Ingrained
in Grain
paper
delivered at the Photography & Postmodernism forum,
Centre of Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 1990
Postmodernism is a term of self abuse : whenever you use
it, you will most likely run into greater problems than
those you wished to avoid by using the term. This is neither
new nor surprising, considering that the term postmodern
has been given life partly through its excessive applications
and partly by hysterical reactions against its spread. The
result has been a confusing mess of dialectics which have
tended to loose sight of their initial relationships and
conflicts with each other. One can only hope that after
having suffered a decade of theoretical emissions there
might be some use value left in all the discursive rubble.
On
the subject of photography and postmodernism, I wish to
propose some ways of sifting through the rubble to (a) evaluate
the medium of photography in relation to postmodern cultural
effects, and (b) discern what postmodern communicative effects
(if any) the medium of photography can generate. To do this,
though, will involve an awkward mix of both modernist and
postmodernist strategies, for such is the state of contemporary
art criticism ie. a weird mix of looking at the postmodernists
within modernist parameters and the modernists as producers
of the postmodern. In other words, I am saying that despite
the rubble there is clear space to discount many of the
purported differences between the modern and postmodern
and that the stale mate of many 'post' debates prompts us
to rethink some of their key issues of difference.
So,
we start with the photographic medium. I stress the term
'the Photographic medium' because all political and textual
effects (to pick extremes) are embodied by material effects,
and material effects are the result of the potential, actual
and virtual interaction between technological and physiological
states. If one appreciates this enough, one is capable of
reconciling the microscopic with the microcosmic and the
macrocosmic that is, of describing the medium, its manipulations
and its messages in each others' terms. In this sense which
I should point out is not a scientific measure but a solely
critical apparatus photography is primarily defined by its
grain : the molecular fusion of the textural and the textual,
where all manner of photographic effects (generated from
anywhere within the medium's spectrum of processes) establish
a dialectic relationship with the medium's grain. The photographic
grain is simultaneously the dimension of the medium's existence
and the material means of materializing photographs into
existence : all photos have 'a grain' of sorts or at least
are perceived in relation to existing grains, and all photos
are produced in line with their perceivable outcome in grain.
An analysis of this 'grain' reveals or declares the medium
as still, frozen and immobile, caught and captured. This
can be explained through two qualifications: photography
as a 'reading', and photography as a 'passing'.
The
notion of photography as a 'passing' relates to the medium's
death erotic, where the photograph somehow captures life,
freezes it, mummifies it in a zone that only requires memory
maintenance. This idea of the photographic process centres
on the registering of light and warmth, both at the stage
of taking the photograph and throughout its multiple development.
The photograph that comes from such a process is a mapping
out of image as a chart of chemical reaction, where ever
microscopic realm across the granular terrain of the photograph
is a recording of an occurrence of incidental light and
interactive warmth. Textually, the life in front of the
camera has now passed on, passed by and passed through the
photographic apparatus. The death erotic arises in the tactile
play on the photographic surface which transforms all into
the microscopic, via the execution of matter.
In
correlation with this notion of 'passing' is the notion
of photography as a 'reading'. This is marked by the photograph's
status as a consumed event : not only as something that
has already occurred, but also as something that is defined
as an occurrence by the event of taking the photograph.
Photographic technology is thus designed in terms as a set
of readings which gauge the event and work as an interface
between all microscopic and mechanical features. The textual
outcome is the reading of photograph, via both the perceptual
logic which constitutes our interpretation of the medium's
phenomenological effects (how human and camera optics interact)
and the linguistic codes which arise from perceptual permutations
of the medium (stylistic representations and abstractions).
At this level of 'reading', photography once again restates
its status as something frozen and immobile, as something
excerpted and reported both infinitely and indefinitely.
While
these qualifications of photography as a 'passing' into
and 'reading' of the photographic grain might be rudimentary
and even somewhat outdated, I am nonetheless left with two
problems : (a) no still photography I have encountered has
marked any extra dimensional or contra granular potential
for the medium, and (b) this fixed status of the photographic
medium as something 'still' is at total odds with the established
effects of postmodern culture. This is because if postmodernism
is about anything at all, it's about the event of the pseudo
quantum point of eventfullness erased by the disappearing
presence of the present. Well, that's a flowery way of putting
it, but my point is that postmodernism in its many manifestations
often exhibits a desire to come to terms with the present
at odds with and at the very expense of time, rendering
the past immaterial and the future immemorial. Now, if ever
there was a medium that disavows experience on the plane
of the present, it has to be photography. Photography renders
the present immaterial and transforms the past into material.
