had to travel – when finally, after its shape was fixed, and became one’s signature in the world of forms, then faithlessly, like a ship tide-persuaded, it drifted, abandoning what it sought to become, the body in youth lingering only a moment in its own folds. Ellen Hinsey Photographs are strange creations. They are depictions of a moment that is always passing; after the shutter closes, the subject moves out of frame and begins to change outwardly or inwardly. One changes. One shifts to a different state of consciousness. Subtle changes can take place in an instant, perhaps one does not even feel them – but they are perceptible to the camera. Susan Griffin

18

Touching Surfaces

By custom, we conceive of aging as a separation – from youth and its attributes. Or we think of aging, internally, as a split – between a younger self and another self, a stranger, new self, yet a self that is always getting older. But on the inner screen of aging, these shadows – memories of younger selves, anticipations of older selves – meet, conflict, interact. Separation and continuity are the source of a tension that helps us accommodate change. Incorporating previous states of consciousness of the self, we become the sum of what we have been. It is, paradoxically, a permanently inchoate process. As a rule, loss and mourning accompany the discourse of aging. Yet loss’s life-long companion is accumulation – of imaginary selves as well as of psychic objects, of all that we call the “baggage” of the past. How do we then relate, in the psychic workshop of adult life, to what the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas has called our various “sequential self states” and “idiomatic dispositions” (1992: 29-30)? Instead of thinking of old age as a discrete element in a linear narrative or in a hierarchy, I will focus in this chapter on continuity, on the possibility of bridging our different age-selves, of creating a space of communication between one’s own ages and between generations. While aging may indeed encompass a “subtle continuum” of generations, in Kathleen Woodward’s phrase (1991: 6), we mostly experience it as a discontinuous flux of psychic images, of discrepancies between different age-selves. Psychic space embraces the multiple transformations that make up the imaginary unity of the self. But the very multiplicity of these psychic images blurs our vision of this imaginary unity. Thus aging itself poses a particular challenge to the very possibility of its representation in visual terms. Yet, in fact, does not the very indistinctness and indeterminacy of such blurred images – the elusive possibility of seizing the contours of the state of being old within the process of aging – seem more faithful to our actual perception and experience of aging? For at what age, actually, can we situate the borders of aging? Who decides the age of aging? As medical research has proved, our body begins to age at infancy. Cellular tissues, the eye’s crystalline, the nerve cells of the brain all diminish starting with the fifth year of our life as Paul Virilio reminds us in his Aesthetics of Disappearance (1991: 13-14). Even before our body has acquired a distinctive shape, it seems to start vanishing owing to biological and chemical transformations, many imperceptible, off focus in our consciousness. Aging equals change,

The Visible

19

everybody seems to agree; yet the ways of reading these changes and the direction of these changes are richly diverse. Our Western cultural tradition understands age in terms of a binary system. Old age is defined in relation to youth and thus essentially by what it lacks. In keeping with this negative definition, one of Western culture’s ways of dealing with old age has been to bring it into alignment with the model of youth. In an attempt to “combat” the aging process, contemporary practices such as cosmetic surgery and hyper-fitness regimes have in fact contributed to the cultural denial of aging through an artificial aestheticization of the body designed to approximate depersonalized canons of youthful beauty. The premise of this book is that we need, individually and culturally, appropriate images of aging, just as crucially as we need ways of mourning, ways of dealing with loss. To deny aging results in psychic and cultural dysfunction, a kind of anesthesia of both the personal body and the cultural body. To hypervisualize it, on the other hand – as recent images circulating in the media do – often results in too offensive a rhetoric. In the art world of the 1980s and 1990s, more and more photographic images appeared that challenged the artificial and frozen aesthetics of aging which had for a long time placed youth at its center. Recently, aging has gained attention in cultural studies primarily by exploring the sociological and psychological dimensions of growing old. Work has focused on the cultural stereotypes, ideological underpinnings, and theoretical deadlocks in which images of age have been confined. But the aesthetics of aging – one of the most frequent standards by which we measure the realities of aging – is still very much ignored. In the following pages I would like to suggest that the photographic works which I discuss may represent a decisive creation of new forms of expression and new aesthetic conceptions that integrate conventionally negative categories into new visions, very much like the negative categories introduced into modern aesthetic forms throughout the twentieth century. Given what has been often called the double standard of aging for women, research on aging has focused mainly on the position, perception, and representation of older women. Here, however, as well as in the following chapters, I will focus on photographic images of older women and men made by both female

20

Touching Surfaces

and male photographers, images that disrupt that binary division between youth and age in an effort (more or less explicit, more intuitive than programmatic) to challenge the devaluation of aging. As I hope to show, these images foreground multiple visions of old age, exploring the rich potential of this period of human life, one that is in fact in the process of extending further and further into the future. The creative possibilities offered by these art photographs help make up for our culture’s devastating lack of imagination with regard to this domain of our lives. It is important to note that many of these photographers are younger than their models. Their photographs reveal, in many ways, images of the other we feel growing in us as we grow old, explorations of what has been called “the gray continent” (Lapierre 1983). Yet they are also fictions of what we can hardly visualize as a stable form of consciousness: our own aging. In its vernacular* uses, photography is associated with representations of identity and plays indeed a significant part in the construction of our personal or collective narratives. It has also to a large extent molded our perception of aging. Family albums, or more recently blogs, but also journalistic or archival photographs document our relation to time. Photographs accompany us in mourning losses of so many kinds. They fill in gaps in our memory, help us build family narratives, and create a continuum as we move through generations, one that functions as a mirror to our growing older. The question I raise here, however, is how can speculative photographs help us think of aging in different ways, since the images I discuss can express both idiosyncrasies related to aging and also possibilities of changing them. In this chapter, then, I will look at photographic techniques and metaphors used by artists to accommodate tensions between the state of being old and the process of growing old. For a writer it is easier to create alternative spaces that account for the ambiguities and uncertainties we are faced with when we think of aging. But how does the photographer account not for the signs of aging (signs that up to recently have been quite invisible in visual culture), but rather for inner realities, realities that are inevitably relegated to the domain of * Since the terms low, mass, or popular culture are heavily connoted by

the theoretical paradigms of the 1970s and 1980s, I have preferred here the term “vernacular”, as used in linguistics or architecture to designate other uses of photography than artistic: family, documentary, commercial and journalistic.

The Visible

21

the invisible? Rather than insist on old age as static, the authors of the photographs that inform my argument in this chapter, and throughout the book, reflect precisely on paradoxical process of physical and psychic change, as well as on the visual configurations that can evolve from them. How does photography visualize aspects of aging that do not merely correspond in a documentary way to visible realities? How are such complex psychic structures as those related to aging translated into visual patterns? If accumulation of the stuff of one’s own psychic life can be as problematic as loss, what are the photographer’s ways of dealing with such accumulation? These are all questions that relate to the modalities of translating inner life into visible patterns. As Bollas suggests in his book Being a Character. Psychoanalysis & Self Experience, we function in the awaking part of our existence in accordance with the psychic mechanisms of condensation and displacement, of symbolization and overdetermination that Freud read in the dream work. We ourselves “become a kind of dreaming”, he states by extension and insists on the similarities between inner world and actual experience rather than on their differences. “Although the internal world registers the multivalent factors of units of experience, rendered into textured condensations of percepts, introjects, objects of desire, memories, somatic registrations, and so forth”, Bollas writes, “in fact we become a kind of dreaming: overdetermined, condensed, displaced, symbolic (1992: 52; emphasis added)”. Bollas uses the terms of dream functioning as a model of articulation of individual character based on the capacity “to devolve consciousness to the creative fragmentations of unconscious work” (53), one that contributes to the build-up of what he calls “a human form”, which emerges from fragmentary perceptions and disseminations of consciousness routinely grasped as a chaos of forms. Photographs deviating from the mimetic reproduction of reality bring to light precisely such tensions between external perceptible form and internal chaos of forms by creating a peculiar sense of space which relates to temporality as a process instead of a fix moment in time. In that space, different age-selves, or different images of aging exist in simultaneity. Most of the works I discuss below suggest indeed an intermediate area between reality and illusion (an adult equivalent of Winnicott’s “transitional space”) by

22

Touching Surfaces

imaginatively exploring the possibilities of the photographic medium not to delude but rather to construct visual analogs of unstable perceptions and of their possible development into patterns. Focusing on the intersections of the psychic with the corporeal to approach realities of aging, they run against photographic conventions and also against conventional ways of looking at aging.

2. Jeff Wall, “The Giant”, 1992. Color; transparency in lightbox, 15.1/4 x 18.3/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

The Visible

23

1. A Huge Body in a Small Frame. Jeff Wall [...] she is not an old lady but simultaneously a young girl and a child and all of them. Czeslaw Milosz [...] people are not just their own age; they are to some extent every age, or no age… D.W.Winnicott

In his photographic work “The Giant” (2), Canadian artist Jeff Wall boldly addresses the delicate subject of the female nude. Through a series of reversals of sizes that make up the illusionary space of this photograph, Wall suggests a psychic space that can simultaneously contain multiple ages. A naked woman on the landing of a library staircase is reading a scrap of paper while other readers go about their own business. The confusion in the perception of space, suggestive of Escher’s architectural puzzles, is counterbalanced by the poised pose of the woman – modest yet unashamed. Another paradox results from the dimensions of the picture. In spite of its title, “The Giant”, this is a small format photograph (15.1/4 x 18.3/4 inches), an otherwise unusual size for Wall’s work. The relatively small size of the image replicates metaphorically the boundaries and closures imposed upon representations of the elder body. A huge body in a small frame. A visual pun as it were: a condensation of growing old, which is figured as maturing (growing in size) and getting older. But this is also the naked body of a woman placed in an open, public space. Size functions here as a visual metonymy for age. Magnified, overexposed, the woman is self-absorbed in her own private world, one that remains secret to us. Denuded of any other signifiers of her identity, she simply gains respect for the human being in its most genuine – and most vulnerable – appearance. The monumental architecture of her body defies the structure and size of the public space. The fact that the naked body is located within the space of the library suggests a syncopated overlap of the world of experience with the world of knowledge. In an uncanny way, this image bridges the large and the small, a sense of openness and a sense of confinement

24

Touching Surfaces

(and perhaps of self-contentment), the geometry of rationalized space and the unpredictable habitations of the unconscious. Incidentally, in the 1995 Jeff Wall retrospective at the Jeu de Paume Gallery in Paris, “The Giant” was placed in a corridor, a space of transition, surprising the viewers as they rounded the corner with its very discretion. And discretion is precisely what is so odd about this bold photograph, so unlike many inauthentic recent photographs of middle-age female nudes in popular magazines. As in Lacan’s reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Purloined Letter”, the mystery of “The Giant” lies in its very openness. It is an openness that paradoxically suggests interior corridors, flights of stairs, meanderings and hidden corners of the psyche – knowledge contained within the covers of books and passing into the body. Significantly, the photograph is not printed on paper but on a transparency framed in a lightbox that intensifies the illusion of a third dimension. The multiple sources of light contribute to the dazzling effect of the photograph. There is the light in the photograph itself, there is the impression of light that made the photograph possible, and there is the light in the box coming from behind the image. Another space is thus created, one that radiates light from a hidden (inner) source. Physically and metaphorically, the photograph converts the unseen into (visible) matter. Yet, at the same time, the image acquires a transparency that enables us to see through the body into another space, into another dimension. There, this older woman, the Giant, probably entertains a dialogue with the younger – smaller – figures in the picture. And in fact, the geometric center of the composition is occupied by the small figure of a young woman situated on the same staircase landing, walking, as it were, in the direction of the figure of the older woman whose presence she seems to ignore. There are other characters on that staircase whose structure recalls the centuries-old pyramidal model of the ages of man and woman: our going up from childhood to maturity and from there on down to the grave. Its broken-angle geometry together with the presence of the small figures definitely belonging to a different reality than that of the Giant (and to actual photographic captures of different spaces) disturb however that hierarchical pattern. We might, then, read this image of an older woman’s body framed by an irregular pattern as an ironic transcendence of age, for despite the unabashed display of her naked body, the composition of the work turns the viewer’s attention

The Visible

25

towards inner spaces. Its syncopated visual rhythms echo the conflicts between internal and external perceptions of age. Wall uses computer manipulation to obtain effects of displacement and condensation that unsettle conventions of the nude, as well as traditional representations of the aging body. Like many art photographers today, he is known for working across the boundaries that separate documentary from art photography. He has chosen, in the words of photography critic Vicki Goldberg (1997: 32), to “manufacture a reality that has the effrontery to look real”. For most of his photographs, Wall brings in actors or performers who reconstruct real-life scenes. He puzzles the convention-laden viewer by making use of the very conventions he attacks and thereby visualizes confusions between reality and fiction that clichés coming from vernacular visual culture can create. Where then can one psychically situate “The Giant”? In the realm of fantasy? Of desire? For, to its owner, the aging body is always a reality, always a fiction – a composite made up of past or prospective images, a portable set of generational images. Like the Rilkean angels alighting on the reading tables in a library in Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire, the Giant is a powerful archetypal presence, one whose meaning, however, remains suspended in ambiguity. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in a letter in 1915: “Everywhere space and vision came, as it were, together in the object, in every one of them a whole inner world was exhibited as though an angel, in whom space was included, were blind and looking into himself (1963: 16; emphasis added)”. Do we not sometimes notice in people who are older (our grandparents, friends, passersby) this sense of looking into oneself, of detachment and abstraction from the real that Freud associated with the death instinct?1 With time, it is true, we seem to turn the world into ourselves. It is probably not (only) because of the limitations of our body that we tend to move or travel less, but (also) because of a self-containment that prompts us to pursue longer journeys within ourselves. Like giants in fairy tales or in myths, we eventually contain so much space. Most commentaries on Wall’s “The Giant” have in fact focused only on this mythic quality of the woman’s body as a fixed 1 For a reassessment of this position, cf. Woodward 1991: 47-51.

26

Touching Surfaces

image, thus rebuffing it as a potential vision of inner experience about the changing body over time. Discussing enigma in Wall’s work, photography critic Jean-François Chevrier (1995), for instance, dismisses this otherwise quite enigmatic photograph as simply “allegorical” and “funny”, thus voicing, even if unconsciously, the common attitude of keeping our eyes closed to the exposure of older shapes.2 Aging can trick an eye trained in conventional readings for conventional signs. Even more reductive is Richard Vine’s decoding of the mytho-poetic figure of “The Giant” as a “geriatric amazon” who “though somewhat withered in her extremities, retains a powerfully sexual torso and breasts, suggestive both of the physical losses that accrue with age and of the erotic self-identity which may nevertheless stubbornly persist” (1996: 91; emphasis added). Vine interprets the relation between knowledge and experience in the photograph in consonance with linear narratives of age. He views pessimistically and, shall we say, dramatically, “the goddesslike idealization of the cultural pursuits that engage the surrounding students” as a representation of the futility of those pursuits that “will not save them from time’s insidious devastations of the flesh” (1996: 91). Is not this reading of the nude as mythical figure in contradiction with its being a sign of the decaying flesh? For if the fear of one’s mortality is what probably prevents the viewer from seeing this nude as a beautiful, accomplished body, is it not also the fear of one’s own immortality likely to provoke the denial of such images? For eyes used to idealized representations of the naked body, is the openness of this image blinding? Yet, if classical art forms or modern advertising have made it possible to artificially fabricate youth, one could also imagine the reverse, namely fabricating old age, and thereby introducing such images into varied aesthetic circuits. In her article entitled “Photos That Lie – and Tell the Truth”, Vicki Goldberg (1997: 32) seizes on the productive nature of this paradox that confuses the relation between the natural and the artificial. “The most direct way to the 2 Wall also comments about humor in this image in relation to the

discrepancy of sizes. He considers “The Giant” and “Abundance” (one of his other images representing an old woman) as visual equivalents of a “philosophical comedy” (Jeff Wall 1996: 21). In his own words, “The Giant” is an “imagery monument” (21) expressing his intention to magnify “what has been made small and meager, what has apparently lost its significance” (78).

The Visible

27

visible”, she writes, “is to make it up”. The re-created, illusionary location of “The Giant” suggests such reversals owing to which the confusing perceptions of the psychic body turns into physical stabilized shape. Yet, instead of aestheticizing the body, Wall exposes it as it is – not as a youthful body, but as an accomplished shape. The body as significant form. Fiction documents here a reality that sees beyond the visible, beyond habits of perception.

3. Jacqueline Hayden, Figure Model Series (2A), 1991. Unique silver gelatin print, 84 x 52 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

28

Touching Surfaces

2. Long Hair on Older Women. Jacqueline Hayden; Hervé Guibert Paris, August 12, 1978 Suzanne The letter that I would write to you might seem indecent: for it would be a love letter. You seem to be talking to me, and I to you, we seem to communicate through these photographs much better than through words. With the same love that I wash your hair, depilate your chin or massage your tender muscles, my dream would be, of course, to photograph your body. Don’t ever be afraid. If you turn blind, I will come and read to you. And when you feel yourself dying, call me, I will come to hold you in my arms. Hugs and kisses: Hervé Hervé Guibert

In her essay “Visible Difference. Women Artists and Aging”, Joanna Frueh (1997: 197-220) discusses the discrepancy between the formal norms established by the female nude in Western art and popular culture and the real female body in terms of the opposition between the norm embedded in cultural icons and what appears as the shapeless reality of the body. “Aging women”, she insists, “are excruciatingly aware of the visible changes in form that occur before their own and others’ eyes, the ‘shapelessness’ that makes them, even more than young women, unable to be the incarnation of perfection” (212).3 Important art shows such as “Feminin-masculin” or 3 In Lacan’s description of the throat of Freud’s patient, Irma, we are

reminded that it might be, in fact, the form (as fixed, definitive, that is, not alive) that we might fear together with the formless (which, involving transformation, is life): “The flesh one never sees, the foundation of things, the other side of the head, of the face, the secretory glands par excellence, the flesh from which everything exudes, at

The Visible

29

“Formlessness: A User’s Guide” presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in the late 1990s have explored this problematics in modernist and contemporary art works, one in which the shapeless takes its place in the alphabet of forms. Of course, a chain of diverse shapes informs the history of the nude from archaic Venuses to cubist figurations of the body. But the primary variable in the history of the nude is the binary fat/thin. If each period reinvents the feminine, the photographic images that explore the rich texture of the aging body will, perhaps, in time reshape the category of beauty. This seems to be the intention of Jacqueline Hayden in her compelling series entitled Figure Model (1991-1996) (Woodward 1999: 227-231), a project involving the creation of a gallery of photographic nudes of older men and women (3; 21). Ranging in age from sixty to eighty-four, they picture either their own versions of classical poses or they simply improvise. The fact that her sitters have worked as professional models in art schools (all but one were still active at the time of this project) contributes to Hayden’s notion of challenging canons of beauty in Western art that have informed our sensibilities for centuries, shaping what we see. As Hayden puts it: “Our public view of the body is much edited, whether conditioned by the ideals of classical sculpture or the images of modern advertising” (1996: n. pag.). Placed on a dark background, the nearly life-size black-and-white figures of the Figure Model Series are abstracted from all social context. The pictorial quality of the photographs (the result of the artist’s direct intervention on the emulsion) foregrounds the shapes of the models’ bodies and sustains the intense tactile quality of the photographs. A dripping effect seems to cradle the body. The light Hayden uses softens the texture of the skin without however intending to efface the signs of age on the body, only placing them in a different perspective. For the lighting gives the flesh of the models the translucent quality of marble or alabaster. They are – as the size of the works indicates – statuesque. But the effect is double. The soft light brings the surface of the skin closer to the eye. In the transparency of these bodies, we also read their frailty. The figures in the very heart of mystery, the flesh in as much as it is suffering, is formless, in as much as form in itself is something which provokes anxiety” (1988: 154-55; emphasis added).

30

Touching Surfaces

these photographs are both art-like and life-like. That Hayden went to nursing school and worked in a hospital is relevant here. Her experience of holding, washing, and watching over the elderly shows in the gaze she projects on her models, a gaze that seems to envelop them as it places them in a creative space. Where Wall uses distance as a form of modesty and even pride to protect the exposed body, Hayden uses closeness, a sensual approach that breeds a space in which the models act out the realities of their bodies within the forms and fantasies of art history or of their own imagination. I should add that these photographs are shown unframed, a fact which enhances the fragility of the art image and, implicitly, that of the represented aging self. That they are unframed also points to the human body’s resistance to being framed by restrictive categories, to being immobilized into fixed forms. Sometimes the models have brought along canes or bandages, thus incorporating accessories of the aging body into its aesthetic reconstruction.4 Each of them has her or his version of the aging body. That the prints are unique, stresses the singular qualities of their interpretations of aging. Hayden’s choosing models of both sexes is an implicit reconsideration of the relationship between gender and aging, one that echoes Woodward’s interesting suggestion that “in advanced old age, age may assume more importance than any of the other differences which distinguish our bodies from others, including gender” (1991: 16). Makeup and costume discarded, the resemblances in the aging bodies are more striking than are their differences. Yet, as the large format of Hayden’s photographs suggests, so is their potential monumental quality, a quality that symbolically redeems the diminishing that may come with time.5 Images such as these are crucial to the visual integration of the realities of old age into an aesthetic circuit, especially because Western art has mostly relegated images of old age to the domain of the caricature. Real without being either cruel or sentimental (as documentary photographs of the elderly 4 In his recent choreographies, Merce Cunningham also wonderfully incorporates the incapacities of his own elderly body into the performance. Dancers such as Cunningham, and also Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, or David Gordon have contributed significantly to a repertory of creative representations of the older body. 5 I am reminded here of Richard Avedon’s dramatic close-ups of his father’s almost androgynous expression (1993).

The Visible

31

can sometimes be) and fictive (set in an art studio context and placed against neutral, pictorial backgrounds) without being unfaithful, these art photographs present the viewer with an aesthetics of expressivity as opposed to the aesthetics of effacement that we find in the in shape contemporary icons of aging in the media. Unlike these media clichés, in which women and men tend to be either idealized or objectified, the nudes in Hayden’s work appear rather as representations of internal objects, each of them one among many “sequential self states” (Bollas 1992: 29-30) that negotiate tensions between actual and internal realities and address in a complex way, in Hayden’s words, “our sense of identity and our immortality” (1996: n. pag.). In a different way than family photographs do, these images can function – for both spectator and models – as transitional objects that accompany rituals of passage from one age to another. Her models are, Hayden has said, “professionals who are working to be translated and transformed through the pictures” (Flynn 1994: n. pag.; emphasis added).6 The effect these photographs can produce on the viewer compares to a moment of instant recognition – of the phantasmatic unitary self or of a generational code one is part of. If these figures can be looked upon as objects of desire, desire has a wide spectrum here. “The experienced body is deeply erotic”, remarks Frueh, “for it wears its lusts and (ab)uses of living” (1997: 212). But as she also notes, the experienced female nude “contradicts the sex object status of most female nudes” (212). Frueh’s understanding of this unconventional – or until recently, unrepresentable – form of desire shows in Hayden’s photographs. “Perhaps the aged and aging female body”, as Frueh puts it, “can become an object of love, for the old(er) woman herself to have and to hold” (212; emphasis added). What is then seen conventionally as a sign of aging could be read as a sign of the woman’s changing attitude towards herself – her self-esteem, her desire or, as Germaine Greer sees it, her coming to possess serenity and power (Pearsall 1997: 363-387).7 6 Hayden has pursued her unconventional exploration in the field of art

canons and art models in her digital photography series Ancient Statuary (1997). Cf. “Argument”, Chapter 4. 7 We find qualities similar to those I have discussed in Hayden’s work in a series of photographs that the British artist Melanie Manchot took of her mother: fifty large-format photographs printed on canvas and processed through painterly techniques. Manchot also examines the aging body with a protective, inquisitive gaze, and, like Hervé Guibert, she “projects her own identity into the future”. Manchot

32

Touching Surfaces

Still, the association of eroticism, or of any form of positive affect with the old body, is indeed against the norm. The photographs of French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert – I am thinking, in particular, of his portraits of his aunts Suzanne and Louise – have been received with reserve at the opening of the exhibition in which they were first presented in 1979. Their scope belongs however to an entirely different area than either eroticism or overexposure of aging figures. Diagnosed with AIDS, Guibert created most of his works of fiction and his photographs in the 1980s with the awareness of the impending approach of his own early death. Characters in some of his novels and in his book Suzanne et Louise. Roman-Photo (1980; 2005), the two sisters – they are in their eighties – appear to be an important affective and visual site of prospective identification early in his work, even before the onslaught of his disease. A strange foreshadowing. Guibert’s photographs are radically different in tone and intent from those of either Wall or Hayden. Different too is his highly charged emotional involvement with his photographic subjects, one from which he gains distance through mise-en-scène. In both his fiction and in his essays, Guibert repeatedly refers to his love and affection for the people he photographed. Like beauty or the aesthetic, these categories resist definition. For Guibert this vaguely defined form of love exists in a larger realm of creativity shared between aesthetics (as in love of beauty) and ethics (as in care for the other). Combining affectivity with sensuality, this form of love saturates the artist’s entire visual field, extending from people to objects and to habitats. Paradoxically, it is this very attachment that enables the photographer to take distance from his subjects (most of them close friends). For in turning them into objects of vision, Guibert is aware that the photographer always betrays them. His passion for photography originates, therefore, in his very resistance to it. What he documents then is not a material reality but an affect. And bearing witness to his love for his subjects has been, as he notes in the introduction to his collection of photographs Le Seul visage (1984), the aim of his entire activity. However diffuse or effusive this may seem theoretically, it is an aesthetically powerful argument.

“shows the female body removed from time and place”, notes Katja Blomberg, and she monumentalizes age “with modesty and distance”, “shattering the boundaries of shame and taboo”. Blomberg in Manchot 1998 (n. pag.).

The Visible

4. Hervé Guibert, “Suzanne”, 1979. Courtesy Christine Guibert.

33

34

Touching Surfaces

In his photographs, Guibert does not intend to efface the signs of old age, but, on the contrary, to make them visible, even to enlarge them. In one of these photographs, for instance, Suzanne is pictured holding a huge magnifying glass in front of one of her eyes (4). A daring project: to see both behind and beyond the signs of old age! One a widowed pharmacist, the other a former nun, Suzanne and Louise are Guibert’s protagonists in his scenarios of aging. He has them pose in their domestic environment, one in which he stages, with affection and humor, an intermediary phantasmatic space where his own anxieties and fantasies liberate the two women’s world of subdued desire. This is also a touching story of mutual love, one that unfurls the imaginations of the two sisters and engages them in the creation of the poses. Like the active participation of Hayden’s models in the composition of the poses, this collaborative project documents the powerful creative potential of old age, one that still awaits further exploration. In indirectly reflecting on his own aging by projecting it onto the two older women, Guibert also transcends sexual difference: the two women pose as objects of his own inquiry into the textures of older age. But the two women are also mirror images to each other, a detail that brings up questions of difference along with those of resemblance. As sisters, they are naturally likenesses of each other. Yet one is more pensive, while the other more inquisitive, as in the photograph that shows them contemplating their own images in their bathroom mirror. Like Guibert’s prose fiction, these photographs are a mixture of authenticity and reconstruction. They have a ceremonial aspect. They also have an ironic and a playful dimension and so hover wonderfully between reverence and daring. At the same time and in spite of their theatrical character, these photographs are also marked by a nakedness of style similar to Guibert’s writing – a directness in the treatment of the image, a desire to spend it all, a passion for looking at the world as if the intensity of the gaze itself might coat the real in a thin film, one scarcely visible yet indelible.8 In contrast with the portraits of Suzanne and Louise, Guibert’s photographs of young people – in Le Seul visage, for 8 Guibert has developed this motif in his short fiction “Roman posthume”, published posthumously in La Piqûre d'amour et d'autres textes suivi de La Chair fraîche (1994).

The Visible

35

instance – are often idealized; some of them adopt romanticized poses. Between his self-portraits or the portraits of friends and those of the two old women there is a gap.9 In his work, as in his own life, Guibert skips middle age. Yet, in following the two old women he loves into imaginary death, Guibert traces his own destiny as a human being and as an artist. A series of images actually stage Suzanne’s death, casting her as the main actor. Unlike Hippolyte Bayard’s famous 1840 photograph, “Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man”, or, closer to him, his friend Duane Michals, Guibert does not perform his own death in front of the camera. Instead, he displaces anxieties related to it onto an other while frustrating the plot of photography as a conveyor of factual truth, as Bayard did in the early years of the medium. In the texts accompanying the picture, we learn that Suzanne wants him to photograph what happens to her body at the medical school after her death, and he gives a long account of what he imagines will happen. For Suzanne, accepting to pose for her nephew is to come to terms with death as possible reality. Yet, in having Suzanne perform her own death, Guibert posits it as possible fiction. In the way she poses, she seems to dream herself out of life. She enacts her death with a playful sense of complicity. It is turned into a joke, a wink behind death’s back. This is Guibert’s signature of shamelessness and modesty, the same mix with which he boldly recorded the last months of his own life in the video piece, entitled significantly, La Pudeur ou l’impudeur (1991). Modesty, or decency, or delicacy (“la pudeur”) is not dictated by social norms but rather by a respect for privacy. It suggests an attitude imposed by intuition rather than rule. One of the most stunning images in the series is the unbraiding of Louise’s long, long hair (5). Liberated in 1945 from the Carmelite convent where she had spent eight years, Louise (not to be confused with French women whose heads were shaven for being suspected to have “sinned” with the enemy) had let her hair grow, decently coiled and pinned atop her head. By convention an erotic symbol, long hair is not part of the public visual idiom of the older woman, if not as a caricature. It is seen as obscene because erotic, hence inappropriate to old age.

9 With the exception, perhaps, of two photographs of his parents, where the portrait of the middle-aged mother holding a picture of herself when young is an overt and parodic commentary on aging. Cf. Guibert 1984: 18.

36

Touching Surfaces

Casually entitled “Une transformation”, this sequence of elegantly unbridled portraits results in an actual transfiguration of Louise’s gloomy face, one from which emerges the hypostasis of a new self. A self which to the protagonist’s eyes is also old (that is, reminiscent of a younger self). As in a fairy-tale, she suddenly turns into a resplendent woman. When she looks at these pictures of herself, Louise experiences a moment of derealization. Divested of her habitual image of herself, she thinks she sees the other, that is, her sister (and this is an interesting dramatization of what is a common reaction to one’s own aged image in the mirror – a fear of what Pearsall (1997) calls “the other within us”). As Guibert writes: Isn’t what happens on Louise’s face at the moment of the picture taking, an actual transfiguration? When I showed her the latest photographs of herself where she appeared with her hair undone, her face relaxed; exceptionally beautiful, and having suddenly lost her age, Louise does not recognize herself, she first thinks she sees her sister: “it is not I”. (Guibert 1980: n. pag. emphasis added; all translations from Guibert mine).

Once “transfigured”, once transformed into a photograph, an art object, Louise is estranged from her own image of herself. Whom she sees instead is somebody familiar (her sister), not a stranger but not exactly her, either. Loss of age (of the conventional masks of age) can mean liberation. However, this is a form of freedom that can also be experienced as confusion, as loss of identity – hence a form of death. (Not long after these photographs were taken, Louise actually did cut her hair short, “as if photography were a sacrificial practice”, glosses Guibert.) Louise had, in fact, been deprived in another way from her own image – “separated from my image”, as she puts it – during her years in the Carmel convent: “There was no mirror at Carmel, not even the right to suspend one’s reflection in a window, or in the wash basin, in the morning. For eight years, I had not seen myself” (Guibert 1980: n. pag.; emphasis added). And she comments strangely: “But I don’t regret anything. When I think of it, these eight years were the most wonderful of my life ...”. There is yet an even larger gap in the two old women’s images of themselves that comes from the common idea that, in Guibert’s words, “as we grow old we become ugly, old age is not showable” (1980: n. pag.). The two women had no photographs of themselves taken after the age of thirty. It is no

The Visible

37

surprise, then, as Guibert reports, that “they were surprised by this image of themselves that I was giving back to them, after a gap of forty, fifty years”.

5. Hervé Guibert, “Louise”, 1979. Courtesy Christine Guibert.

Guibert’s aesthetic reconstruction of the two women’s femininity transforms the obscene (what is offensive to accepted standards of decency and modesty) into the erotic, his erotic, that is, his love and desire for life, which, paradoxically, he documents not far from the threshold of death. A logic in which Eros and Thanatos are not in struggle with each other (as in Freud’s scenario), but strangely intertwined and ultimately both absorbed into Guibert’s aesthetics of love. By undoing an artifice – the braided crown of hair – that had frozen the eighty-years-old woman into a portrait of a schoolgirl, Guibert restores Louise’s chaste figure her sensuality. At the same time, he grants himself something very important: an image of old age, one that in his later photographs he seems to anticipate the mourning of. In the posthumously published volume, La Piqûre d’amour (1994), several of Guibert’s texts contain that possibility of anticipated mourning through which he paradoxically extended his own life by “stealing some years, some months to write against death not only the books of his anticipated maturity but also, sending them

38

Touching Surfaces

out like arrows into the future, the very slowly ripened books of his old age” (Bianciotti: 1994). While Guibert looked gently and patiently both at and after the two sisters, while he thought of them as photographic images of another life, the very slowly ripened books of his old age were in the making. Suzanne et Louise was published in 1980. Hervé Guibert died at age thirty-six in December, 1991. In more than one way photography has always been linked to death or to mourning. Related to our perception of aging, photography can also trick time by effacing traces of aging through technical cosmetics. Yet the superb way in which Guibert associates affection and erotic signs with old age here makes of these photographs not only compelling aesthetic objects but creative elements in the self’s long combat for preservation and reinvention.

3. Images That Matter. Terry Pollack; Cindy Sherman She is looking at something visible, distant, but perhaps coming slowly closer. Susan Griffin There was age in her hand. Dawn Raffel

The photographs that I have discussed in the previous sections share a concern with the phantasmatic realm of aging. The artists create settings, stagings, photographic fictions that make the changing body visible while emphasizing its relation to dream, knowledge, experience, art, death. Instead of faking or effacing signs of aging, they explore the expressivity and creativity of old age. The gaze of the photographers is gentle without being sentimental. Instead of idealizations, we are faced with alternatives to both artificial and

The Visible

39

negative portrayals of aging. Other art photographers have addressed aging as matter and enhanced artifice to incorporate contrasting images of the self over time that resist representations of the body as the exclusive locus of cultural and discursive practices related to aging. We have seen with Guibert that rendering old age in photographic works can place one in imaginary spaces in future time. To accommodate the passing of time the subject tends to project itself as a whole. Yet, to the extent to which that sense of wholeness borders finitude, it is fixity of form that we might actually fear and not deviation from form or shapelessness. That very fear of fix images of old age entails a necessary disruption. Disjunctive images of the body are, then, not only enactments of the phantasms of fragmentation that accompany old age.10 Created by younger artists on the mode of meditation, these images also map out a matrix of freedom, ways of creating metaphors of temporality. In photography and film it is harder to fake old age than youth (although digital photography makes now possible any shift in time and space). In her series entitled Homage to Käthe Kollwitz (1992), Terry Pollack experiments with such reversible traveling from old to young age. In Pollack’s remakes of some of the German artist’s self-portraits (a process of introspection and representation that spans Kollwitz’s life in her drawings and prints), it is highly significant that she uses younger models to play out a wide range of contradictory emotions related to aging. In this series about our tenuous relation to time, aging is used both referentially and metaphorically. It constitutes the very matter of these images, all kallitypes11 printed on rice paper. Pollack uses alternative processes to integrate elements of time (of another time) into her work – the aging of the paper, of the pigment. The images are evocative, nostalgic. Enacted by a younger model, a phantom self (companion in our journey in time), the aging figure in Kollwitz’s originals is sublimated in Pollack’s photographs into a diffuse yet dominant presence. 10 For an analysis of literary representations of the relationship between

the fragmentation and the wholeness of the body in old age, cf. the chapter “Phantasms of the Aging Body”, in Woodward 1991:167-91. 11 A kallitype is a photograph resulting from an iron and silver printing process used in the nineteenth century. Contemporary photographers use it owing to the richness of tones that this contact printing-out photographic process provides.

40

Touching Surfaces

6. Terry Pollack, Homage to Käthe Kollwitz, 1992. Sepia; kallitype print on rice paper, 6 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

The Visible

41

In one of them (6), significantly, the face takes refuge from the spectator’s gaze. The viewer’s attention is displaced from the body to the background. We are projected into the future by going back in time. Individual aging is placed here in the perspective of a larger time framework. We are invited to step out of our bodies, into a costume, into a pose. Photographer and model collaborated closely in creating this sense of temporality through the plastic conception of space. During the preparation of the setting and the discussion of the poses, Pollack declares to have literally witnessed the model’s “taking on age” in order to convey what to her was crucial for the work, “going into another space.” (2006) At the opposite pole are Cindy Sherman’s photographic images of old age in her History Portraits (1988-1990), her Sex Pictures (1992), or the Horror and Surrealist Pictures (1994-1996). Her reconstruction of well-known Renaissance portraits (1988-1990) – some of which suggest caricature by exaggerating the aging of the originals – addresses idealizations of beauty and the authority of canons in an approach which differs from Hayden’s observant gaze at her subjects. Like in the other impersonations Sherman has created, to fake old age she uses makeup, postiches or false body parts. Attached to these representations is also a desire to go beyond layers of paint and time in search of human forms transfigured by the artists. Like Guibert, Sherman unbraids her models, yet not gently, but rather with a kind of childhood cruelty that undoes the toy to see what it is made of. She cunningly explores the creative potential within that destructive impulse through pictorial devices by using enhanced color effects, contrast, texture. As in her sex series (which allude to Hans Bellmer’s dolls), in the portraits Sherman attacks taboos or clichés of representation frontally and stages wild fantasies by expanding the limits of what photography can show. While deconstructing the Western canon of beauty, Sherman’s grotesque depictions of aging, which are actual character compositions performed in front of the camera, ironically refer to clichés about visual representations of the elderly (the crone, the witch).12 Yet by making use of these clichés, she also addresses some of our visceral fears related to the 12 For a historical and sociological analysis of the origin of these representations, cf. Herbert C. Covey’s book Images of Older People in Western Art and Society.

42

Touching Surfaces

visualization (that is, the materialization) of old age or of the body in pain. In her 1993 Fashion Series,13 Sherman has wonderfully incorporated the very materiality of age into her photographs by creating a subtle optical illusion, one at the limit of visibility (“Untitled # 276”; “Untitled # 282”). This is what I would call a grain effect, one that she had used in some of her early Untitled Film Stills series in order to veil the image, to enhance its suspense, to delay the decoding of the figure. In two of the fashion photographs, the hands of Sherman-the model are foregrounded, touched by age spots*. Given the large format of her photographs, the grain of the paper is extremely magnified and especially visible on the close-up of the hands. The age spots read as paper grain. Transposed on paper, a surface as fragile and resilient as skin, the age spots are not only preserved, but also in a visually provocative way, celebrated. Here, age provides the texture of Sherman’s work as it provides the rich textures of our lives. Exploring the becoming of the body is in fact only natural within the logic of Sherman’s entire work, since over the years she has always used only her own body as a model. However, or precisely because of this travesty of the corporeal, her reconstructions of aging extend beyond the body. The only time when Sherman uses non-Sherman and non-human models for her photographs (before she turned away entirely from her own body to use mannequins from medical supply catalogues for the Sex Pictures) is in a series of relatively abstract compositions evoking decay and death (19851987). Very pictorial, shot with dramatic lights and intense color filters, these images that seem to dodge the body represent, in fact, diverse rotting matter that Sherman had collected in her studio and studied as it changed, metamorphosing over time. What becomes of the material stuff of our lives? How is matter affected by the passage of time? How can we integrate such stuff into the psychic and material economy of our lives as we do with the residue of everyday life that pass into our dreams only to unravel deeper, hidden patterns? Referred 13 More recently, Sherman has worked for fashion designers, in the style

of her more recent typological studies, by deconstructing the fashion canons of beauty through the caricatural overemphasis of all markers deviating from those canons.

