<nettime> Contemporary transformations of the image-movement

[Jose Luis Brea <jlbrea@aleph-arts.org>]

Contemporary transformations of the image-movement: post-photography,
post-cinema, post-media

José Luis Brea

---------

In 1959, Marcel Broodthaers produced a film entitled "Song of My Generation"
. It was a film collage, put together from documentary fragments, some
filmed by the artist himself, others collected from existing material.
Evidently it was nothing but a neutral documentary and devoid of any
specific artistic pretension. It was simply the recording of a time, of a
period, a frozen moment of the collective experience, a sort of memorisation
of subjective time, shared time, the psychological time of a community.

It was this artist's first foray into the film medium, nor would it be his
last. A few years later he was to make a perhaps better known film, "A
Second of Eternity", which was presented at Prospekt's 1971 edition. This
time the film was markedly self-reflective. On the one hand it is a film
that reflects on the nature itself of the cinematographic medium and its 24
frames per second. On the other, the film also reflects on the presence of
its author in the work. The 24 frames which make up the work - a film that
lasts exactly one second - reconstruct the successive strokes of his
signature, and the spurious promise of eternity for him that his signature's
presence there signifies. Broodthaers writes: "For Narcissus, one second is
already the time of eternity. Narcissus has always respected the time of
1/24th of a second. In Narcissus the retinal after-image lasts forever.
Narcissus is the inventor of film."

"A Second of Eternity" is thus first and foremost about the enigma of the
image-time, the image-movement. The artist himself in fact had this to say:
"A second of eternity has a double meaning. First, it represents
cinematographic time. But it also represents the sense and nonsense of the
collision of two languages: the language of words and the language of film.
Or, better yet, that of the relation between the static image and the moving
image".

We may at this point intuit a very good primary reason why so many of the
most important artists of our time have approached film (or more recently
video): the search for this "expanded time", for this time of happening,
which is written about in the world of the technical image. Consider, for
instance, of "Empire", the film Andy Warhol made of the famous building, in
front of which he placed an unmoving camera for 24 hours.

It could be accurately said that the greatest event that characterises our
time with respect to visual arts and the image is in fact the rise of an
image-movement, of an image-time (to use the expression adopted by Gilles
Deleuze). We would have to say furthermore that it is a great "event" in the
more precise and rigorous sense of the term - i.e. in the metaphysical
sense. It is also such an event in the sense that it refers to the beginning
of devotion to the image itself, to its representation, as an event, as an
occurrence, as something itself differing from difference, not as something
definitively and statically given, always identical with itself.

In order to properly appreciate the importance of this fact, we have to keep
in mind that this appearance of the image-time was something absolutely
unprecedented, and that it signified a great novelty in the history of
representation - indeed ultimately in the history itself of man. Until the
arrival of film, and of this key element mentioned by Broodthaers as "the
retinal persistence of 1/24th of a second", until this moment man was not
even able to conceive of the time of representing something. Or, to put it
more precisely, would not have been able to conceive of the time of
representation as anything but pure stasis. For representational art,
duration, difference in time, the occurrence of things, and their continual
change, were wholly unrepresentable. A propos of film, Henri Bergson wrote:
"The first time I saw a film I understood that it was contributing something
absolutely new to philosophy. It gave us the capacity to understand our way
of knowing. In fact we could even go so far as to say that film is itself a
model of consciousness. To go to the movies is thus an authentic
philosophical experience."

Accordingly, it is not strange that so many of the most interesting
contemporary artists have undertaken to deal with this problem - which
radically affects the way in which the ontological nature of representation
itself is conceived. Nor is it surprising that to do this they have resorted
to the image technically produced and reproduced. Only with the image
technically produced and captured is it possible to produce this internal
expansion of one's own time, in the field of representation. Outside this
field, outside the field of the technical image as such, it would not make
sense to speak of a "time-based art", - referring to the plastic, the
visual.

With a view to understanding all that the new artistic practices can
specifically contribute to the critical history of creative visual
practices, it is necessary first of all to recognise their capacity to make
use of the legacy of this discovery. In any case before proceeding to place
what in my view constitutes its second great hereditary patrimony, I would
like to mention a last example of a work that raises the very essence of
this question, a work whose true meaning would be inconceivable without the
desire of the contemporary artist to confront this problem in order to
comprehend the generic transformations of the mode of experience. It entails
the first appearance and now the establishment - through its full
implantation thanks to the audio-visual industries - of an image-time, as a
characteristic form of the contemporary experience of the image, once and
for all no longer static, no longer the experience of the image as stasis,
identical to itself.