Thus, nothing is 'becoming' in photography : everything
has already happened and is in the process of being transformed
into a document of transformation. Postmodern effects generally
can not be rendered by acts of transformation, development,
definition, displacement or replacement. Such acts require
processing, and processing covers over the implosive events
of simulation, of things becoming things. Photography leaves
us with something, while the postmodern impulse drives towards
leaving us with nothing except what we already had in the
first place.
But
while there is an inherent impossibility for the photographic
medium (unlike other media) to ride postmodern drives, we
can reinterpret certain so called postmodernist tendancies
in contemporary photography as interesting failures and
new developments in previously unexplored modernist potential
in photographic exchanges. To this end, I wish to briefly
discuss some of these tendancies. Basically, I can distinguish
three subsiduary drives, where art photography has attempted
to 'become' other media (via either appropriation, situationism
or recontextualization) but in the end has succeeded only
in defining its own spherical trajectory. These subsidiary
tendancies I would call (a) the printed advertisement (eg.
Kruger and Burgin) ; (b) the film still (eg. Sherman and
Prince) ; and (c) the tableau vivant (eg. Zahalka and McDonald).
Quite obviously, all three terms here accent stillness once
again, from the printed advertisement boxed in by surrounding
type and contained within the magazine, to the film still
wrenched from the celluloid strip and left fragmented and
frozen, to the tableau vivant and its theatricalization
of mummification in the repose of motionless silence. What
is most telling yet nonetheless interesting is how photography
has harked the postmodern clarion call but ended up chasing
its own tail.
While
the appropriation of the the advertising space (both surfacially
as in Kruger's appropriations and Burgin's simulations,
or geographically as in Holzer's transmissions or Wodizco's
projections) is deemed part of socio political stratagem
by occupying said space, there is something impotent in
their contemporization of image text explorations which
have lived in various forms of social satire throughout
this century MAD magazine from the late fifties being the
best example of image manipulation intent on disservicing
the appropriated image. Art photography that attempts this
simulation of the advertisement and all its text image logic
and rhetoric in the end has to face the limitation of its
recontextualization, wherein the images resonate only in
their new art context and provide a reading of the printed
advertisement rather than a disclosure of the advertisement's
own contextual implosion. The art photo ad detonates no
new meanings, no new insights, and renders the cultural
livelihood of advertising's continually evaporating discourses
into a fine art grain no matter how big the benday dots
are enlarged. If anything, the art photo ad demonstrates
the ease with which many socio politico mandates are met
in a postmodern era.
The
film still photograph is jouissance at its most protracted
and pathetic. Here, the photographic document goes to extreme
measures to become film, to become cinema, but only so it
can flaunt its own stillness and play with the narrative
effects it can generate by mimicing the film still. This
is not to say that, for example, Sherman's or Prince's work
is thin or shallow (on the contrary : they are rich and
complex) but that their relationship with the cinema is
extremely perverse. The problem, though, is that what at
first seemed like a new appreciation of cinema has ended
up being a solely photographic appreciation of cinema, where
the cinematic text (a multi dimensional mobile machine)
is plundered for those wonderful scenes which would look
great as stills or photos. People now pour out of art house
cinemas talking about 'haunting images' from the film they
just experienced. That is perverse : treating the cinema
as 'moving photography'. But such is the omnipotence of
photography's granular textuality, that its affairs with
the cinematic have tended to belie their seduction by the
cinematographic. The photographic appreciation of the cinema
(which is held up as being 'visual' or 'contra literary')
is fact no more than idle ponderings on filmic grain : on
light, density, saturation, exposure, tone and texture.
The fine grain aesthetic of photography is transferred into
the cinematic apparatus only to become a hyper illusory
image of textual movement.
Finally,
the tableau vivant. This tendency is the most ironic, because
its desire to become something in the realm of fine art
has led it to the most morbid and necrophilliac of painterly
measures : controlling and freezing the subject to theatricalize
an image of life which is thus set up (literally) to be
passed on for the photographic reading. In other words,
photography becomes engaged in freezing the frozen, which
is not unlike frozen reconstituted orange juice which I
guess is pretty postmodern at that. Tableau vivant photography
tries to be perverse but it ends up being too clever for
its own good. It attempts to become theatre, to theatricalize
its mode and method of photographic presentation, but in
the end the material effects of the medium are already outcoding
the photographic discourse. For at the microscopic level
of the medium, the textual effects have been and are already
being forged by material forces and mechanical means. Photography
remains still.
In
summary, it is worth noting the possibility that these subsidiary
postmodern drives in fine art photography are displays of
the act of implosion registered within the nature and status
of the photographic medium. Laterally, an awareness of the
technological/textual fusion of the medium can aid in defining
the postmodernist potential the medium fails to realize.
As such the value, worth and interest of these exercises
in contemporary art photography should not be lost in the
firing between sides concerned with solely placing the works
on one side of the fence or the other.