The Visible

43

to as the “bulimic” (or the “disgust” series, Krauss 1993; 200614), these images come close to the unstable balance between lack and excess, between fascination and rejection relative to what eludes the form of our bodies. The force with which they play on that ambiguity strikes at a threshold of sensibility. The pictorial distribution of these elements in the photographs does not coat the real with a cosmetic layer. It shifts our perspective on a common reality, since by placing the actual organic degradation of matter into an aesthetic environment, Sherman reveals the transformative possibilities inherent in that process – a cycle instead of a dead end. The fact that the shapeless portions of matter in her photographs are aestheticized does not necessarily make them more agreeable to the eye. Some viewers might still consider them ... disgusting, others (to the great surprise of the former) ... engaging. It is a matter of taste, one could say. But it is mostly a matter of point of view. To the realistic viewer (the one who is tricked by the mimetic power of photography), these uncanny “still lives” will appear as mere detritus. To the imaginative viewer, they will appeal as possibilities of life. In them time is incorporated, not denied. So is the possibility of form. The very popularity of her work and the counter-canon that the Sherman pictures came to represent is itself a manifestation of the culture’s need of representations deviating from both role models and canons of beauty. Sherman enjoyed great popularity in academia in the 1980s and 1990s particularly because of her ironic impersonations of conventional roles of women. What explains, however, Sherman’s success as an artist is her personal and daring use of the art of photography in ways that unsettle mimetic photographic conventions and thereby unsettle readings of the real. In her analysis of Sherman’s History Portraits series, Rosalind Krauss argues that Sherman’s approach to images works precisely against “the sublimatory energy of Art” (1993: 174). In this sense, given the degree of entropy they entail, both the “bulimic” series and the art history portraits have a definite anti-aesthetic character. Yet, Sherman creates disorder by forcing the limits of her craft. In both subject and form, her series call on a wide range of modes of representation – cinema, painting, 14 For a recent selection of articles on Sherman in which the essays in the 1993 volume are reprinted, cf. Krauss 2006; and, in French, Durand et al. 2006.

44

Touching Surfaces

fashion, fairy tale, history, and, more recently, a gallery of contemporary typologies which she impersonates. She destabilizes the mimetic function of photography by staging entropy through a sophisticated system of aesthetic strategies borrowed from other modes of representation. In elaborating what Krauss calls “the field of a desublimatory”, Sherman’s subversion of the geometry of beauty bears witness to the fact “that behind the façade there lies not the transparency of Truth, of meaning, but the opacity of the body’s matter, which is to say, the formless” (1993: 174). It is, however, arguable that the strategies Sherman uses represent what Krauss calls a “transgression against the form” (109) since Sherman’s understanding of form is, I would hold, rather generative. Form as mutable, dynamic, perishable: a perfect analog to the art of photography itself. Yet her images also explore the potential of form in disorder. Although her work presents figures, both the historical series and the sex series (the images of old age included) have a non-figurative dimension. Fragmentation and shapelessness are not the exclusive avatars of old age. Sherman refers indeed to idealizations of the body and to stereotypes of feminine mystique. At the same time, through the aesthetic codes that she disrupts and then reconfigures, her work also questions materialistic reductions of the body. Laura Mulvey sees in what I would call Sherman’s “matter” series (what other critics call either the “disgust” or “bulimic” series), “a monstrous otherness behind the cosmetic façade” (1991: 148; Krauss 1993: 192-93). Yet, I would suggest that what we find there is, in fact, a part of the human that eludes discourse, but not significance. Few commentators of Sherman’s work address its tactile sensibility, its aesthetic qualities. While illuminating an important aspect of Sherman’s complex project, most of the ideologically oriented readings of her work support, even if in an unconscious way, our culture’s fear and anxiety related to matter, to some of the stuff we accumulate, to detritus, to a part of our humanity that is not framable by social discourse. Similarly, the image of decaying flesh, one recurrent in the discourse of aging, is an example of the poverty of metaphors our culture has for representing the transformations of the body.

45

The Visible

4. A Space to Hold the Gaze. Terry Pollack; Geneviève Cadieux I realized that, while I was writing about my childhood, about a certain year of my childhood, I was writing from everywhere, writing about my whole life, all years confounded, of this life, as I had never done before. Marguerite Duras

In a composition entitled “Death Mask” (7), Terry Pollack superimposed a slide representing a portrait of her grandmother on a photographic self-portrait. Part of an installation piece that included a taped narrative where the grandmother tells the story of the loss of her first baby, this photograph creates an intricate pattern of identifications and projections that are made visible in simultaneity. The grandmother’s wrinkles show on the young artist’s face from another space, a sense of depth conveyed by the different qualities of the superimposed images: the transparency of the slide, the opaqueness of the initial self-portrait, and the fluidity of the Polaroid print. The uncanny character of this combined portrait shows precisely in the textures enhanced by the lighting Pollack has used and by the contrast between the figure and the ground. All add to the density of the photographic matter, and also to the extent of the photograph’s temporality. This double portrait can be read as a memorial to the grandmother, a search for identifications, and also, as a projection in time. Unlike the journey backwards that we see in the Kollwitz series, here past, present, and future are framed together. It must be added that Pollack’s work has developed in directions that are often at a distance from the body and rather deep into the habitations of the soul or the archeology of emotions (“The Archaeology of Fear” is, for instance, the title of a series of photographic meditations on violence that she created in 2003). Throughout her varied projects, her exploration of actual spaces or recreations of imaginary ones revolve indeed around questions of temporality, like a melancholic echo that her use of the camera and her thinking of images places in a lucid perspective.

46

Touching Surfaces

7. Terry Pollack, “Death Mask”, 1987. Color; large format Polaroid print, 20 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

As in Pollack’s visualization of a generational simultaneity, we can experience the physicality of overlapping generational features, just as our old and new selves intersect, or various places we have inhabited or traversed are superimposed in our mind to

The Visible

47

compensate for disruptions in space and time. As Bollas remarks, redefining D.W. Winnicott’s notion of a true self (the vague site of a wholeness of being as opposed to various fragmentary false selves), it is hard to conceive of the self as phenomenologically unified. The difficulty resides in the fact that “the true self is not an integrated phenomenon but only dynamic sets of idiomatic dispositions that come into being through problematic encounters with the object world” (Bollas 1992: 30). Similarly, I would say that there is no true old self but a permanently fluctuating relationship between a younger and an older self, perceived now as bracketing (in time: hence the sense of closure, even of claustrophobia or of estrangement from one’s chronological age), or as suspension (out of time: hence the sense of insecurity). These different forms of being or of experiencing being, also associated with different ages, can at times be perceived as glimpses of a posture, a feature, or a tone of the voice. In a short conversation with a friend my mother’s age, for instance, I can see through her to others, as in sequences of different photographs projected rapidly on an imaginary screen. In her gestures and words I read visitations of my mother; in the impatient zigzagging of her hands, I see her daughter’s; in the undertones of her voice, her own mother’s idiom. In such ways we are able to grasp our lives as a continuum, ways so different from the sense of hierarchy presupposed of old age. As in the case of the cubist unfolding of the different sides and facets of an object or figure not visible to the eye, the photographer’s conundrum is how to represent as a plausible (that is, visible) form of reality the different forms of being and the different states of consciousness that inform our sense of identity. Our desire to see our selves as a whole, to see the histories of our bodies as an unfolded scroll meets what Jean-Pierre Nouhaud has called “the photographer’s renewal of the panoramic desire” (1987: 26), namely his idea that the part of the real shown in a photograph is not a fragment; that what it shows equally contains what it conceals thus enlarging the photographic perspective from the visible to the invisible.15 In making visible those “dynamic sets of idiomatic dispositions”, in Bollas’ phrase, speculative photographs present us 15 The fragmentation and reconstruction of a linear perspective in David Hockney’s photocollages also expresses such panoramic desire. Besides his landscapes, one might think in particular here to his mother’s portrait in photocollage.

48

Touching Surfaces

with new modes of visibility, with new ways of relating to the real, to time passing. Double or multiple exposure is a common photographic error. It is a visual reverse of a slip of the tongue, one that makes latent images surface, instead of vanishing, unexpectedly. The same effect can be obtained by superimpositions that visualize a physical impossibility: that of being in two or several places at once. Metaphorically, these double or multiple images visualize in fact the many places we travel within ourselves, or phantasmatic selves who inhabit us. We all host within ourselves dormant images of aging, invisible prints on a film that waits to be developed, one in which various age-selves connect (or, as in Myrtle’s case, struggle to connect) In Pollack’s intriguing composition of superimposed images, one form shows through another, as if by looking at a single image we could have access to many images, the familiar as well as the unseen, the conscious as well as the unconscious. This materialization of the condensation and displacement processes of dreams produces an uncanny effect: the recognition of patterns of thought that bring us to remote or yet unknown facets of ourselves. It is owing to such images that we keep in touch with different forms of the self, that we travel in time back and forth. They give glimpses of the mind’s probing into the chaos of mental images, attach them to material forms.

Double images can also give form to transient perceptions of the self, to forms of double consciousness that we experience in the dream, and sometimes in actual life, often in relation to perceptions the aging self, when one takes distance to observe, to look closer into the emerging self. Such divide shows in the photographic composition entitled “Blue Fear” (1990) by Canadian photographer Geneviève Cadieux (8). Here, the superimposure is not between images of two generations, as in Pollack’s mask, nor is it between two age-selves. This is an altogether uncommon mirror image of old age. In this large format photograph printed on masonite, the torso of an elderly man seen from the back is superimposed on a frontal close-up of his eyes. The enlarged image produces a contradictory effect of both attraction and repulsion, a pair of affects not unlike our ambivalent relationship

The Visible

49

to our own aging or, sometimes, to old people themselves. The spectral portrait is, as the title suggests, deeply disquieting. Blue fear – to be scared to death – is the fear of death.

8. Geneviève Cadieux, “Blue Fear”, 1990. Color cybachrome print, 73 x 116 inches. Photo: Louis Lussier. Copyright Geneviève Cadieux. Courtesy Galerie René Blouin, Montréal.

Immersed in blue (the color of the man’s eyes, perhaps the only physical attribute that does not change over time), the whole composition appears as an emanation of his vision, of his emotions in relation to his old age, to death. In the transparency of superimposure, consciousness dissolves, vacillates in the instability of forms and

50

Touching Surfaces

colors. This exorbitant surface of skin-cum-gaze disturbs the boundaries between the physical and the psychic body. The photograph itself seems to dissolve under the beholder’s gaze, like time that passes, like light eating into the paper, into the skin. The work expresses a fear stronger than that of the precarious image of our changing bodies: it is the fear of our very vanishing to which the photograph alludes. Recreated in this transparent photographic reality, however, fear is transformed into an indefinite and diffuse feeling. It becomes almost fear tamed, something soothing. This effect results from the paradoxical spectral area created within the image by the superimposure of two photographs. It is an analog to that inner space Rilke describes, that of a blind angel looking into itself. (The project was initially entitled “Blind Faith”, and blindness is the intriguing subject of other works by Cadieux.) Here, the image includes inner space. The photographed subject’s gaze, one that uncannily mirrors that of the viewer, creates an interstice, an area filled up with air, as it were, between the two simultaneous images of the same person, a buffer space to hold that metonymic body, to abide the crisis of aging. Such photographs can be considered as transformative holding objects. They go further into the perception of aging than documentary photographs precisely owing to their aesthetic effects and create, I would argue, an illusion of vision as a modification of the sense of touch in a more enhanced way than painting can do, and thereby, an uncanny closeness to the photographed subject. Larger than life, “Blue Fear” participates in this exacerbation of touch to create a powerful holding environment. The disturbance in outlines and conventions in this composition helps us imagine spaces in which one can experience concomitant forms of consciousness of the self. Like Hayden’s pictorial fields in which naked bodies are displaced from the usual habitat of images of the elderly, the puzzling perspective of this work not only expresses but also sublimates the fears and anxieties related to aging by placing them in an appropriate aesthetic environment. For as they question classical or current public images of the elderly, such photographic works pose the problem of the representation of the body by using the metaphoric potential of optic deviations. In his essay on Cindy Sherman, Norman Bryson (1993: 219) reminds us that the constructionist understanding of the body as a social and historical representation faces its limit with the problem of

The Visible

51

pain. Perhaps even more so, an understanding of the aging body confronts that same limit, what Bryson calls “the boundary of the discoursive empire”. This raises fundamental questions about representability and knowledge. If as psychic images, ages – like time – do not exist in isolation but rather simultaneously (so that we can read the younger woman through the older woman, the mother through the daughter) is it at all possible to isolate aging as a sign? How is it visually possible to symbolize the contradictory experiences of the changing body? Bryson’s articulation of the conflict between discourse and the reality of the body is suggestive in this respect: “the body is exactly the place where something falls out of the signifying order – or cannot get inside it. At once residue and resistance, it becomes that which cannot be symbolized: the site, in fact, of the real” (220). The very de-figurations of the reality of the body that the images I have discussed here present – be they grotesque (Sherman), lyrical (Cadieux) or, both lyrical and ironic (Hayden) – address the limits of representation. They do so by placing the focus not on limits imposed by convention but on limits that evolve naturally from the relationship the photographers establish with their models. In the photographic works I have discussed here, the artists do not figure the human body overtly mapped by social discourses with assigned meanings. Nor do they isolate their models from social contexts in any essentialist way. Instead, these artists capitalize on the metaphorical potential of a body on which inscriptions of varied natures coexist in different degrees of visibility (hence, for instance, the focus Cadieux places on “concepts of vision, both ocular and extra-perceptible”) (Pontbriand 1990: 82).16 The images that we see bring evidence about both physicality and its sublimation. Consider this important detail in “Blue Fear”. We see the body of the man from above the shoulders. Part of his body has been left out of the frame. The viewer has to “restore a body to the vision”, as Régis Durand has pointed out in connection with one of Cadieux’s 16 Cadieux makes an important statement in contrast with the

marginalization of the aesthetic in the cultural discourse of the 1980s and 1990s: “When an artist (particularly a woman artist) works with images of women, questions of sexuality, politics, voyeurism are discussed. However, as far as I am concerned, the most important aspect of this installation [“The Shoe at Right Seems Much Too Large”] deals with concepts of vision, both ocular and extraperceptible” (Pontbriand 1990: 82).

52

Touching Surfaces

other works (1990: 124). The space that holds the blue gaze is symbolic for a gaze that holds the whole body. The poetic body. Inspired by these photographic works, I have come to think of the poetic body as a form that ensures the connection between the physical and the psychic self, one that eludes rationalizations of discourse or hierarchies of narrative. In a single vision, it brings together imaginary age-selves, not with the constancy of the phantasm but as fleeting images, like photographs themselves. The poetic body as a mental (and here) photographic construction helps keeping in touch with one’s different ages or different age-selves. As an unstable form that represents the subject’s all-embracing consciousness, it structures multi-layered experience, and creates a generational continuum within the self. Yet the poetic body is elliptical. It contains and is comforted by loss. Volatile, it nonetheless has a particular inconsistent persistence. The consciousness of the poetic body is not a mental image, but rather a diffuse retinal memory, now intense, then evanescent. It participates in a fiction necessary to the slow and often painful process of internalizing aging, a fiction that brings us from one age space to another to see our life as from everywhere in both space and time. It is both a displacement and a condensation of ages. From that privileged perspective that bridges past, present, and future, ages do not exist in isolation. We are not stuck in time. We ourselves create such metaphors of continuity, metaphors that provide a link between a larger past and a more extended (yet, with time, vanishing) future, as if these metaphors were, literally, vehicles that transport us from one age destination to another, now backward, then forward. As I approach the end of this chapter, an after-image persists in my visual field. It comes from E. J. Bellocq’s “Storyville Portraits” dating from ca. 1912, found by accident and restored to paper form by Lee Friedlander from the original glass plates in 1970. The image is that of a young woman from a brothel in the Red District of New Orleans (9). Posing unsophisticatedly in front of a big wooden bed, she is nude except for her black stockings. On some of Bellocq’s plates, the faces of the women have been covered by mysterious scratches, as if to conceal their identity or to erase some vital part of it. But in this particular re-photographed image, there is also an intricate network of accidents on the surface of the glass plate that looks, on the smooth surface of the paper print, like a piece of unweaving lace

The Visible

53

partly covering the naked woman. Shapes emerge from these accidents. A constellation of dark spots frames the woman’s body placing it further in space. And where once the scratches were, the plate is now also cracked, broken. A dark cavity opens in place of the face. The image of the woman has come to us fragmented, deteriorated, touched by time. Attractive yet phantomatic. In its fragility, the aged photograph restored to new form evokes what is most moving and also most disturbing in our difficulty to envisage the shapes of our own aging. Enigmatically enclosed in it lie the unpredictable configurations that it may take, along with its paradoxical aesthetics.

54

Touching Surfaces

9. E. J. Bellocq, “Storyville Portrait”, Plate 41, ca. 1912. Copyright Lee Friedlander. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

10. Jim Dine, “Heart’s Door”, 1999. Digital pigment print, edition of three, 68.3/4 x 48.1/4 inches. JD52D. Courtesy of the artist.

2

(In)visibility: Photographs that Make a Change Argument: the Photographic Unconscious The camera sees even beyond the visual consciousness. Ralph Eugene Meatyard

In the previous chapter, I have addressed the problem of the invisibility of the aging body from two different viewpoints. First, as an absence of the aging body in current cultural representations up to the 1990s. Then, in relation to perceptions and representations of aging in the work of art photographers of the 1980s and 1990s in whose engaging, often provocative visions I have read an articulation of physical and psychic aspects. From those photographic images that challenge the cultural notion of visible signs of aging, I will now turn to artists who explore and extend our understanding of visibility by showing perceptions and mental processes that are invisible to the eye. How can photography render mental images and processes visible? How can such “visibility” redefine our understanding memory, or of the unconscious, and bring into consciousness various age-selves? Since its early days, photography has indeed been associated with psychic processes. Photographic operations, the mechanisms of the camera, and the dark room itself have, over time, supplied suggestive metaphors for the functioning of the mind precisely where the language of rationality was facing its enigmas. Modern theories of memory and of the psyche emerged at the turn of the twentieth

58

Touching Surfaces

century in parallel with the development of photography and other optical devices, though, as Frances A. Yates has shown in her seminal history of representations of memory (1966), mnemonic devices have since ancient times been associated with visual methods of organizing material to be remembered. More recently, in Metaphors of Memory. A History of Ideas About the Mind (2000), Douwe Draaisma1 brings into focus the metaphors provided by technologies of all times to facilitate the understanding of mental processes. These include technologies of image-making (from wax-impressions and the camera obscura, to photography, cinema, and holograms) and, more recently, computer hard disks, all of them devices that serve memory systems. The very difficulty to define elusive memory processes philosophically, he argues, has called for these metaphorical models that try to grasp the processing of experience in the mind’s dark room and are inspired by devices used to preserve it. Similarly, in an essay comparing photography with other recording supports (tape, or the film used in cinema), Max Kozloff holds photographs for “a class of objects that comprise a sophisticated and rather mysterious memory system” (1984: 19; emphasis added). Such models – photography and cinema among them – have also been used in order to make consciousness and the unconscious graspable. In his Creative Evolution (1908), Henri Bergson associated the mechanism of thought with the emerging form of cinema (“The Cinematographic Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanism of Illusion”). In his book Matter and Memory, he describes the body as a “conductor” in order to highlight the solidarity between memory images and movement and that between mental and body memory. In discussing the question of corporeal memory “in the form of motor contrivances”, Bergson notes that the body “can store up actions of the past”, the body itself being “never more than one among these images” (1896; 1910: 77). “The faculty of mental photography” belongs for him to subconsciousness rather than to consciousness,2 a 1 In his recent book, Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older (2004),

Draaisma explores the nature of autobiographical memory and its relation to the passing of time. 2 For his study on matter and memory, Bergson makes extensive allusions to the photographic device, in particular in the chapters: “Of the Survival of Images. Memory and the Mind” and “The Delimiting and Fixing of Images. Perception and Matter. Soul and Body” ( [1896] 1991: 133-178; 179-224).

(In)Visibility

59

space in which actions of the past are being retained much like light impressions on a sensitive plate. In his “Interpretation of Dreams”, Freud employed the metaphor of the photographic device to illustrate the functioning of the psychic apparatus. Other theories of memory (as corollary of the unconscious) and of dreams (as its expression) have often used analogies with photographic processes,3 yet mostly by considering photography a replicative rather than a creative medium. It is to a large extent photography’s capacity to “fix” an image that has called for the understanding of memories as precise and static, stored in the mind like photographs in an archive. “Photography imitates memory”, stated George Santayana around 1912 in his conference, “The Photograph and the Mental Image”, “so that its product, the photograph, carries out the function imperfectly fulfilled by the mental image." (Goldberg 1981: 260; emphasis added). For Santayana, the function of photography was definitely that of fixing the image of things or beings in order preserve and potentially bring back the memories we have of them. Although, in his view, photography was to ensure a continuity between actual and internal experiences, he was placing it among the mechanical and not the creative activities, and the “irrevocable mental image” (260) was for him rather a question of memory than one of imagination. However, over the past decades we have learned to consider memory as a dynamic, creative process in which imagination recategorizes stored images. Cutting-edge medical technology has made it possible to see into the human body and brain. Advanced research in neuropsychology and cognitive psychology has indeed refined – and will, in the near future, considerably modify – our understanding of the unconscious precisely by means of technologies that visualize mental processes.4 Rather than elaborating on these issues, which are the subject of current debates among philosophers of 3 In his strangely eclectic book Les Rêves et les moyens de les diriger, Hervey de Saint Denis notes: “Our memory is, to use a comparison borrowed from the discoveries of modern science, like a mirror covered by collodion, which preserves instantaneously the impression of images projected onto it by the objective of the dark room” (Saint Denis [1867]1977: 73; tr. mine), or “In the depth of memory, cliché–memories are recorded infinitely” (74). 4 For an approach combining psychology, philosophy and science in the interpretation of the unconscious in connection to figural operations of thought, see Bert O. States, The Rhetoric of Dreams (1988).

60

Touching Surfaces

the mind, I will discuss in this chapter photography’s possibilities to grasp, as American photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard puts it, what is “beyond the visual consciousness”, in order to point out how our awareness of mental processes of aging – such as processing memories, connecting time levels, or associating registers of perception – is being shaped by art photographs. My exploration takes as a starting point a question suggested by photography critic François Soulages in his article “Photographie avant analyse” (Photography Before the Invention of Psychoanalysis),5 in which he discusses the reciprocal relations between photography (as an emerging technology in the midnineteenth century) and the study of the unconscious (prior to the invention of psychoanalysis). Soulages does not explore photography for its capacity to document and to inform but rather for its formative dimension. To what extent, he asks, did a new technology such as photography enlighten, modify, or enrich the understanding of the unconscious? And, conversely, how did what he calls “the hypothesis of the unconscious” allow for a better understanding of a new technology (1986: 31)? These questions, inherent in the beginnings of photography and essentially linked to its role in the understanding of the visible and the invisible body, have gained considerable importance today in the context of an extensive use of image-making technologies. In her book, The Optical Unconscious (1993), Rosalind Krauss transforms the term in her title – one coined by Walter Benjamin – into a concept which she uses in order to disrupt the modernist understanding of human vision as “master of all it surveys” in order to see it “in conflict as it is with what is internal to the organism that houses it” (Krauss 1993:180). In his “Small History of Photography” (1931), Benjamin had pointed to the “unknown” which lies in wait for the photographic act. “We have no idea”, he writes, 5 Soulages’ article primarily deals with the beginnings of photography and its paradoxical uses in psychiatry. The photographs done for psychiatric use by Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, in France, and by Hugh Welch Diamond, in England, are treated in the context of their institutional destiny. One can consider the significant detail that once the theories they were meant to support became obsolete, from testimonial, their value became aesthetic; Boulogne’s photographs, for instance, are now housed by the Ecole de Beaux-Arts, in Paris.

(In)Visibility

61

“what happens during the fraction of a second when a person steps out”, a phrase he uses precisely for sequences of movement which the naked eye cannot perceive (Benjamin [1931] 1979: 240). Inspired by the chronophotographs of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey – which record, by successive shots, the physical logic of movement – and also by montage and enlargement techniques practiced in the 1920s and the 1930s, Benjamin notes that photography can, in fact, reveal what remains secret to the eye. The camera can visualize imperceptible physical elements, he argues, and it can also introduce us to the unconscious: “It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis”(240; emphasis added). In his less known short prose pieces, Benjamin shows indeed more concern with the optical rather than with the instinctual unconscious. In these pieces, he often frames internal and external spaces elliptically or articulates fragments of thought by juxtaposition, as he does in his Arcades Project. In his short texts on childhood memories collected in the volume Berlin Childhood ([1938] 2007), the ways in which Benjamin edits material of the unconscious (memories of actual things together with memories of dreams) recalls indeed the photographic curiosities and the avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, their extensive use of framing, enlargement, juxtaposition, or superimposure. Like his dream memories, his childhood memories emerge as a series of configurations in which internal and external spaces are reversible, time levels versatile, and both respect the only imperative of coherence of vision. Krauss shows how in the works of surrealists the “optical unconscious” was very much linked to the “instinctual unconscious” and had to struggle its way out from a system based on the repressed as embodied in the logic of modernism, so that the visual field becomes, instead of a latency, “a field that is already filled, already – to say the word – readymade” (1993: 54). If surrealists have turned the conception of space, as Krauss puts it, “inside-out”, under the dramatic technological changes of the second half of the twentieth century, the refinement of optical techniques has contributed to an extension of our field of vision, from the inside of the body (and mind), to cosmic and virtual space. Relations between such notions as the corporeal and the mental, or inner and outer space have been (and

62

Touching Surfaces

are being) considerably redefined. Many contemporary artists use medical technology, for instance, in order to question notions of identity or redefine conventions of representation.6 As a consequence of these new possibilities of image-making, the juxtaposition of various registers of reality (conscious or unconscious, physical or mental, present or past) takes a variety of new forms which think of human vision neither as a “master of all things” (as Krauss discusses it in the logic of modernism), nor as the locus of conflicts between the mental and the corporeal (as in the logic of surrealism). Whereas in the surrealist collage, for instance, the seam between different spaces is still visible, the computer collage is able to smooth it, if not to completely efface it. As the use of digital manipulations7 in photography shows, inner space can no longer be conceived of as a discrete unit (a separate space, a dark room, as it were) but as a reactivation and conjunction of zones that we inhabit mentally in simultaneity. The visualization of such conjunctions of various physical and/or mental spaces produces uncanny effects, as in Jeff Wall’s “The Giant”, or in Jim Dine’s compositions that I will discuss in this chapter. These effects do not (or not exclusively) represent the emergence of something repressed. Instead, they reveal dimly known shapes or emotions from the more or less distant past to insist on how we experience the consciousness of these shapes and emotions. Such works bear witness to the fact that changes in techniques of imagemaking entail changes in the parameters of perception that compel us to reconsider, if not to reinvent, theoretical frameworks. A more open, less deterministic view of the unconscious evolves from these works, 6 Medical visualizations of the body have been a source of inspiration for many avant-garde artists. In the late 1960s, for instance, Robert Rauschenberg had Xrays taken of his entire body and included images of his skeleton in the lithographs he made. However, besides the embodiment of a desire to go beyond the visible, medical imagery seems to play now the role anatomy once played for painting even before it became a legal practice, that is a cognitive role. X-rays, MRIs or DNA diagnosis have modified our view of the body, a view that a large number of artists have been integrating to their work during the past decade. Cf. Barbara Pollack, “The Genetic Esthetic: DNA, MRIs, and X-Ray Visions” (2000: 136-37). 7 The distinction should be made, I would like to insist, between the manipulations used in journalistic or any other form of utilitarian photographs and those used in art photography. In the former case, which is not my subject here, manipulation serves entirely different purposes (and, as the history of photography shows, is by no means a new procedure).

(In)Visibility

63

one recalling Christopher Bollas’ extended notion of internal objects as imprints that shape individual idiom throughout life, and not only in early childhood. In his book, The Shadow of the Object (1987) (incidentally, a wonderful metaphor for photography), Bollas places internal objects relating to remote memories in the mental area of what he calls “the unthought known”, that is “the sense of being reminded of something never cognitively apprehended but existentially known” (emphasis added; 17). From a variety of technological devices, Dine derives, as I will suggest, a photographic method that enables him to redefine the scope of the consciously known within the context of “the unthought”, namely, in the spontaneity of the creative act. From the perspective of a philosophy of representation, Patrick Maynard has defined photography as “a technology which we can see progressively thematized as meaning” (1997: 309; emphasis added). In his book, significantly entitled The Engine of Visualization. Thinking Through Photography, Maynard addresses the controversial question of what kind of reality photography represents by highlighting the complementary relation between the creative and the epistemic functions of photographic technology, which amplifies, as he puts it, “our powers to imagine things and our power to detect things” (1997: x; emphasis added). Instead of providing equivalents for mental processes from the domain of photography, Maynard is concerned with the formative dimension of photographic modes of representation. He looks at how photographs inform our thinking. And, most importantly, he also looks at how they can shape our thinking as well as at the impact photographic procedures might have on our perceptions and thought patterns. Similarly, I read in the photographic techniques and aesthetic strategies of speculative photographs possibilities of reshaping our understanding of corporeal and mental realities. Such imaginative projects participate, I would argue, in what Richard Wollheim has called “the corporealization of thought” (1993, x). In spite of photography’s being largely associated with fixing the present fugitive moment, underlying our phantasmatic rapport with photographs is the concern with reading interiority through visible shapes. In the specific case of aging, exposing signs of aging can be turned into a means of restructuring our perception of it and, consequently, our relating to it.

64

Touching Surfaces

“Photography”, writes philosopher Mario Costa, “is not the memory of an instant, but the memory of a shape” (1990: 17; emphasis added). If the image perceived by the photographer in his viewfinder is a promise of a photograph, the resulting photograph stands out not only as a record of what the camera has caught but also as a hypothesis of a mental image, or of an association of several such images. In turn, how often doesn’t a photograph itself become a memory – participating to more or less faithful restorations of memory? Or how often isn’t it read – unconsciously – as a perception of time formalized in a shape we can speak of, describe, relate to other shapes, to other perceptions in which experience is stored, invisibly? We can think of such perceptions, I will suggest, as forming patterns that sustain the wholeness of the self in time. The photographic works I will discuss in this section participate in our understanding of memory, the unconscious, and our consciousness of time passing in a paradoxical way since, like Benjamin’s prose pieces, they do not imply disclosing unconscious images specifically encoded into symbolic meaning in the psychoanalytical sense. Instead, they present us with visual analogs of inner life perceptions and experiencings in a variety of puzzling formal patterns whose disclosure of meaning is cunningly deferred. These images are neither transpositions nor narratives of inner life, but forms of visual experience that inform our understanding of varied forms of consciousness of the self. Unlike documentary, informative, or testimonial pictures, speculative photographs require from the viewers a form of “willing suspension of disbelief”, that is to say a bracketing of their belief in the photographic reproduction of reality, since these photographic images bring into visibility shapes which our eyes cannot perceive but which we experience rather synaesthesically. Photographic equivalents of such shapes or configurations of shapes – that surface only dimly into consciousness – derive from elaborate photographic technique. They can also derive, as I will show in the following chapters, from what we normally consider to be accidents, or technical errors, such as the blur. By turning the mirror inwards,8 8 On the occasion of photography’s 150th anniversary, Andy Grundberg reviewed two major shows: “On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: 150 Years of Photography”, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and “The Art of

(In)Visibility

65

art photographers create what elsewhere I have called “la cassure photographique”, a chasm in our mimetic understanding of photography, or, perhaps, in an understanding of photographic mimesis limited to retinal impressions (Cristofovici 1996: 186). As Dine’s photographs suggest, the visual model of the unconscious or of mental life as photographic9 is linked to the common understanding of photography as a mimetic form in a problematic way. To the extent to which a photograph may disturb the contours of visible realities in order to reconstruct a picture of a thought, of an emotion, of a dream, or of a mental image, it can be indeed faithful to an invisible reality. It can be, not or not only, a faithful image of a specific object, person, place, but also an image whose referent is a synthesis of spaces, of time moments, of fragmentary perceptions of an object, or of a person. From this perspective, photographs appeal to our senses as fixed images of fugitive perceptions or emotions. Like imaginary referents in the rhetoric of literary texts, a photographic fiction can be the result of a juxtaposition of different iconic objects and metonymies of mental images.10 The computer editing or doctoring of images ensures the seamless representation of mental space. Instead of discontinuity, it highlights reconfigured continuity as an essential element in the construction of subjectivity. Such formal aspects call our attention to the formative character of aesthetic objects, an approach that has somehow fallen into oblivion in much of the current visual culture critique. Photography, 1839-1989”, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. His review is significantly entitled “Now, the Camera’s Eye Turns Inward”, (1989: 18-19). 9 In his essay “Une technique de l’instant ou la machine à clicher”, Daniel Sibony draws an analogy between photography and psychoanalysis based on the hypothesis that: “Our dreams function on the photographic principle”, (1990: 69-73; tr. mine). 10 Philippe Hamon studied this fascinating aspect of the interference between photography and other visual systems of the nineteenth century on the one hand, and literature on the other. He paid particular attention to the ways in which the various aesthetic codes in the vernacular visual culture of the time forced literature to redefine itself. Hamon analyzes the juxtaposition of various iconic objects in nineteenth-century French literary texts and mentions a detail that supports my hypothesis here, namely that the objects juxtaposed in the rhetoric of texts were the result of mental images which had already operated a synthesis of various visual codes (2001).

66

Touching Surfaces

In its artistic uses, photography relies extensively and increasingly so on mental processes rather than on mental states. These processes are sometimes imperceptible moves crystallized into figurative or abstract forms. But are, in fact, the mimetic and the antimimetic impulses opposite or rather complementary visions? For, yes, speculative photography is indeed replicative, but in a different sense than testimonial photography can be, since speculative photographs visualize such minimal inner processes that Nathalie Sarraute called “tropisms”: indefinable movements which penetrate consciousness very rapidly and represent, as was her belief, the inner source of our existence ([1939] 1957). And then, of course, this aspect does not exclusively concern speculative photography, but also our affective relation to family or documentary photographs. Don’t we carry throughout our lives the memory of images – actual, imagined, or dreamt of – together with reminiscences of art works? Mental images which are actually rather unfaithful to the original, since we certainly see the photographs that we have once taken or hold in view more often in our minds than we actually look at them, so that they act on the mental shape we have of them, unknowingly, as much as they act on our imagination. Significantly, the questions addressed in this chapter were prompted by the work of Jim Dine, an artist who has come to photography quite recently, and to a quite special use of it, one that unsettles categories of mimesis as well as boundaries between art media. “I feel in photography it’s part of the challenge, to bring that which is dead to life” (1998: 7; emphasis added). This is how Dine sums up his approach of photography in an interview, a statement that openly privileges the creative dimension of photography over its traditional reflective function. For Dine does not understand bringing “that which is dead to life” in the sense of monumentalizing the instant, the event, or in the sense of making images that represent life stills. On the contrary, his creative efforts focus on reaching what photography critic Andy Grundberg has called a “latent metaphoric potency” (1999: n. pag.), a dimension which has, in fact, emerged progressively in Dine’s work with other art media.

(In)Visibility

67

Dine’s photographic work 11 came to my attention in connection to reading patterns of memory as sites of creativity in speculative photographs. It struck me for its potential to bring mental processes into the visual field as well as for its open and intentional relation to the unconscious. In almost every interview, Dine associates his use of photography as an artist with his exploration of what he explicitly calls his unconscious, highlighting it as a major theme in his photographic work. At the same time, he uses his own unconscious, as I will try to show, as a source for his innovative technique and aesthetics. Instead of relocating vision in the opacity of the body and the invisibility of the unconscious, as Krauss does, my focus here will be on the materiality of the body on which fleeting mental images are projected, even as the body – Dine’s very first instrument of expression, in the field of art – is only metonymically present in his photographic compositions.

1. Jim Dine Mirroring Marginal Thought: an Aesthetics of Doctored Images In inner life, time plays the role of space. Simone Weil

Jim Dine is known as an artist who has experimented since the 1960s with a wide range of materials and techniques, in a variety of art media, from drawing with the body in space (in his happenings), 11 The Guggenheim Museum presented Dine’s early work in 1999, and a retrospective of his drawings was shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2004. His photographic work has been shown in Europe and the United States. Dine has lived for many years in between Europe and the United States. Significantly, he donated the entire set of his photographic work to the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris and made the same donation to the Davison Art Center at the Wesleyan. His bent for layering and associating images in his recent photographic work can be read as an echo of his living in various contexts, in different cultural and visual landscapes.

68

Touching Surfaces

to pencil or ink drawing, printmaking and painting, sculpture, and mix-media assemblages. His work in various art media has been described as a glossary of recurring images that make up “an aesthetic journey into a personal world” (Dine 1995: n. pag.). Dine started working on his first series of photographs in 1995 precisely as a means of investigating psychic material more in-depth, or, as he puts it, as “a way to translate my unconscious into the medium” (Dine 1998: 6).12 That the theme of the unconscious comes up with surprising persistence in his commentaries on his own work is perhaps not so surprising since his photographs are not actual pictures that record, in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s often quoted phrase, “the decisive moment”. Instead of the term photographs, it is therefore more appropriate to use that of photographic tableaux or compositions, for, as I will show, his strategies of processing and printing photographic images are varied and complex, from his first heliogravures to the subsequent photogravures, and to the more recent digital ink prints. Fields of memory, dream, and emotion are explored through the very processing of these works that combine plastic and poetic images (in many of them, words, lines, or sentences, written on blackboards or paper, often smudged, add up to the visual layers). These preoccupations can be traced as far back as his early work (the last performance Dine held in 1965 was suggestively entitled “Natural History (The Dreams)”). Evocatively, an exhibition of his early works (1959-1969) hosted by the Guggenheim museum in 1999 was entitled “Walking Memory”, a title suggestive of that solidarity Bergson referred to between body and images in the dynamics of memory. Why then has Dine chosen to turn to photography so late in his life, around the age of sixty? What types of latent images do his camera works bring into visibility? In his essay on Dine’s photographic work, “Assaying the Photographic”, Andy Grundberg suggests that he has not been attracted to photography until recently “because it cannot break down the surface of appearances as can the intervention of the hand” (Grundberg 1999; n. pag.; emphasis added). Yet Grundberg points out that it is precisely the wide range of technical possibilities he resorts to that allows him to “refashion the consequences of the camera lens”, in other words, to modify the impressions recorded by the camera. 12 Dine had in fact already “practiced” photography in a series of Polaroid

portraits and self-portraits he made in the 1970s, cf. Dine 2003, vol. IV.