I refer to the well-known video by Gillian Wearing, entitled "60 Minutes of
Silence". Ostensibly it is a traditional corporate "snapshot", in this case
of a group of policemen in a London neighbourhood. Nevertheless, the image
is really produced by a video recording with an unmoving camera for 60
minutes, obliging the characters to remain completely immobile and silent
during these 60 minutes (emulating a snapshot). Despite the proverbial
British imperturbability and the incomparable sense of discipline of its
police, the silence is of course broken on many occasions and the pretended
absolute immobility is almost continually interrupted.

The metaphysical distance between representation and reality (where it was
perfectly established in the showing of times reversed, crossed: the real
was in flux and the image remained static, stopping the fleeting instant),
this distance remains in this work, anew, problematic - and of course this
is made possible precisely by the mediation of technique as the producer of
the representation. As I have already stressed, only the development of the
technical means of capturing and manipulating the image permitted the
expansive germination of a time of representation, of a temporalised
representation.


#


Let us proceed at any rate to the second factor whose legacy charges the new
artistic practices with their own specific critical potential. Without going
farther than the artist with whom we began this essay, Marcel Broodthaers,
and following the trail that his work marks out for us, we shall
characterise this second factor as having established as an objective of
many of the most critical works of the contemporary tradition the autonomous
production of devices for public distribution of artistic knowledge, the
production of media devices.

All Broodthaers' work for his "museum" project is well-known, his renowned
Museum of the Eagles - of which his cinematographic work is actually a
"section". We may relate this work to that of other artists - such as the
small portable museum represented in "La Boite en Valisse" by Marcel
Duchamp - and also of course the celebrated "Imaginary Museum" of André
Malraux. Of course in none of these projects is it a matter of producing a
museum as such, in the conventional sense, but quite the contrary, of
critically engaging the museum as institution by means of the specific
production - this itself, as a creative practice, becoming the work of art -
of independent means for the public dissemination of artistic knowledge. To
say it a different way: of little museums that in themselves question the
institution of the museum itself, little museums that are at the same time
anti-museums.

It was above all Douglas Crimp, in successive instalments of his
investigation "On the Ruins of the Museum" throughout the 80's, who showed
how a spirit of radical questioning of the museum was present and ran
through the principal currents of the artistic languages - the neo as well
as the post-avant-garde - enriching its development with the dialectic
components of immanent self-questioning that these practices inscribe in the
bosom of the tradition of the avant garde - a tradition that is precisely
recognised by that spirit of immanent criticism.

Sharing this mood of negation of the art institution are not only the
explorations of site-specificity but also those of dematerialization of the
object, displayed in the approaches characterised as conceptual art in the
broadest sense, to cite a pair of significant examples of recent tradition.
There is an exploration of the limits of all that which exceeds the capacity
of the museum: either because of excessive size or specificity of the
location (as in earthworks and land art), or on the contrary by the
radically immaterial character of the work (as in many of the conceptualist
works, whose immaterial subtlety made them for a long time equally
inaccessible to the museum).

>From the point of view that is of interest to us here - namely, setting
forth a likely genealogy for the new approaches that has the most promise
for being included in a territory of critical legacies - there are two
essential aspects for both "adventures" which ought to interest us
particularly- that of specificity of siting and that of dematerialization.

As far as the experiment with public art is concerned, that aspect is no
other than the production of spaces for communicative urban interaction,
starting from the Habermasian idea that what is public in contemporary
societies is not given, but on the contrary stolen, made to vanish: and that
its construction is therefore a "task." From this point of view we do not
call public art any monstrosity that gets installed in an urban setting - we
say, absorbing the logic of the monument - but apply the term only to those
artistic and cultural practices that actually have as their mission the
production of a public domain - understanding by such, and following the
illustrated definition reclaimed by Habermas, the production of a space in
which city-dwellers may encounter each other, and discuss and decide through
this process of rationally conducted dialogue the issues that concern them
in common. That is: a domain of the politically active public, neither
neutralised by the weight of the false sphere of the mass media, nor
disempowered by being orchestrated by the smug phantasmagoria of the
political spectacle - itself neutralised by the mass media.

We may propose two or three examples of this kind of approach to public
art - already classics in a certain way. On the one hand, the well-known
projects for public spaces by Vito Acconci, or some of the public and
conversational space of Art & Language. On the other, all the practices of
the situationist detournement, such as the practise of transforming daily
life by bringing encounter and communication into urban spaces .