(In)Visibility

69

Significantly, the resulting photographs are not always reproduced from negatives, but either from printing plates (in the photogravures) or from larger computer files of digital captures (more recently Dine has largely explored the possibilities of the digital camera and printing techniques). By using these possibilities to associate images of different visible textures, Dine unsettles what Grundberg has called the essential tension of his art: the one between rational space and “the floating arena of the subconscious” (1999: n. pag.). The memory of the camera is thus being articulated with the memory of the computer, enhanced by it. Both the photogravures and the digital images are carefully processed to infinitesimal detail, refined and redefined so as to render approximations that may come closer to fleeting mental images. Such photographic images suggest their sensory dimensions, their transience, and the variety of patterns mental images can create. As a result, the photographic tableau becomes a more accurate representation of mental processes and of emotional experience. “All my photographs”, declares Dine, “are as accurate descriptions of a thought I’ve had, or a passion I’ve had, or a sorrow I’ve had, as anything I’ve ever done” (1998: 10). There is however nothing static about these “descriptions”, which, in being faithful to the dynamics of mental life and to the ambiguities of perception, recall Benjamin’s notion of “figures of thought”. Paradoxically, photography – the art of the real – enables Dine to pursue a concern he has shown since his earliest works with exploring the imaginative reaches of the real. A new category of representation has emerged in his camera works, one for which Grundberg – borrowing from an earlier text by Krauss (1990) – uses the term the photographic. Grundberg defines it as “a hybrid analog of photography per se”, a category that subverts the mimetic association with photography to enlarge its understanding in the sense suggested by Maynard: as a category of thought. Yet for Dine, photography is also very much a medium among other art media whose possibilities of expression he has been exploring over more than four decades. In his photographic works, Dine displaces the focus of the viewers’ visual habits of reading photography from the real to the mental by insisting on the potential of the camera to record thought and emotion. In his commentaries, he parallels the speed of the captures with the speed of dreams and with that of the eye blink. For him, photography “mirrors the marginal thought – every frame – and

70

Touching Surfaces

it can be done so very quickly, not as quickly as the human mind can, yet very quickly, so that one could have many, many thoughts on a roll of film” (Dine: 1998: 8; emphasis added). However, his photographic images are not snapshots of sudden associative flashes (in the sense of the surrealist free association). They catch the viewer’s attention as very exact compositions that combine spontaneity with minuteness to create an intermediary space in which the separations between the unconscious and consciousness are shaded off, smudged. As James L. Enyeart notes: “the apparent incongruity of meaning helps to induce a dream-like opportunity for conscious exploration of what is an otherwise fleeting aspect of reality” (Dine 1999: 8; emphasis added). In light of his work in other art media, it is important to note the material aspect of Dine’s approach which reflects back on his understanding of the unconscious as part of reality processed either in peripheral vision or in the margins of thought. Consider an accurate technical note made by the Adamson Editions, in Washington – where some of his pigment prints on canvas have been produced – which presents us with a detailed description of one of the procedures Dine has used for these prints: The Dine pigment prints on canvas utilize several key technologies. […] The images, although created entirely digitally, are not in fact manipulated. Each capture can take up to seven minutes, a fact that Dine uses to create a visual paradox. The digital capture (photograph) is a carefully orchestrated tableau. Dine uses layer upon layer of these captures that are subsequently printed as large format images. The images are then placed into the tableaux as new elements; these new elements are captured along with a combination of actual objects, i.e. dolls, birds, skulls, etc. This process is constantly massaged by Dine until a final digital capture is created. This image is then proofed out at the studio by a high resolution digital printer using a refined six color pigment process on canvas. Finally, Dine may make minor adjustments in terms of color, contrast, and overall tonality before the final large scale image is printed. (Dine 1999: 35)

As in the case of Jeff Wall’s digital processing, which I have discussed in the previous chapter, the use Dine makes of a specific technical operation or of a technological device contributes to enlarging the figural field of the image. The manipulation or doctoring is not, in this case, a factor of misinformation (as it can be in the case of photojournalism), but a device that turns psychic material into

(In)Visibility

71

visual effects, channels it in new patterns. Doctoring devices can indeed intensify the metaphoric dimension of photography as well as its formative dimension. Though different in their artistic purpose, as well as in their actual use of digital technology (Dine’s is, in a captivating way, closer to older techniques used in the visual arts, more of a craftsman’s), both artists appeal to “forgery” in order to recreate paradoxes of inner visions in which memories of actual objects occur in a variety of patterns that define their respective aesthetic idioms. Dine combines photography, computer, and traditional art techniques to doctor the images recorded by the camera in various ways. The pictures of actual images (showing referential objects, or figures) become elements of virtual spaces (by way of displacement, condensation, and association, we might say, as many of them – the raven, the self-portrait, the Pinocchio – appear in diverse combinations suggestive of a variety of mental configurations). The processing of the photographic captures enables Dine to objectify inner life in a more direct way than in the other art media he has worked with. It allows him to recreate inner space from a series of objects of perception that can fit into many patterns. While the objects are actual (a stuffed raven, a Pinocchio toy, a photograph, a shell, a skull, an old mattress, a blackboard, a bunch of candles, a metal ladder, tools), their assemblages present us with various hypotheses of inner landscapes. Stabilizing the perception of inner landscapes relies on leaving behind the logic of binaries to bring opposite categories – such as the conscious and the unconscious, memory and forgetting – together within the same space of representation, quite as they often appear in the logic of life. Accordingly, the effects produced by such images are ambivalent. In his photogravures, the positive transparencies printed on a copper plate are then processed in a way similar to printmaking techniques, which implies that the plate undergoes the intervention of the hand. The resulting images retain something of the roughness, of the apparently unfinished, sketchy character of his other work. By contrast, the possibilities of visual accuracy provided by the inkjet prints, which combine sharp with soft tones, render a more evocative or approximate precision, one that creates an uncanny illusion of depth and transparency.13 The elaborate 13 An interesting technical detail needs to be mentioned here for its

metaphorical connotations: the printing technology used by Dine “delivers a droplet

72

Touching Surfaces

processing of various captures, as well as the grain of paper they are printed on produce an intense tactile effect that is enhanced in his recent series of large-scale pigment photographs printed on canvas. Paradoxically, such an effect alludes to the ungraspable character of mental images, and also to the multiple sensory ways in which they may touch us. Dine uses a specific program that allows him to “paint in” elements coming from several captures, to vary the contrasts and consistencies of the images, and to layer images coming from different spaces and corresponding to as many degrees of consciousness, to as many forms of memory. However, his intention is not to create metaphors of mental life, but to highlight it as a process and, I would say, as a presence, that is, as part of the reality of the subject who constantly processes images situated on different levels of consciousness. The association of objects evocative of different spaces is central to most of Dine’s photographic work. Only occasionally do these spaces assembled in a composition directly refer to different chronological levels, as in “North Crescent” (11), a digital pigment print in which a photograph of Dine the child is actually the background against which a raven projects its shadow. However, his photographs relate to varied layers of time associated in one image, as well as to the passage of time in many ways, and I would say, increasingly so. First, thematically. Dine’s early large format blackand-white photographs represent objects and human presences in isolation or in various associations of recurring elements, some of which can be connected to the pictorial genre of the vanities, a reflection on the transience of life, on the passage of time, and on death – all themes unavoidably relating to photography, to aging as well. Some of the texts, usually written on blackboards, some partly effaced, refer to the passage of time in a direct way. Then, time is also present technically, unavoidably so, given the role of time-length in the capture and processing of photographs. But also because of his conjugating procedures of capture and impression drawn from a history of artistic representations originating in printmaking, a history that photography belongs to. the size of 10 microns (the size of a human blood cell), the droplet size is variable and therefore able to deliver an image of continuous tonality and richness with an apparent resolution of 1.800 dots per inch” (Dine 1997: n. pag.; emphasis added).

(In)Visibility

73

11. Jim Dine, “North Crescent”, 1999. Digital pigment print, edition of three, 48 x 68.1/2 inches. JD57D. Courtesy of the artist.

Thematic and technical associations with temporality in Dine’s photographs are as many ways of working with time. And then, there is the constant reference to memory work, to bringing the inert matter of inner life into the visual field, into the consciousness of a shape, of a figure, or an object. These are as many ways of working against time in a creative, formative way. For Dine, visualizing territories of past and present experience involves exploring the past as a set of fragmentary, transitory mental images. His photographs challenge the viewer, as Grundberg puts it: “to comprehend camera pictures not as ready-made frames but as images constituted by the sum of their parts” (1999: n. pag.; emphasis added). By incorporating

74

Touching Surfaces

a stock of images from his own past work into his photographic tableaux, Dine works with referents that have been already formalized and function in the new work as landmarks of memory. Such reminiscences from what he calls “my own dictionary of my own works” (1999: n. pag.) pass from one medium to another, and are often combined in various patterns in the photographic compositions. When compared, the figures recurring in his photographs and in his other works show how each of these elements contains an infinite potential of association, and therefore of meaning construction. This is, for instance, the case of a figurine representing a cat embracing an ape. Dine has explored the expressive possibilities of this object (which he found in an antique shop in 1992) in various media, with an emphasis on the tension between object and medium: from the smudged, elusive shapes in the drawings, to the rough ones in casts he has made of the figurine and then incorporated into several photographic compositions, such as “Ape and Cat in Focus”, “Love in the Everglades”, “The Madonna of the Future”, or “Two of Everything”, all digital inkjet prints dating from 1997. The serial character of his entire work relates to the Pop Art tradition. Dine’s interest is however not in the repetitive character itself but in the transformative potential of serial work, in the changes or variations that can occur by transposing a visual motif into another medium, or into a different configuration, a process during which the origin of the object is progressively lost, as it often is in the dynamics of memory. If one considers the entire body of Dine’s work, his permanent reshaping of recurring elements in various patterns bears striking similitude to the memories of dreams or to the memories of memories replayed on the mind’s screen. Metamorphosing a stock of images prevents the artist precisely from veering into a repetitive or obsessive use of unconscious motifs or patterns. Dine actually notes that for him “photography seems a more accessible road to bring down the unconscious and channel it: as grist for my mill” (1998: 8). He seems to have chosen the photographic medium precisely on an anti-mimetic impulse. Consequently, objects and figures in his compositions are not illustrations of the unconscious but, like the camera itself, instruments to access it. These elements, which can be referred to as analogs of internal objects, of spaces of memory, and of layers of time, structure the space of the composition to represent

(In)Visibility

75

memory not as replicative, but as constantly changing, growing even from its own gaps. The recurring objects in the photographs become themselves residual memories of Dine’s past artwork. In the ironic vein of his first Pop works, he integrates such archetypal icons as the raven, the owl, the skull, into a personal vision that opens up the field of meaning instead of freezing it. Serial work provides him with a means of conjugating time (and even measuring it against an emotional backdrop) without articulating a specific life narrative. On that account, he uses elements coming from a personal vocabulary (and from associative time patterns), yet he also casts new light, so to say, on stereotypes that are part of our imaginative routine, or on elements of commonly shared cultural codes. The irony in his titles often adds to his demystifying icons and unsettling mental habits related to the symbolic value of objects (the skull, the raven). For Dine cunningly makes sure that even as we read through these associations imprinted on our cultural unconscious we are, in fact, undoing them. In some of the photographs the raven is, in fact, given a name, one that ironically alludes to Dine’s first name: “Jimmy” (1997), or “This Guy, Jimmy” (1996), a cute stuffed pet (one of the three Dine actually had in his Berlin studio when he first engaged in photographic work). In other compositions, this lighter register is sustained by the presence of a Pinocchio toy simply and touchingly introduced as “Portrait of the Boy” (1997). By varying the angle or the position and the visual weight of these elements within the composition from one photographic work to another, Dine also creates a displacement of images in time and space, and thereby, a continuum of his own work. The recurrence of images and his specific use of serial work relates to the passing of time and, most importantly, to a way of conjugating time levels that resist narrative closure. Significantly, the catalogue raisonné of his photographic work, published in 2003, is entitled The Photographs, So Far. Bringing to consciousness images coming from varied forms of experience creates an imaginary continuum of the self. Dine’s actual treatment of photographic material, as well as the commentaries he makes of his photographic experience are indeed suggestive of an urgency of processing unconscious material as past experience and also as a form self-scrutiny: a way of re-evaluating or redefining (or rehearsing) one’s place in time and space. We can notice this search

76

Touching Surfaces

for more encompassing images of the self coming with the maturation of the creative process in the work of many artists. In his essay on memory and the imagination in later life, “The Makeup of Memory in the Winter of Our Discontent”, Herbert Blau refers to the power of such writers as Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett not only to bring to surface accumulated memories but also to transform what he calls “reruns of repression” that are likely to accompany the habits if not the anxieties of the aging self. He insists on the fact that these two writers decondition habits of perceiving memories by relocating them in the conscious experience of the present. “What we see in Proust as in Beckett, who studied Proust and Freud”, writes Blau, “is a powerful drive to bring into consciousness all of what belongs to it. So long as it remains in a primary or inaccessible state it constitutes part of our life which, in its essence, remains unlived” (1986: 26; emphasis added). The vocabulary of elements reworked by Dine in various art media can be considered instead as reruns of expression: a strategy in the economy of time. In his work over the past four decades, visual elements are not recycled by way of routine. They do not stem in an exhausted imagination. Nor do they appear as obsessive reruns, but rather as playful access to fresh perception carried out through incremental repetition and variation. As a consequence of such repetitions and formal variations, his scenarios of memory do not fall into the category of linear life narrative. Even when technically juxtaposed, they are figured as images on transparent mental screens that symbolically meld time lines in the space of a photograph. The serial character of Dine’s work enhances this effect of superimposed reminiscences. The viewer’s own memory is then called to play an active part in the processing of the perceived image as in the case of the series of photogravures of the raven, or of the cat embracing the monkey. Like the memory of the artist, the memory of the viewer has been stimulated by the partial recognition of elements from past work, rehearsed by their migration into different art media and by the variety of their associations owing to computer doctoring.

(In)Visibility

12. Jim Dine, “Nuptials”, 1999. Digital pigment print, edition of three, 66.3/4 x 48 inches. JD59D. Courtesy of the artist.

77

78

Touching Surfaces

2. Editing, Composition, and the Visual Reconstruction of Memory As we grow older, our youth silently expands in time, while old age conversely contracts [...]. I and others like me live in a kind of eternal middle age, and no wonder; for no matter where we are in age, we are always in the middle of time, and must weigh our future equally with our past. Robert Grudin

How are these elements coming from different time levels organized and in what ways does composition participate in the visual reconstruction of memory? We have seen that, in his first digital works, Dine combined diverse digital captures in a seamless composition in which images taken in different physical spaces were brought together in a hybrid photographic composition, in a synthesis recalling the ways in which memory networks function (or what we know of them). In his subsequent work, he has used a different procedure. For a series of photographs made in 1999, he recreates mental scenes in actual compositions of objects, which he arranges before the photo session, and then photographs with a digital camera, as in “Nuptials” (12). Unlike his previous digital work, these photographs are not doctored; they are not the result of several juxtaposed or superimposed captures. In this case, Dine simply creates the scene, builds it up like a still life, and then photographs “what’s there”, as he puts it (2001), that is, already edited. In the first digital works, the staging done by computer manipulation resulted into a similar smoothing of different spatial planes. Editing enables Dine to bring together the conscious and the unconscious, or the present and the past, instead of placing them into a binary relation. In his specific use of photography, Dine did actually find a way of “breaking down the surface of appearances”, as Grundberg put it (1999: n. pag). The compositions of these pictures of the mind are rigorous yet – now more radically, now more subtly – de-centered, abstracted from a well-balanced frame through his use of low angles, contrastive lighting, or dramatic close-ups. Among his photogravures, for instance, “The Ear” is a huge visual ellipsis of a portrait. It shows

(In)Visibility

79

just a crop of grayish hair and an ear cornered on the right side of the composition, and then the immense shadow of the same head projected on a wall. The composition is so extremely decentered, as if the human presence were perceived only in peripheral vision (as an expression of “a marginal thought”). Foregrounded here is not the image itself but rather its double, the shadow: a light impression on a white surface. However, like his other work, these images on the edge of abstraction (in which the human figure seems to have “stepped out”, as Benjamin put it) are still figurative, since they retain the passage of objects, of human presences, or of their shadows not “like a bug in amber”, in Eugenia Parry Janis’ metaphor for photography (1989: 9-30), but rather like its trace only dimly recalled by the amber. In some of his color photographs, Dine explores a new dimension of the photographic blur produced by the computer in the form of a geometric smear, a series of horizontal lines which deface the figure slightly. This unsettling of the contours of the image records physical movement and simultaneously represents minimal changes in position, imperceptible to the eye, as in “Heart’s Door” (10). Like the lines scribbled on the backgrounds of his compositions, the lines of the digital blur are intermittent and roughly sketched. The lines in the blur record as many instantaneous perceptions as the written lines. On the significance of the latter as a form of poetry, Dine comments dryly: “They are just lines!” (2001). Because of its capacity to capture the fugitive instant, photography is commonly read as an object that can preserve the past. But the compelling question in Dine’s photographs is: how can photography record time levels and modes of perception – verbal, visual, sensory – that coexist in the fugitive instant of the mental image? How do they formalize varied forms of consciousness, the unconscious and memory among them? And what kind of knowledge about inner life do his photographic compositions propose? For Dine, it needs to be underlined, that knowledge is not of narrative nature. While photography in general largely participates to the construction of narratives of identity, Dine capitalizes on the non-narrative forms of subject construction. The events that happen in his photographs are purely visual, even when in the form of partially effaced words written on a blackboard or on torn-up rolls of paper. As in his work in other art media, the elements recurring in various combinations in the

80

Touching Surfaces

photographs do not present definitive scripts but only possibilities of narrative. The forms that unconscious mental life can take are here visual happenings recalling the spontaneity of Dine’s earliest work. The free association of sets of objects in different patterns – either in individual series (the raven, for instance), or in varied combinations – allows for a wide range of possible configurations of memory, an aspect which I consider fundamental for what we can learn from Dine about the visualization of the unconscious. As in the dream (or in the child’s global perception, for instance), there appears to be a narrative, but it constantly escapes us. Time as a factor of narrative development is thus deeply embedded in the image (it represents, so to say, the very matter of the image) yet the passage of time is cunningly bracketed in a skillful visual suspense that compacts past, present, and future in one tableau and defers the exposure of meaning. Doesn’t such suspension of time through narrative freeze bring to consciousness, in fact, common ways in which we perceive the passage of time, namely that it passes without notice? By disrupting linearity and unsettling linear perspective, Dine transposes photographically a visual journey from the present to the past, from the real to the imaginary, and vice versa. The result is a strange familiarity (the vague recognition of certain elements recurring from one photograph to another, from one medium to another). In a recent series (2004), mostly made of rephotographed photographs, Dine has edited various images that refer more explicitly to the past seen from the perspective of the present. Some are selfportraits in which two images are brought together: the older Dine with the younger, a photograph with a drawing. In others, his presentday self-portrait appears against the background of family photographs. The compositions highlight the fact that the camera does not only record the past. It is also an instrument for reconstructing memory by recategorizing elements that go in and out of the visual field, in and out of the field of consciousness. As in the other series, the oblique angle, the play with the contrasts between sharp and soft focus, the subtle variations of light intensities create a visual dynamic that enables him to deconstruct the very fantasy of the photographic unconscious and of photographic memory understood as replicative processes even as he makes use of this fantasy. “Bringing that which is dead to life” is dramatized in Dine’s photographic compositions as beating inert matter into life. He retains

(In)Visibility

81

on film the capacity of the mind to retain – in time – parts of life faithfully, that is creatively, by permanently reworking and recombining sets of elements. This particular approach makes it possible to accumulate visual experience selectively, so that one object, one figure, one impression can be used in several combinations. By being alert and faithful to process – to the mind in progress, to the eye in movement – Dine’s photographs integrate fantasies and realities of time passing, of light changing, of texture gaining in expressivity or becoming fragile on the verge of extinction. Dine works and reworks certain elements, as Grundberg has remarked: “to transform them, from one state to another, altering their meaning in the process” (1999: n. pag.). By disturbing the conventions of photographic time and space, Dine invites the spectator to look at the images otherwise. Displacement, association, and condensation of space and time levels help him access and use images emerging from his unconscious as material and not as a reductive set of symbolic signifiers. Significant detail expands the sense of the unexpected or the uncanny to create new visual realities that reflect and structure thought through vision, and also communicate with larger collective cultural patterns of thought. The symbolic openness of the images calls for further reading and contemplation. It seems to block interpretation and to reveal forms of what Anton Ehrenzweig has called “the hidden order” of the unconscious that we can read in art forms (1967). The apparent playful visual dynamic of Dine’s compositions reveals indeed a highly organized perceptual field, one which, however, resists symbolization. And it does so owing to elaborate photographic processing that enhances the aesthetic configurations inherent in mental images. Composition provides fleeting images with frames within which meaning oscillates between one shape and another before it builds up into a relatively stable configuration. In Dine’s photographic compositions, we have seen how figural expression can be obtained not by completely abandoning mimesis but rather by baffling its temptations. Now, the question is to what extent are, in fact, Dine’s photographs about aging? A question that seems easy to answer if we consider the photographs at their literal level, namely that some of them – more and more with time passing – do represent aging figures together with a stock of objects

82

Touching Surfaces

associated with classical symbols of the passage of time, and of death (the skull, the raven), in association with childhood’s transitional objects (the Pinocchio toy). Yet Dine’s cutting answer to this question clearly points to the fact that aging represents for him – like the unconscious – material for his work, in other words, life in terms of visual experience: “If I make photographs now that move anybody, it’s because I’m 63 years old and I’ve had 63 years of looking” (1998: 11; emphasis added). Approaching Dine’s photographic work in terms of representations of aging brings us naturally to the role of photographs in the construction of subjectivity. Yet, it also alludes to the very question of the subject of photographs, of what a photograph is about. As Philippe Le Roux has noted in his article significantly entitled “L’irréel photographique”: “the image itself is the ‘matter’ of photography” (1987: 71; tr. mine; emphasis added). What are, for instance, Sally Mann’s photographs of her children but only images and hypostases of childhood, visual interrogations on the universe of early life? They are not about childhood, but instead seize a glance into the puzzling world of childhood. Like Dine, in her photographs of children she stages a silent dialogue between ages, between different images over time, between various visual textures of the growing body, which is – like the aging body – so revealing in its surprises and unexpected associations of shapes and expressions. And isn’t it saddening – if not dangerous – that they have been subject to controversies that are so much outside the artist’s concern? Following that line of argument, we understand that Dine’s actual photographic subject is in fact vision itself and the mental workshop seen from the perspective of the older artist, in which growing old is an experience the artist digs into as into any other form of reality. Dine’s staging of visibility by degrees structures photographic space in a non-hierarchical perspective. It is, in fact, precisely by combining perspectives that he can bring together diverse visions (as he does, for instance, when he superimposes various captures on the same print, or when he flips the positive into the negative). It is certainly interesting that Dine has come to use photography in his late career as a relatively new experience but also, in a sense, as a synthesis of his own work and as an expression of a panoramic desire to encompass life, a desire that photographs can give the illusion of. Some of his work looks further into the paradox of

(In)Visibility

83

time passing and of the perception we have of it by using instead of visual images of aging, verbal images, as in “The Veronica” (13), (incidentally a title suggestive of photographic impression). When images of aging do appear, the question of aging is placed the margins of the composition in a way that does not suggest avoiding it but rather as a consequence of his preoccupation with capturing marginal thought, as in a more recent self-portrait in soft focus and decentered composition identified as “Untitled (Old)” (2001). And also, in a chromatically and emotionally galvanic series of three digital pigment prints, bearing the mysterious title “Keeperess”, which refers to aging by way of metonymy, showing a pair of relatively old legs hanging over a pair of old shoes placed in a pool of cadmium red. In the third image of the series, simply called “The Letter”, the legs have disappeared; the empty worn out shoes have now become a studio still life, a signature. In his previous work, Dine has used various tones of color, from somber to psychedelically vivid, in the Pop Art tradition. However, in his photogravures and in some of the digital prints, he has chosen black and white based on a rich play with light effects that actually enable him to shade off the contours of the images, so that he passes from chiaroscuro to very fine ranges of grays, and then to thick and charcoal-like blacks, as a mark of truthfulness of perception. “There is ... yes, there’s a lot of darkness in the photos”, comments Dine, “So what? There’s a lot of darkness in the unconscious” (1998: 10). In a series of sculptures and mix-media assemblages dating from the mid-1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Dine displays an apparently disconnected number of elements on platforms, shelves or tables. Cast in bronze and some of them painted in intense colors, others more somber, these pieces that seem to be disposed in space casually stage the fantasy of peering into a mental factory of images. Dine’s making use of assemblages prefigures his photographic editing and juxtapositions. Among these assemblages, “Feral Air” (1992) is particularly powerful, fascinating, unsettling. A series of objects – ranging from the domestic universe to remainders of art history, from the mineral to the vegetal – are displayed here in a seemingly chaotic way, reminiscent of a hardware store (a significant childhood memory often evoked by Dine). In the chromatic context of the muffled tones

84

Touching Surfaces

of this work (rusty browns, charcoal grays, grim whites), though placed in an eccentric position, a parrot dominates the view. It is painted in glaring red veering on the margins into bright yellow. Its vivid colors catch the eye of the viewer while its head leaning towards the right side engages the viewer’s gaze in a circular movement from the heavy matter lying on the ground to that of the tools and ropes placed on the table and the chairs, and then to wires and branches raised like thin arms in the air. As an isolated element in such a visual environment, the parrot actually participates to the paradoxical unity of the random-dominated composition, since it links its heavy material aspect with a more imaginary one. Like a red bulb suddenly turned on in the dark room, the parrot (that we remember from Dine’s previous work) throws momentary light on the workshop of the mind. The scene it illuminates is messy, full of surprises, of unexpected memories, of unbidden images: chipped, obliterated, yet abiding. Just like the unconscious. In it share lodging tools, dismembered objects, disjunctive mythologies: odds and ends with which one has to make do. The works I have discussed in the previous chapter belong to younger artists who use older models to explore old age in varied ways. In Dine’s case the camera work focuses on the artist’s own world, on its alphabet of objects and human presences transformed into visible analogs of time passing. Even when decentered by asymmetrical framing, as in his most recent work, the rephotographed photographs do not appear like disintegrating memories but rather like parts suggestive of a whole. As such, they are also reminiscent of the metonymic patterns of our lives sustained by objects and metaphors, by miniature or fragmentary histories of personal or cultural representations. As they loom in chiaroscuro, these shapes recall perceptually the immediacy of mental flashes. For with time, our sight might diminish, but we are drawn deeper, further back into the past. The various images brought together in these photographs seem to meet the viewer’s eye in remote corners of early life memory, where thought and vision are in the process of being structured, where the unconscious is a way of editing our selves, and clear liquid thought is what we see, unthinkingly (“Clear Liquid Talk” is the title of one of Dine’s photographic compositions). While philosophers of the mind wonder whether consciousness might bear resemblance to a series of

(In)Visibility

85

photographs, psychologists speculate about the baby’s perceiving its environment between rapid eye blinks by which reality is integrated into its consciousness very much like a series of photographic flashes that contribute to the early construction of the self. Intuitively and independently of models of the unconscious and of consciousness, Dine’s photographic works create moments of “aesthetic bliss” (Bollas 1987: 28-29), fugitive images of integrity, which are – in their sometimes grotesque somber atmosphere and their playful aspects – evocative of that exciting element of fear contained in fairy tales. The images of remote memories superimposed in the space of one photographic tableau do not belong then to the notion of the repressed in the Freudian sense. Instead, they are suggestive not so much of childhood traumas but rather of early childhood inarticulate bliss, or of what Bollas calls “psychic genera” (1992: 66-100). Subliminally, they function as connectors of different age-selves (a possibility ironically suggested in Dine’s “Me Dangling”, representing a Pinocchio toy placed upside down and superimposed on a self-portrait of the adult artist). In Dine’s photographs, memory is reactivated not through a narrative but via its gaps, not exactly within the frame of an image, but in its margins. The viewer’s attention is bidden by the unexpected associations in his photographic tableaux, and also – most importantly for my point here – by the suggestive way in which they bring inner life work into visual consciousness. Like the enlarged shadow in the background of some of Dine’s compositions, memory itself might be vague or diminishing in consistency with time, but the sudden surfacing of mental images into consciousness and into the structured vision of a photograph may contain – in privileged moments – the possibility of making us see clear liquid thought.

86

Touching Surfaces

13. Jim Dine, “The Veronica”, 1999. Digital pigment print, edition of three, 68.3/4 x 48.1/4 inches. JD77D. Courtesy of the artist.

3

The In-visible: Spectral Visions, Transformative Perceptions Argument: Photography and Perception Thierry Kuntzel; Janice Tanaka My face froze with the vast world of time in a smile That has never left me since my thirty-eighth year When I skated like an out-of-shape bear to my Chevrolet And spun my wheels on glass: that time when age was caught In a thaw in a ravelling room when I conceived of my finger Print as a shape of fire and of youth as a lifetime search For the blind. James Dickey 1

The question of the invisible is closely related, as I have tried to show, to a variety of photographic formalizations of the consciousness of subject construction over time, making of photography an instrument of exploration that has structured, since its invention, private and collective perceptions of identity. In Dine’s work, lost or hidden visual configurations come into visibility as metonymies of the uncanny coherence of the subject in the course of time. In this chapter, devoted to the photographic work of Duane Michals, I will consider 1 Dickey’s poem “False Youth: Two Seasons (Winter)” refers to a blind woman caressing the speaker’s face.

88

Touching Surfaces

photography as an instrument, a function, and a workshop of perceptions helping us reconsider the notion of invisibility alongside with that of reflexivity. In Michals’ approach of the invisible I read an exploration of the limits of representation – of change, movement, and disappearance – which he transcends by using techniques deviating from mimetic photographic practices, techniques whose effect highlights the dematerialization of images. Two works, which are significantly not photographs but video pieces making use of them, will be my guides in discussing the possibilities of speculative photographs to represent paradoxical perceptions related to the consciousness of time and identity. In an installation piece created in 1995 for the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, French video artist Thierry Kuntzel staged a disquieting aspect of our bond with photographic images as repositories of memory and witnesses of our selfhood, which is, like photographs themselves, simultaneously built up and eroded by time. Nostos III is the third work in a triptych devoted to the remembrance and forgetting of images as visual objects, but also as mental traces of one’s past selves. The only piece exposed in a large room, the installation is composed of three elements that enhance perceptually our mental hold of photographs. Two large format screens face each other at a considerable distance. On one of them a family photograph recorded on video is projected: the classical threequarter pose of a child – the artist himself – between his parents, in black-and-white slightly turned into sepia. The facing screen shows an adolescent photograph of the author. As we watch the former, the contours of the image are fading away at a pace perceived as extremely slow. An essential element of photographic impressions, light seems to be now, slowly, under the spectators’ gaze, eating up the image. To its extreme vanishing point. In the physical interval of this process – about ten minutes long, yet experienced as a much more extended space of time – the screen has become blank: a white surface invaded by light, now turned into a signifier of dis-remembering. The retinal shock produced by this vanishing image evokes the imperceptible nature of physical and psychic transformations for which photographs serve as landmarks. In its fading away, the photograph projected on the screen recalls the fleeting and yet persistent character of mental images as signifiers of both the frailty and the endurance of our physical and psychic selves. The

The In-visible

89

disintegration of the image has a powerful impact on the viewer. Yet, after a short pause, the image suddenly looms up on the screen. A cycle of moving into and out of visibility and consciousness seems to be now underway, one which is unlimited in time, since the installation is based on this rhythmic effacing and coming back into sight of the image. The effect of dissolution of the photograph is intensified by the material presence of three piles displayed on the ground, in the space between the two screens, in three large trays. Black, white, and blue pigments (charcoal dust, starch and cobalt powder), these are material metaphors of the light and shadows captured by the camera and of the sensitized paper photographs are printed on (the complete title of the installation is, in fact, “Nostos III, powder, gelatin”). This work engages the viewer in a meditation on the transience of material and mental images, on our changing perceptions of them, an aspect that intersects my exploration of visualizing temporality here in a striking way. The cyclical dissolution of the image displaces the focus from the common fear of seeing metamorphoses of the body to more disquieting anxieties related to the disappearance of images as signifiers of identity. Kuntzel’s staging of the articulation between photographs, memory, and temporality brings us back to the question of the invisible in quite a literal way. That a photograph can reveal the inner side of the visible to go “beyond visual consciousness”, as Meatyard put it, was my preoccupation in the previous chapter. Here, I would like to focus on photography’s potential to enlarge our perceptual and imaginative field by expanding the limits of the visible. At the core of the present chapter are the modalities whereby photography fixes that which is either leaving or escaping our field of perception in the present moment. I will explore in particular the photographic representation of processes of moving into or out of visibility, a zone of shifting contours, which I call, following Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion, the invisible. In a restricted sense, the invisible is the contrary of that which we can perceive, as in its dictionary definition: “that which cannot be seen by the eye, either by nature or because it is hidden”. However, in the dynamics of perception, the unseen is not the opposite but the very correlative of the visible, in the same way in which the photographic positive printed on paper is the material

90

Touching Surfaces

correlative of the negative recorded on film. In his unfinished work, Le Visible et l’invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty approached the subject of the unseen from his phenomenology of perception opening towards a phenomenology of the imaginary and the hidden (invisible life forms, communities, other human beings, cultures) (1964: 282). Referring to meaning as invisible (in the sense of its being placed at a vanishing point in contextual and connotative fields), Merleau-Ponty calls attention to the problematic separation between the seen and the unseen. Significantly for my point here, he does not consider the two categories as opposites, but rather as complementary elements of a process of meaning construction: Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not the opposite of the visible; the visible itself has a membrane of invisible, and the in-visible is the secret part of the visible [...] we can see it therein, yet all efforts to see it make it vanish. (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 269; tr. mine)

We infer from Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion that, in fact, like meaning itself, objects or figures can come into the field of the visible without however being at all times graspable. This implies that what appears as immediately visible can also act as a screen, not in the sense of something repressed, but literally, as a hindrance to sight or to the perception of more latent patterns of memories or cultural imprints.2 The disquieting effect in Kuntzel’s installation results from the slow dissolution of the image perceived as a memento of loss of memory and also of our own slow effacement from the world. Yet, in the progressive vanishing of this effigy-like family portrait, only its iconic dimension is effaced. There persists an after-image, a form of energy, which, though strictly dependent on it, is no longer articulated into a visual object (a photograph). As the screen turns blank, the effacing image is being stored in the viewer’s mental space. It has become a mental image. Within the dilated duration of perception, the viewer has traveled sensorially, in fact, not only in the future – 2 In this respect, consider a remark made by Brassaï in the preface to the catalogue of a series of cubist photographs he created between 1934 and 1935, and in which he made graphic interventions on the negative: “My aim was to reveal the latent figure existing in each image. The photograph was thus turned into raw material, the point of departure for mutations and transmutations which had nothing to do whatsoever with the initial image” (1967: n. pag. ; tr. mine; emphasis added).

The In-visible

91

towards the moment when the image will no longer be – but also in the past, in search of some relation to the image or to the self therein framed. When the family portrait re-emerges suddenly on the screen, it strikes us as identical and yet different from the photograph whose dissolution we have witnessed. In the process, the photograph appears as both a visual object and as the remembrance of a visual object: it has been turned into experience, into reruns of expression (the term that I have used for Dine’s transformative resort to a specific set of elements). Indeed, the transient and repetitive time structure of this work generates a new contact with the image with each rerun. The same image thus embraces different values of the present and it is also a reminder of persistency, of the fact that some transparent substance of images still survives even when they have fallen out of the optical field or into oblivion. Due to the cyclic recurrence of the photograph (which had been recorded with a video camera and then projected on the screen on the fading away mode), its perception is being transformed and it is, in turn, transformative.3 Significantly, this elaborate composition based on the affinities between memory-work and photography cannot be fixed photographically precisely because it is conceived as the representation of a process. It is, as many of Kuntzel’s works, an ephemeral fiction.4 One of Janice Tanaka’s video pieces, suggestively entitled Memories from the Department of Amnesia (1990), is based on a similar reflection on images as a factor of identity processing, on their paradoxical transience and persistence in the vacillating stock of memory. Part of a diptych,5 this work is a reconstitution of family history from gaps of individual and cultural memory. In this piece devoted to her mother, American video artist Tanaka blends actual 3 One might think here of a similar visually arresting moment in Federico Fellini’s movie Roma, where a film crew accompanies the team digging for the Rome subway. At a certain point, they fall upon a wall behind which they discover a Roman room with frescoes. As the air enters through a hole they are breaking in the wall, the painted images enclosed for centuries dissolve under their gaze. 4 Shortly before Kuntzel’s death, in April 2007, a bi-lingual (French and English) collection of his texts came out together with a DVR–ROM of his works, Title TK (2006). 5 Tanaka’s second video piece, Who’s Gonna Pay for These Donuts Anyway (1992) is devoted to her father and is more documentary oriented.

92

Touching Surfaces

photographs of her mother with reconstructions of mental images to explore the role of visual memory work in the process of mourning. Some of these sequences appear literally under the form of visual blanks which precede the surfacing of visual associations corresponding to forgotten events or to events beyond conscious memory (such as her own birth). As in the case of Kuntzel’s installation, the blank screen creates a powerful effect. Here too, the absence of image dilates, in fact, the psychological time of perception, since in actuality the lapse of time during which the screen remains blank is not so extremely long (a few seconds). Images function in both works as a time-measuring device, and also – by alternating visibility with invisibility – as metonymies of the spatialization of memory. Like Kuntzel, Tanaka explores the expressive power of the white screen (not a non-image but an alternative visual field). However, instead of operating on the disappearance of the image, she works, on the contrary, on the slow surfacing of mental images. As equivalents of blanks of memory, the vacant screen sequences are progressively shaped into such figures as fog or snow, which formalize a visual potential slowly transformed into an actual environment. In this piece, Tanaka displaces the focus from autobiographical narrative to an account – as accurate as it might perceptually be rendered – of the role of various types of images in memory-work and identity construction. However, it is important to note that this displacement of the personal originates precisely in her failing to reconstruct her family history in a linear way. This echoes other displacements in the history of her family of Japanese extraction, such as internment and relocation. The effaced images or the blank screens are powerful visualizations of “the silence which was the key of my own memories”, as she puts it in the voice off commentary, suggesting that forgetting might link us to much larger communities than memory itself. In his preparation notes for Nostos I, Thierry Kuntzel refers to the content of his work as to a void filled up with a potential activated by the dynamics of the installation: Almost nothing. Almost nothing in terms of representation, of narrative – of naming objects, actions. [...] Almost nothing. It was only that almost nothing that allowed me – and allowed the viewer – to access another

The In-visible

93

space: the one working under, or between the image. Another space: that is to say, simply, time (Kuntzel 1988: 149; tr. mine; emphasis added).

In Nostos III, the alternation between the slow disappearance of the image and its subsequent surfacing accommodates time with movement by suggesting the varied layers of temporality that exist in the memory of an image (the recording of the photograph on video tape being itself a way of processing visual memory). “The time that space takes to be shaped”, adds Kuntzel (1988: 149). And, it is significant to note that the spatialization of time in Nostos III is also sustained by his having the photograph migrate from one support to another: from paper to the video tape, then to its projection on the screen. By contrast with a film camera, which records space with more fidelity, the video camera renders time with more accuracy. Because of its capacity to record the temporal flux more minutely, the video camera defers the perception of sequences. It slightly segments the fluidity of movement. The two installations are suggestive of the possibilities to visualize the relation between movement and temporality in video works that use photographs to evoke the processing of mental images and their role in the fabric of the subject. But in what ways can still images be records of temporality as a process? How can one temporal condition coexist with another within the frame of a photograph? And how can reflections of temporality and movement in speculative photographs participate in the visualization of physical and psychic change? In his essay introducing the artists presented in the exhibition suggestively entitled “Vanishing Presence” (Walker Art Center, 1989), Adam D. Weinberg points to what artists coming from different traditions, such as the Americans Ralph Eugene Meatyard, William Klein, Duane Michals, the Canadian Michael Snow, or the Europeans Anna and Bernhard Blume, Dieter Appelt, or Thomas Keith, have in common: their use of “time-bending techniques to produce images that are seemingly caught between the past and the present and imply the future as well” (1989: 74; emphasis added). Weinberg employs the interesting term “evolutionary images” to characterize these varied ways of representing movement and of drawing the unseen into the visual field. Such images capture what Merleau-Ponty had called “the invisible membrane” (1964: 269) of imperceptible processes of change. Weinberg’s argument regarding the tension between the fixed and the fluid dimension of photographs

94

Touching Surfaces

suggestively intersects with my discussion of speculative photographs that represent aging as part of a continuum of transformative processes. The extension of visibility and of temporality through a variety of non-conventional photographic techniques plays an important role in these images which, as Weinberg points out, “do not describe parcels of time corralled in a frame and clearly denoting the past”. Instead, he insists: They are pictures suspended in the perpetual process of becoming and concerned with change itself. They urge us to consider the experience of time not as interchangeable, digital segments, but as a continuous, disturbing, overwhelming, and wondrous whole. (1989: 74; emphasis added)

Duane Michals is part of that family of artists who seem to work with but also mostly against conventional photographic images to extend our field of perception as well habits of relating to time aspects in photography. His aesthetics of change concerns discrete moments that pass unnoticed to the eye and consequently escape our field of consciousness. Michals’ is an aesthetics of the ephemeral that places the question of aging in the perspective of an enhanced awareness of the transitory. The following chapter is devoted to the photographic paradox of producing a fixed image of a flowing moment, that is, a passage, a transition. Something that we see and we don’t: a visual event which emerges into visual awareness as an interaction between different forms and levels of space and temporality shown on the flat surface of a photograph (as Michals does in his book of photographs and texts, The House I Once Called Home (2003), where he superimposes on old family pictures recent photographs he took of the house in which he grew up). How then does the photographer bring these different time levels into a coherent, plausible visual field? In what ways can such deviations from conventional photographic perceptions as the blur or the sequence represent perceptions of time? And how can the photographer show what we normally perceive through senses other than sight (or just within peripheral vision) with the accurate, relentless eye of the photographic camera? How can a visual fallacy such as the blur be turned into an optical argument?

The In-visible

95

1. Duane Michals The Fixation of Unstable Fields: Movement, Change, and Temporality the fixation moves from left to right as time goes on it becomes clockwork you will have your way and i will make do in the end we can double back and play the field i don’t want to deny you your own flesh and blood who am i but a figure of speech free standing in advance of a broken arm these things can happen when one gets ahead of themselves Garry Hill

A fixation that moves clockwise is a paradox which epitomizes Duane Michals’ artistic adventure in the fields of movement, change, and temporality. Since his early work, Michals went against the grain of mainstream American photography of clear and precise vision by exploring the capacity of the photographic medium to enrich our understanding of reality through visual fictions. His photographic work holds in balance fixation and change, and thereby places the instant within a larger time-frame in trying to deal with, as he puts it in his photo series Real Dreams, “one’s total experience, emotionally as well as visually” (1976: 4; emphasis added). And he does so mainly by using devices that run against the common characteristics of photography: double-, multiple-, and overexposures, or series of pictures associated along potential narratives. Instead of referring to a specific moment in time, these photographic fictions lay out the question of change and that of the subject’s evolving over time as a preoccupation with representing physical movement and subliminal perceptions and emotions associated with change. If, in the history of representations, photography is the accomplishment of a desire for a faithful fixation of moments and forms of life, it is only through change in the creation and perception of an image that it can record movement, as it is also only through change that we exist. That a device producing a fix image can record

96

Touching Surfaces

The In-visible

14. Duane Michals, “The True Identity of Man”, 1972. Four gelatin silver prints each paper, 8 x 10 inches. DMI.S.243. Copyright Duane Michals. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.

97

98

Touching Surfaces

movement is a paradox which I will explore in this chapter. One whose visual effects enhance our consciousness of the passage of time wittingly, lightly, instead of sentimentally. In Michals’ world, to move is to create a space of time in which the self crosses infinitely small areas, a passage perceived as a disturbance in outlines producing – somehow like overstated facial expressions in still movies – the suggestion of a visual noise, or of a visual echo.6 To move is also to touch, and to be in touch with one’s vulnerability in the face of change.7 The tactility of the ethereal presences in his photographs functions as a rhetorical argument for this ambiguity. For the visual impact Michals’ work has on the viewer originates precisely in his attempt to catch images of impalpable, imperceptible change. Rather than focusing on the results of change, he explores its large figural spectrum and creates corresponding visual metaphors. Instead of representing the rational and the emotional as separate areas, his photographs show how we think, unknowingly, with our bodies, echoing Merleau-Ponty’s belief that experiencings can have as much consistency and expressivity as forms of positivist or rational thinking. In revealing – or imaging – experiencings that are less, or not at all, graspable to the eye, Michals’ reflections on the multi-layered nature of reality are, visually, refractive. They run, that is to say, against common perceptions of what photography can do and, as a result, against how it relates to time patterns, to aging in particular. In order to render an awareness of “total experience” in a moment, for instance, Michals creates photographic sequences – moving pictures, as it were – assembled in a composition, or in a book of photographs often accompanied by texts. Many of these images combine various visual consistencies by bringing together figures in sharp and blurred focus. His technical and rhetoric use of what is conventionally considered as a photographic error supports his concern with incorporating negative experiences within our staying 6 An echo is a signifier of extension in space; inevitably one might think

here of the mythological association between Echo and Narcissus. 7 The vulnerability of the photographic image is linked to the frailty of the self, while at the same time Michals acknowledges the unavoidable need to go along with it: “It is important”, he states in his handwritten introduction to Real Dreams, “to stay vulnerable. To permit pain, to make mistakes, not to be intimidated by touching. Mistakes are very important, if we’re alert” (1976: 7).

The In-visible

99

alive: a process of taming contradictions which enables the individual to become, to grow through change. His serial compositions are comparable to brief fictional forms: a representational continuum within discontinuity. By disturbing the contours of images and by overlaying other forms of discourse on the photographs (short texts, and, in some cases, engravings), Michals diverts photography from its reflective dimension (even as the texts are often reflections on its nature and paradoxes). Considering the body of work Michals has produced within a span of more than forty years one is, indeed, struck by his increasingly working against the photographic medium to visualize a subtle spectrum of forms of change: transformations of the self, of his own vision, of ways of looking at the world. Michals works at a vulnerable junction point of several surfaces of visibility. His objective is half “turned inwards”, in Grundberg’s phrase (1989: 9), since his philosophy associates the notion of external appearance to appearances in the sense of extrasensory perceptions: imaginary fields emanating from the real. The body evolves in time through movement. Yet Michals does not look at the becoming of the body in terms of an accumulation of shapes. Nor does he look at the becoming of the self as an accumulation of mental images, as it was the case with other photographers whose works I have approached in the previous chapters. He does not see the body in motion as a precise addition of photographic sequences that document motor processes, as, for instance, in the nineteenth-century photographic analyses of movement done by the American photographer Eadweard Muybridge and in the chronophotographs of his contemporary, the French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey, or in those of the American painter Thomas Eakins. Michals regards the moving body as a corporeal structure fading away. Within one picture frame or within a sequence of images, a figure represented in sharp contours often appears together with a double which represents the moving self, the latter being shown as a body made of variable degrees of transparency instead of opaque corporeality, like a shadow either partially superimposed on its solid counterpart, or detaching itself from it. As manifestations of the tensions between the physical and the phantasmatic body, these photographic couples have complementary

100

Touching Surfaces

visual functions resulting in an effect of double consciousness: that of a solid figure and of its invisible counterparts, that of a stable identity and its shifting hypostases, or that of perception and its delusions. Jim Dine’s photographs relate to the unconscious, as we have seen, precisely by accumulating varied captures in the same composition, a strategy which enhances the consciousness of shapes related to mental images and processes of memory. Conversely, Michals dematerializes the physical body to express – and sublimate – anxieties related to change over time. Neither Dine nor Michals illustrate or document perceptions of older bodies. However, where Dine reflects on the self’s journey in time as a collection of past moments and objects, Michals addresses the diverse aspects of change as a series of volatile moments in the present. His visual question does not relate to what the body was, but to what it is and what it becomes as it moves in the instant. The body he explores the limits and potential of is situated neither totally in the realm of the physical nor exclusively in that of the psychic. Both metaphorically and, through its photographic deformations, quite literally, the changing body shows as a plastic body. Equivocal imagery, visual ambiguities and optic puns sustain the tension between the awareness of actual transformations and the simultaneous difficulty to grasp them even as they happen. Accordingly, his reflection on the becoming of the self, on how discrete moments relate to larger time streams intersects the technical aspect of the fixation of unstable fields of perception and optic energy. Michals’ photographic work destabilizes fix, fixed, or fixated images to highlight what in his novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to A Dance, Richard Powers calls “a shifting ambiguous place of possible meaning” (1985: 212) in a reality dominated by the instability of signs. The technical corollary of such an understanding of photography implies stabilizing the singular sample in a mass of factual and sensory experience. That sample will act as the signifier of a field of consciousness informed by imperceptible variations in the photographed figure which might suggest more considerable variations in perceptions of the self. The photographic fixation of unstable fields metaphorically opens up questions of subject position to the extent to which the plastic body moves, changes, and by extension, acts on its own symbolic position as well as on conventional subject representations. Without falling back on any

The In-visible

101

form of social constructionism, by treating the issue of movement in photographic terms, Michals’ images act on our habits of seeing, and, through their meditative aspect, on our habits of thinking.

2. Optical Thresholds Thresholds of change Michals is known for his use of the blur and of overexposure as technical means of converting the energy of the physical presence into optical illusions that can convey imperceptible transitions. Proceeding from the common observation that signs of change are perceived a posteriori, he displaces the focus from the fix image (the fix position of the figure in a photograph and, by extension, that of the subject in space and time) to a field of unstable signs perceptible beyond the limits of the eye. The photographed figure consequently appears in two temporal perspectives from which Michals considers perceptions of the self’s becoming: actual time and imaginative time. From the perspective of the former, change is ungraspable. As he suggests, visually and textually, in the photograph “Now Becoming Then” (15), the moment is only an illusion of a present – “a long ‘now’,” as he calls it – which is imperceptibly “radiating and expanding and changing and flowing to itself” (1971: n. pag.). In “Now Becoming Then”, Michals embodies this fluent time experience in a transparent silhouette of a man about to leave the present instant to become – within the very moment of the photographic capture – a form of time that has passed away, namely an image. Significantly, the figure is advancing towards a fireplace on which a mirror in a wooden frame was placed and then touches its own double going in the opposite direction. A white wall shows in the mirror, that is a nonimage, a mise-en-abîme of a sensitized photographic support ready to capture a unique and elusive moment that can only be revealed by way of discrete elements, in sequences taken at different time stations. For, as Michals puts it: “Change is invisible. It is linked to time and we can only perceive it in the past. We never recognize the exact moment, despite the fact that its signs are everywhere. But change cannot hide itself from photography” (1981: n. pag.; emphasis added).

102

Touching Surfaces

15. Duane Michals, “Now Becoming Then”, 1978. Gelatin silver print with hand applied text paper, 16 x 20 inches. DMI.104. Copyright Duane Michals. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.

The double figure represented in “Now Becoming Then” seems to be suspended in the inner, imaginative time of the optical illusions created by the blur and by the apposition of the two identical images. Instead of escaping the logic of temporality, the figure seems to move along with the vanishing present moment, an “event”, as Michals calls it, or a “construction, an invention of the mind”.

The In-visible

103

Looking at the present moment as a mental construction makes of the photographic image a privileged intersection of temporal planes. Michals disturbs the contours of shapes, ripples the surface of the photographic space, gives us to see less sharpness and more depth. His photographs are not remains of the past, or reliquaries of remote experiences. At a time when the discourse on photography was dominated by the testimonial value of photographs and by the melancholic attachment to past states retained on film, Michals draws from the possibilities of photography to enlarge our optical field an empiric theory of mental life in which various time planes exist synchronically. This is a way of looking at time in photography which, in his novel prompted by a photograph by August Sander, Richard Powers calls “synchroneity” (1985: 235; 257; 350). Rather than objects hackneyed by mechanical reproduction, as Benjamin’s devotees have too often regarded them, photographs can be looked at, Michals seems to suggest, as instruments for traveling in time, back and forth. They enclose past experience, but also what I would call anticipative or expectative memory, potentially contained within the image and, one should add, given his insistence on perception, possibly reactivated by each viewer, with each viewing, reaching across conventional temporal partitions. If Michals places his focus on the instability of signs of change by visualizing temporality through movement, in his book, Changements, published in France (1981), he addresses the issue of change and aging as temporal processes in a more direct way. The sequences of photographs included in this book as well as the accompanying texts (originating from an interview taken by his friend Hervé Guibert, in 1978) document age transitions of various kinds in an apparently anecdotic way. The first section of the book shows a series of photographs that Michals had taken of a friend’s first and then second child over a lapse of time of ten years: a choice of one shot for each year span. In the following sections, he combines photographs of himself (taken first by others, then by him) at different ages with those of friends and family, including two pictures of his grandparents on their deathbeds. From the remote moments of his past life shown in the first photographs in the book, up to this extreme vanishing point in the future, the images in Changements do not relate an actual life story, but, as the title suggests, a series of changes at various points in life,

104

Touching Surfaces

through images which account for physical presence and movement in parcels of time. Rather than structuring his book on narrative development, Michals seems to be concerned with what develops perceptually and mentally when images taken at different moments in time are brought together. He is “more interested”, as he puts it, “in documenting the facts of the invisible” (Diamondstein 1981: 119) than in documenting physical change. In Michals’ book on varied forms of change, the awareness of different age-selves that photographs convey addresses the family of visible facts only indirectly, namely as visibly plausible facts. From such a perspective, we can consider that Michals’ photographic fictions – like speculative photographs in general – do not reject the referential function of photography but, on the contrary, they enlarge its scope. For his self-portrait taken on his 47th birthday (the occasion on which he began the project for Changements), Michals adds the following notation in which he isolates the self from the young versus old binary to locate it in a transitional space of age consciousness: “I am not young, but I am not old yet” (1981: n. pag.; emphasis added). He thus places himself in an intermediary zone of age in time, one that brings along the awareness of its passage even as time is bracketed within the space of the image. In many photographs, the imperceptible passage of time is made visible in a rather anecdotic way as part of a continuum that extends the representation of the self beyond the present moment in a future projection. This uncanny other sense of time is explicitly visualized by the blur. The actual and the imaginative time dimensions are suggestively represented in two types of images Michals placed at the two poles of the pseudo-autobiographical narrative he constructed in the second part of Changements. At one pole, in the past, are the typical childhood family photographs of Michals taken by different people: they present remote images of the growing self. At the opposite pole, in the future, are the photographs of projections into old age and death: fictional representations of the self. In these sequences, actual time is embedded in the imaginative time dimension through short fictional episodes, or events, photographic happenings, as we might call them. Two of these photographic episodes, which Michals introduces as “two small sequences of my old age and my death”, openly upset the association of photography with the past. As

The In-visible

105

106

Touching Surfaces

The In-visible

107

16. Duane Michals, “My Old Age”, [1980] 1997. Five gelatin silver prints with hand applied text each paper, 5 x 7 inches. DMI.S.431. Copyright Duane Michals. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.

108

Touching Surfaces

projections into a potential future, the staged photographs locate referentiality in the mental domain. Section six, referred to as “My Old Age”, is composed of six sequences which show middle-aged Michals acting as an old man. In an almost empty room, he is moving, sequence by sequence, towards a chair placed by the window (16). A younger man accompanies him in this brief journey into the immediate future. Though not a blurred figure before the last image of the sequence (as the double of the self appears in other images), this younger presence suggests the shadow of a former, younger self that holds the older body. When he has eventually sat “the old man” in the chair, the young man effaces himself in the last sequence, fading away from the frame, like a dim silhouette in the old man’s memory. The last section of the book touches a limit of representability. Here Michals stages his own fictional death in four sequences.8 In a Pieta-like pose, a naked young man is placing the dead body impersonated by Michals on a plain board. In the following sequence, the young man is covering the body gently with white linen. The light coming from the window on the right is slowly getting dim. In the last sequence, the viewer only guesses the volume of the body under the now dark cloth.9 The childhood photographs as well as the fictional photographs of old age and death embody Michals’ philosophy of existence as ungraspable other than as a series of illusions, implying that at a certain level of perception we might exist only as images. In this respect, the childhood photographs suggest here a chasm in identity experienced when we look at images of ourselves that escape our memory. As a consequence of their being not outside but beyond the field of consciousness we can have of our own past, such photographs seem somehow separated from our adult identity (the photograph opening section 5, shows Michals one year old). 8 Michals’ photographs undoubtedly had a powerful effect on Hervé Guibert (who wrote on Michals and sometimes posed for him) and it is interesting to note how the uncanny preoccupation with photographic fictions translates into Guibert’s own work, particularly in the series which I have commented in the first chapter, where he stages the fictional death of his aunt, Suzanne (cf. Chapter 1). 9 Although Michals has transposed these sequences in a one-minute-long video piece, the paradox of having a fixed image of an immobile body is more intense in the photograph.

The In-visible

109

This fabricated, pseudo-life narrative in Changements ironically suggests an omniscient photographic narrator who could tell the complete visual story of his own life: from its beginning to its end … and further to its perpetuation under the form of an image. The very fact of visualizing one’s own mortality incorporates the fact of death into the facts of life as yet another form of change. “That’s all there is, change”, comments Michals dryly in his book Real Dreams (1976: 4). A sense of coherence, of duration spins out of the discrete image-units in Changements that build up an awareness of change. In the paradoxical continuum that develops from photograph to photograph, change is fleshed out by the awareness that each image contains the possibility of another. Cyclic growth (suggested, as we will see, in other sequences as well) is epitomized in the photograph that opens the book: a baby’s wrinkled face, which, like that of a fetus, is an emblem of life and death potential. This image heralds the last sequence in the book and also addresses the question of how far photography can go beyond the self’s consciousness?

Thresholds of movement Within the chronology of Michals’ work, the photograph of his fictionalized death is not situated in the beginning. I have however chosen to place it at the outset of my search into his creative process precisely because it helps me look at the plot line of his work in terms of the tensions between state and process. Moving away from a particular state runs against common perceptions of the photographic image. Technically, movement produces an effacement of the image, it renders it literally transparent. From the beginning of its history, this has been considered as a shortcoming of photography.10 Due to the lengthy exposure time required to capture an image, anything that moved was rendered invisible as a shape with well-defined outlines. Michals’ photographs of moving figures recall the ambiguous effect 10 Upon the official recognition of photography, patented under the name

of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in January 1839, La Gazette de France reported that “Nature in motion cannot reproduce herself, or at least can do so only with great difficulty, by the technique in question” (Newhall 1980: 17).

110

Touching Surfaces

produced by nineteenth-century photographs in which moving bodies appear as brush strokes even as we know that these are shapes wiped out not by the intervention of the human hand, but by the time that has passed over the duration of the capture. The effect is ambiguous. While these images can be visually captivating, owing to their ethereal character, their depth of field, and their enhanced tactile quality, the fading bodies show a physical presence extended and diluted in space and thereby suggest a sense of loss that resonates deeper, further into our consciousness of identity. We remember the progressive fading out of a portrait of the artist as a young boy in the work of Thierry Kuntzel; its unsettling effect and along with it the hypothesis that the loss of one’s own image might be a signifier of the self’s passing away. This anxiety is exorcised in Michals’ photographs narratively or through the comic effect produced by many of his sequences, and also visually, through the insistence on movement rather than on state. Movement is treated by Michals as a condition of permanent becoming and also as a way of looking at the self beyond the very limits of representation, as in the impossible photographic image of his own death: yet another form of change. Vanishing images, however, can be instead of reminders of the disappearing self, reparatory objects of mourning, as in Tanaka’s video piece, which inscribes transformed images of loss in the continuum of life. To engage the viewer into imaginative, projective mourning, Michals has to let the body go. And he does so not by abandoning it, but by extending the movement of the photographed figure in space, plastically and imaginatively. The physical body is sustained in this process by a series of optical illusions evoking private, imaginative rituals that may accompany the processing of loss in mental space. Detached from its material existence as it moves, the corporeal self re-emerges into visibility under the guise of a series of immaterial presences. Unlike testimonial photographs, which focus on the particular presence of a person, these photographs foreground the body of the image as a unit of experience, with its variety of textures and consistencies, with its visual weight turned into lightness by degrees. Reaching out for space, the moving self becomes part of a larger picture, it is absorbed by it.

The In-visible

111

In fact, at the outset of his creative photographic work 11 Michals had evacuated the human presence from the picture altogether, if we think of his 1965 project, Empty New York, inspired by the abandoned street scenes of the nineteenth-century French photographer Eugène Atget. From that initial project of urban setting, he then turned towards public and private interiors. First photographed as empty spaces, the interiors soon became the setting for uncanny happenings recorded in photographic sequences representative of the casual ways in which more or less dramatic turns in situation may occur. The interiors then slowly became signifiers of inner spaces. These early works (Michals was thirty-four when he undertook the New York project) show his concern with displacing the subject of photography from external appearance to the inner world, to “anxiety, childhood hurts, lust, nightmares” (Michals 1976: 10). This shift from the present to the past, or rather to psychic spaces in which past, present, and future interact will be a constant preoccupation in his work that sublimates the dark side of the self into fictions of the self, an operation which puts a doubt on the reality shown in a photograph to place it, against the medium, beyond the domain of the visible.12 Considering the various types of visual displacement in his photographs, or even some of the titles of his books – such as Real Dreams. Photo Series (1976), Sleep and Dream (1984) – the influence of Surrealism on Michals’ vision is significant as the series of photographs he took at René Magritte’s home in Brussels also suggests. Yet, rather than a free association of symbolic elements, the unconscious is for him, as it is for Dine, a form of energy, a domain made of light and darkness accompanying life, fuzzily. Although death is the subtext of many of his photographs, their temporal and spatial treatment suggests Michals’ concern with other aspects of immobility. One particular photograph in Changements, which precedes the two sequences explicitly related to old age and death, indicates that for the creative self mental lethargy and imaginative annihilation can be more menacing than physical 11 Michals started in commercial photography, which he subverts in his

own way, a significant detail for his attitude against visual and ideological clichés. 12 Significantly, in 1986 Michals took part in an exhibition entitled “Apparitions and Allusions: Photographs of the Unseen” at The San Diego State University Gallery of Art.

112

Touching Surfaces

demise.13 This photograph shows a double portrait: one figure lying on a board as an inanimate body, the other standing by it and contemplating the possibility of one’s ultimate state of immobility. In Michals’ world, not to move imaginatively is not to be alive. In many of his works Michals explores the passages of the body into various phantasmatic states (visualized as phantomatic) by showing figures which are, in Max Kozloff’s plastic description, “dissolved in light or enveloped into darkness, which allows them to slip away under external cover” (1989: 55). In order to visualize the juxtaposition of actual and imaginary experiencings as part of an enhanced sense of reality, Michals borrows from a history of photographic representations that, since the early days of photography, have attempted to bridge such dualities as matter and spirit, consciousness and the unconscious, life and death, presence and absence. I refer here in particular to the tradition of spirit photographs, which emerged in the United States in the 1860s and soon became extremely popular (in Europe as well). As Tom Gunning has pointed out, spirit photographs appeared in a context – similar to that of the turn of the twenty-first century – of increasing emphasis on visual evidence (1995: 42-71). However, whereas within the perceptible faith of the nineteenth century, spirit photography was perceived by many as evidence of an afterlife, for Michals it is an exploration of imaginary possibilities, a flight from the body which connects the self to forms of experience that go beyond corporeal limitations. What he has retained from this tradition – which adds a supplementary time dimension to his photographs – is the modern conception of the spirit as a correlative for the imagination, one which, in his work, is embedded in the reality of a photograph under the form of uncanny perceptions of the real. Still, as in the tradition of spirit photographs, ghost images can play in his work a particular function of mourning, namely the mourning of former configurations of the self. In this sense, these images relate to the past by giving visual shapes to the consciousness of what one has been (a consciousness sustained, to a large extent, by 13 The photograph in question actually follows a commentary on what he

calls “loops of comfort” which maintain the self in a state of lethargy thus representing a hindrance to experiment, that is, in Michals’ understanding, a hindrance to experience.

The In-visible

113

our common perception of photographs). However, given his melancholic approach tamed by humor in both images and texts, and his insistence on movement and change, on not being stuck in one position in time and space, for Michals the ghost figures seem to be predominantly projective. They figure the becoming of the self. And it is precisely in this respect that they refer to forms of anticipative or expectative memory. Yet, instead of physical evidence of one’s becoming over time, these photographic images tap on inner resources. Michals eludes the traces of time from the physical body so as to shift the focus (literally, through the double- or over-exposures) on the psychic body. He smoothes the contours of the figure to catch the gaze through visual surfaces and textures with which the viewers can identify, mentally or perceptually. The nebulous corporeal selves, taking off, so to say, from their material counterparts represent tropes for invisible changes. They are fleeting effigies of the survival of the self or of private and cultural icons that preserve it. Even sequences such as “My Old Age and Death”, or “Death Comes to the Old Lady” (1969) which openly refers to spirit photographs, do not insist on a state but on a performative aspect. They anticipate a series of events, physical and mental, that are part of an imaginary coherence of the consciousness of the self. Rather than intimations of another world, Michals’ modern versions of spirit photographs are spatial and temporal extensions of experience. These airy double or multiplied figures trigger off alternative optical fields, synoptic perceptions placed at the intersection between the material and the immaterial. Max Kozloff has interpreted Michals’ spectral photographs in terms of change and becoming “as a form of eventual extinction” (1989: 55). However, one could argue that Michals’ vision takes into account the transformations of the self as a whole, the spectral images playing in this respect a significant role in the formal growth of the image, an aspect that I will develop in relation to Francesca Woodman’s photographic work. The evanescent doubles in Michals’ photographs shed the shadow of a doubt not only on the common expectations that photography mirrors reality but also, most importantly from a cognitive perspective, on the very question of what type of information we include within our understanding of the domain of reality.

114

Touching Surfaces

The sequences entitled “The Spirit Leaves the Body” (1968), “The True Identity of Man” (1972), or the photographs published in his book The Journey of Spirit after Death (1971) dramatize Michals’ notion of change and motion as functions of thought and of emotional energy. “The Spirit Leaves the Body” is a sequence of seven photographs showing a double-exposed, airy figure detaching itself from the body of a naked man lying on a bed. From one sequence to another, the shadow sits up, stands, and then starts walking. The more it is foregrounded, the larger, the more aerial, and the more impalpable it becomes. The last of the seven sequences reduplicates the photograph which initiates the series – that of a flesh-and-blood, sharply outlined, solid figure – as if to suggest film stills from a journey of a sleep-walking double who eventually returns to his own body. Yet, as in Kuntzel’s Nostos III, from the perspective of the viewer’s experience, the initial photograph re-presented in the seventh sequence can no longer be perceived as identical to the first, since the recurring photograph has itself become an ocular spectrum of the former image. Time has passed between the contemplation of the first and the last image. Time passes through the image under the form of the specter. “The True Identity of Man” (14) humorously displays matter-and-spirit transformations by degrees in a different way. Four hypostases of a naked young man are shown in this series, each photograph being accompanied by an ironic caption. The figure in sharp contours in the first sequence, “Man as animal”, dissolves progressively in the subsequent sequences into three shadowy presences figuring a series of transitions: “Man as spirit”, “Man as energy”, “Man as God”. In the latter, the entire body is dressed up in light. There is no “true identity” other than that of a becoming self, a series of “sequential self states” in Christopher Bollas’s phrase (1992: 29–30). The very irony in the title undermines essentialist understandings of subject construction. Similarly, in his book The Journey of the Spirit after Death, Michals presents the spirit as an incarnation of various phantasmatic transitory states in keeping with his philosophy of change. Michals’ interest in eastern philosophy (like that of video artist, Bill Viola, for instance) places him outside current critical views that oppose technology to spirituality. However, unlike Viola’s more lyrical and metaphysical vision, Michals’ photographs express and exorcise

The In-visible

115

anxieties related to physical change and death by means of humor and derision. The narrative of an accident presented in the sequences of The Journey of the Spirit after Death is, for instance, wittingly transferred from the domain of the actual into the domain of the immaterial. A man stumbles and slides down a steep flight of stairs as if he were sliding along a dark tunnel. Progressively, the sharp contours of the figure are also dissolved into blurred or superimposed images. The subsequent sections visualize – in a mode reminiscent of fairy tales but also of comic strips – the transformation of the body into a source of energy projected into cosmic time, then its reincarnation and its visitations of various sites from its previous life. The journey is, in fact, circular. The spirit eventually returns to its origins, a return represented by the photograph of a baby, which is the last image in the book. Rather than expressing an attachment to spiritualism, these hypostases of the figure are witty embodiments of perceptions and of varied forms of consciousness. Michals’ work engages the reader in a meditation on transience, permanence, and appearance that sustains his view of subject identity as one which unfolds over time and in relation to a variety of mental constructions. It is important to underline this particular aspect of his creative work, since his interest in visualizing mental constructs corresponds to a subversion of social constructions that are likely to undermine the individual’s identity. It is probably why, current studies of visual culture focusing mostly on the social and historical constructions have paid little attention to the work of Duane Michals, who addresses directly the limitations of cultural critique as well as the recent deviations in the market of photography in his book Foto Follies (2007).

Thresholds of the visible In Michals’ spectral photographs, his technical allies are precisely the accidents of photographic technique that allow him to alter, namely to extend time, by having the figures step out of the visual field, as Benjamin put it, and thus capturing something of the fluid perception of time. These accidents (the blur, overexposure or superimposure) make it possible for Michals to show the

116

Touching Surfaces

photographed figure as a figure attempting to escape its iconic status. His rhetorical allies in this journey into the afterlife of the self as image are irony and the repetition of the ghost trick itself. By the mere fact of its recurrence from one piece to another, the dissolving figure no longer produces – as was the case with Kuntzel’s installation – an anxiety for the loss of the image. Instead, it can be looked upon as a remedy against it, since the dematerialization of the figure is part of its evolving in time. The repetition of the dissolving figure device fixes – be it only vaguely – a series of transitory impressions which are thus incorporated into duration, and, symbolically, into a process of becoming. For viewers familiarized with Michals’ photographs, the recognition of the ghost trick structures the perceptual field into a game-like space in which the deviation from form – the blurring of contours, the overlapping planes – opens up the speculative potential field of the image. It also produces, owing to its recurrence, a comic effect. In contrast with other photographers whose work I have approached in the first chapter, rather than incorporating signs of aging into an aesthetics, Michals focuses on visualizing smaller scale changes. He neither eludes physical transformations, nor does he take on an aesthetics derived from the physical changes in the texture of the body as metaphors of inner transformations. Instead, he explores the release of the body from the fixation within a frame of time, unbinding, as it were, from the laws of gravity. Max Kozloff has suggestively described the link between time and the movement of the body in Michals’ photographs as a kind of progressive extinction: “Each time action is taken a bodily zone is visibly aerated, and since the figures were originally discrete, their stock of substance is exhaustible. To move, in Michals’ world, is to be depleted (1989: 55; emphasis added)”. Yet one could argue that there are, in fact, two visual fields in Michals’ photographs that interact like communicating vessels of perception: the field of what we see, and the field of what only the camera can see. The full bodily area (the one with sharp contours) seems to be vampirized by its transparent counterpart (with blurred contours), one that overwhelms the gaze of the viewer with the surprise of change. As a result of the representation of motion in the physical space of the photograph, the physical body dissolves from its present state to reach an indistinct future. For its memory to persist as

The In-visible

117

an after-image the physical body has to be visualized as a series of unstable fields of optic energy. “What I cannot see is infinitely more important that what I can see”, writes Michals in Real Dreams (1976: 4). However, his immaterial, dim, blurred figures appear, photographically, as extensions of matter rather than as signs of absence. In the history of the medium, the blur has made its way slowly into the photographic vocabulary, from Julia Margaret Cameron’s soft focus portraits, considered as a drawback according to the late nineteenth-century aesthetic expectations of photographs, to an acceptable use in the experimentations of the twentieth-century avant-gardes, to become then quite a common practice among photographers of diverse orientations in the 1970s and the 1980s. The blur is, as photography critic Jean-Claude Lemagny has remarked in his article “Le Retour du flou” (The Return of the Blur), not the mark of an absence, but “the paradoxical sign of matter regained” (1985: 21). By justly considering it within a history of pictorial and photographic representations, Lemagny elaborates on the paradoxical materiality of the blur: In photography, the blur leaves behind a permanent shape, which can be examined at leisure. The blur has a body, a texture, a certain extent, and a depth, and even (photographically, it is indeed very possible) a sharpness. (1985: 21; tr. mine; emphasis added).

If, as Lemagny holds, “in photography the blur, which in reality is an elision of matter, becomes objective and present matter” (emphasis added), the fact that the blurred images rely on the extension of the exposure time allows the photographer to record movement and also, both technically and symbolically, to act on time. By using what Kozloff has called “time-bending techniques” (1989: 74), Michals shifts, in fact, the focus of his photographs from the actual changes of the body to the larger problem of temporality and its visualization in photography. Time is thus incorporated in the physical, photographically representable body as a substance that passes through it, leaving behind unstable configurations of full shapes that alternate with empty shapes. In them, one sees surfaces of time made of infinitely small particles which add up in volume like pyramids of sand. On a small scale, they mirror a condensation of varied forms of temporality: physical, historical, and metaphysical.

118

Touching Surfaces

Egypt as a symbol of such condensation of time levels was actually the object of a series of photographs Michals took in 1978, published in France with accompanying texts in the volume Merveilles d’Egypte (1978). “Like Egypt, we as well are time”, writes Michals in this book in which he associates images of the Egyptian monuments with snapshots showing inhabitants of the land that he met on his journey. The microscopic dimension of instant encounters and snapshots is placed on the backdrop of the monumental time signified by the pyramids, themselves a memento of mortality (and of immortality as well). Although Merveilles d’Egypte is not a book devoted to change, the photographs are all about permanence and transience, a couple epitomized in Michals’ text accompanying the photographs, “The Sand Man”, which strikes the reader as a metaphor reminiscent of Biblical dust, and also of Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Sand (1975). Like Borges, whose work had an important impact on him, Michals believes that no matter how precarious images might be, their imaginative use is an important function of survival. He also shares with Borges the belief that fictional patterns can reveal historical patterns. It is why questions related to the persistence of our private and cultural memory through images in image-dominated cultures underlie his preoccupation with the limits of visual representation at a distance from speculations on the death of photography or on the crisis of the visual.

3. Of Pictures & Words: Flashes of Consciousness The apparitions are manifest, their bodies weigh less than light lasting as long as this phrase lasts. Octavio Paz (tr. Elizabeth Bishop)

In addition to the nominal sense of blur, that of “dimness” or “confusing effect”, the verb to blur means literally to smear with ink, to sully, to disfigure, to efface. American photographers such as Ed Ruscha in the 1960s, or Robert Frank in the 1970s, have associated words and photographic images – words that frame the image or,

The In-visible

119

often, words written on the image – to reveal, perhaps, more than photography can show. We have seen that in Dine’s late photographic work, lines are placed on the background of photographs (frequently written with chalk on a black board, and partly effaced, resulting in a visual effect close to that of the blur, while most of his photographs are sharp). It was in his book The Journey of the Spirit after Death, published in 1971, that Michals first introduced captions to accompany his images. However, in Michals’ work words do not actually seem to reveal much more than images do. Within the logic of his approach, the text – rather transparent, reflective, explanatory – appears more like an echo of the image, a kind of verbal specter. The text does not represent a closure of meaning, but rather – like the photographic image itself – a search for more open formal configurations. Like the image, it epitomizes what escapes rational understanding in a simple gloss or a brief story whose intentional naiveté mocks rationalization. The texts up-end the traditional role that captions play: that of directing the viewer’s attention toward a specific message conveyed by the photograph (speculative photographs resist by definition the notion of message, limited to advertisement or propaganda photographs). Yet, words, phrases, or sentences accompanying photographs, may bring into consciousness flashes of thought, doubts, or reflections on their making. In mixing words and pictures, Michals highlights what might be the simultaneous emergence of thoughts and mental images into consciousness. It was initially Michals’ distrust in the capacity of photography to mirror reality that led him to use words in association with photographs. Captions or brief texts accompany many of his photographs often collected in photography books. Some of these notes suggest the difficulty to capture and fix images photographically, thus reinforcing his vision dominated by appearances, that is by the instability of signs. Given their reflective character, the texts also seem to be a way of extending the possibilities of representation, of relating to photographic images discoursively. If the photographic blur can be associated with poetic ambiguity and the double exposures with certain forms of narrative juxtaposition, in the texts adjoined to, superimposed on, or completely replacing the photograph, Michals’ expression is quite direct, explicit (unlike Dine’s, which is mostly elliptic, and, usually with no reference to the

120

Touching Surfaces

photograph, appearing mostly as yet another visual element). Some of Michals’ texts read indeed like inner monologues, contemplative complements of the photographic act understood as a momentary, spontaneous gesture. In “A Failed Attempt to Photograph Reality” (1975), for instance, he transgresses another threshold of visual perception by abandoning the image altogether to substitute it with a verbal reflection on the nature of reality. In this photographed text, he denies photography’s capacity to retain any essence of reality, since there is none for him if not in appearances. However, in this piece Michals does not altogether abandon photography, since what the spectator contemplates is, in fact, a silver gelatin print of the photographed handwritten text, signed and indicating the number of prints. The lack of image appears here as a sudden access to consciousness: a realization of what the photographer can do, or a brief argumentative development of a mental snapshot: How foolish of me to have believed that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearances of trees and automobiles and people with reality itself and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it; and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

In rejecting photography as a replicative device, Michals has created a visual universe in which actual perceptions together with relics of dreams and phantasms of the moving body play against the conventions of rationality. “To photograph nothing”, means to him to photograph “one’s total experience” in an instant, or, as he does in the sequences, in an accumulation of instants. It means working on the possibilities of the camera to create a consciousness of infinitely small displacements and transformations, which the human optical apparatus cannot perceive. Michals’ attitude shows a disbelief in the aesthetics governing the photography of the 1970s and the 1980s, with its emphasis on exploring the real rather than on the imagination, a reason why he has been dissociated from the tradition of American photography. His affinities go rather with a subsidiary – yet no less noble – American tradition of speculative photographers of the midtwentieth century, such as Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Clarence John Laughlin, or Thomas Merton, who were looking for alternative

The In-visible

121

photographic forms to document landscapes of the mind rather than social scenes. Theirs are visual meditations on the dynamics of natural forms, on how the camera may capture larger patterns of time and configurations of natural forms (as, for instance, in Laughlin’s “Massive Dance”, or “The Tree as Visual Movement”, 1953). Significantly, Michals’ work – in which revolt against conventions of various natures is sublimated in aesthetic transformations – emerged in a context of important shifts in the post-World War II American society. Michals belongs to a generation for which youth became an important locus of social, political, and cultural change and, in spite of his entire work being dominated by his reflection on temporality and becoming, he has chosen to stay young in his vision and, as he puts it, to be surprised – in his mid-seventies – every single day, every single moment, by what it is to be alive (2006).

From projections into the immediate or more far-reaching future, either by means of dissolving the figure or by placing it in sequences to suggest movement, in the late 1980s and 1990s, Michals moved towards a certain form of intentional and ironic regression. In a series of picture books, in playful words and images, the older artist addresses children, or the remote child-self in adults. His 1989 show “Slow Upside Down Inside Out and Backwards” (a title otherwise indicative of motion in words!) is presented as “Fairy Tunes for Children”, and composed of even more hybrid material than his previous work. The book that followed, Upside Down Inside Out or Downside Up Outside In and Forwards (1993) develops the playful approach of scales and ages. In this book, Michals superimposed on the photographic images photographed texts reminiscent of Edward Lear’s limericks together with engravings typical of Victorian children books. Here, photography represents only a part of the work, the same way in which it is only a part of our lives. Significantly, as he advances into his life journey, his own work expresses – lightly – the vulnerability of aging, as for instance in Sleep and Dream where the ingenuous form of nursery rhymes captures an affective charge in words, discretely yet with the immediacy that photographs can convey. One of these points to old age wisdom touchingly and at the same time mocking sentimentality:

122

Touching Surfaces Some day, someone may Touch you on the shoulder with affection a timid indiscretion And you may flee Flustered and frightened by what you want Be brave and touch and hold For you may need these memories When you are old. (1984: n. pag.)

Haunted by the ghosts of time from the early period of his creative work, Michals seems to retreat progressively from photography, or at least, from a mainstream understanding of it. Interestingly, while Dine has resorted to photography later in his life, Michals has taken distance from it quite early in his work, but even more so with time. Like Nicholas Nixon in the series of photographs he had been taking of the Brown sisters year after year since 1975, Michals has tried to cope with physical change photographically (as in Changements, for instance, or later, in Eros and Thanatos, 1992). And yet, there is a resistance in Michals’ work to reveal the textures of the older body. His self-portrait as an old man evoked earlier is not a close-up but only a silhouette bent by time. At the end of a video piece he made on his own work, he is applying dark paint over his photographic portrait, painting it out of the screen, as it were. Unlike Nixon’s other project, in which he photographed old people in hospitals and asylums (1988), or AIDS patients (1991), and unlike John Coplans’ photographs of his own aging body (1987; 2003), Michals prefers to maintain reserve, discretion over the realities of the changing body. He can address them with humor, as in a recent sequence titled “Who is Sidney Sherman” (2003), in which, wearing the mask and wig of an older woman (as Cindy Sherman does in her photographs), he mockingly addresses the hypervisualization of aging, and, in the captions, the fetishization of photography and of academic discourse. Or, for instance, in his book Questions Without Answers (2003), in which the question of aging is – like that of consciousness – part of a longer list of unanswerables: “what is beauty/the universe/magic/trust, happiness, pleasure, consciousness, the mystery of the sphinx, dreams, memory, youth and old age, time, humor, grief, desire, love, music, god, life, death, nothing, who am I” (n. pag.). The middle section of the book is significantly entitled “the seven ages of man”, borrowing from Shakespeare’s legendary soliloquy, and it

The In-visible

123

catalogues the seven states in words and images with the same oscillation between affect and irony. Alongside this ironic approach of aging, the lyric tendency is increasingly present in his more recent work. Like Robert Mapplethorpe’s late work, or Hervé Guibert’s idealized photographs of young friends, rather than documenting the frailties of the aging self, Michals condenses a maze of conflicting feelings in fictional images or in photographs of idealized beauty (as, for instance, in Eros and Thanatos, 1992). With bold modesty, he catches the viewer’s gaze and also protects it to suggest that the vanishing physical body needs an aesthetic shape to abide by. For Michals to protect emotion and privacy, the shutter seems to close slowly, silently.

4

Photographic Aesthetics and the Fabric of the Subject Argument: the Inner Statue Jacqueline Hayden The photographers I have chosen to discuss in this book displace the focus from the physical body (which has been the center of attention for the past decades in the critique of visual culture) to the psychic body, whose photographic representations deviate from technical conventions and habitual perceptions of photography (of aging as well). Releasing the photographed subjects from detailed identity markers or abstracting them from references to the quotidian liberates space in the photographic representation for other dimensions of the real. Hence, the camera is drawn to record unstable perceptions of change, and also of conflict between images of the physical body and internalized corporeal images, or between realities and memories of the body. It is therefore important to note that optical distortions and deviations from conventional representations and perceptions of photography are not exclusive signifiers of interiority. They are also markers for contacts and passages between external and internal spaces. Like the figures represented in these works, the body of the photograph itself is plastic in its pictorial treatment but also – and, most significantly so – in its capacity to transform routines of seeing. Rather than an instrument more or less adapted to the necessities of life, the body is seen in terms that are close to what in his book, Le Corps. Essai sur l’intériorité, philosopher Marc Richir refers to as “an inner statue”. Considering the Western philosophical history of the body, his phenomenological perspective (in the tradition of Husserl

126

Touching Surfaces

and Merleau-Ponty) transgresses the classical dualism between body and soul by considering inner life (sensations, affects, emotions, thoughts) as an excess of the physical body. Richir’s suggestion, which supports my argument on the figural dimensions of the body in speculative photographs, is to look at the physical body from the inside, as it were, that is from the angle of what he calls “the inner statue”, one which he describes, phenomenologically, rather than immobile, “infinitely labile and moving, ephemeral and changing in its manifestations” (1993: 11). From this paradoxical perspective situated at a threshold between movement and immobility, between fix and fluid identity markers, between perception and figuration, we find in the art works considered here a different understanding of our consciousness of aging to the extent to which, by unsettling photographic conventions or unmediated mimetic expectations, the artists create visual equivalents of subtle transformations that participate in the elaboration of interiority. Passages, intersections, or reciprocations between physical and psychic body schemes in these photographs are therefore not formulated in terms of referential bodies, but in terms of corporeal figures, in the sense of tropes (the word figure, I am reminded, derives from the Latin figura, meaning “form”, and was first used in the sense of external shape mainly with reference to the body). Such stylization – which has by no means essentialist undertones – extends the field of interpretation of the image. The reconfigured corpo-realities evoke imagined configurations, mental spaces in which the subject can take momentary refuge from determinations of various natures – social, historical, and cultural –, then adapt them to new situations to enter in resonance with larger communities of thought and sensibility. Representations of the figure as a mediator between the physical and the psychic body therefore engage the question of difference in a direction cultural studies might take in the future. We can think of this area as one of complementary relations and exchanges between firm group identity markers, on the one hand, and, on the other, shared patterns of thought or experience among all the categories that aging brings together. The various forms of indeterminacy created by the liberation of the body from the referential dimension – forms in which one reads open cognitive spaces – leave room for the viewers to bring in their own experience, their own perceptual spaces, and also their own

Photographic Aesthetics

127

mental representations of age consciousness. Relating to other imagined configurations, to other forms of consciousness, being in touch with images that call for the imagination as a factor of processing ordinary experience participates indeed in the elaboration of alternative (as opposed to informative) forms of cognition and may create such new shared patterns. Though by far a new idea in art history, the critique of visual culture has however very much bracketed this aspect, as much as the question of the aesthetic. And yet, if the historical and social grounding is indispensable in the study of visual culture, how can the construction of the subject be separated from the individual’s elaboration of interiority, or from the aesthetic distillations that are part of this process? As we see in all aesthetic idioms of the works discussed here, the issue of subject growth is addressed metaphorically, an approach which, in fact, extends the scope of questions concerning the social and cultural body that we find in testimonial images of aging, since by eluding the referential they speak to larger audiences, across differences of various natures. In her series Ancient Statuary (1997-1998), Jacqueline Hayden addresses some of these questions precisely from the vantage point of the aesthetic. Here, Hayden brings together actual photographs of elderly subjects (coming from her Figure Models series discussed in Chapter 1) with pictures she took of Roman and Greek statues in Rome, by grafting fragments of the former into the latter (1; 17; 18). This perfectly computerized surgery enlivens the ancient art figures that have been amputated by time with the imperfections of live models. An ironic inversion is at work in this series: the living grows into a prosthesis of the artistic while the remain(der)s of Ancient art are given new life in a photographic form that recalls nineteenth-century photographic travel diaries (the digital composites are presented as small format platinum/palladium prints). The aesthetic transformation seems to drape the body, protecting its vulnerability and veiling its nudity even while it exposes it. “When conceiving Ancient Statuary Series”, declares Hayden, “I was intent in subverting the association of the aged body with decay and the grotesque. […] Re-presenting the statuary fragment/torso blended with an aging mortal being, my work questions the terms that define culture and knowledge” (1999: n. pag.; emphasis added).

128

Touching Surfaces

17. Jacqueline Hayden, Ancient Statuary Series, “IV Torso of Boy”, 1997. Platinum/palladium print, 7 x 4.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Photographic Aesthetics

129

18. Jacqueline Hayden, Ancient Statuary Series, “V Aphrodite, Hellenistic”, 1998. Platinum/palladium print, 8.5 x 6 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

130

Touching Surfaces

In this series, Hayden creates a new aesthetic idiom drawing from the conjunction of the aesthetics of ancient statuary with that of nineteenth-century photographs used to represent such works. Layers of time are thus brought together, but also layers of perception, since our knowledge of ancient statues has been based on fragmented, color-bare representations, which rarely our imagination places in their complete, colored, and contextual situation. If the much evoked postmodern proposition that the simulacrum overruns the real has been used in relation to contemporary photography perhaps more than to any other art form, the paradoxical displacements that we find in Hayden’s series suggest, however, that the reverse can also be true. Fictions that inform the real are a form of the real. Hayden’s photographs, which help me articulate the argument of this chapter, hold two significant suggestions: one concerning the aesthetic, the other, the construction of the subject. The conjunction of two aesthetic modes in this series creates a new physical body, one that challenges both stereotypes of perception (of ancient statuary) and of representation (of elderly bodies). Yet, as in Dine’s photographs discussed in the second chapter, in Hayden’s moving statues there is no suture. Two representations, coming from different cultural moments in this case, are blended. By bringing together in one composition images coming from different individual and collective zones of memory, the new work recategorizes forms of consciousness or perceptions related to the past. In them, temporality shows as shape. A shape turned into a figure, in the sense of trope, by virtue of its relating to a variety of time moments as opposed to an indicial reference. Hayden’s series appears to us as an archeology of the persistence and fragility of the body in time, an archeology of its perceptions as well. “The platinum prints”, she comments, “through their scale and materials, lend an intimacy and timelessness to the interpretation” (1999: n. pag.). Significantly for my point here, Hayden relates intimacy (a question of subjectivity) to timelessness (a question of persistence in time, which itself, as we see in the statuary, is subject to time, hence, like aging, persistence falls into the category of process rather than state). This association reinforces the ironic reversal of the relationship between art forms and life forms: while the intimacy of the elderly nude is made durable in its association with the ancient statues, frozen perceptions of broken (or, in Hayden’s terms, “amputated”) statues are enlivened by grafts coming from

Photographic Aesthetics

131

photographs of actual models. Paradoxically, the exploration of subjectivity in larger temporal and cultural patterns calls for an abstraction from time (and, implicitly, from other referential elements). Although in the on-line version the photographs are accompanied by placard buttons that give specific indications for each historical or mythological figure and the period each statue belongs to, these references only intensify the mimetic illusion. Hayden’s “operations” are passed under silence in these captions. The pact between the living model and the statue is thus reinforced, if it were not for a more fluid wrinkle here, or a fold of skin there. And when the graft has reached consciousness of form (more subtle in some photographs, more visible in others), an echo of the real life models comes to us through time, and with it, a projection of what we may become over time. Hayden’s association of fragments from her previous series (actual elderly art models) with already formalized referents (the statues) relies precisely on archetypal echo. It looks at forms of art as forms of life, and intimates, without idealization, a potential reverse. The inner statue is given visible shape. The body in question in the photographs I approach here questions the dominance of the physical even as it counts on it as a carrier of figurative propositions that redefine our understanding of the corporeal.1 Deviating devices redefine in turn notions of photographic aesthetics (along with the category of beauty) by rooting it in subject experience and in personal ways of processing determinations, instead of relating it to cultural convention. For the photographs to foreground temporary configurations or arrangements between external and internal realities, the authors rely on a renunciation to “the bodily ego”, a term I am using here as a signifier for non-referential modes of photographic representation (or rather, not directly referential) that capture infinite variations of images of the 1 A recent exhibit from the collection of la Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Le Corps aujourd’hui, histoire d’une métamorphose (The Body Today: A History of Its Metamorphosis), was explicitly based on a transformative understanding of corporeal realities in contemporary photography. Significantly, the exhibit brought together testimonial and speculative photographs, and was structured in three sections entitled: “Transparence”, “Transformance”, and “Transmutation” (Lille, Hospice Comtesse, May 2004).

132

Touching Surfaces

self in one frame.2 As a result of the abandonment of conventional indications of identity, the corporeal becomes a metonymic reference of experiencings turned into skin textures, or of emotional configurations that relate to body zones and shapes. The corporeal involvement of the viewer is equally solicited in quite a literal sense in the case of mix-media installations that include photographs. In many of these, for instance, the circulation of the viewer within the space of the installation, or the physical and perceptual accommodation of distance in front of the photograph, participates in the construction of meaning. As James Lingwood has shown in his essay “Different Times”, the implication of the viewer as well as the layering of times is not the exclusive prerogative of photographs that create fictional images. In contemporary photographs which explore the real world, objects, people we find the same “instantaneity of the image […] superseded by the enduring experience of the art work”, an aspect which affects perception literally and metaphorically. They “give to the viewer, and ask back, a longer time” (1994: 20; emphasis added). In speculative photography, however, those parameters are considerably enhanced. Restructuring perceptions or ways of understanding reality requires distanciation as a necessary step in enlarging the perspective. Some photographers use art models or art vestiges (Jacqueline Hayden), others use actors or performers to pose in actual or reconstructed settings (Jeff Wall), or else, ordinary people who pose as models (Geneviève Cadieux, Joyce Tenneson), and yet others are their own model and performer (Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman). The poses captured by these photographers recall either classical figures in the history of painting or statuary (Hayden, Tenneson), or more or less known images from the repertory of photographic art forms (Woodman). Other artists stage narratives (Duane Michals), or reshuffle images from a mental kaleidoscope (Jim Dine). Even when the body is mostly absent or present only metonymically (as in Dine’s photographs, or in those of Cadieux), the emphasis of these works is still on its metaphoric potential. From figurative the body becomes figural, in the process shifting the focus 2 Borrowed from Freud (The Ego and the Id), the term is used by Richard

Wollheim in his essay “The Bodily Ego”, in which he discusses the body-mind question and the corporeality of representation. Wollheim reconsiders Freud’s striking phrase “the bodily ego” to insist that a mental act is not only equated with a body state, but – essential for my point here – with a process (Wollheim 1993: 64-78).

Photographic Aesthetics

133

from the indexical value of photography to its metaphoric dimensions (and not to the symbolic ones, which would involve relating to a unique term of reference). Accordingly, the human figure in the photograph ceases to be the indexical signifier of a specific person, of a fixed identity, or state in a specific moment in time, to become an impersonation, an embodiment of variable patterns that foreground external and internal realities and suggest a larger spectrum of relations.3 These photographers who use actors, models, settings, or sui generis narratives, rely on a manifest performative character, one that embodies the lability of the inner statue in varied degrees, without however following the sense given to the body as language in the performance art practices of the 1970s. The performing character of these photographs consists in exposing the body as a zone of resonance and articulation of wide-ranging forms of experience, subtle degrees of consciousness formalized in constellations of shapes and textures that only borrow naturalistic shapes. In addition to aesthetic parameters (or to addressing the question of the aesthetic in specific ways, as I will try to show in the work of Tenneson, and then in that of Woodman), the performative character in such photographic works has an equally important pragmatic consequence since it involves the subject’s active participation in the construction and perception of the image. I refer here in particular to a dimension which implies neither acting as old (i.e. adopting a convention), nor acting as young (i.e. effacing the markers of old age), but rather acting on perceptions, changing habits of seeing, and hopefully, subtly, in the process, habits of looking at aging, our own and that of older people of various ages. Acting can signify an active form of contemplation (as in the extended 3 Jacqueline Hayden’s most recent work, Cuerpos Voluminosa y Vieja, a series of flesh tone photographs that bring together voluminous bodies and older bodies, relates to several aspects that I have highlighted here: the combination of two hypostases of the body that deviate from canons; the emphasis on texture (in contrast with her Figure Models and Ancient Statuary); the performative aspect; and, significantly, the question of identity. With regard to the latter, the tightly cropped frames of these photographs (in which the face of the models is left out) displace the attention from the identity of the model to the perception of the viewer, “encouraging the viewer”, as Hayden puts it, “to imagine living in that body or seeing large bodies and older bodies in a different possibility, for example, as beautiful and desirous” (Hayden: 2008).

134

Touching Surfaces

time of exposure or perception required by the works). It also calls for forms of empathy that relate, instead of specific situations, to more complex configurations of experience. This is not only the attribute of speculative photography, if we consider how art works affect us when consumer-, or simulacrum-oriented discourses have been consumed. However, in the case of photography used as an art medium, this pragmatic aspect is highlighted by its ambivalent position, crossing borders between several types of referential categories: the literal and the figural, the replicative and the creative, the reflective and the refractive. Seen from such pragmatic aesthetic perspective, these photographs relate to reality in other ways than testimonial photographs do: instead of exposing its diverse aspects, they insist on how we think of the varied natures of reality and how we relate to them. Over thirty years of activity, American photographer Joyce Tenneson has developed a body of work in which aesthetic preoccupations meet important aspects of the position and construction of the subject, since she works both in the field of art and in that of commercial photography and, in her art photographs, she combines models or stereotypes of beauty with bodies deviating from all canons. Her work, I suggest in what follows, shows the shapes “the inner statue” may take in the course of time. It also brings interesting suggestions concerning the ways in which aesthetic preoccupations can be related to larger cultural questions.

Photographic Aesthetics

135

1. Joyce Tenneson Transformations of the Self: Motion, Emotion, Repose Reality is ungraspable. [...] The real reality is something else – only the strangeness of it can be taken in and that’s what interests me. ... The real reality, the flickering of seen and unseen actualities, the moment under the moment, can’t be put into words; the most that a writer can do – and this is only rarely achieved – is to write in such a way that the reader finds himself in a place where the unwordable happens off the page. Russell Hoban Recall, reader, if ever in the mountains a mist has caught you, through which you could not see except as moles do through skin ... Dante Alighieri 4

Duane Michals’ photographs persistently perceive transformations of the self through forms of visual energy in which the body dissolves into a plastic shape. Blown out of the frame, as it were, the body is 4 Quoted by James Merrill in a commentary to Charles Singleton’s prose version of Dante’s Inferno, these lines are wonderfully evocative of the misty visual effect in Tenneson’s photographs. On the subject of moles, Merrill comments: “Those moles, to resume, are just one filament in a web whose circumference is everywhere. They presently mesh with an apostrophe to the imagination, which also sees without using eyes”. And this is fragment’s original texture:

Ricorditi, lettor, se mai ne l’alpe ti colse nebbia per la qual vedesti non altrimenti che per pelle talpe [...] . (Merrill 1986: 89-90).

136

Touching Surfaces

thus projected into the imaginary space of infinite variations of being. At about the same time Michals was experimenting with the blur and the photographic sequences – in the late 1970s and early 1980s – Joyce Tenneson, a young photographer based in Washington, a striving professional, wife, and mother, considered today among the major contemporary photographers, was working out in her own dark room possibilities of visualizing transformations of the self. Her concerns focus on the possibilities to fix these transformations photographically in ways quite opposite to those of Michals. It is, in fact, the visual result that diverges from Michals’ preoccupation with physical movement as a signifier of inner motion. Visually, Tenneson’s photographs are static. The poses of her models mostly suggest attitudes related to repose: stillness, tranquility, peacefulness. They seem (at first sight) to have a soothing effect on the viewer. Yet, behind their composure or ease of manners, behind the harmonious combinations of forms, more disquieting patterns emerge, patterns that relate to the ambiguities of the “inner statue” as a trope for paradoxical corporeal and psychic realities.* From her early reflections on images of the self, rituals of passage, or motherhood, Tenneson has opened up in the late 1980s and 1990s to a wider range of generative relations and transformative processes, and then to her most recent direct exploration of aging in her books of photographs Wise Women (2002) and Amazing Men (2004). Over the years, her work has imposed itself as a personal inner journey of self-discovery in which the forms of energy and consciousness that sustain the self in time play an increasingly important part. Though different in their formal propositions, the two artists share an anticipation of visual research on perceptions of change before aging became a significant issue in American culture. Either by exploring the body’s operating on various time scales or simultaneous consciousness of time levels (as Michals does) or by visualizing states replete with complex emotions (as in Tenneson’s photographs), these photographs transcend the focalization on the physical precisely by appealing to a form of double consciousness visualized in Michals’ work by means of superimposing images or associating texts to images. * I refer the reader to the gallery of Joyce Tenneson’s work: http://www.tenneson.com

Photographic Aesthetics

137

In discussing Michals’ work, I have used now the term change, then transformation, in an indiscriminate way. Yet, on closer scrutiny, there seems to be a slight variation in the two almost synonymous notions, one that might point to the difference in the two artists’ approaches. As I have read it in Michals’ photographs, change implies movement in space, the emphasis being on the depletion of contours that extends the reaches of the body in space (and time). Transformation (which incorporates the word “form”) highlights instead an integrative alteration of shapes. It relates more closely to metaphoric displacements within a field of relatively stable configurations. The title of one of Tenneson’s books is, in fact, Transformations (1993), a volume of photographs showing both a wide range of possibilities of recasting older pictorial or photographic forms into new ones and a sense of growth over time in relation to her own vision. Tenneson’s work has been described as haunting, ethereal, pensive, disturbing. Her photographs do not relate so much to what we see directly as to forms of perception likely to trigger off inner scrutiny. “To me”, she declares suggestively, “the larger reality has always been internal reality, those emotions that are not visible to the naked eye” (1986: n. pag.; emphasis added). Either caught in unusual postures or outspokenly posing in front of the camera in classical poses, her models partake of a pictorial iconic dimension that allows her to suggest inner motions and emotions through physical immobility. Although from one photograph to another gradual transformations are quite noticeable, in each individual photograph her focus seems to be not so much on the process of transformation itself as on its startling result. Visualizing a state of being is a major concern for Tenneson. In the baroque statuesque contortions of bodies and in the folds of cloth, she seems to seek the bewildering surprise that accompanies imperceptible transformations of the self (we need to remember here that though usually associated with immobility, the art of sculpture implies, in fact, a variety of kinetic factors, the perception of the figure from different angles among them). While the pose is still, the variety of pictorial devices she uses create an impression of movement. Capturing process within a statuesque pose is, as I will show, a striking paradox in Tenneson’s work, one that has also caught my attention in Jacqueline Hayden’s Figure Model and Ancient Statuary Series.

138

Touching Surfaces

Among all the photographic work I approach in this book, Tenneson’s has been the most openly and most persistently devoted to the various metamorphoses of the body over time, from childhood into old age. In her essay “Unwritten Myths”, prefacing the photographs in Transformations, Vicki Goldberg sums up Tenneson’s concern with representing the emotions related to change by referring to her portrayal of “pregnancy, the heavy flesh of middle age, and emaciated old age with grace, acceptance, affection” (Tenneson 1993: 7). She reads Tenneson’s use of the veil – a dominant formal element in this series – as a significant thematic aspect of aging. “The varied shapes and states of the human form”, Goldberg remarks, “are covered but not hidden by thin veils”, accessories in which she sees “a kind of reminder of the veils of custom, limit, and discretion that obscure so many mysteries when we are young (and when we are not so young as well)” (1993: 7; emphasis added). It could be added that, in Tenneson’s photographic syntax, these mysteries become visual sites in which aging appears as the source of a compelling interaction between realities surfacing behind other realities, between images hidden under the veil of other images. The strangeness of her “real reality” (in Hoban’s phrase evoked in the epigraph) relies precisely on the problematic question of beauty, a question inherent in transformations of the body. Unlike the models of photographers that I have discussed in the first chapter – whose beauty seems to emanate mostly from the inside and in clear opposition to the standards circulating in the media – Tenneson’s models radiate an uncanny canonic beauty. Whereas Jeff Wall, Geneviève Cadieux, or Cindy Sherman create an aesthetics that runs outspokenly against the clichés in vogue, Tenneson works within the limits of several kinds of stereotypes. An eclectic aesthetics emerges from the association of these stereotypes, one that highlights the odd character of common places when displaced from their context and looked at from a different perspective. The intriguing aspect of Tenneson’s work, especially of her color photographs since the late 1980s, lies in her combining images inspired from different sources – ranging from religious and secular art history models, to current clichés of the beauty industry – which appeal to a variety of visual registers and ways of relating to an image. Her reflection on the psychological or historical constructions of the varied notions of beauty (many of which are indeed conflicting)

Photographic Aesthetics

139

interacts with other dimensions that have generally been repressed or eluded both in contemporary photography and in the current critical discourse, and I have to name them: myth, transcendence, spirituality. Tenneson’s work engages the intriguing question of how photography can show these dimensions. Far from representing a form of nostalgia for past paradigms, her visual treatment of these categories incorporates the past into a personal search, one that is symptomatic of the twentieth century in which, as Ann Roiphe points out in her introductory essay to Tenneson’s collection Illuminations, the relationship to the sacred has been “no longer easy and communal but rather private and uncertain” (Tenneson 1997: 5; emphasis added). The first two sections of this chapter are devoted to an analysis of formal patterns in Tenneson’s photographic work by means of which she reconsiders the question of beauty in the history of pictorial representation in a context of a culture dominated by heterogeneous imagery. Her association of aging with aesthetics, I will suggest, can be instrumental in exploring our thinking of time structures and of the notion of beauty in time. In the last section, I will refer to her commercial work. Underlying my argument in this chapter is the question of the aesthetic modes her photographs propose not by way of deconstructing the category of beauty but rather by bringing its scope and contradictions into focus. The composed expression of Tenneson’s models that comes forth almost as a retreat from expression is part of these significant contradictions. Their statuesque poses render the photographed figures rather unreal yet intriguingly palpable. In fact, on closer examination, the expressions of the figures oscillate between peace, tranquility, and a certain unease, as if the models were uncomfortable in their pose, enshrined in it. The women and the men, the children, the young, and the elderly she photographs have in common an immobility relating to forms of endurance. The calm, apparently flat expressions of the models seem to intimate misty disquieting inner climates dissimulated in the folds of the drapes that cover the bodies or beyond the veils that catch the slow pace of light, like tropes in a coherent rhetoric of wrinkles. What at first contact appears as smooth surface or tranquil demeanor turns out to be the expression of something disturbing, as if the figures were actually caught in the trap of their own beauty, which is shown as something they have to suffer and expiate, to surpass and

140

Touching Surfaces

perpetually reproduce. I am intentionally using a vocabulary suggestive of the various areas of beauty Tenneson combines in her work: the clinical domain and death, along with a mythic dimension that transcends actuality only to expand, photographically, our experience of the real. Rather than mourning the loss of the spiritual dimension, her photographic rhetoric engages it provocatively in the creative process in the form of a dialogue with personal and cultural memories. The varied visual references combined in Tenneson’s photographs appear as revelations of cultural or private latent images articulated into a new aesthetic syntax whose uncanny effect invites us to reconsider our relationship to forms of representation belonging to different time periods, to different areas of experience that engage layers of personal and collective consciousness. Both in her early black-and-white photographs (1983) and in her subsequent color work, the body is shown as a solid, persistent presence, yet seen through a kind of screen materialized under different forms. What we see is nude figures partially covered by thin, transparent cloths, representing men and women of different ages set up in individual or group compositions. They are placed on painterly backgrounds mostly devoid of concrete references. The body is both exposed and concealed by textures of various kinds: gauze, veils, drapes, and later, as we will see, light. In the color photographs, the expressivity of white cloth, which Tenneson had explored in her early work, appears as an impression of mist (to obtain this result Tenneson uses various devices such as netting or powdering in association with special lighting). Monotonal, bleached, dusky, her color work plays down the sharp tonal contrast and the glamour of vernacular photographs to create an illusion of depth. The textures themselves participate in that illusion of depth of field, which insures a certain distance from the body, even as they capitalize on tactile effects. In her first black-and-white photographs dating from 1977 – self-portraits and group compositions – Tenneson had developed a personal printing technique, whereby she would apply silver emulsion into soft-textured rag printing stock which merged with the print surfaces. This developing process was meant to enhance the tactile qualities of the film as well as the tonal contrasts, and to reveal in the printed image symbolic dimensions that can be located in an area of religious representations neighboring a sanative sensibility (Tenneson

Photographic Aesthetics

141

spent her childhood next to a convent her parents were working for). In her association of the religious and the clinical spheres, the former is neutralized, desacralized by the latter. Reminders of the “fearful symmetry” of the mythological characters in William Blake’s etchings, Tenneson’s figures seem however to slightly step out of canons. In the dissolving contours, in the purified setting of her photographs we read a hesitation of form, as if the ambiguities of beauty opened up the surface of the image like a wound. The soft values she obtained in these prints smooth the body and invest the figures with an ethereal, sensual quality. At the same time, the figures seem to be placed in a visual purgatory, as it were, suspended between suffering and healing, performing rituals of purification and regeneration. As in Sylvia Plath’s metaphoric fields, for instance, the ambiguity of the color white combines clinical with lethal tones even as it plays a cathartic role. Surprised in their intimacy (as in the classical genre of bath scenes) and at the same time ceremonial, statuesque (reminiscent in their postures of Greek statues), the figures in Tenneson’s compositions reach however more down-to-earth shapes as they deviate from the poses they recall, be it by showing pregnancy, aging at different stages, heavy flesh, or skinny silhouettes. “Carol and Mirror” (1987), for instance, shows the profile silhouette of a woman of round, full shapes and long gray hair (all details differing from the conventional aesthetics of the nude). She holds a small round mirror in her left hand and is placed against a background of painted arches that gives depth of field to the flat photographic image. Her nudity is discretely protected by her extending arm, by her long hair covering her back, and by a white cloth unfolding down her waist. Like Wall’s “The Giant”, her posture reveals modest pride. The painted arches on the background of this photograph convey a sense of harmony between the actual image and the image the woman seems to behold in the mirror. Because of its angle, we do not see the reflection in the mirror other than as it mirrors back on the model’s face. The older woman is not made beautiful, but is brought, through the visual dynamic of the composition, within an optical field that highlights the “grace, acceptance, affection” pointed out by Goldberg in relation to Tenneson’s approach of variations of the physical body. With discretion, the model evokes a layered body memory of private and cultural reminiscences, of changing paradigms of beauty.

142

Touching Surfaces

In other photographs Tenneson breaks with stereotypes even as she makes use of them, as for instance when she explores a repertory of romantic or Pre-Raphaelite imagery (wings, wedding dresses, angels, or dolls that look like painted saints) in order to visualize the ambivalences in rites of passage and processes of inner transformation that she shows as actual trans-figurations. The emotions these photographs evoke are ambivalent, if not contradictory: both pleasure and fear, expressing excitement and anxiety in relation to the unknown. The future seems to lie out in front of the models like a white page they have to deliver themselves to, a white dress awaiting to be inhabited, a deserted nightgown hanging by the blind window of a cathedral (all images from Tenneson’s early black-and-white work). In many of the black-and-white photographs, embroidered veils also allude to an indefinite past. The portions of time contained in the stitch bring to mind fabrics of memory passed on by such frail tokens of anonymous past lives. Time shows through these modest aesthetic codes like a spider web in which generations of women’s hands have been caught. In the photographs I have discussed in the first chapter, a sense of generational continuum was suggested by younger photographers whose projection into older age suggested an exploration of as yet invisible sides of the self (such was the case with Hervé Guibert’s photographs of Suzanne and Louise). By contrast, in some of her photographs, Tenneson brings together generations in the same photograph, thereby highlighting visually both the likeness and the difference of shapes and expressions, an association which results in an uncanny effect. In “Man and Two Women” (1989), for instance, a profile composition, the silhouette of an adolescent is placed between that of an older woman – his right arm gently encompassing her hip – and that of a younger woman leaning on his back. The draperies covering their bodies, the rounded geometry of the leaning figures (the older woman’s head reposes on the young man’s chest) convey a sense of reciprocal physical and psychic holding. In “Peter Holding William” (1989), a Pieta-like composition, a young man tenderly holds the frail body of an old man, a photograph in which Tenneson relied extensively, as she confesses, on the two models’ spontaneous reaction and emotional input. “Old Man and Deanna” (1986) recalls Geneviève Cadieux’s piece “Blue Fear”, which I have analyzed in the first chapter. Tenneson’s photograph

Photographic Aesthetics

143

shows the silhouette of an older man, his back turned away from the camera and apparently ignoring the girl shown in profile, who seems to be whispering something into his ear. However, unlike Cadieux, Tenneson’s photograph is not based on a metaphor of selfexamination but on an odd interaction between different age- and gender-selves. The gaze projected on the body of the old man seen from the back is not a reflection of his own (as was the case in Cadieux’s “Blue Fear”) but that of the partly devilish, partly angelic girl seen from profile, whose silhouette is covered by a thin veil, out of which the wing of a bat surfaces: such mixture of innocence and wickedness that childhood can sometimes project against old age. In spite of the soft tones of the image, of its lyrical mode, this combination of emotions dodges sentimentality, a feature which emerges in Tenneson’s more recent work as a means of addressing the issue of an aesthetics of aging to a larger audience. Significantly, Tenneson considers this picture of contrastive emotions as being very much about herself: an allegory of growth (Deanna is actually a model that Tenneson has followed in her bodily and emotional progress at different ages in several compositions and portraits). The lyrical approach prevailing in most of her photographs does not prevent Tenneson from looking into the conflicts between generations or into the contradictions of subject construction. Some of her black-and-white photographs from the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, dramatize the taboo conflicts between the pleasures and the anxieties of motherhood, as in “Mother Holding Her Child” (1983), where the baby’s capped head obliterates the mother’s face. In this photograph, strangely, the baby’s head looks like a mask on her eyeless, mouthless face, a detail that conveys a powerful sense of suffocation. While in Tenneson’s black-and-white photographic work different textures of cloth cover parts of the body, in her color photographs the fabric becomes more transparent, it dissolves into thin gauze, as in “Three Women” (1987), reminiscent of a shroud, organic tissue, or placenta. The slight out-of-focus effect produced by these materials does not result from the manipulation of the time of exposure. Technically, it is not a blur and it does not relate, as in Michals’ photographs, to movement in the physical space of the photograph. While the body is mostly stationary, statuesque,

144

Touching Surfaces

movement unfolds from thin fabric or lighting effects. Bringing together the sensuality with the immobility of the body produces a disconcerting effect on the viewer. It confers a threatening connotation to beauty when fixed in the photographic image (as, for instance, in “Suzanne in Contortion”, 1990). Either statuesque, or placed in the company of fragmented statues or monuments, Tenneson’s models have something of the immobility of lasting relics. We remember that Roland Barthes associated photography to mourning while in the middle of writing Camera Lucida he was experiencing the death of his own mother. Yet photography has been linked to death in very specific ways since its early development and sometimes, in fact, for mere technical reasons. Before double or multiple exposure were intentionally used to create varied aesthetic effects, with a few exceptions (such as the intention implicit in certain spirit photographs to extend the boundaries of the visible into an image of afterlife), in the early days of photography, unfocused images were considered a flaw. Resulting from the model’s movement during the process of the picture-taking (quite a long one at the time), the mysterious auras surrounding the figures or their soft contours – part of the aesthetic vocabulary of photography since at least the 1950s – provoked at the time great dissatisfaction, especially in the case of portraiture. Nineteenth-century photographers were faced with a conundrum concerning the inverse proportion between the long speed of the exposure and the natural air of the picture. In other words, the less the model moved to allow for the time of exposure, the more artificial the picture. As Geoffrey Batchen notes in his book, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, some critics objected that the effort to maintain the pose “made the subject’s face look like that of a corpse” (1997: 208). It seems indeed that the emaciated features in the portraits done by Julia Margaret Cameron were partly provoked by the actual exhaustion of the models due to the strain of the pose, their melancholic attitude being therefore the result of the extended duration of the exposure. However, Cameron turned this technical drawback into an aesthetic device by using the sfumato-like effect due to the long exposure time to convey a sense of otherworldliness to her figures. In a letter to Sir John Hershel, dated December 31, 1864, she expresses her anger against the critics who

Photographic Aesthetics

145

deplored her disrespect for conventions of photography understood as a mechanical reproduction of nature: I believe in other than mere conventional topographic photography – map-making and skeleton rendering of feature and form without that roundness and fullness of force and feature, that modelling of flesh and limbs, which the focus I use only can give, tho’ called and condemned as “out of focus.” What is focus – and who has the right to say what focus is legitimate focus? (1989: n. pag.; emphasis added).5

In order to obtain the “roundness and fullness of force and feature” that she associated to truthfulness of character, Cameron had to go against “conventional topographic photography” by way of using costume, mask, and deviating technique. Ironically, a prop had been invented in order to help photographers to create more lifelike effects in agreement with photographic standards, a device which, like other technical developments of her time, Cameron refused to use. This contraption was meant to support the heads of the models to prevent them from moving in order to ensure the production of a portrait without failure! Clearly, for a more natural effect of the photograph, the figure had to be frozen and the photographer had to avoid the most minimal movement over the duration of the picture taking. As Batchen justly remarks: “This device transformed the lived time of the body into the stasis of an embalmed effigy. In other words, photography insisted that if one wanted to appear lifelike in a photograph, one first had to act as if dead” (1997: 208; emphasis added).6 5 Cameron’s statement is strikingly similar to another outspoken declaration of freedom of form expressed by photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard in the 1960s. In an unpublished lecture delivered around 1961 and entitled “No-Focus”, Meatyard refers to his series of photographs with the same title in which he had deliberately used the blur in order to explore new forms of vision: “As for what No-Focus had done and can do – it is freedom [...]. It is an art of visual acrobatics which result in acrobatic emotions and misgivings. No criticism has ever seemed as valid as the reasons for the importance of the being of No-Focus” (Unpublished typed ms, c. 1961, n. pag.; quoted in Tannenbaum 1991: 35; emphasis added). 6 Actually, in spite of her revolt against the critics’ displeasure with her focus, later in her life Cameron came to acknowledge that movement was indeed in the way of a perfect picture. She writes to one of her models: “All the others are prevented from being quite perfect by movement and if I could only get at you again I would make you repeat it all till you were perfect in the still sitting and then the pictures would be perfect” (Gernsheim 1975: n. pag.).

146

Touching Surfaces

It is a “melancholy truth”, in Michals’ ironic phrasing, that in photography beauty cannot be fixed as an ideal iconic form but only as a momentary state, as the impression of a shape. And that the dazzling sight of beauty is reminiscent in its immobility of the dazzling sight of death. Even as they show the frailty of beauty, Tenneson’s photographs of younger women are unsettling in that a pleasing sight of the human figure can be experienced as false, unreal, or uncanny because of its excessive perfection. Tenneson’s skill consists precisely in her displacing the viewer’s attention from surfaces to interior spaces. Stripped of its everyday references, covered with drapes or seen through a foggy screen, the nude body itself becomes a signifier of interiority, enigmatic in its economy of movement. The minimal indications given in the titles of the photographs do not add much to what one can see at a first glance. Instead, they invite the viewer to look for the image under the image, to observe the movements of a visually reconstructed interiority. The sfumato-like effect smudges the frontiers between physical appearance and psychic experience, between actual and imaginary spaces, between time dimensions and angles of vision. It creates the illusion of a possible coherence of the subject in a visual world that relates to reminiscences of heterogeneous imagery.

2. Photographic Diversions, Forms of Consciousness Transformation (of bodies), transgression (of canons), and transparence (of shapes) are articulated in Tenneson’s vision as terms by means of which she questions our relationship to images that formalize degrees of consciousness related to different states or ageselves. Her own history as an artist highlights this very important fact: there is no transformation without transgression of conventions. In some of her photographs, she has indeed reached a threshold of photographic representation which transforms the figure more radically than in the works I have discussed previously, namely by partially dematerializing the image of the body and then using light to materialize forms of consciousness, to show them as an integral part of the corporeal presence.

Photographic Aesthetics

147

Her book Transformations, for instance, includes a series significantly entitled “Light Writings”, in which figures similar to those in her previous photographs are surrounded by light materialized as lightning, auras, or luminescent globes. Turned into bodies of light, these shapes give the impression of emanating from the human figures and, as a result, seem to liberate them from the forces of gravity. The dematerialization supports the release from the bodily ego, from a particular state of being. The photographed figure becomes the metaphoric site of complex or subtle experiencings. Literally invading the image, light also unifies diverse forms of psychic energy to convey something about the creative alliance between the photographer and her models.7 If in this series, Tenneson still shows the bodies as protected by thin veils. Yet, given the luminous quality of the photographs and their effect of transparence, she seems to use nudity here even more explicitly than in her previous work “as a kind of window on the psyche, the inner self” (1993: 91). In Illuminations, a book that combines representations of figures with photographs of architectural and sculptural details or fragments of Neo-Gothic monuments, Tenneson explores the emotional interaction between individual and historical time. The relics of the past are contrasted here with the energy of the human presence, a contrast enhanced by her using the same device as in the previous series, namely light as an actual instrument, that is an optic fiber laser wand which she manipulates very much like a flash light during the process of capturing the image. This allows her to control as well as to release energy in order to create new shapes, to literally write with light (to create a photo-graph). As in Dine’s use of digital camera and printing devices, for Tenneson’s aesthetic purposes the laser wand combines the sharpness of vision provided by leading-edge technologies with the intervention of the hand. At the same time, although this specific technology she utilizes suggests the possibility of control over a natural element, the laser wand – rather difficult to manipulate because extremely quick – is as unpredictable as the blur so that it leaves room for accident, namely, for the spontaneous 7 Like Jacqueline Hayden, Tenneson talks about her models’ input in the compositions, about the inspiring exchange of emotional energy, and about their creative participation in the choice of the postures.

148

Touching Surfaces

emergence of shapes in the making of the image. Instead of consuming the body, light sublimates it into new configurations in which figurative and abstract shapes are combined, as, for instance in “Woman with Light Hat” (1997). By giving light actual shapes, Tenneson illuminates graphically the imaginative extensions of our lives. In her earlier photographs, light allowed her to explore varied textures of the body. In these series, Tenneson transforms the battlefield of the destructive effects of light on the skin – one that, in fact, cosmetic industry is fiercely contending with – into a creative field in which different textures generate intriguing optical illusions, expressions of the self in other registers of visibility. Skin is a “raw material” in Tenneson’s phrasing: “I love it when light passes onto skin”, she notes, “transforming it. The play between, is it skin, is it stone, is it fabric, is it light? – when they meld into each other, fascinates me” (Dunas 1987: 102; emphasis added). These effects of light recall Kuntzel’s installation, that intense moment in which the photograph projected on a screen effaces itself to materialize the imperceptible passage of time. Here however, the various degrees of white produced by Tenneson’s use of light dissolve the contours of the figure and create the optical illusion of the figures moving slowly back and forth, in a space that seems to escape the laws of perspective, and that in spite of the models’ frontal position. The resulting images read like a metaphor for photography itself, one of the instruments we have devised and developed in order to fix a moment – and not only to escape the destructive effects of the passage of time upon memory – but also to better understand the formative value temporality may have in the becoming of the self. “Woman Holding Cloth” (1988), for instance, is one of Tenneson’s photographic images which can be regarded as an allegory of photography: the torso of a young woman, her arms bent in square angles holding a thin cloth in front of her face, the arms somehow framing the cloth. Her face vaguely shows through this rather unorthodox veronica, yet not one printed on the cloth – as in the Biblical allegory – but emanating, as it were, from the inside (and in a different vein than Dine’s evocation of the Veronica in his digital composition). “The search of transcendence with a camera” has become, as Vicki Goldberg puts it, “unfashionable in a secular climate and difficult in any event” (Tenneson 1993: 9). Goldberg also notes that:

Photographic Aesthetics

149

“transcendental ideas in the photography of the last 50 years tend to be coached in terms of abstraction (Minor White) or allegory (Clarence John Laughlin, Duane Michals) but seldom translated onto barely disguised flesh” (1993: 9; emphasis added). In the materializations of light accompanying the physical bodies in Illuminations, we can see a source of psychic sustenance that transcends the physical. In other photographs, this source is figured by an angel, a worn-out image to which Tenneson gives new wings, so to say, a stereotype that she uses in order to visualize, as she puts it, “just another form of consciousness” (1993: 122; emphasis added). Many of her photographs explore such different forms of consciousness that synthesize a wide range of individual and cultural memories. Where substance encounters consciousness and the fragile surface of gauze the thick lens of the objective, an inner clarity emerges, a personal vision keeping in touch with uncanny configurations of time lodged in our memory. While matter is dissolving into transparency or luminescence, the immaterial takes on shapes that become visual metaphors. The emotion has the slippery consistency of photographic emulsion. Ethereal as they may seem, these photographs are a tactile compendium to ways of staying alive. Instead of representing a retreat from the world, the otherworldly in them is, on the contrary, a result of Tenneson’s keen observation of human nature, of her reflection on matter, which, as physics sees it today, is but another form of energy.8 Interestingly, with regard to Tenneson’s paradoxical treatment of spiritual or transcendent dimensions through bodily shapes, the photography critic Claude Nori has associated her not, as one would expect, with a spiritualist tradition but, on the contrary, with the great tradition of naturalist photographers “who questioned matter in looking for an answer to their interrogations” (1983: 78). By way of displacement or stylization (as, for instance, in some of the photographs in which she has used head caps to neutralize 8 About this aspect in relation to images, photographer Tom Drahors notes: “The reading of an image cannot be exclusively conceptual, visual or aesthetic. It is a much more complex question. An image reflects a reality. But that reality is matter, and as we know in our time matter has become an extremely vague concept, since from the point of view of physics, matter is above all energy”. (Drahors 1987: n. pag.; tr. mine).

150

Touching Surfaces

the figure), Tenneson takes her models out of actuality – but not completely out of time – to project them, inquisitively, into larger dimensions of temporality. These misted, risk-laden images of condensed time seem to question the possibility of adhering to myths in an era when the abusive uses of imagery have rendered the very mythology of image-making banal. Tenneson capitalizes on the cognitive and affective qualities of photographs even while alerting us – through her ambivalent view of beauty – to ways in which the seduction of images can freeze perceptions of the self into stereotypes. Her layering of images combines the concern for the individual’s relation to images with an interest in how Western visual culture is changing and growing, with the directions it takes. The aesthetic idiom Tenneson has created over time can be instrumental in addressing conflicting theoretical views in visual culture precisely because of her attempt to surpass common dichotomies in order to reach what William H. Gass has called “a true community of ends”. Commenting on Catherine Wagram’s photographic compositions inspired by laboratory instruments, Gass notes that such a community implies: giving each dimension of the medium its due, its full and fair share: matter, mind, imagination – trope, thought, thing – function, form, feeling – use, design, dream – percept, concept, precept – theory, fact, fiction; and to allow the various elements of the composition [...] an uncoerced allegiance to the whole (1996: 43).

That as a philosopher and a fiction writer, Gass uses ternary groups in his commentary on the relationship between art and science is a significant conceptual move away from patterns of thought based on binaries, a move inherent in the creative work of many photographers today. The lyrical undertones of Tenneson’s work (which, in turn, have called here for a more evocative discourse) do not preclude over the questions she addresses. Their theoretical scope relates to current concerns about the role of heterogeneous images in subject construction in a critical context mostly focused on the destabilizing effect of images.

Photographic Aesthetics

151

3. Aesthetics and Cosmetics My mother wore lipstick until the day she died. […] Her hair thinned and grayed for all the brushing, but as I look at her image now it’s only the photographs that age. Herbert Blau

The heterogeneous references in Tenneson’s photographs – religious, artistic, or vernacular – are, I would like to point out, not only domains of representation, or aesthetic versions of the subject. They embody areas of the subject’s life experience, as many zones in which the psychic body circulates. Similarly, the combination of two photographic practices, the artistic and the commercial, allows her to circulate conventions from one domain to another and explore the category of beauty and that of the aesthetic from the glossy rhetoric of magazines to art history canons back and forth. Despite its apparent transparency, her way of understanding beauty unveils hidden twists. If she conjures the aesthetic within the area of commonplace – “to show that even lovely women have inner lives”, as Vicki Goldberg puts it (Tenneson 1993: 8) – she also reveals what can be repulsive in canonized forms, namely how, by being fixed into stereotypes, beauty can become a dead form (or, a form of perceptual death). Transgressing the boundaries between the two approaches of beauty allows Tenneson to explore transformations of the individual body along with its visual constructions in the history of representations. Indeed, her commercial work does not, in fact, diverge very much from her fine art work in that she uses sometimes the same models, similar settings, atmosphere, and lighting. However, as she remarks, her commercial work rarely reaches “the psychological edge” of her personal work (1993: 109); it does not possess the same haunting strangeness, which her clients unequivocally avoid.9 Ironically, however, her commercial work (commissioned portraiture, 9 “Clients want something pleasant and beautiful, a little bit unusual but not too strange”, notes Tenneson (1993: 109), and she remembers by way of anecdote the reaction of a client before taking his portrait: “Remember, no death or dying, nothing disturbing [...]” (1993: 112).

152

Touching Surfaces

fashion, advertising) addresses the religion of beauty, which carries the promise, as a Vogue advertisement informs us, “to erase time, alter perception, create a new reality” (2000: n. pag.),10 an effect which actually her art photographs produce. Two modes of understanding the performing self (the cosmetic and the aesthetic) are at work in the two fields. Where her commercial photographs show idealized states in normalized bodies, the pictorial performances in series such as Exposures (1986), or Transformations (1993) incorporate varied realities of the body as expressions of the becoming self. Instead of placing them in conflict, Tenneson explores the tensions between the two fields creatively and looks into the many ways in which they interfere with issues of subject construction and cultural determinations. A particular relation emerges from Tenneson’s photographs, as discussed in the previous sections. While the allusions to art models or the constructed poses convey a statuesque character to the figures, the techniques that insist on dematerialization deconstruct it by degrees. The effects she uses carry a wide range of affects that integrate conventional and non-conventional forms of beauty into a continuum of subject perception. Round, emaciated, wrinkled, or too smooth bodies become touching precisely because of the inner logic suggested in the composition, one which combines varied emotions associated with the complicated, discrepant, conflicting perceptions of the changing body and to the images we have or are making of it. Where testimonial photographs of older people can generate particular forms of affect, speculative photographs bring together complex, sometimes contradictory forms of emotion that are part of conscious or unconscious processes related to the construction (and expression) of subjectivity and to that of the subject, in time. Blinding, like the fact of figuring death, the embodied light caught in these photographs also represents, perhaps, just the transformation of ways of seeing. By effacing the contours of the 10 The photograph, an advertisement for the cosmetic product MAGIC by Perspectives, represents a woman holding a bowl of light in her hands very similar to the technique Tenneson used in “Light Writings”. MAGIC is presented as “an extraordinary new concept that optically transforms the skin” (Vogue 2000: n. pag.). Signifiers of the fierce battle with time in cosmetic industry, terms such as “time stop”, “optic illusion”, or even “mimesis” [of natural processes] are frequent in the recent rhetoric of cosmetic products.

Photographic Aesthetics

153

figures, Tenneson transgresses current canons of beauty in order to direct the beholder’s gaze elsewhere, not – or, not only – inwards, in the sense of deliberately visualizing particular psychological states, but into areas of transition, of processing emotions, and of formalizing them into aesthetic idioms. The uncanny formal similarities between her commercial work and her art work suggest that the glowing shapes and the glossy photographic surfaces that circulate in the current commerce of images might also be turned into instruments which can help us consider common place representations otherwise than mere manipulative objects. Tenneson’s ambivalent aesthetics shows the human being in its frailty – as a momentary monument – and our consciousness of human experience in its variety of forms or versions. The association between personal relics of childhood and images of erotic seduction, or that between myth and contingent reality, integrates conflicting aspects of the self in a world dominated by paradox. By the very special use of light she makes in Transformations and Illuminations – light as metaphor and as technology – Tenneson explores the nonhuman sources of human energies. In the depredations of time (difficult to locate and to accept) and in the frail instruments we have devised to escape them – photography among others – she finds sources of energy. Her elegiac formal approach has such holding effect that other photographers working with aging models insist on, while the models bring in a transformative power that incorporates the alterations of time into a larger, different understanding of beauty. Hence the difference of intent between her commercial photographs, in which she insists on the illusion that we can have some control over time, and the creative, generative dimension of time patterns in her art work, where gauze or mist covering the body are also tropes for skins we shed, for debris of former selves that add up into perpetually transforming patterns of the subject. The two aesthetic modes come very close to converging in her recent work collected in two volumes of photographs and interviews, Wise Women: A Celebration of Their Insights, Courage, and Beauty (2002), portraying women aged 65 to 100 from all walks of life and parts of the United States, and the subsequent Amazing Men: Courage, Insight, Endurance (2004), meant to give a new vision of masculinity and aging today. The two books continue questions of subject identity, difference, and aesthetics from her Light Warriors

154

Touching Surfaces

(2000), in which she had explored the lives of women of varied ethnic appearances, aged between 20 and 55. More outspokenly rhetorical than her previous work, these recent books crystallize aesthetic preoccupations that intersect with questions present in a larger current cultural landscape in the Western world. With these photographs Tenneson hopes to provide new models of aging, alternative answers to the fear of growing older, “a new vision, a revelation” (2002: n. pag.), as she admits to have been herself transformed in the making of Wise Women, a book that she considers as the logical development of her thirty-years long career as a photographer. Many of these photographs were a revelation for the subjects themselves, since many of these women, like Guibert’s Louise, had not been photographed in many years and were “startled to see their current image” (2002: n. pag.). As in the photograph “Three Women” I have referred to in the previous section, the women in her new book express, in Tenneson’s words, “a new collective yearning for compassion and relatedness”. In 2003, Wise Women was the subject of a six-part Today show special, serialized in The Oprah Magazine11 and in Modern Maturity. It has quickly become a cultural phenomenon. In her introduction to the book, Tenneson actually remarks that in was a 1990s phenomenon that many artists do commercial work. These two books bring Tenneson’s preoccupation with redefining the category of beauty from the domain of art into that of actual life and express a significant turn in more recent perspectives on aging, to the emergence of which photography (both testimonial and, as I have tried to show, speculative) has contributed in many ways. In some respects, aestheticizing aging in these new books is evocative of a larger American social and cultural history of defeats: “aging is our final frontier”, says Tenneson in the preface to Wise Women. However, because of her skill and her reflection on the notions of beauty which intersect with notions of difference, her work brings up seductive, inspiring, and provoking questions which leave behind that very rhetoric. The critique of visual culture has, for instance, focused on the influence of the media on the construction of models of physical identity. Little has however been said about the 11 In an interview given on that occasion, Tenneson refers explicitly to her concern with redefining the notion of beauty, not only in art, as she did with her previous work, but in life as well: “One of the things I hope to do with this book is to open a discussion about what real beauty means” (Raffel 2002: 264).

Photographic Aesthetics

155

intersections between these models and those coming from other registers of visual culture; or about new notions of beauty that can emerge from such intersections. Tenneson’s work in what are often considered as opposite fields, art and commercial, invites us to meditate on these questions. Her own idiom of combined aesthetic approaches reflects back on the variety of factors that contribute to fugitive revelations of “the inner statue”, to the diverse forms it can take. That her visual research has, like that of Hayden, somehow archetypal connotations is suggestive of a new stage in the study of difference in cultural contexts that become more and more heterogeneous, as a consequence of which identity markers common to different groups are being sought for. At the same time, Tenneson’s bridging artistic and commercial visual registers speaks of the fact that, at the turn of the twenty-first century (and since the outset of my research on the subject in the mid-1990s), the discrepancies between the photographic treatment of aging in the two domains tend to be less and less striking. It is not so much the technical and aesthetic strategies that make a difference now, it seems. The difference lies rather in the uses made of the images, in their intent, and their emotional input. Tenneson’s aesthetics – even in its getting closer to a certain sentimentality which her earlier work avoided – strikes a balance between documenting and imagining, between sentiment and distance, thereby drawing attention to the ways in which photographic aesthetics can relate to issues of aging and becoming of the self in a culture undergoing significant transformations.

5

Performing Corpo-Realities Argument: the Spectrum of Aging Francesca Woodman; Donigan Cumming It is an irony of sorts to end a book on temporality, consciousness, and aging with a chapter devoted to a young photographer, one who did not take the time to age. Francesca Woodman was thirteen years old when she started photography. Between 1972 and 1981, she produced a huge amount of work: more than 500 photographs, mix-media projects, and an artist book. Her life ended short in 1981, with her suicide at age twenty-two. The undeveloped films she left behind contain so many latent images, the contact sheets so many sequences of potential enlargements, croppings, prints, which have not yet, or might never become a photograph, and yet exist as “many, many thoughts on a roll film”, in Jim Dine’s phrasing. With the exception of a few minor shows, Woodman’s work enjoyed little recognition during her lifetime. Her work and figure came to public attention posthumously, in academic circles of feminist and psychoanalytical orientation, as well as in art circles, and have also turned to be inspirational for many young artists, largely owing to the strategies she developed in her formative years. Her work has also been seductive for the public, yet not so much for the precision and distinction appreciated by artists, but probably rather for the non-finite character of her destiny, for the mixture of spontaneity and theatricality evocative of adolescence, for its intensity as well as for its indeterminacy. As many spaces of thought that viewers can identify with and whose gaps or missing links invite them to participate,

158

Touching Surfaces

respond to, develop … and, perhaps, project on the fantasy of growing up without ever growing old. It is only at the turn of the century that a few new readings have brought into attention aspects of Woodman’s work related to the innovative dimensions of her photographic thinking in the context of the artistic preoccupations of her time, Minimalism and experimental video in particular (Baker et al. 2003: 52-67).1 More recently, we have also become aware of the highly edited character of her work, which intersects obliquely with my concerns here with the role of creative photographs in the construction of the subject (and of images representing it, of their accessibility, or editing). Interestingly, it is not theory that brought into attention critical aspects concerning the circulation and reception of Woodman’s work, but a video piece, The Fancy (2000), made by American experimental filmmaker Elizabeth Subrin. The Fancy is presented as “a speculative, experimental work that explores the life of Francesca Woodman evoked by the published catalogues of and about her photographs”.2 Subrin’s introduction to the video piece mentions the fact that all catalogues existing at that point draw from three sources (the catalogues published in 1986, 1992, and 1998). She calls attention to the fact that the public image of Woodman’s work has been highly edited and limited to the circulation of 107 printed images from the 500 existing negatives, out of which only about 30 are repeatedly 1 A first version of this chapter was completed in 2001. The subsequent discussion of Woodman’s work at a roundtable that brought together art historians and artists concerning some of the points that are at the core of my argument in this chapter – the question of performance and subjectivity in particular – confirmed the intuition that prompted my approach of her work (Baker et al. 2003: 52-67). Peggy Phelan also hints at this issue (Phelan 2002). 2 The catalogue of the Video Data Bank of the School of the Art Institute in Chicago notes on this video piece that it “radically reorganizes information from the catalogues in order to raise questions about biographical form, history and fantasy, female subjectivity, and issues of authorship and intellectual property […] in an attempt to uncover the traces of a seemingly suppressed history embedded behind the photographer’s pictures”. A new book devoted to Woodman’s photographs came out after the completion of my manuscript. Two hundred-fifty images are printed in this book together with unpublished extracts from her journal selected by her father (Townsend 2006). In his essay “Scattered in Space and Time”, Townsend also places Woodman’s work in a larger context of art history as well as in that of the art practices of her time. As for whether this new book reveals more of a “the seemingly suppressed history”, as Subrin puts it, this is a question beyond of the scope of my study here.

Performing Corpo-Realities

159

reproduced.3 These catalogues mostly present Woodman’s photographs in isolation, leaving behind the importance of serial work in her approach to photography. Suggestively, Subrin isolates two of the meanings of the word fancy that she uses as a title for her film, namely “to visualize”, and “to suppose/ to guess”, hinting at the fact that the body of Woodman’s photographic work – that carries so much creative potential – has not been entirely developed. Of small (and mostly square) format, Woodman’s blackand-white photographs come into the viewer’s visual field with force, not to say with violence. We are compelled to cast off preconceptions and habits of seeing and adopt her angle, to shrink in age imaginatively, to get in touch with that period of our lives when creativity was within striking reach and the past appealing because not ours, not yet the heavy stuff of our lives. Woodman restores a lost innocence to the beholder’s gaze and, thereby, an all-sensory perception that time accumulated in layers has the tendency to vitrify, one recalling the freshness of perception Myrtle Gordon summons in Opening Night: “When I was eighteen my emotions were so close to the surface …”. In adolescence, the awkward age of multiple physical and psychic transitions in which we create our own potential spaces, our personal idiom, we become aware not of aging but of age, an evershifting notion that is to change over time. The visible is then a space one traverses to grasp life lines, to reach out for new spaces, for new areas of experience, and to find out how to deal with them. In the process, a consciousness of the self develops as a physical and psychic body opening up to new physical and mental environments. Hence, for the adolescent – for as much as that age of contradictions holds generalizations – the borders between the phantasmatic and the actual world, between intuition and rationality, are more fluid, not yet stuck into binary categories. The interiors in Woodman’s photographs are devoid of the paraphernalia of everyday life and rather resemble intimations of dreams, of imaginary spaces. They are unprotected, open. The past is alluring because it is anonymous, perceived in the eagerness of a future. Rather than a critical gaze projected onto the real, we read in Woodman’s deflections of the photographic medium 3 A photographer’s work will always be the subject of editing (by the author and/or by others, or, simply, by time itself, as in the case of E.J. Bellocq).

160

Touching Surfaces

questions related to how far photography can go to encompass immediate realities as well as realities beyond visible reach. Her photographs formalize the boundless potential of adolescence and the concomitant need to find guide marks, to break ground in order to experiment with various locations of the self, to create one’s own inner space. Moving away from stereotypical images of the teenager, Woodman does not show adolescence from a narcissistic perspective (an aspect I will elaborate on farther), but as a way of addressing its problems creatively. The stakes of her performing a wide range of corporeal realities in front of a camera are related to the transformations of the physical and psychic body and also to the possibilities of the camera to capture them. At the opposite spectrum of aging, we can find photographs that are more closely related to performing realities of the changing body (in old age), such as those of the Canadian photographer Donigan Cumming collected in his book of photographs Pretty Ribbons (1996). Cumming met Nettie Harris, a former journalist, then artist, in 1982, when she was in her seventies. For nearly ten years, week after week, he photographed her in her apartment, in poses that very openly discard superficial standards of beauty. Working with his model’s spirit of improvisation, dramatization, and humor, Cumming places Harris either in her everyday environment or in compositions, some of which show an old Nettie lying on a flowery carpet in a fetal position, or enacting a moment of sleep (or perhaps death). In one of them, she is surrounded by instantaneous portraits of herself displaying a wide range of emotional impersonations. Other photographs in this series are provokingly close to caricatural images of old age. Although it addresses the relation between the consciousness one can have of aging and the external perception of its realities, Cumming’s series belongs to a different field of photography than the one I have approached in this book, namely the social documentary, a genre which “records and documents” to express an outspoken attachment to external reality. Like Nicholas Nixon, Richard Avedon, John Coplans, and more recently Nan Goldin, in a series of photographs of her parents, Cumming “stares”, as he puts it, into the realities of old age (1999: 2). Adolescence and old age are critical moments of transition, of dreaded thresholds, as we well know! It is not unusual (as medical

Performing Corpo-Realities

161

inquiries into patients’ perceptions of age confirm it) to perceive the puzzling changes in the older body as a memory of the adolescent body and thus relate to that identity in the shaping, or to that other age-self, as I have called it at the outset of this study. Performing different age-selves may be a reaction of defense, but also, or perhaps, mainly, one of accommodation to new realities. One coming from the need to explore the contrasts between external realities and their perceptions. These contrasts can be either softened (as Tenneson does with her models), or overacted (as Nettie does in Cumming’s photographs). Adolescence and old age can be seen, as I have suggested earlier in the book, as extensions of the transitional processes theorized by D.W. Winnicott in his Playing and Reality, an extension used by Christopher Bollas to refer to the transitional objects of adulthood (Bollas 1987). Similarly, performing can help recategorize aspects of the consciousness of the self in ways which are comparable to the role that “playing” has in the maturational process of the child: namely by facilitating the subject’s relating to the environment via a network of illusions and enactments of mimetic selves (equivalents of what Winnicott called “false selves”). Instead of exposing physical appearance, photographers who explore the spectrum of aging creatively integrate conflicting perceptions and emotions into an elusive coherence of the physical and the psychic body. If I have preferred to discuss in more detail Woodman’s work in the context of aging, it is precisely because of the distance the adolescent body provides to the understanding of the older body. Cumming’s photographs of Nettie call for empathy in a direct, immediate way. Their performative aspect is related to the phatic dimension and to an unambiguous message, as Cumming points out: “[Nettie’s] was about being an elderly woman. Nettie understood the impact of what she was doing on other elderly women of her social group and she was prepared to risk criticism” (1999: 4). On the other hand, Nettie’s poses relate to phantasms of the body in relation to different age-selves, but they also hint at their limited scope in vernacular visual culture. Cumming has indeed called attention to his use of theatrical metaphors in his social work, as well as to the importance of the Performance Art of the late 1960s on his training as a photographer.

162

Touching Surfaces

Instead of that direct approach, the ambiguities in Woodman’s photographs relate to my point here as a different kind of provocation, precisely because she works not so much the poses but the distance we can take from them through optical illusions that can provide subtle accommodations to imperceptible realities. Her exploration of the consciousness of aging is rooted in possibilities provided by the camera at once to expose, to screen, and to transform the tropes or broken narratives of inner growth (very much like the photographer in Opening Night who reads the wrinkles on a 90-year old woman’s face as tropes for experience “every wrinkle [is] a joy she has had, a sorrow”). What can an aging perspective bring to a reevaluation of Woodman’s work? How do the questions it raises help our understanding of aging as an ongoing process of building up configurations of a consciousness of the self in the ongoing temporality of subject growth? By displacing such specific questions as adolescent narcissism or the gaze projected on the female body onto problems of visualizing internal spaces and positioning the subject in physical space, I would argue that Woodman operates a series of shifts in categories. Recently, Ann Daly has highlighted the importance of taking distance with the limitations of feminist readings of her work by suggesting the necessity to “open up the discourse around her work, maybe by placing more emphasis on her interest in categories of representation and the disruption of the categorical” (Baker et al. 2003: 56; emphasis added). Within the context of my argument, I understand this disruption of the categorical as a series of visual recategorizations (mainly by means of “playing” with photographic conventions and modes). Theoretically, the performative effects of the corpo-realities in Woodman’s photographs come close to the understanding of aging and consciousness that I have acquired from other photographers discussed in the book. Some of them more obliquely, others more directly, not only create an accrued awareness of images of aging circulating in Western cultures, but also propose imaginative expressions of realities of aging and their perceptions. Cumming, whose work I situate at the opposite spectrum of visualizing aging (and in a different photographic genre), also insists on the necessity of working in between categories. “In my work”, he notes, “I address issues of categorical confusion and transgression”

Performing Corpo-Realities

163

(1999: 3). Where Cumming addresses these issues in the domain of social attitudes and individual response, in Woodman’s photographs these aspects appear in the context of self-exploration and development of a personal aesthetics.4 Suggestively, Cumming has accompanied his model beyond the photographic project and to the end of her life, by making his first video piece, entitled A Prayer For Nettie (1995), which he presents as “a transitional work, originally conceived as part of an installation with photographs and seven monitors”. An “Elegy to Nettie Harris”, as he calls this piece about “mourning and memory” (1999: 4), this tape was made the summer before Nettie died, as a continuation of their collaborative project for Pretty Ribbons. I have earlier underlined the quality of holding in Jacqueline Hayden’s work with elderly art models, in Hervé Guibert’s photographs and texts about his eightyyear old aunts, or in Geneviève Cadieux’s “Blue Fear”. In them, I have read an opening up to the models’ creativity and a holding gaze when the body becomes too frail to even be touched. At the other pole in the spectrum of transitional processes, it is perhaps such holding gaze that Francesca Woodman created for her own growing self in the extended space of the photographic image.

4 The concern with recategorization in the fields of documentary and art

photographs that relate to aging is itself an engaging topic, yet one which does not encompass the scope of this book, where the focus is on the affective, cognitive, and formative role of the aesthetic.

164

Touching Surfaces

Performing Corpo-Realities

165

166

Touching Surfaces

19. Duane Michals, “The Woman is Frightened by the Door”, 1966. Five gelatin silver prints each paper, 5 x 7 inches. DMI.S.027. Copyright Duane Michals. Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.

167

Performing Corpo-Realities

1. Francesca Woodman Photographic Ambiguities and Formal Growth Perception of an object costs Precise the Object’s loss — Perception in itself a Gain Replying to its Price — The Object Absolute — is nought — Perception sets it fair And then upbraids a Perfectness That situates so far — Emily Dickinson What is more precise than precision? Illusion. Marianne Moore I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions Whatever I see I swallow immediately Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. Sylvia Plath

In the sequence entitled “The Woman is Frightened by the Door” (1966) (19) opening his book Real Dreams, Duane Michals sets up a suspense story in five sequences with anxiety as a featured character. Sequence 1: naked woman reading on a couch. Sequences 2, 3, and 4: door opens tentatively (a gust of wind?); woman turns her head in the direction of the door. Sequence 5: her gaze fixed on the door, her body, her face, and the book in her hands loosen their shape. In the short interval between these sequences, nothing has happened. Only the contours of her body have been disturbed. The woman has been swept along by a fear unknown, an unseen visitor. Here, Michals turns once more to the tradition of spirit photographs, yet, like in “Death Comes to the Old Lady” (1969) (which is more literal), on a visual tone that is half lyrical, half ironic. This distance allows him to displace the focus (symbolically, and visually, by the use of the blur), from the body-spirit question to that of the imperceptible, which for him is the very substance of photography. Duane Michals was one of

168

Touching Surfaces

the photographers Woodman admired, although one could talk more of elective affinities rather than direct influences, as it is the case with other photographers that Woodman crossed paths with. The hermeneutics of literary works is based on the supposition that each text contains the inscription of the interpretative moves to follow in partially decoding its enigma. Similarly, the formal and energetic patterns of a photograph are carriers of patterns of meaning as well as of a larger dimension that encompasses its morphology and its visual syntax. From that vantage point, Francesca Woodman’s work can be said to capture the unstable balance of growth suggested in Richard Powers’ novel, The Gold Bug Variations, through the metaphor of “the threshold effect” (a phrase inspired by René Magritte’s painting “Threshold of Liberty”), a metaphor which he places at the core of the logic of life and of systems of knowledge and representation: the accumulation of small variations that transform a change of degree into a change of nature. Life stands on the threshold of some new twist it will never be able to name but must live through all the same (Powers 1991: 616).

An untitled photograph by Francesca Woodman from the series Boulder, Colorado (1972-1975)* functions within the range of that same problematics. This particular photograph shows a blurred silhouette crawling through the cross-shaped orifice of an old headstone. The figure (a child? a teenager? a girl or a boy? or, most likely a self-portrait) seems to dissolve into thin air as it is moving, yet its blurred palms are firmly rooted in the grass on the one side, as are its knees on the other. Caught between two zones of air separated by solid stone, the figure has vacillated at the moment of the capture to grow into a different body, one shown in a state of visual confusion, a chaos of material particles (in a digital photograph, this is the actual form that the fluid, transparent blur of the analogical image would take). In spite of the location (a cemetery), the becoming body is not * Unfortunately, I was not able to secure permission to reproduce Woodman’s photographs here. I refer readers to the sites: “A Francesca Woodman Gallery”, http://www.heenan.net/woodman; Francesca Woodman, “http://www. artnet.com”, and “’Cesca’ Francesca Woodman”, http://www.arrangedmonster.com”, the latter particularly highlighting the serial aspect of her work.

Performing Corpo-Realities

169

symbolically located between life and death, as it has been suggested, but at the threshold of two stages of life, whose boundaries are difficult to draw but emblematically. The date of the series itself does not situate the photograph in a specific moment in time. Sometime between 1972 and 1975, when Woodman was fourteen to seventeen years old. Three years that count for so many more at a stage when, in its groping for experience, the psychic body observes, dodges, and often outgrows the physical body. The blur suggests here a galaxy of changes, the confusion accompanying their apprehension even as the subject has already developed into something else: a consciousness of the self captured as vanishing presence shown in intermittent motion, from outer shapes towards inner constellations of images developing into visual patterns. The distinction between the conscious and the unconscious in such perceptions of the self is, like in the creative process itself, not as clear-cut, as strict as we have the habit to think of it. Woodman’s work raises two engaging questions in relation to my exploration of photographic aesthetics. How much of the creative process (as a trope for the construction of the subject) relies on the organizing powers of inner life turned into consciousness by the controlling sense of form, in the context of unconscious spontaneity? And, conversely, how does her work – accomplished during her formative years – articulate inner psychic structures into photographic forms as a way of accessing consciousness (very much like Jim Dine does when he uses photography to grasp inaccessible forms of memory as areas of dim, dream-like consciousness of the self). Critics have discussed varied influences on Woodman’s imagination, ranging from Victorian novels to surrealist photography (Posner 1998: 157-58; 167-171), and more recently, to Minimalist and art video strategies developed by her contemporaries (Baker et al. 2003: 52-67; Townsend 2006). The photographic or pictorial references in her work are numerous, and their intelligent weaving into a personal idiom is striking. In a personal way, she combines memories of Italian painting or sculpture, and other artistic references, with a selective history of American photography ranging from her contemporaries Duane Michals or Diane Arbus to the older generation of visionary photographers still active in the 1960s and early 1970s, Clarence John Laughlin and Ralph Eugene Meatyard, in particular. Her references also include the turn of the century mysterious E.J.

170

Touching Surfaces

Bellocq, whose partly defaced glass plates of women from a brothel in New Orleans, taken around 1912, were first brought into public attention in 1970 by the book composed of Lee Friedlander’s photographs of the plates. The book became very popular in the photography world by the mid-1970s when Francesca Woodman was being trained as a photographer at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence. If the identification of references is by no means essential for the viewer’s response to Woodman’s aesthetics, it proves however instrumental to our understanding of her photographic thinking in relation to my I focus here. Consequently, such references do not call our attention as a form of anxiety of influence (in passing, more of a critic’s problem than that of an artist’s), but as a question of method. Many of Woodman’s photographs are, indeed, what Rosalind Krauss has called “problem sets” (1986),5 that is the result of various assignments during her years at the Rhode Island School of Design. These photographic versions of the academic studies in drawing classes are responses either to a technical question or to varied categories of representation. In Woodman’s creative use of photographic models, the source work becomes part of her formative dialogue with visual forms. “Two women, one in slip, one in robe, New York, 1979”, for instance, reminiscent of Pompeii frescoes and also of a photograph by Ralph Eugene Meatyard (“Untitled [Two ghosts with a fireplace]”, ca.1969), is suggestive of her combining, like Tenneson, visual codes of different art forms coming from different historic moments. At once melancholically alert and technically skilled, her photographs are all thought in process, intuition, and meditation merging into one fugitive image. If consciousness functions like the photographic device (which is, as we have seen, but a theoretical supposition), we can say (metaphorically), that the multitude of its forms unfolds here on the surface of the photograph: witty, subtle, playful. A repertoire of states embodied in puzzling configurations associated to the developing body. Although speculations on Woodman’s suicide have been avoided in the catalogue of her first posthumous exhibition (1986), commentaries on intimations of death in her photographs come up 5 “Problem Sets” is the title of Rosalind Krauss’ essay in the 1986 catalogue. The quotations here are from the version reprinted in Krauss’ collected essays Bachelors (1999).

Performing Corpo-Realities

171

now and again, partly on account of her early departure, and partly owing to the ghostly apparitions in many of her photographs.6 However, what strikes the viewer is rather their powerful creative energy so skillfully balanced between expression and reflection, between identifying the problem within the given image and trying to find a new visual solution for it, between the constrictions of the imposed form and the search for a liberating energy within these very limitations.7 As Kathryn Hixson remarks in her essay “Essential Magic: the Photographs of Francesca Woodman”: “The work has an effective presence that is not dependent on death, but rather on a full exploration of the possibilities of depicting through the photograph the essence and vitality of life” (Woodman 1992: 28). The phantom presences in her images, disembodied by light, hovering like white fabric or smoke between patterns of matter and patterns of spirit might indeed support associations with death. Yet, made between early teenage and full-shape adolescence, Woodman’s photographs seem more precisely related to life forms8 and life transitions: from one space to another, from one area of time to another, from a state of wonder to a state of dimly intuitive or suddenly sharp understanding. The lens of her camera catches knots of contradictions whose unresolvedness accounts for their truthfulness. In many photographs she combines blurred with sharp focused zones to catch the paradoxical association between confusion and clarity that 6 Peggy Phelan has a peculiar position with regard to that subject, considering that Woodman “invites us to see her suicide, like her art, as a gift” (2002: 1002). I am not discussing here this hypothesis that seems to me problematic. The article can be consulted on-line and it contains illustrations of works that I discuss here: the photograph from the Series Boulder, Colorado, 1972-1975 (986), “Then at one point, […]” (996), On Being an Angel (989), an image from Some Disordered Interior Geometries (998), and “Study for Space 2” (1000). 7 A relatively comparable case is that of Abigail Cohen, who died in 2000 at age 27, and recorded her experience in a series of photographs entitled One Cycle of My Journey, published by Light Warriors Press, in 2003. In her statement about her work, she also mentions being interested in freeing the photographic image from its limitations. 8 Incidentally, “Life Forms” is the title of a video dance piece created by Merce Cunningham in the 1990s, in which he combines computer-designed choreographies with actual improvisations. This fleeting association with performance art relates to my discussion of the performative character of Woodman’s photographs at the end of this chapter.

172

Touching Surfaces

accompanies the passage from one zone of time and space to another with the precision epitomized in Dickinson’s lines evoked in the epigraph. Blurred and sharp outlines create a disturbance in geometries (to paraphrase the title of Woodman’s artist book, Some Disturbed Inner Geometries). Shapes appear in the visual field with outstanding clarity, while others disappear. Requiring both optic accommodation and restructuring the perception of photographic space, this dynamic determines the progressive emergence of another visibility, of layers of reality other than the immediately visible, which coexist or interfere with it. Woodman belongs to a family of photographers who express, in Max Kozloff’s phrasing, “a pictorial protest against the solidity of things” (1989: 45) to reveal something of the immediacy of perception and of the textures of the psychic body. However dematerialized or illusory the matter of her images may appear, it reveals the potentialities that inner shapes hold, the possibilities of doing and undoing them in the photographic process so as to match perceptions of these inner shapes with changing corporeal realities or with diffuse, not to say confuse, perceptions of them. Optic accommodation triggers off psychic plasticity. In such photographs, the dissolving figure creates, instead of the illusion that we are in front of a body which has moved at the moment of the capture (in the past), that of a displacement which seems to occur at the very moment of perception (in the present). “Perception in itself a Gain”. In his essay on the power of photographs to increase emotional knowledge, entitled “The Etherealized Figure and the Dream of Wisdom”, Kozloff has pointed out this contrast of “time zones” (a notion which recalls the solidarity between metaphors of time and space in photography). What he calls “the figural dissolve” – resulting from various uses of the blur – signifies precisely an effect which calls up the viewer’s emotional participation in a very specific way, representing, as he puts it “a somehow live transit at the viewer’s moment of contact with the image” (1989: 45). “As it simultaneously dissolves and leaves some trace of itself”, concludes Kozloff, “the figure comes to seem like an alter-ego of our condition” (1989: 61; emphasis added). As a complementary volet to the chapter devoted to Duane Michals’ use of spectral visions to create images of movement and change in time, I would like to approach here the figural dissolve

Performing Corpo-Realities

173

in Woodman’s photographs with added emphasis to the spatial dimension. Starting from the most striking feature of her work, namely her treatment of bodily sensations in spatial terms, I will suggest that her use of the dissolving figure (like that of photographic models) is, in fact, a matter of formal growth, since it results in an extension of the perceptible photographic space. Woodman works with the fluidity of forms, with their plasticity, with the possibilities they hold to be transformed and, in the process, to transform the subject and to explore, as I will show in the following section, its positioning in space. The principle of the figural dissolve however does not only operate on the possibilities of the camera to represent change in the physical and psychic body. It is also a principle of inner growth according to which bodies of knowledge (art history models, photography included) are distilled into the process of self-knowledge and self-representation. These bodies of knowledge formalize states of consciousness in her development as an artist. Most of Woodman’s black-and-white photographs engage a visual dialogue with the nature of shapes, of the body and the object world surrounding it, with the environment in which it acts: small variations of form. Accordingly, her own body, or that of the few models she has used, becomes part of the environment. This fusional relation with the environment is metaphorically suggested in the images in which the body of a girl or that of a young woman merges with or emerges from the peeling wallpaper of an abandoned house like the sudden materialization of a figure in the carpet. In other photographs, the body becomes a misty presence; it seems to pass through a fireplace, through a wall, or through a window (as in “House #3”, “House #4”, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975-1976). Woodman catches the possibilities of a shape even as it is dissolving under the gaze of the camera. The light silk dresses with small flower patterns accord with the faded wallpapers in these anonymous houses. In many photographs, however, the body is uncovered, in wait for its own shaping, the skin is a sensitive plate capturing the variations of light, a workshop of instantaneous pictures. In his book, Marcel Proust sous l'emprise de la photographie (Marcel Proust Under the Impact of Photography), photographer Brassaï described Proust in terms close to those of Bergson mentioned in the argument of Chapter 2. Brassaï imagines

174

Touching Surfaces

Proust as a kind of mental photographer, one who considered his own body to be an oversensitive plate that captured and recorded in its youth thousands of impressions which, as he set upon his journey to recapture time, he developed and fixed in writing, thus rendering visible the latent image of his entire life in that huge photographic composition which is his Remembrance of Things Past (Brassaï 1997: 20).9 In Woodman’s photographs, the physical presence is actually difficult to separate from a larger time and space dimension, as if it were part of an intricate continuum that resists to be fixed in one image. She places the body at the center of her observation, be it in the portraits, in the compositions, or even in her still lives. In contact with the environment, the body becomes a receptive, sensitive vehicle, reminiscent of the turn-of-the-century tradition of “manifestations”, a continuation of the trend of spirit photography (and, in some respects, intersecting with ephemeral, process-oriented performance art practices popular in the mid-70s). In some of these photographed sui generis performances (as, for instance, those of the medium Florence Cook impersonating the spirit of Katie King), a woman medium would retire into a dark chamber to produce a double of herself standing for a deceased person and emerging physically as sublimated form, one which was actually produced by quite simple technical devices. In many of her photographs, Woodman takes herself as a model, mainly by necessity or for commodity reasons, as is the case with many photographers at the beginning of their career (Cindy Sherman started her self portraits for similar reasons, and earlier on, in the 1920s and 1930s, the French photographer Claude Cahun based her work on impersonations of the self across gender boundaries). However, as in the case of Cahun and Sherman, the emphasis is not on self-consciousness but on the transformation of personal emotional material, on the distance taken from mere autobiographical report to reach larger patterns of consciousness of the self, some diffuse, others emerging into view with stunning clarity. A concise working note for one of Woodman’s compositions, for instance, highlights her exigencies in terms of detachment: “For photographing Pilgrim Mills:

9 Woodman was reading Proust at the MacDowell colony in the summer of

1980.

Performing Corpo-Realities

175

1) Keep distance in photography. A) memorial to a place aspect” (Woodman 1998: 38). Commenting on her working out the requirements of the problem sets, Krauss relates the question of self-consciousness in Woodman’s approach to “a sense of self as a medium” (1999: 173), one which, as she points out, does not stem from a narcissistic impulse. As in her utilization of models, in her responses to technical problems Woodman also works with another type of given elements, stereotypes of representation (such as the mirror or the angel) in this case, in order to explore ways in which, within the technical constraints of the photographic device, a visual problem can turn space inside out or vice-versa. The strategies she develops pertain therefore to the broader question of how our ongoing experience of the real (and our consciousness of it, in Michals’ terms) can be turned into a visual approximation of perceptions situated on varied levels of reality (and of visibility). Photographers of the past decades belonging to a wide spectrum of orientations, from the more documentary (such as Lee Friedlander) to the more speculative ones (such as Geneviève Cadieux), have used mirrors and other reflective materials not as forms of narcissistic figuration, but simply to create more space, more material surfaces, and, as I am suggesting throughout the book, as matter to reflect on the possibilities of photography to bring together different registers of reality.10 As Woodman puts it in one of the texts accompanying the photographs made for her artist book, Some Disordered Interior Geometries (a collage of photographs she placed on the pages of a geometry primer): “This mirror is a sort of rectangle, although they say mirrors are just water specified” (1981: n. pag.). Significantly, in Woodman’s photographs there is no perfect symmetry between the figure and its reflection in the mirror or its image reflected on silver coated surfaces or placed under glass panels. The latter (the double) is a version developing from the former (the original). In most cases, the image in the mirror (usually a cropped body, a torso) appears as a blurred shape. As a consequence of what in Tenneson’s case I have called a release of the bodily ego, a different double appears in the reflection, a new self emerges in the mirror, so 10 For a more extensive development of this aspect in relation to Geneviève Cadieux’s work, cf. Cristofovici 1996.

176

Touching Surfaces

that we can see two versions of the self or two hypostases coexisting in two spatial planes of the same picture (and in the extended time unit of the capture). The otherness (or otherworldliness) of the reflected figure is both fascinating and unsettling since it often appears more naturalistic than the model. As a result of this reversal, the body in the mirror seems to be not so much a reflection but rather another image, a fiction, as in “Self-Deceit, Rome, 1978”, where it has sharper outlines than the figure that looks into the mirror (and whose gaze, as a result of the framing, is out of our visual field). One of the photographs in the series Untitled, Providence, 1975-1976, for instance, shows a blurred nude torso kneeling on a mirror, posed on the floor, which reflects only the knees in sharp contours and, strangely, a hand (too blurred to be perceived in the torso above the mirror), as well as parts of the room not caught in the photograph. The different visual consistency in the two figures suggests indeed two different (yet related) levels of reality, an impression increased by the fact that each space (that of the room and the one seen in the mirror) has its own vanishing point. The torso, blurred in the former, is drastically cropped in the latter to show more space than body (a towel partially covers the mirror). In photographic vocabulary, “cropping” actually implies trimming off the edges of an image to remove unwanted areas so as to improve the composition. It eliminates unwanted details caught by the camera that distract and helps focus on what the photographer wants to frame. My slightly inappropriate use of it for the reflected figure hints at Woodman’s use of the mirror both as a framing device (to delimit a portion of space) and as an enlargement device (to extend the area of visibility limited by the fix position of the camera). Focusing is obtained here by subtracting from the actual figure and adding to the mirror figure which appears, very much as in Michals’ photographs, as a complementary side. In another untitled photograph from the series Providence, Rhode Island, 19761977, the mirror device is left behind altogether, the double being just a negative impression left by a body on a floor covered with a white powder-like matter (a detail which brings forth the relation between visibility and tactility in the awareness of form, an outstanding feature of most of the photographs discussed in this book). For Woodman, the mirror is therefore not a device she uses to duplicate an image but rather to extend the space of the photograph and also to orient the gaze of the viewer in at least two directions in

Performing Corpo-Realities

177

space whose simultaneous existence (at the time of the capture and at that of perception) creates a disturbance in the category of reflexivity. And it does so, both in relation to the mirror as a trope, and to photography as a reflective – and reproducible – form. Instead of reproducing a woman looking in the mirror, the ambiguity resulting from such illusions of bifocal vision grasps different spatial levels, different visual textures, ranging from physical appearance to introspection. Metaphorically, they highlight the photographic image as a multilayered surface (as opposed to a flat surface), one in which a device meant to reflect or to record physical reality reveals instead its flip-side, or both sides, in a simultaneity tending to get as close as possible to actual perceptions of physical and psychic realities, or to diffuse states of consciousness related to the location of the subject in space. The impression that we witness the conscious and the unconscious visually side by side (as we do, through different effects, in Jim Dine’s photographs, or in those of Duane Michals), as well as the bifocal perspective underscore the ambiguities of subject locations in physical and mental spaces. Rather than unstable or tenuous, the subject positions Woodman creates in her photographs are visibly flexible, plastic, working within the interstices of the visible. It is owing to these ambiguities that her work outgrows feminist readings of the 1970s and the 1980s, which pose the female figure as unhinged from conventional frames. The plasticity of the body and Woodman’s visual reflection on notions of displacement can indeed be read as indicative of a more flexible understanding of subject position, one in which solutions are being worked out within given frames (very much like the imposed assignments of the problem sets). These are solutions that subvert systems of geometry, optics, and other, from the inside, as it were. Or from an intermediary perspective imagined within a series of given elements. Woodman uses ambiguity of perspective not only as a challenging technical device for photography, but also as a signifier for one’s positioning both in a known, confined space and in space unknown. Instead of a flight from reality, this device suggests ways of reaching it, imaginatively. The associations between the blur as a photographic form and the unconscious are multiple, as we have seen in the previous chapters. A technical accident which can reveal latent potential (visually, at least, if not symbolically), the blur has been used by

178

Touching Surfaces

Michals to record the body’s fading away over infinetisemal portions of time. Instead, Woodman uses this form of dematerialization of the image to underscore the progressive appearance of visible forms, to give another visibility to the body, to test, reveal, and enlarge its possibilities of expression. Whereas Michals focuses, as we have seen, on time, on “now becoming then”, Woodman’s photographs seem to be all about space. Bodies or objects traversing spaces produce the visual effect of time being compressed. But is that indeed possible: to trick time? Technically, in photography (not unlike in actual life) the spectrum of possibilities at hand is rather limited. Through a photographic paradox, however, visually, they can be very diverse. Several time units are in fact incorporated in the blurred image due to a simple technical imperative: the longer the stretch of time the photograph covers (the exposure time), the more dissolved the silhouette, and consequently, the more extended the space the figure occupies in the photograph. With Michals, we have seen to what extent the camera can bringing movement into visibility. Woodman has drawn from such uses of the blur the possibilities of the figural dissolve to figure passages between external and internal realities, mingling metaphoric and literal references to explore not only changes within the subject, but also how the subject (the figure) can change in relation to space. Instead of staring at a subject performing in a familiar space, as Cumming does by photographing Nettie in her apartment, Woodman combines several spatial planes in a photograph (mirror, glass case) to engage the viewer into following a figure reaching out for space, moving, drawing a repertory of possibilities. A puzzling perception of time results from this combination of spaces, one in which future and past are condensed in a fleeting image. Though unsettling, somnambulistic, her way of dramatizing the space and time continuum through discontinuity is perceptually close to actual time experiences which simply do not emerge into awareness because of their speed. It also recalls more or less common optical illusions requiring accommodations in the perception of objects or sometimes figures by means of progressive referential recategorizations. Significantly, Woodman’s photographs are not doctored. She photographs what is there. Consequently, the blur effect results exclusively from the capture of the (often deliberately intensified) speed of the moving presence (figure, clothes, tissue) and from the

Performing Corpo-Realities

179

prolonged time of exposure. However, the powerful fictional character of these images comes from her inventive use of the possibilities of the photographic device, often combined with a preliminary rough staging of the elements to be photographed. Woodman therefore intervenes not on the taken photograph but on the real. Although the corporeal latitudes (the body released from gravity, or its metonymical presence: a dress, a scarf floating within a door frame) seem to be flattened as a result of the figural dissolve, a new sense of volume obtains from this optical illusion. This sense of volume results precisely from the inversion of foreground and background. It is a consequence of the paradoxical visual relationship between depth and surface produced by the juxtaposition of different portions of space, or by the combination of different spaces and various tactile textures. Regarded from this perspective, photographic ambiguity becomes a tool for precision. The less consistent the body, the stronger the illusion. As if to prevent the figure from complete dissolution, Woodman uses a series of framing devices: door frames, window panes, museum showcases, or geometrical figures drawn with the marker on the discrete images of contact sheets, all of which bring forth the contrast between solid and soft tactile surfaces. As Ann Daly has pointed out, Woodman explores “the palpable and ruinous properties of space – its potential to disrupt and dissolve gestalt or form through an extravagant dissipation and annihilation” (Baker et al. 2003: 60). It is precisely the physical gestalts or forms she disrupts, I would argue, that smooth the progress of inner forms or gestalts into visibility. As Krauss notes, “she internalized the problem, subjectivized it, rendered it as personal as possible” (1999: 162). The particular technical question of the series On Being an Angel (Providence, R.I.), being, as Krauss suggests, to photograph something that does not exist. Drawing from Italian statuary representations of angels, Woodman materializes in this series that particular problem through various enactments and embodiments (postures of her own body, but also tissues floating in the air). Instead of re-presenting a canonic figure in art history which, we recall, Tenneson referred to as “another form of consciousness”, Woodman figures out optical and tactile possibilities of relating to it through a variety of positions in actual space evocative of mental images (memories of such representations as already formalized referents; mental images associated, or not, to them; fictional constructs stirred

180

Touching Surfaces

by them or emerging spontaneously from the situation of the photographic session). The perceptual mode proposed by Woodman’s photographs originating in visual ambiguities does not reproduce the logic of the directly visible. Instead, it foregrounds the alliance of eye, body, and brain cells at work in the optical sensory mechanics. This mode equally animates the photographs in which she produces an optical illusion of puzzling spatial planes by means other than the figural dissolve. A photograph in the series New York, 1979-1980, evocative of the enigmatic scratches on Bellocq’s glass plates, translates a historical enigma into a visual interplay of figure and ground, volume and flatness. The photograph shows a young woman placed off-center in the composition in the corner of an empty room, at the angle of the wall and the door. She is on her toes, arms uplifted and stretched towards an upper plane (the ceiling is framed out of the picture). The visual weight of the composition is carried by two dark parallel irregular shapes hanging somehow loosely in the picture, one of which seems to be cut into the nude body. At a closer look, the two abstract dark shapes or accidents that catch the viewer’s gaze by way of contrast with the soft lighting in the rest of the photograph turn out to be two black fox furs hanging on a rope (they were red, we find out in Subrin’s film, when she takes long shots of the collection of objects Woodman was working with). Though placed on the foreground, because of the light coming from a window on the left side (no artificial lighting in this photograph) the two irregular elongated dark shapes appear flattened and thus they create the illusion of two nonfigurative hollows, one of which seems to be cut into the nude, the other into the wall. Through this optical reciprocation of full and hollow shapes, Woodman interprets here the enigmatic layers of cracks and scratches on Bellocq’s “Storyville portraits”11 that I have evoked earlier (20). What in Bellocq’s photographs was the result of 11 Woodman reconsiders another Bellocq photograph in her “Polka Dots, 1975-1976”, where she displaces the visual enigma of the erasure on the woman’s crop of hair in Bellocq’s photograph and refigures it as a non-figurative dark scratch on the wall. The blurred figure in a flower dress suggestive of wallpaper recalls the butterfly the woman in Bellocq’s photograph is scratching on the wall. Incidentally, the same Bellocq photograph has been used by Geneviève Cadieux in a diptych entitled “La Blessure d’une cicatrice ou les Anges” (The Wound of a Scar or the Angels), 1991.

Performing Corpo-Realities

181

various accidents and of the much speculated on mysterious malefic intervention of a hand on the glass plate, becomes here only the illusion of a hollow which turns out to be just another form of substance that adds volume to the photograph. Here the subject writes its own presence in space as the two dark shapes unfold like openings into an unfathomable interiority. Metaphorically, this inversion between surface and depth alludes to the photographic process itself, to its revealing latent images through the inversion of the negative. The dark shapes come forth with intensity not by virtue of their position in the foreground but rather owing to the optical effect they produce, an effect which is intensified by the possibility of decoding them as figurative referents. In order to decode these shapes literally (as two fox furs hanging on a rope in front of a nude placed eccentrically at a certain distance), the viewer has to get closer to the photograph (the photographs, we remember, being of small format, when exposed, they necessarily require the viewer’s moving back and forth in space, accommodating various perceptions of the image). An entire remote fabric of unseen, imperceptible or diffusely identified shapes zooms into view engaging the corporeal subjectivity of the viewer who has to follow the displacement and restructuring of elements operated by Woodman in this photograph, which, like her other work, turns out to be more than a simple formal academic exercise. “The problem set”, notes Krauss, “has become a medium in which to think” (1999: 177). Thinking through photography gives Woodman the possibility to create images of the becoming self at a distance from the clichés of adolescence as split or divided, to the same extent to which Joyce Tenneson’s photographs diverge from the tropes of fragmentation commonly used with reference to perceptions of the older body. The space of the photograph extended by way of visual ambiguity is also a metonymy of larger spaces in which the subject develops, grows up. How do such disruptions of photographic conventions and categories as those operated by Woodman inform us about the role images may have in locating the subject’s own idiom, and also in outlining the subject’s place in more extended frameworks?

182

Touching Surfaces

20. E.J. Bellocq, “Storyville Portrait”, Plate 41, ca. 1912. Copyright Lee Friedlander. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

183

Performing Corpo-Realities

2. Photography, Time, and the Body in Space Pretend you are made of air. Joanna Scott

It is essential to underline that in Woodman’s work the exploration of the self is concomitant with her investigation of the photographic medium, of its representative and imaginative possibilities. Cultural studies oriented readings of her photographs have underlined the unsettling quality of her viewing positions in terms of gender roles (Solomon-Godeau in Woodman 1992 and Chadwick 1998). Art critics have however highlighted a more subtle dimension of her treatment of the photographic medium. Adam D. Weinberg, for instance, notes that “Woodman’s photographs also undermine traditional temporal assumptions”, along with the fact that she uses “the transparent, transitional, and transformational qualities of time exposures, together with a host of symbolic and thematic elements, to free the viewer from a single transcriptive understanding of photography” (1989: 147; emphasis added). (Significantly, Weinberg also points out that the blurring of time levels in Woodman’s photographs affects the perception of time in the sense that the viewer is “neither firmly rooted in the past, nor the present, nor the future”).12 In working out solutions for mental questions, Woodman does not simply reflect on time and space in photography, or in the subject’s maturation. The constraints of the camera also compel her to try out new patterns of the subject’s being in time and space by combining technical skill with improvisation. The resulting photographs bring in touch several surfaces of reality in which the figure acquires varied forms of visibility. They relate to sharp or diffuse perceptions of being or moving in time and space. I have pointed out before the role of spontaneity which Woodman 12 Kathryn Hixson has also highlighted the fact that Woodman’s concerns are

not political and that “she unapologetically and unabashedly uses the female nude to explore her own identity” – and I would add here, her identity as an artist. (1992: 29).

184

Touching Surfaces

incorporates in a method that allows her to visualize fugitive perceptions in spaces that are either in “dissipation and ruin”, as Daly points out (Baker et al. 2003: 57) or in staged, reconstituted, improvised spaces. If we consider Woodman’s trust in spontaneity and a certain lightness that gives such visual weight to her figures, her photographs are not, as Kathryn Hixson has pointed out, “physical portraits that reveal the psyche” (1992: 29). Instead of translating or illustrating psychic realities through physical forms, Woodman approaches time and space through body metaphors. Revealed in the developed photographs are visual possibilities of crossing lines between external and mental spaces, between emotional bodies and bodies of knowledge. In acting in and on the actual scenes that she photographs, Woodman suggests, phantasmatically, the possibilities the subject may have to reach new spaces of experience and knowledge, to act across boundaries. The counterpart of exposing the body as a surface on which social and cultural texts are symbolically inscribed is the possibility of writing one’s own physical and symbolic presence in space. This seems to me by far the most outstanding statement in Woodman’s work. It is also a perspective worth developing in relation to speculative photographs and to perception and knowledge patterns that we can draw from them. In its journey of self-discovery that Woodman depicts photographically, the body reaches out for space, as in the contact sheets for her composition entitled Space2, suggestive of the revelation of another dimension of space, or of another dimension of the subject acting in it. In its groping for space the photographed figure occupies extended surfaces in the frame of the photograph. Consequently, the visual equivocations on how much space the body can cover carry the question of how far photography can follow it. Extent becomes a matter of speed of movement in front of the camera (the speed of the figure’s performance), which reduces the physical body to a thin, milky envelope, a membrane more suggestive of internal textures (a membrane of meaning or of the invisible, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms evoked in the argument to Chapter 3). As we have seen in the case of Woodman’s taking a base in Bellocq’s photograph, the perceptually extended limits of the corporeal expand photography’s bidimensional character and thereby create a symbolic third dimension. By a paradox of pictorial thought, the depth of the

Performing Corpo-Realities

185

photograph is thrust into surface, due to the contrast between the extended time of the exposure and the speed of the moving body. Double or multiple vanishing points upset mono-ocular perspective to suggest multiple viewpoints within one capture, that is in one sequence of perception (and not through montage, manipulation, or doctoring). Symbolically, this photographic deviation reflects on fix subject positions. In his discussion of images formed by means of the old device of camera obscura, Geoffrey Batchen considers the relationship between the inscription of the visible into the physiology and the temporality of the human body at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In that context, he emphasizes the part played by the new form of vision that photography has produced in the configuration of the modern epistemic paradigm. “Scholars were forced to address a newly uncertain relationship between observer and observed”, remarks Batchen, “and to incorporate within their work both the unpredictability of the flesh and the exigencies of time” (1997: 84; emphasis added). We seem to stand now at an interestingly symmetric moment in the history of photography, a turning point in which extreme experiments with the photographic image reenact a similar change in perception to reflect an understanding of knowledge adapted to new realities and technologies informing and reforming them. Paradoxically, a certain release from the corporeal accompanies this change in the epistemic paradigm of the turn of the twenty-first century in the case of speculative visual work (photography or video), such as the release of the bodily ego in Tenneson’s photographs, or Michals’ dematerializations. I would like to point out that these visual forms working against the image, or incorporating its effacement (as in Kuntzel’s video piece) appeal not so much to a deconstructionist view of the subject as image but rather to photography’s possibilities to re-figure and synthesize experience and our consciousness of it. In her re-figurations of the body’s positions in space, Woodman reflects the “unpredictability of flesh and the exigencies of time” Batchen refers to on a mode that surpasses the exclusive domain of adolescent growth or narcissistic musing. One of her unfinished works, The Temple Project, New York, Spring, 1980, epitomizes the inseparable connection between visuality, temporality, and the positioning of the body in space. Printed on blue and sepia sensitive paper used by architects for their drafts, the photographs in this series

186

Touching Surfaces

depict living caryatids, young women wearing around their waist silk analogs of drapery in ancient Greek sculpture. Here, Woodman’s metaphoric and structural approach of a historical model allows us to visualize time as a physical and psychic dimension. Plastic qualities of temporality are worked out in this sequence of images. While the body is metaphorically incorporated into a larger time frame through the historical reference and the panoramic set-up of the project, space – metonymically suggested by the bodies cropped in the photographs – becomes part of an architecture: a structured spatial form. As Kathryn Hixson has pointed out, “the body is an architecture, the supports that literally constitute space” (Woodman 1992: 31). Most of the series of Woodman’s photographs have, instead of titles, names of places attached to them and a time period indication, starting with the earliest photographs, Boulder, Colorado, 1972-1975, to her last series MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire, Summer, 1980. These references locate the present time dimension of the capture into a potential narrative of life experience in a certain space of time and place which is both specific and vague (functioning much as a frame or a series of frames). Yet, in many of her photographs, the body is placed, as we have seen, at the intersection between actual and imaginary spaces. In these photographs, Woodman explores both the transience of life and existence in transition, as if, in order to be creative, life itself had to be conceived as an extended series of transitional spaces. The intermediate states captured in the contact sheets or in the compositions made up of several sequences situate the moment of the capture within an imaginary and imaged temporal continuum. In the 2 printed contact sheet for Space , for instance, are displayed the stages that precede the choice of the one sequence to be enlarged, an image resulting – as the contact sheet shows – from a complex protocol of juxtaposed postures, movements, displacements by which the body inscribes itself in space and occupies several temporal moments and physical modalities. In her earlier photographs, we remember, peeling wallpaper, mildewed walls, derelict interiors, forsaken homes were the locus of fluid imaginary tapestries allowing Woodman to probe into various textures of time and the ways in which it is experienced in the interstices between the physical and the psychic body. Technically focused on an extension of the present, Woodman’s photographs generate a spatial development of the instant

Performing Corpo-Realities

187

in various ways. Either by leafing through layers of time – as in her allusions to past models –, or by representing time embedded in extensions of the photographed figure (through the blur or the series). Her unsettling the fix character of the photographic image highlights the relative character of permanence, and that of impermanence as well. Along with the sensuality of her photographs that brings to surface close-ups of skin-depth emotions, Woodman has also a keen eye for rendering abstractions visible. Paradoxically, this allows her to enhance the tactility of the dissolving body. Similarly, time is visualized as something slippery: a whitish matter, a geometry of smoke caught in its passage (in a door or a window frame, in a mirror, or in dust). Yet, these moving images also reveal permanence (as an impression) and consistency (as remodeled possibilities of shape), as if each movement we performed added up in a fluid continuum, visible by degrees. In Woodman’s photographs, the present is conjugated in the progressive mode: a process unfolding under the beholder’s gaze. “Then at one point I did not need to translate the notes; they went directly to my hands,” reads the title of one of her compositions (done in Providence, Rhode Island, around 1976), the comma at the end of the title suggesting a virtual continuation equally alluded to in the picture (the title comes, in fact, from a note in her diary). Performative aspects in Woodman’s work relate to developments in art history based on crossing boundaries between art forms, between art and other modes of representation (in Some Disordered Interior Geometries, referring to memory objects included in the photograph, she notes: “These things arrived from my grandmothers. They make me think about where I fit in the odd geometry of time” (1981: n. pag.; emphasis added)). Like other photographers of the 1970s and 1980s who have used the blur and the sequence, Woodman anticipates current video techniques of condensing time and space, the real and the virtual. Such works show that, contrary to Paul Virilio’s prediction in his Aesthetics of Disappearance and to other similar positions on visual culture, the speed factor does not destroy the image. Incorporated by artists in modes of imaging temporality and the mutability of signs, the figural dissolve breaks ground for a refiguration of the subject. In such works, technology acts as an ally and not as an enemy of creativity. The

188

Touching Surfaces

apparently disruptive conception of time in the work of such artists as Francesca Woodman or Duane Michals, as Adam Weinberg concludes in his essay “Vanishing Presence”, attempts to reintegrate past, present, and future and thereby create an aesthetic confrontation with the present, an attempt to enlarge it. Dissociated from the present versus past binary, speculative photographs fixate the mutability of existence, the instability of signs (images and art forms included) in a cross-section of representations of individual and collective time zones that capture simultaneous and heterogeneous perceptions. They articulate different time-levels into a “temporal polyphony”, a term employed by Stan Douglas, an artist who works with both still photographs and video versions of the same subjects. In the photographs discussed here, this “temporal polyphony” becomes a technical modality allowing for the representation of multiple aspects of experience and perception that challenge notions related to a single, stable identity, or of a fixed position in physical as well as in symbolic space.13 Although Woodman’s photographs show a condensation of several spatial planes through the extension of the figural dimension, they seem however not to be so much about escaping or surpassing the limits of one’s condition (as feminist readings have insisted), but rather about exploring and defining one’s own scope within a given space. In the contact sheets for Space2 (Study for Space2), for instance, a blurred silhouette ruffles the air with vivid, graphic gestures. In many of the miniature photographs associated kinetically on the contact sheet, the silhouette is inscribed within a geometric figure drawn on the photograph with a marker. The contact sheet is used as a form of serial work. Significantly, in some of the sequences that are less dense, the overlit parts of the body merge with the white surface of the wall. In other sequences, the line of the marker, which interferes with the contours of the human figure, has stopped short. The geometrical figure drawn on the figure does not hem in the body; it 13 In an interview, Douglas comments on the possibility of representing different temporal conditions in one image by “flipping the signs of the screen over time” to show “the splitness of the image”. He also very suggestively describes the technique he used in his video piece The Sandman: “I guess I was trying to establish some kind of temporal polyphony, where you’re able to have two things happening and you’re able to perceive those things simultaneously [...] just as one is able to look at the present and understand how the past lived the way it did” (Douglas 2000: 27; emphasis added).

Performing Corpo-Realities

189

appears instead as an obstacle to go beyond, or a threshold. The human figure performs the role of an acrobat trying to keep its balance (and consistency) as it moves. The sequences of this particular piece highlight a quality present in all of Woodman’s work: a simultaneous sense of continuity and contiguity. The irregular geometries drawn around the figure on the contact sheet suggest an awareness – subsequent to the act – of larger patterns we are creating or interfering with as we move. A tentative form in itself, the contact sheet displays sequences of momentary states that lead to one configuration, one image chosen to be enlarged, an often difficult choice. In Space2, what appears as the somehow conclusive image of the series is the one in which the moving figure has almost regained its contours, only the head (slightly inclined forwards) and the palms are blurred. In the empty room, the acrobat has turned into an actress bowing in front of an imaginary audience at the end of a performance. Matter has coalesced. The performative aspect of Woodman’s photographs, which has been only recently highlighted, is significant in a larger context since it situates her work at the crossroads between two important moments in the history of the visual arts from the second half of the twentieth century.14 And I am on purpose insisting on this aspect in this final chapter since it allows me to underline the relationship between photography and other art forms in connection to the visualization of temporality and of the consciousness of the self over time. Performance emerged as a new art form in the 1960s and the 1970s, a form difficult to situate within the established genres of art history. Generally considered within the larger trend of Conceptualism, performance art has reintroduced in fact the real within the fine arts under the form of a physical experience of the real through the figurative body that had been evacuated by the various abstract trends of the first half of the twentieth-century. Performance art as an established alternative artistic practice had a relatively short existence, among other reasons because of its intentional ephemeral character. One of its major premises – the impossibility to grasp time as an abstraction – became the very obstacle to its preservation. The then emerging art of the video 14 Cf. Notes 1 and 2, p. 160.

190

Touching Surfaces

provided for a while the possibility to record it. Performance artists of the 1970s, such as Vito Acconci or Marina Abramovic, found in video not only the possibility to record the ephemeral performance but also a continuation of their research into the possibility of exhibiting physical time through the body, or of exposing time as a material. The following generations of video artists continued this exploration of the visuality of time, which implies, as Dominique Païni has pointed out, erasing and transforming feelings and conditions (2000: 33-40). The performative, tentative, transient aspect of Woodman’s photographs marks a moment in which speculative photography was redefining its place within the dynamic of art forms, between providing the passing of time with a fixed image and exhibiting the fluidity of time as remodeled by the second generation of video artists who, in the 1980s and 1990s, use the medium for its plastic purposes (Gary Hill, or Bill Viola, in the United States, Stan Douglas, in Canada, or Thierry Kuntzel, in France). It is no accident that Woodman’s work has inspired video artists (and that, ironically, her own photographic work based on a history of representations have now become a model for art students). Woodman herself used video camera either to create short pieces or to test visual possibilities for her photographs. In her video piece, Subrin actually has art students enact Woodman’s strategies of creating the figural dissolve, by moving (that is, performing) in front of the camera in some, or in others, by waiving rapidly a hand placed close to the objective. The main question in Woodman’s approach to photography is a question of perception: how does one feel to be in a certain space, to move in it, not to move, to accommodate one’s body to spatial constraints. The resulting images do not reflect the passage of time, but rather its fluidity, that is to say, the varied shapes time perceptions may take. This concern in her work relates to forms of consciousness we have of time, forms that relate to positions of the body in space, to its ability to upset or relocate frames or boundaries as it moves, “to transform a change of degree into a change of nature” (memento, Powers). It is perhaps because of this formative aspect of time experienced by imperceptible degrees that we become aware of the change of nature only in retrospect. I see in this aspect, one which Woodman’s photographs so poignantly draw attention to, the expression of a new paradigm in the perception of photographs as

Performing Corpo-Realities

191

instruments of identity construction. Instead of nostalgia coming from an attachment to a fixed moment in the past, for Woodman, as for the other artists discussed in this book, photographic thinking is used creatively in the subject’s vital performances to bring psychic patterns to surface, often by way improvisation (that is by relating to perception instead of convention). This notion brings to mind Myrtle Gordon’s solution, at the end of Opening Night, when she has come to terms with the ghost of the adolescent and has integrated the girl’s image into her own generational idiom. This move from conventions to a new perception of the self helps Myrtle surpass her aging and acting block and find the necessary energy to play the part of “the second woman” by improvising, reinventing, adapting the given script. Woodman also rewrites visual photographic scripts by appealing to inner patterns and relying on spontaneity, improvisation, or performance (physical and technical). She recategorizes the chance factor inherent in the photographic process so that it becomes instrumental in the subject’s playing against or with determinations. At a time when the visual critique was focused on social constructionism, Woodman was proposing a more “subtle model of subjectivity”, as Margaret Sundell has suggested (Baker et al. 2003: 59), one that foregrounds, as I have tried to suggest, subject agency. Woodman’s radical approach to corporeal realities helped me articulate photographic representations of the body with an understanding of the subject as an active agent in the creation of its own history, instead of a passive surface on which historical determinations are inscribed. The weight of subject agency that I read in Woodman’s photographs builds up from aesthetic effects emerging in the context of the spontaneity of the creative act subsequently developed into aesthetic strategies. Like the creative efforts of the other photographers, Woodman’s are, as it has been pointed out “not deconstructive, but constructive” (Hixson 1992: 29). In my approach of her work, I have placed the constructive creative dimension in relation to her reflecting on temporality and subject agency with the means provided by photography. Yet, when all has been said and done, in the margins of thought persists the development of her own life that faces us with the question of the end, and, along with it, with the very limits of interpretation.

Coda The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought […] was simply this: that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained – at last! – the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence – the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light. Virginia Woolf

In between the introduction and the conclusion of a book, there are sequences of an initial intuition, what develops from glimpses and flashes of thought. In between these two conventions, there is time. The time the reader takes to read the book, and – multiplied by many – the time it took to be written. In the interim, there is the process of thought and, when the corpus is contemporary with the writing, the concomitant development of new work. By necessity, research on recent material is open-ended. Since the outset of this project in the mid-1990s, new developments in the work of many of the photographers I had chosen to discuss, as well as changes in commercial imagery or in the critical discourse, have prompted me to reconsider the works and to adjust my arguments to changing realities. In the course of writing the book, the issue of aging came inevitably to be subordinated to the wider question of the role of images in the elaboration of subjectivity. We have the habit of looking at photographs as parts of individual or collective narratives. Yet, from its early days, photography has contributed to the deconstruction of the binary opposing subjectivity to objectivity. In my exploration of ways in which speculative photographs and aging illuminate each other, I have therefore considered subjectivity as a factor of consciousness of the self and as such, both an object of exploration and an instrument of access to the photographic object. Consequently,

194

Touching Surfaces

the aesthetic angle dominating the book is placed under the sign of the cognitive dimension. At the same time, the prominence I have given to the relationship between age-selves (and more extensively, my emphasis on connectedness) raises the question of the problematic isolation of aging in the study of art works. The spectrum of that question extends upon the methodological problem of isolating a discrete unity from a heterogeneous field of signifiers without verging on ghettoization. In studying difference and representation at this point in time, how we create categories that are both rigorous and open, and how we think of the relationships between categories – cultural, social, psychological, or aesthetic – seems to me an important path to take, one that cannot ignore the area of consciousness as a many-faceted reality and as a complex concept. In that respect, the history of photography – with its dynamic of genres, questions of representation, editing, or archiving – can help us reconsider current problems of categorization in the approach of art works. By way of conclusion, I would therefore like to insist on the importance of considering photography as an element of individual and not only of social construction. What I have called the fabric of the subject results precisely from essential tensions between technical and symbolic practices, between determinations of various natures and creativity. Many of the photographs discussed here show, for instance, subjects as relating entities in reciprocal autonomy. Instead of subjects whose bodies wear inscriptions of social texts, or time inscriptions, the artists insist on agency. This challenging position, distinct from ideologically oriented studies on photography and grounded in my exploration of the aesthetics and philosophy of art photography, is one of the arguments of the book that I would like to highlight. For the aesthetic, as I have seen it in the photographic works that came to my attention, integrates realities that are often difficult to categorize – such as movement, change, and temporality – into a more comprehensive, more alert consciousness of the self. The aesthetic also brings into public attention creative ways of approaching such complex psychic, physical, and cultural realities such as those related to aging. As these works show, the body does not only carry time along. It is also an active factor in structuring our consciousness of time patterns. By considering the visual problem of positioning the body in reconstructed photographic spaces and temporal frameworks,

Coda

195

the artists discussed here insist on the impossibility of the subject to be fixed within rigid frames of convention, of roles, or canons. Within an aesthetics of the corporeal understood as a larger metaphor for experience, the physical presence “caught” in the photographic image is thereby endowed with the possibility of being an agent instead of a passive medium. Photography too is being transformed in the process. So is our attachment to photographs, when we take the time to look at them. Released from the bodily ego, the figures represented in the works that I have discussed create the illusion of moving through different space levels but also through layers of time. The present captured in the photograph becomes then not the trace of a moment in time (and, implicitly, of a state associated with it) that will no longer be – according to Roland Barthes’ “that-has-been” aspect, or to Susan Sontag’s understanding of photographs as “melancholy objects” –, but an accumulation of instants situated on different temporal planes, which can show in the photograph as a progression of states. In a speculative photograph, the moment that was (a unique moment in the past) is no longer a unique reference point. Like the multiple vanishing points in the multi-ocular perspective that structures space in many photographs, it has outgrown its horizon. And this is a fact difficult to dissociate from our mental habits so ingrained in the understanding of photography as a mimetic medium. In such photographic works, the present is always refigured through the choice of models and of the poses, through the setting and the processing of the image (by the artist, technically, and by the viewer, perceptually). The stress falls on the presence. Similarly, the past is refigured, not as a reminiscence of something that was at a certain point in time, but as a dynamic of varied forms of memory, as a conjunction of patterns of consciousness that interact with actual modes of experience. The distortion of conventions entails, as we have seen, modifications in the perception of photographs, and, more extensively, in our understanding of subject position. Our reading of speculative photographs, I have argued, may restructure our thinking of the real in different ways than documentary photography does, that is, formatively, rather than informatively. This important fact also implies the mental possibility of acting on the reality of the subject, the possibility of changing its representations, a notion which I have highlighted in the last chapters but which is inherent to all the photographic work considered in the book.

196

Touching Surfaces

Over the past decades, photographers have explored the transience of time not discoursively but technically, making of temporality an essential component of their photographic work. In order to materialize the effects of time, Alain Fleisher, for instance, has placed photographs taken from funerary monuments in developing trays filled with a very concentrated developing substance. In contact with light, the effect of the developing process in the dark room is reversed. The images are progressively fading away throughout the duration of the exhibition so that, with each view, one sees the image in a different state of visibility, to its eventual complete effacement. Conversely, Heather Ackroyd and Daniel Harvey have produced photographic images that emerge on unexpected surfaces by using a special ephemeral photographic process which alludes to the “the pencil of nature”, the metaphor employed by William Henry Fox Talbot in the nineteenth century to describe his attempts to fix images imprinted on paper durably. The photographs of Ackroyd and Harvey are printed on grass grown from seed, a living, developing surface that records as it grows the shadings of a projected negative. Photosynthesis replaces here chemical pigments in a literal expression of an aesthetics of the ephemeral that many art forms have privileged in the second half of the twentieth century. In photographic works made by artists, we see how aspects of subject position and consciousness of the self can be illuminated by photographic technique, particularly by deviating from conventions of photographic representation within the constraints imposed by the medium. What all the works discussed in the book have in common is that they are engaged in exploring both the possibilities and the limits of the body, and I have taken this phenomenological engagement with the bodily experience as a signifier of subject growth. The performative aspect evolving from such explorations of technical and physical constraints, which became predominant particularly towards the end of the book, is by no means a manifestation of masquerade practices or of purely deconstructive projects. Performing with the camera or in front of the camera enables the artists to bring into the visual field more subtle textures that are suggestive of the subject’s exchanges with its own cultural, physical, or psychological determinations.

Coda

197

Consequently, I have considered consciousness not exclusively as a mental process, but also as a way of exploring, surpassing, or containing the limitations of the material body. In other words, consciousness is understood as a phenomenological presence represented in the physical body, a processual presence that connects the physical and the psychic body. With Dine, we have seen the coming into consciousness of images of different age-selves, and ways of connecting them. Central to Michals’ work is the exploration of consciousness of movement, that is, of infinitesimal changes of the subject in imperceptible time. Tenneson calls our attention to an enhanced consciousness of emotions out of which she has built her aesthetic idiom. Like Michals, she reminds us that resorting to conflicting emotional zones and formalizing them even by sometimes intensifying the sentimental aspect can be a way of touching sensitive surfaces of contact between the physical and the psychic, as well as a means of touching a larger audience. The evocation of the video pieces by Kuntzel and Tanaka reflects on the alternative apparition and disappearance of images as signifiers of a consciousness of the self beyond memory, while Dine and Woodman seem to attempt to stabilize it from a flux of images. Explicitly or intuitively, in all the works considered here, consciousness relates to bringing perceptions of the self – some conflicting, others of variable consistencies – into visibility by deviating from photographic conventions in order to provide varied visual understandings of the aging body. They concern ultimately, as it has been said about Woodman’s work “what one feels as a body as opposed to how one looks” (Baker 2003: 59). At the same time, the exploration of photographic works from the perspective of the category of aging also speaks of visualization as a practice whose dimensions are aesthetic, ethic as well as social, even as the notion of invisible does not have here the predominant cultural meaning of absence of representation, but rather a more diffuse sense denoting areas which are not easily perceptible and, hence, representable. The aesthetic visualizations of aging, I have tried to suggest, can rebound on its ethic and social dimensions even as they do not relate to them in a literal way. At the end of the first chapter I have referred to this form of consciousness metaphorically through the notion of “the poetic body”, and I have turned this notion emanating from fictional visualizations of the subject into a mental construct that enabled me to relate the

198

Touching Surfaces

physical to the psychic body. The performative dimension of the photographs discussed in the subsequent chapters has revealed the importance of “the plastic body”: a metaphoric concept for representations of the subject that foreground the flexibility, namely, the adaptability of the body. More recently, the aging body has become visible in commercial photography as an acceptable body, as a form of new normality. The strategies of representation in the two fields are no longer, as we have seen, so different. However, through deviating techniques, speculative photographs propose forms that reach beyond acceptability, to accompany the subject in its synaesthesic accommodation with varied versions of the physical body. The underlying assumption of this argument is that, by producing changes in perception through the technically and plastically extended possibilities of the photographic medium, speculative photographs carry the possibility of transforming our vision, in the optical sense as well as in its larger sense of world view. As I approach the end of this book, Bellocq’s photograph evoked in the first chapter comes back to mind. And with it, Robert Grudin’s remark in his Time and the Art of Living, that “the real crux of aging [is] that the pain of growing old lies specifically in the fact that part of us does not grow old” (1982: 113). Some twelve years ago, at the outset of my research on speculative photographs and aging, I was asked at a conference about precisely which part I thought that could be. My reply was hesitant since it seemed difficult to determine whether such location was physical, psychic, or both. In the process of writing the book, the answer emerged progressively: each of us locates the part of us that does not grow old differently, physically or phantasmatically, not as a reminder of the past, but rather as a detail, or a punctum as Barthes would have it, which reorganizes our perception of the self. Year after year, in the summer, I have spent many hours by the sea contemplating bodies in the variety of their expressions, shapes, and ages. Young ones – often stereotyped, or not yet wearing their own signature. And older ones, sometimes very old women and men exposing themselves to the sun and the sea air without restraint yet with modesty. I have tried to focus on what, in old age, each body had preserved from former age-selves: some a youthful gaze, or an inclination of the head, others slender, elegant legs; some well-stretched shoulders, or a firm design of the

Coda

199

back, others a bony ankle or wrist echoing adolescent anatomies. In its dissymmetry of signifiers of age, the syntax of the older body seems to retain the memory of a shape that I read not so much as a token of the past, but rather as a presence, a persistence. In a photograph, such presences can represent metaphoric sites of a congruous consciousness of the self. From looking at the photographs that have accompanied me in the process of writing (… and aging) I have drawn an understanding of the variety of such locations based on photographic processes and procedures that change our notions of beauty or the aesthetic, and, perhaps, our very perception of temporality. From that perspective, the part of us that does not grow old can be, rather than a source of pain, a triggering factor in the process of recreating ourselves, even as we struggle against the limitations of aging and learn how to come to terms with them.

200

Touching Surfaces

21. Jacqueline Hayden, Figure Model Series (3B), 1993. Unique silver gelatin print, 84 x 52 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Works Cited Arnheim, Rudolf. 1969. Visual Thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press. Avedon, Richard. 1993. An Autobiography. New York: Random House. Baker, George et al. 2003. ‘Francesca Woodman reconsidered: a conversation with George Baker, Ann Daly, Nancy Davenport, Laura Larson, and Margaret Sundell’ in Art Journal 62 (No.2): 56-67. Barthes, Roland. [1980] 1981 Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography (tr. Richard Howard). New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Basting, Anne. 1998. The Stages of Age. Performing Age in Contemporary American Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Batchen, Geoffrey. 1997. Burning With Desire. The Conception of Photography. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Bellocq, Ernst J. [Ca. 1912] [1970] 1996. Photographs from Stroyville, the Red-Light District of New Orleans. Reproduced from prints made by Lee Friedlander. Introduction by Susan Sontag. Interviews edited by John Szarkowski. New York: Random House. Benjamin, Walter. [1931] 1979. ‘A Small History of Photography’ in One Way Street. (tr. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter). London: New Left Books. Benjamin, Walter. [1938] 2007. Berlin Childhood. (tr. Howard Eiland). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. [1896] 1991. (tr. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer). New York: Zone Books. Bianciotti, Hector. 1994. ‘Guibert, par-delà la mort’ in Le Monde (30 September 1994). Blau, Herbert. 1986. ‘The Makup of Memory in the Winter of Our Discontent’ in Woodward and Schwartz (1986): 13-36. Bollas, Christopher. 1992. Being a Character. Psychoanalysis & Self Experience. New York: Hill and Wang. Bollas, Christopher. 1987. The Shadow of the Object. Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia University Press Brassaï. [Gyula]. 1997. Marcel Proust sous l'emprise de la photographie. Préface de Roger Grenier. Paris: Gallimard. Brassaï. [Gyula]. 1967. Transmutations. Exhibition catalogue. Lacoste: ed. Galerie Les Coutavalas. Brunet, François. 2000. La Naissance de l’idée de photographie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bryson, Norman. 1993. ‘House of Wax’ in Krauss (1993): 216-23. Cameron, Julia Margaret. 1989. The Art of Photography. 1839-1889. Exhibition catalogue. Mike Weaver ed. Princeton: Yale University Press.

202

Touching Surfaces

Cassavettes, John. 1978. Opening Night. Chadwick, Whitney (ed.). 1998. Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and SelfRepresentation. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Chevrier, Jean-François and James Lingwood (eds.). 1989. Une autre objectivité/Another Objectivity. Milan: Idea Books. Chevrier, Jean-François. 1995. Lecture presented at the Jeff Wall Exhibition. Paris, Jeu de Paume. Cohen, Abigail. 2003. One Cycle of My Journey. New York: Light Warriors Press. Coplans. John. 1987. A Body of Work. New York: Printed Matter. Coplans, John. 2003. Body Parts. A Self-Portrait. New York: PowerHouse. Costa, Mario. 1990. ‘Photographie et phénomènologie de la présence’ in La Recherche Photographique 7: 17-9. Covey, Herbert C. 1991. Images of Older People in Western Art and Society. New York: Praeger. Cristofovici, Anca. 1996. ‘Un frémissement de miroirs, la beauté inattendue: les mondes photographiques de Geneviève Cadieux’ in Masques et miroirs dans le monde anglo-saxon. Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen. Cumming, Donigan. 1995. A Prayer For Nettie. Video piece. Cumming, Donigan. 1996. Pretty Ribbons. Hans-Michael Herzog ed. Zürich: Editions Stemmle. Cumming, Donigan. 1999. ‘Continuity and Rupture’ in Screen Off. On line at: http://www.horschamp.qc.ca./new_offscreen/cumming/htlm (consulted 14.07.2004). Damisch, Hubert. 2001. La Dénivelée: à l’épreuve de la photographie. Paris: Seuil. Diamondstein Lee, Barbara. 1981. Visions and Images: American Photographers on Photography. New York: Rizzoli. Dickey, James. 1968. ‘False Youth: Two Seasons (Winter)’ in Poems. 1957-1967. New York: Collier Books. Dine, Jim. 1995. Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture. 1973-1992. Exhibition catalogue with a text by Svenrobert Lundquist. Boras: Boras Kunstmuseum. Dine, Jim. 1997. Photographs. Exhibition catalogue with an essay by Andy Grundberg. London: Allan Cristea Gallery. Dine, Jim. 1998. Photographies récentes. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Maison Européenne de la Photographie. Dine, Jim. 1999. Color Photographs Exhibition catalogue with a text by James L. Enyeart. New York: Pace Wildenstein. Dine, Jim. 2001. Conversation with the author (December 20). Dine, Jim. 2003. The Photographs, So Far. Four vols. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag; Paris: Maison Européenne de la Photographie. Douglas, Stan. 2000. ‘Alienation and Proximity’ an Interview by Robert Storr in Art Press 262 (2000) 26-28. Draaisma, Douwe. 2000. Metaphors of Memory. A History of Ideas About the Mind. (tr. Paul Vincent). Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press. Draaisma, Douwe. 2004. Why Life Speeds Up as You Grow Older. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dunas, Jeff. 1987. ‘Joyce Tenneson’ in Collectors’s Photography Magazine June: 102.

Works Cited

203

Durand, Régis. 1990. La Part d’ombre. Essais sur l’expérience photographique. Paris: La Différence. Durand, Régis. 1994. Le Temps de l’image. Essais sur la photographie : 1990-1994. Paris : Marval. Duras, Margueritte. 1996. Interview in Le Monde (5 March 1996). Edelman, Hope. 1994. Motherless Daughters. The Legacy of Loss. London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd. Ehrenzweig, Anton. 1967. The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press. Featherstone, Mike (ed.). 1995. Images of Aging. Cultural Representations of Later Life. London: Routledge. Flynn, Ann-Gerard. 1994. ‘Photographer Uncovers Beauty of Age’ in Union News (12.12. 1994). Frueh, Joanna. 1997. ‘Visible Difference: Women Artists and Aging’ in Pearsall (1997): 197-220. Gass, William H. 1996. ‘Catherine Wagner’s Laboratories’ in Catherine Wagner. Art and Science Investigating Matter. Exhibition catalogue. Washington Univeristy Gallery of Art/Nazraeli Press. Gaucheraud, Henri. [1839]. 1980. ‘The Fine Arts: A New Discovery’ (tr. Beaumont Newhall) in Photography : Essays and Images, Beaumont Newhall ed.. New York: Museum of Modern Art:17. Gernsheim, Helmut and Clive Bell (eds.) 1975. Julia Margaret Cameron. Her Life and Photographic Work. New York: Aperture. Giacomelli, Mario. 1995. Giacomelli: La forma dentro, fotografie 1952-1995. Milano: Charta. Goldberg, Vicki (ed). 1981. Photography in Print. Writings from 1816 to the Present, Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press. Goldberg, Vicki. 1997. ‘Photos That Lie – and Tell the Truth’ in New York Times (16 March 1997). Greer, Germaine. 1992. The Change. New York: Knopf. Griffin, Susan. 1992. A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War. New York: Doubleday. Grudin, Robert. 1982. Time and the Art of Living. New York: Ticknor & Fields. Grundberg, Andy. 1989. ‘Now, the Camera’s Eye Turns Inward’ in The New York Times (28 May 1989). Guibert, Hervé. [1980] 2005. Suzanne et Louise (Roman-Photo). Paris: Gallimard. Guibert, Hervé. 1984. Le Seul visage. Paris: Minuit. Guibert, Hervé. 1990. La Pudeur ou l’impudeur. Video piece. Guibert, Hervé. 1994. La Piqûre d'amour et d'autres textes suivi de La Chair fraîche. Paris: Gallimard. Gullette, Morganroth, Margaret. 1988. Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel: Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble, Anne Tayler, and John Updike. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gunning, Tom. 1995. ‘Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, and Photography’s Uncannny’ in Petro 1995): 42-71. Hamon, Philippe. 2001. Imageries. Littérature et image au XIXe siècle. Paris: José Corti.

204

Touching Surfaces

Haworth-Booth, Mark (ed.). 2000. ‘Photography and Time: A Special Millennium Issue’ in Aperture, Winter, 158 . Hayden, Jacqueline. 1991-1996. Figure Model Series in Woodward (1999): 227231. Hayden, Jacqueline. 1997-1998. Ancient Statuary Series. On line at: http://www.zonezero.com Hayden, Jacqueline. 1996. Press Release. Center for Twentieth Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. 10 February. Hayden, Jacqueline. 2008. Artist’s statement on Cuerpos Voluminosa y Vieja. Hill, Gary. 1988. ‘Primarily Speaking’ (1981-1983), text of video installation in Communications 48: 55. Hinsey, Ellen. 1996. ‘The Body in Youth’. Cities of Memory. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hixson, Kathryn. ‘Essential Magic: the Photographs of Francesca Woodman’ in Hixson (1992): 28-31. Hoban, Russell. 1993. The Moment under the Moment. London: Picador. Kozloff, Max. 1984. ‘Spoiled by Light. Detached Thoughts on Photography and Recollection’ in European Photography 5.3: 19-25. Kozloff, Max. 1989. ‘The Etherealized Figure and the Dream of Wisdom’ in Weinberg (1989): 31-62. Krauss, Rosalind. 1990. Le Photographique. Pour une théorie des écarts. (tr. Marc Bloch and Jean Kempf). Paris: Macula. Krauss, Rosalind. 1993. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Krauss, Rosalind. 1993. ‘Cindy Sherman: Untitled’ in Sherman (1993): 17-212. Krauss, Rosalind. 1999. Bachelors. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT. Kuntzel, Thierry. 1988. ‘Notes de Travail’ in Communications: Special Issue on Video, 48: 149. Kuntzel, Thierry. 1992. Nostos III. Video installation. Kuntzel, Thierry. 2006. Title TK. Anne-Marie Duguet ed. Paris: Anarchives; Nantes: Musée de Beaux Arts. Lacan, Jacques. 1988. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. (tr. Sylvana Tomaselli) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lapierre, Nicole. 1983. Le Continent Gris. Vieillesse et vieillissement. Communications No. 37. Paris: Seuil. Le Roux, Philippe. 1987. ‘L’irréel photographique’ in La Recherche Photographique 3: 71-6. Lemagny, Jean-Claude. 1985. ‘Le retour du flou’ in Art Press. 98: 21. Lemagny, Jean-Claude. 1994. La matière. L’ombre. La fiction. Photographie contemporaine. Paris: Nathan. Lingwood. James. 1994. ‘Different Times’ in The Epic & the Everyday. Contemporary Photographic Art. Exhibition catalogue. London: The South Bank Centre. Manchot, Melanie. 1998. Look at You Loving Me. Bilder Meiner Mutter. 1995-1998. Texte Katja Blomberg und Val Williams. Basel: Friedrich Reinhardt Verlag. Marshall, Leni. 2006. NWSA Journal. Vol.18, No. 1. Spring. Special issue on Aging.

Works Cited

205

Martin, Rosy and Kay Goodbridge. 2001. ‘Outrageous Agers’. On line at: http://www.focalpoint.org.uk/agers.htm (consulted 02.02.2005) Maynard, Patrick. 1997. The Engine of Visualization. Thinking Through Photography. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. McConkey, James. 1996. The Anatomy of Memory. An Anthology. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meatyard, Ralph Eugene. 1983. Caught Moments – New Viewpoints. Exhibition catalogue. London: Olympus Gallery. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1996. Le Visible et l’invisible. Paris: Gallimard. Merrill, James. 1986. ‘Divine Poem’ Recitative. Prose by James Merrill. San Francisco: North Point Press. Merton, Thomas. 1996. Qtd. in Negotiating Rupture. The Power of Art to Transform Lives. Exhibition catalogue. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art.: 88. Michals, Duane. 1971. The Journey of the Spirit after Death. New York: Winter House Ltd. Michals, Duane. 1976. Real Dreams. Photo Stories. Danbury, N.H.: Addison House. Michals, Duane and Theodore Haimes. 1978. ‘Duane Michals’, Video piece. Michals, Duane. 1978. Merveilles d’Egypte. Paris: Denoël/Filipacchi. Michals, Duane. 1981. Changments: Photographies et texte de Duane Michals. Paris: Hercher. Michals, Duane. 1984. Sleep and Dream. New York: Lustrum Press. Michals, Duane.1989. Slow Upside Down Inside Out and Backwards. Fairy Tunes for Children. New York: Sidney Janis Gallery. Michals, Duane. 1991. Duane Michals. Video piece. Michals, Duane. 1992. Eros & Thanatos. Santa Fe: Twin Palm Books. Michals, Duane. 2001. Questions Without Answers. Santa Fe: Twin Palm Books. Michals, Duane. 2003. The House I Once Called Home. London: Enitharmon. Michals, Duane. 2006. Foto Follies: How Photography Lost Its Virginity on the Way to the Bank. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag. Michals, Duane. 2006. Conversation with the author (July 2). Milosz, Czeslaw. 1984. The Separate Notebooks. (tr. Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky). New York: Ecco Press. Moore, Marianne. 1967. ‘Armor’s Undermining Modesty’ in The Complete Poems. New York: Viking Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1991. ‘A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman’ in New Left Review 188: 136-51. Newhall, Beaumont. 1980. Photography : Essays and Images. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Nixon, Nicholas. 1988. Pictures of People. Introduction by Peter Galassi. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Nixon, Nicholas. 1991. People with AIDS. Boston: David R. Godine. Nouhaud, Jean-Pierre. 1987. Blancs d'oubli: Onze photos de Suzanne Lafont. Royaumont: Editions de Royaumont. Païni, Dominique. 2000. ‘Le Retour du flâneur’/The Return of the Flâneur’, Art Press 255 (March): 33-40. Parry Janis, Eugenia. 1989. ‘The Bug in Amber and the Dance of Life’ in Weinberg 1989: 9-30.

206

Touching Surfaces

Pearsall, Marilyn. (ed.). 1997. The Other within Us: Feminist Explorations of Women and Aging. New York: Westview Press. Pedro, Patrice (ed.). 1995. Fugitive Images. From Photography to Video. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Phelan, Peggy. 2002. ‘Francesca Woodman’s Photography: Death and the Image One More Time’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 27, (4). On line at: www. journals.uchicago.edu Philbrick, Harry et al. (ed.) 1999. The Nude in Contemporary Art. Exhibition catalogue. Ridgefield, Conn.: Ardrich Museum of Art. Plath, Sylvia. 1981. ‘The Mirror’ in The Collected Poems. Ted Hughes ed.. London: Faber & Faber. Pollack, Barbara. 2000. ‘The Genetic Esthetic: DNA, MRIs, and X-Ray Visions’ in ARTnews, 99, (4): 36-7. Pollack, Terry. 2006. Conversation with the author (March 5). Pontbriand, Chantal. 1990. ‘Language is a Skin’ in Geneviève Cadieux. Canada: XLIV Biennale di Venezia. Exhibition catalogue. Montréal: Parachute & Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal. Posner, Helaine. 1998. ‘Negotiating Boundaries in the Art of Yayoi Kusama, Ana Mendeita and Francesca Woodman’ in Chadwick: 157-171. Powers, Richard. 1985. Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance. New York: Morrow & Co. Powers, Richard. 1991. The Gold Bug Variations. New York: Morrow & Co. Raffel, Dawn. 2002. Carrying the Body. New York: Scribner. Raffel, Dawn. 2002. ‘Silver Girls’ in Oprah Magazine May 2002: 262-267. Richir, Marc. 1993. Le Corps. Essai sur l’intériorité. Paris: Hatier. Rilke, Rainer Maria. [1923] 1963. Duino Elegies. (tr. J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender). New York: Norton. Saint Denis, Hervey de. [1867] 1977. Les Rêves et les moyens de les diriger. Paris: Editions d’Aujourd'hui. Santayana, George. [Ca. 1912]. 1981. ‘The Photograph and the Mental Image’ in Goldberg: 259-66. Sarraute, Nathalie. [1939] 1957. Tropismes. Paris: Minuit. Scott, Joanna. 2000. Make Believe. New York: Little, Brown & Co. Shafto, Michael. 1985. How We Know. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Sherman, Cindy. 1993. Cindy Sherman 1975-1993. Text by Rosalind Krauss, with an essay by Norman Bryson. New York: Rizzoli. Sherman, Cindy. 2003. Cindy Sherman. Essay by Rochelle Steiner. Story by Lorrie Moore. Exhibition catalogue. London: Serpentine. Sherman, Cindy. 2006. Cindy Sherman. Textes par Régis Durand, Jean Pierry Criqui, Laura Mulvey. Exhibition catalogue, Jeu de Paume. Paris: Flammarion. Sibony, Daniel. 1990. ‘Une technique de l’instant ou la machine à clicher’ in La Recherche Photographique 7: 69-73. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. 1986. ‘Just Like a Woman’ in Francesca Woodman: Photographic Work (1986) . Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York: Picador. Soulages, François (ed.). 1986. Photographie et inconscient. Paris: Osiris. States, Bert O. 1988. The Rhetoric of Dreams. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Works Cited

207

Subrin, Elizabeth. 2000. The Fancy. Video piece. Tanaka, Janice. 1990. Memories from the Amnesia Department. Video piece. Tanaka, Janice. 1992. Who’s Gonna Pay for These Donuts Anyway. Video piece. Tannenbaum, Barbara et al. (ed.). 1991. Ralph Eugene Meatyard: An American Visionary. Akron Art Museum, Ohio/New York: Rizzoli. Tenneson, Joyce. Artist’s site on line at: http://www.tenneson.com Tenneson, Joyce. 1983. Photographies. Avec Postfaces de Philip K. Jason et Claude Nori. Paris: Contrejour. Tenneson, Joyce. 1983. Photographs. Boston: Godine. Tenneson, Joyce. 1986. Exposures. Photographs. Exhibition catalogue. Boca Raton Museum, Florida. Tenneson, Joyce. 1993. Transformations. Introduction by Vicki Goldberg. Interview by David Tannon. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.. Tenneson, Joyce. 1997. Illuminations. Introduction by Anne Roiphe. New York: Little, Brown & Co. Tenneson, Joyce. 2000. Light Warriors. New York: Little, Brown & Co. Tenneson, Joyce. 2002. Wise Women: A Celebration of Their Insights, Courange, and Beauty. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Tenneson, Joyce. 2004. Amazing Men: Courage, Insight, Endurance. New York: Bulfinch. Townsend, Chris and Edmund Coulthard (eds.). 1998. Vile Bodies. Photography and the Crisis of Looking. Münich/London: Prestel Verlag/Channel Four. Townsend, Chris. 2006. Francesca Woodman. London: Phaidon Press. Vine, Richard. 1996. ‘Wall’s Wager’ in Art in America April: 86-93. Viola, Bill. 1995. Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House. Writings 1973-1994. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Virilio, Paul. 1991. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. (tr. Philip Beitchman). New York: Semiotext(e). Vogue UK, May 2000. Wall, Jeff. 1996. Jeff Wall. Thierry de Duve, Arielle Pelenc, Boris Groys (eds.) London: Phaidon Presss. Waxman, Barbara Frey. 1990. From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature. New York: Greenwood Press. Weinberg, Adam D. (ed.). 1989. Vanishing Presence. Exhibition catalogue. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis/New York: Rizzoli. Weinberg, Adam D. 1989. ‘Vanishig Presence’ in Weinberg (1989): 63-152. Winnicott, D.W. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock/Routledge. Winnicott, D.W. 1986. Home Is Where We Start From. London: Pelican. Wollheim, Richard. 1993. The Mind and Its Depths. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Woodman, Francesca. 1981. Some Disturbed Inner Geometries. Daniel Tucker ed. Philadelphia: Synapse Press. Woodman, Francesca. 1986. Francesca Woodman: Photographic Work. Exhibition catalogue. Wellesley, Mass.: The Wellesley College Museum/New York: Hunter Art Gallery. Woodman, Francesca. 1992. Francesca Woodman. Photographische Arbeiten /Photographic Works. Exhibition catalogue. With essays by Kathryn Hixson and Harm Lux. Zürich: Shedhalle.

208

Touching Surfaces

Woodman, Francesca. 1998. Francesca Woodman. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain et Actes Sud. Woodward, Kathleen (ed.). 1999. Figuring Age. Women, Bodies, Generations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Woodward, Kathleen and Muray M. Schwartz (eds.). 1986. Memory and Desire. Aging – Literature – Psychoanalysis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Woodward, Kathleen. 1991. Aging and Its Discontents. Freud and Other Fictions. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Woolf, Virginia. 1925. Mrs Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press. Wyatt-Brown, Anne and Janice Rossen (eds.). 1993. Aging & Gender in Literature. Studies in Creativity. Charlottesville & London: University Press of Virginia. Yates, Frances A. 1966. The Art of Memory. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Index Ackroyd, Heather, 196 aesthetic, circuit, 12, 26, 30; codes, 2 n.*, 44, 65 n. 10, 142; idioms, 71, 127, 153; modes, 130, 140, 153; qualities, 9, 44; reconstruction, 30, 37; strategies, 4, 9, 44, 63, 153, 191; transformation, 121, 127 aesthetic (the), as a category, 1, 9, 12, 32, 51 n. 16, 127, 130, 133, 151, 163 n. 4, 194; and the cognitive, 194 aesthetics, of aging, 19, 143; of change, 9-10, 94; of the corporeal, 195; of effacement, 31; of the ephemeral, 94, 196; of expressivity, 31; photographic aesthetics, 9, 127-155, 169 affect(s), 32, 48, 123, 126, 152 affection, 32, 34, 38, 122, 138, 140; affective charge, 121; qualities, 150; relation, 8, 66 affectivity, 32 age-selves, 18, 21, 48, 52, 57, 85, 104, 146, 161, 194, 197, 198 aging, and aesthetics, 11, 19, 50, 139, 141, 143; and the body, 4 n. 2, 25, 29-30, 31 n. 7, 39 n. 10, 42, 51, 57, 82, 122, 197-198; as change, 11, 12, 18, 136; consciousness of, 7, 9, 20, 60, 121, 126, 157, 160, 162; creative potential of, 10, 34, 41; and creativity, 5, 12, 13, 38, 161; hypervisualization of, 19, 122; as matter, 39, 79; and photography, 9, 11, 13, 72, 125, 193; as process, 1, 6, 9, 18-20, 93-94, 130; recategorization of, 5;

representations of, 3-5, 82; as sign, 51; signs of, 2, 20, 29, 31, 34, 38, 57, 63, 116; as state, 5-6, 11, 20; as theme, 4; tropes of, 3; visualization of, 5, 9, 197; vulnerability of, 121, 123, 163 Appelt, Dieter, 93 Arbus, Diane, 169 Arnheim, Rudolf, 8 Atget, Eugène, 111 Avedon, Richard, 5 n. 3, 30 n. 4, 160 Baker, George et. al., 158, 162, 169, 179, 184, 191, 197 Barthes, Roland, 4, 11, 144, 195, 198 Basting, Anne, 3 n. 2 Batchen, Geoffrey, 8, 144-145, 185 beauty, 19, 29, 32, 41-44, 122, 123, 131, 134, 138-139, 140-144, 146, 150-155, 160, 199; as a category, 29, 32, 131, 139, 151, 154; canons of, 29, 43, 153; stereotypes of, 134, 138, 142, 151 Beckett, Samuel, 76 Bellocq, E. J., 52, 159 n. 3, 170, 180, 184, 198 Benjamin, Walter, 60-61, 64, 69, 79, 103, 115 Bergson, Henri, 58, 68, 174 Bianciotti, Hector, 38 Bishop, Elizabeth, 118 Blau, Herbert, 76, 151 Blume, Anna and Bernhard, 93 body, the aging, 4 n. 1, 25, 29-30, 31 n. 7, 39 n.10, 42, 51, 57, 82, 122, 197-198; body memory, 58, 141; the old(er), 30 n. 4, 32, 108, 122, 141, 161, 181, 199; the physical, 6, 12, 100, 110, 113, 116-117,

210

Touching Surfaces

123, 125-126, 130, 141, 149, 159160, 169, 184, 197-199; the plastic, 100, 135, 177, 198; the poetic, 52, 197; the psychic, 27, 50, 113, 120, 123, 125, 153, 159161, 169, 172-173, 186, 197-198; textures, 15, 34, 148, 172; the youg(er), 13-14, 198 Bollas, Christopher, 18, 21, 31, 47, 63, 85, 114, 161 Borges, Jorge Luis, 118 Brassaï [Gyula], 90 n. 2, 173-174 Brunet, François, 8 Bryson, Norman, 50-51 Cadieux, Geneviève, 4, 10, 48-51, 52 n. 16, 132, 138, 142, 163, 175, 180 n. 11 Cahun, Claude, 174 Cameron, Julia Margaret, 117, 144145 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 68 Cassavettes, John, 12 Chadwick, Whitney, 183 Chevrier, Jean-François, 26 cognitive, perspective, 113, 194; qualities, 8, 150; role, 62 n. 6, 163 n. 4; sciences, 7, 59; spaces, 126 Cohen, Abigail, 171 n. 7 consciousness, 1-2, 7-8, 11; 17-18, 20-21, 47, 50, 52, 58, 62, 64, 66, 70-73, 75-77, 79-80, 85, 87, 89, 94, 98, 100, 104, 108-109, 113, 118-120, 122, 130, 140, 153, 157, 169-170, 194, 197; of aging, 1, 910, 126, 162; degrees of 7, 72, 133, 146; double consciousness, 48, 100, 136; form(s) of, 20, 79, 115, 127, 130, 146-150, 179, 190, 197; of form, 7, 131; formalized, 10, 133; and photography, 84, 170; of the self, 7, 12, 14, 18, 50, 64, 113, 159, 161-162, 169, 174, 189, 193, 197-199; states of, 18, 47, 173, 177; of time, 64, 88, 136; visual, 57, 60, 85, 89 Coplans, John, 5 n. 3, 122, 160, Costa, Mario, 64 Covey, Herbert, 3, 41 n. 12

Coulthard, Edmund, 3 n. 2 corporeal (the), 5, 9, 12, 22, 42, 6163, 110, 131-132, 184-185, 195; corporeal, images, 125; memory 58; realities, 160, 172, 191 corporealization, of thought, 63 creative, act, 7, 63, 191; potential, 10, 34, 41, 159; process, 59, 76, 109, 140, 169; thinking of aging, 9 creativity, 5, 12-13, 32, 67, 159, 163, 187, 194; and aging, 12-13, 38, 163 Cristofovici, Anca, 65, 175 n. 10 Cumming, Donigan, 5 n. 3, 160-163, 178 Cunningham, Merce, 30 n. 4, 171 n. 8 Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé, 109 n. 10 Daly, Ann, 162, 179, 184 Dante Alighieri, 135 Diamond, Hugh Welch, 60, n. 5 Dickey, James, 87 Dickinson, Emily, 167 difference, 3-4, 13, 30, 34, 126-127, 153-154, 194; corporeal, 3 n. 2; images of, 4; and likeness, 142; and resemblance, 30, 34 Dine, Jim, 7, 10-11, 66-85, 91, 100, 111, 119, 122, 132, 147, 148, 157, 169, 177, 197 Douglas, Stan, 188, 190 Draaisma, Douwe, 58 Drahors, Tom, 149 n. 8 Duchenne de Boulogne, Guillaume, 60 n. 5 Dunas, Jeff, 148 Durand, Régis, 8 n. 5, 51 Duras, Marguerite, 45 Eakins, Thomas, 99 Edelman, Hope, 14 editing, 65, 78-84, 158, 159 n. 3, 194 Ehrenzweig, Anton, 81 emotions, 10, 13-14, 39, 45, 49, 62, 65, 95, 126, 136-138, 142-143, 145 n. 5, 152-153, 159, 161, 187, 197

Index Featherstone, Mike, 3 n. 2 Fellini, Federico, 91 n. 3 Flynn, Ann-Gerard, 31 Frank, Robert, 118 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 21, 25, 28 n. 3, 37, 59, 76, 84 Friedlander, Lee, 52, 170, 175 Frueh, Joanna, 28, 31 Gass, William H., 150 Gazzara, Ben, 12 Gernsheim, Helmut, 145 n. 6 Giacomelli, Mario, 5 n. 3 Goldberg, Vicki, 25, 26, 59, 138, 141, 148-151 Goldin, Nan, 5 n. 3, 160 Griffin, Susan, 17, 38 Grudin, Robert, 78, 198 Grundberg, Andy, 64 n. 8, 66, 68, 69, 73, 78, 81, 99 Guibert, Hervé, 12, 28, 31 n.7, 32-38, 39, 41, 103, 108 n. 8, 122, 142, 154, 163 Gunning, Tom, 112 Hamon, Philippe, 65 n. 10 Harvey, Daniel, 196 Hayden, Jacqueline, 4, 10, 15, 27-31, 32, 34, 41, 50-51, 127-132, 137, 133 n. 3, 140, 147 n. 7, 155, 163 Hill, Gary, 95, 190 Hinsey, Ellen, 17 Hixson, Kathryn, 171, 184, 186, 191 Hoban, Russel, 135, 138 Hockney, David, 47 n. 15 holding, 13, 30, 142-143, 163; effect, 153; environment, 50; gaze, 163; objects, 50 ìnner space(s), 25, 50, 62, 71, 111, 160 invisible (the), 8, 10, 21, 47, 60, 8794, 104, 184, 197; invisible, body, 60; change, 113; meaning, 90, 184; processes, 57, 93, 101; reality, 65 invisibility, 88, 92; of aging, 3, 9, 20, 48, 57; and movement, 111

211 Keith, Thomas, 93 Klein, William, 93 Kollwitz, Käthe, 39-40, 45 Kozloff, Max, 8, 58, 112, 113, 116, 117, 172 Krauss, Rosalind, 8, 43-44, 60-62, 67, 69, 170, 175, 179, 181 Kuntzel, Thierry, 88-93, 114, 116, 148, 185, 190, 197 Ladd, George T., 8 Lapierre, Nicole, 20 Laughlin, Clarence John, 120-121, 149, 169 Lemagny, Jean-Claude, 8 n. 5, 117 Lingwood, James, 132 Magritte, René, 111, 168 Manchot, Melanie, 31 n. 7 Mann, Sally, 82 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 4, 123 Marey, Etienne-Jules, 61, 99 Martin, Rosy, 4 n. 2 Maynard, Patrick, 8, 63, 69 Meatyard, Ralph Eugene, 57, 60, 89, 93, 120, 145 n. 5, 169, 170 memory, 10, 57-58, 68, 71-75, 84-85, 91-93, 100, 108, 116, 118, 122, 130, 142, 148-149, 197; anticipative (expectative), 103, 113; and creativiy, 67; and forgetting, 71, 88, 92; forms of, 72, 169, 195; gaps of, 20, 91; of images, 66; and the imagination, 75-76; loss of, 90; and mourning, 92, 163; patterns of, 67; and photography, 57-60, 64, 66-74, 80, 85, 89-91, 93; retinal, 52, 65; system(s) of, 58; theories of, 5759; visual, 91- 93 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 8, 89-90, 93, 98, 126, 184 Merrill, James, 135 n. 4 Merton, Thomas, ix, 120 Michals, Duane, 1, 7, 11-12, 35, 8788, 93-94, 97-123, 132, 135-137, 143, 146, 149, 166, 167, 169, 172, 175, 176, 178, 185, 188, 197

212

Touching Surfaces

Moore, Marianne, 167 mourning, 14, 92, 110, 112, 163; and aging, 14, 18-19, 38, 112; and photography, 20, 37-38, 144; projective (anticipated), 37, 110; Muybridge, Eadweard, 61, 99 Newhall, Beaumont, 109 n. 10 Nixon, Nicholas, 5 n. 3, 122, 160 Nori, Claude, 149 Païni, Dominique, 190 Parry Janis, Eugenia, 79 Paz, Octavio, 118 Pearsall, Marilyn, 3, 31, 36 perception, 2 n. *, 3, 6-7, 11, 21-22, 25-27, 48, 60-65, 69, 71, 76, 79, 83, 87-95, 96-105, 115, 116, 120, 125-126, 130, 137, 150, 152, 165169, 171, 175, 177, 181, 183, 185, 188, 191, 195, 197, 198-199; of aging, 5, 11-12, 18-20, 25, 38, 50, 57, 125, 136, 152, 161, 181; habits of, 27; phenomenology of, 8; of photographs, 8-10, 113, 191, 195; psychology of, 8; temporality of, 5, 199; of time, 6, 64, 83, 92, 94, 115, 178, 183, 190 Phelan, Peggy, 158 n. 2, 171 n. 6 Plath, Sylvia, 141, 167 Pollack, Barbara, 62 n. 6 Pollack, Terry, 4, 39-41, 45-48 Pontbriand, Chantal, 51 Powers, Richard, 100, 103, 168, 190 Proust, Marcel, 76, 173-174 psychic space(s), 6, 18, 23, 111 Raffel, Dawn, 38, 154 n. 11 Rauschenberg, Robert, 62 n. 6 Richir, Marc, 125-126 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 25, 50 Roiphe, Ann, 139 Rossen, Janice, 3 Rowlands, Gena, 12 Ruscha, Ed, 118 Saint Denis, Hervey de, 59 n. 3 Sander, August, 103 Santayana, George, 59

Sarraute, Nathalie, 66 Scott, Joanna, 183 Sherman, Cindy, 4, 41-44, 50-51, 122, 132, 138, 174 Sibony, Daniel, 65 n. 9 Snow, Michael, 93 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 183 Sontag, Susan, 4, 195 Soulages, François, 60 States, Bert O., 59 n. 4 subject, agency, 191, 194; as agent, 191, 195; construction, 1, 6-7, 9, 11, 79, 87, 114, 143, 150, 152; position, 100, 177, 185, 195, 196 subjectivity, 9, 12, 65, 82, 130, 131, 152, 181, 191, 193 Subrin, Elizabeth, 158-159, 180, 190 Sundell, Margaret, 191 Talbot Fox, William Henry, 196 Tanaka, Janice, 91-92, 110, 197 Tannenbaum, Barbara, 145 n. 5 temporality, 1, 5, 9, 11, 21, 39, 41, 45, 73, 93-95, 102-103, 117, 121, 130, 148, 150, 157, 162, 185, 186-187, 191; and aging, 1, 10; and change, 11, 95-101, 120, 194; metaphors of, 39; and movement, 5, 11, 93, 95-101, 116, 172, 194; of perception, 5, 199; and photography, 4 n. 2, 41, 73, 89, 93-94, 117, 196; and subject construction, 1, 9, 162, 194; visualization of, 89, 117, 189 Tenneson, Joyce, 5, 11, 132, 135-155, 161, 170, 175, 179, 181, 185, 197 Townsend, Chris, 3 n. 2, 158 n. 2 transitional, objects, 31, 82, 161; phases, 13; processes, 161, 163; space, 21, 104, 186 unconscious (the), 7, 10, 21, 24, 48, 57-67, 68-71, 75-75, 78-85, 100, 111-112, 152, 169, 177; optical, 60-61; photographic, 57-63, 80 Vine, Richard, 26 Viola, Bill, ix, 114, 190

Index Virilio, Paul, 18, 187 visible (the), 8-11, 18-52, 60, 89-90, 111, 115-117, 144, 159, 177, 185 visibility, 9-10, 42, 48, 51, 57, 64, 68, 82, 87, 89, 92, 94, 99, 110, 148, 172, 175-176, 178-179, 183, 196197; visualization(s), 2 n.*, 5, 9, 10, 13, 42, 46, 62-63, 80, 92-93, 117, 189, 197 Wagram, Catherine, 150 Wall, Jeff, 4, 23-27, 30, 32, 62, 70, 132, 138, 141 Weinberg, Adam D., 93-94, 183, 198 White, Minor, 149 Winnicott, D.W., 21, 23, 47, 161 Wollheim, Richard, 63, 134 n. 49 Woodman, Francesca, 7, 11-12, 113, 132, 133, 157-160, 162-191, 198 Woodward, Kathleen, 2, 3, 18, 25 n. 1, 29, 30, 39 n. 10 Woolf, Virginia, 193 Wyatt-Brown, Anne, 3 Yates, Frances A., 58

213