May it be, on the other hand, that the aspect that may interest us more is
that of dematerialization? Obviously its medial dimension, we say - that of
all those works that resolve their mode of distribution and public
experience not in the specialised and objectively conditioned form of a
"work" as such, but through their presence in one or the other medium of
communication. Thus, for instance, the traditions of radio art, of mail art,
the projects for magazines, the books about the artists or their appearances
in the media of communication - press, video, or television. Finally,
everything that we may call "media art". All those works whose exhibition
takes place not in the museum or gallery but through one or the other media
of communication.

In this respect I would like to point out two more things: first, that
analysing the tradition of media art in this way may enable us to understand
that its appearance is neither capricious nor - as is so often pretended -
purely instrumental, as if its use in a certain medium or other were
irrelevant or anecdotal. On the contrary, it is appropriate from this
perspective to affirm that the rise of media-art would be inconceivable
outside of a tradition of questioning the very idea of the work of art as
objectively conditioned. We should thus accept that the opening of the
conceptualist tradition into media art results from the logical development
of the negation of the object and the consequent contribution of the
"document" that makes possible its diffusion, its public communication. As
soon as this publicly disseminated and communicated document is converted
into the only surviving sign of the "work", and the only testimony in the
last instance of the culturally developed practice - then we have media art.
That its development should for example be so closely linked to that of
performance art cannot then surprise us - and in fact we may relate this to
the reflections of Rosalind Krauss on the narcissistic character that marked
the birth of video art.

A second question that seems to me timely to point out: that along the same
lines, we may even perhaps refine a second definition of media art, a more
restrictive one. For this purpose, we would not call a practice "media-art"
for the sole fact of its being produced "for" distribution via a channel
that we call a "medium" - a magazine, radio, television, etc. Rather, we
would only call "media-art" those practices that do more than produce
objects "for" a given medium, that have as their mission and objective the
production of a specific medium, an independent one, those works in which
the object is itself the medium - not in agreement with but in fact contrary
to McLuhan.

Obviously it is much more difficult here to offer clearly successful
examples. I am sure that the approximation of the Russian avant-garde to the
experience of the film. as well as the Brechtian experiment with radio, had
much to do with this idea, and its utopian aspiration of developing a
genuine "community of the producers of media". Perhaps we would see
something closer to having fulfilled this ideal in some of the more
interesting projects of the 60's and 70's: projects like the video activism
tied to the Situationist Internationale, the expanded-film tied on one hand
to the fluxus movement and on the other to the European tradition of cine
verité and the film of experience, or, finally, the related experiences with
guerrilla-TV in the US and all its later legacy.

Obviously we can't reconstruct this tradition here in detail, but it
nevertheless seems important to me to point out that what we have is a
direction for critical investigation defined by utopian optimism (in the
sense that it aspires to the establishment of what we could call, in
Habermasian terms, an ideal community of communication), but obviously not
completed: but whose enunciation has not been exhausted nor institutionally
absorbed either - given that it has actually defined a limit with which
institutionalised Art has not known how to "negotiate", ever eluding the
final scenario of this latter: the production of an exhibitable object in a
spatialised formula, aiming instead at the fashioning of an abstract means
of the collectivisation of experience.

Furthermore, in this critical tradition there converge two lines that we
have seized on - that of the production of a public domain, and that of the
drift toward development of means of distribution. What we are claiming is
that the territory thus described, in a restrictive definition of what
"media-art" would be, would gather together the legacy - not yet resolved,
but not deactivated either - of the most radical moments of the avant-garde
tradition of contemporary art. And, at the same time we claim that the task
of undertaking its historic realisation in the present epoch is the most
radical challenge that a contemporary communicative approach can undertake.
And therefore that it constitutes the most noble and critical genealogy that
the new approaches can make their own, as its most crucial and impassioned
challenge.

In any case, before outlining the contemporary map of that challenge -
indicating some of the features that mark its layout - I would like to focus
on a fact that is I see as crucial - which is the confluence of the two
macro-problems that I have elucidated so far: on one side that of the
image-movement, as a crucial ontological question of our time in all that
relates to the problem of representation. And on the other side, the
question of the medium, of the production of autonomous means of
distribution of aesthetic knowledge - as the most radical way of using the
tradition of the avant-garde's immanent self-criticism. As I see it, it is
clear that the encounter of both problems territorialises the critical
topology by means of the characteristic excellence of the practices of
visual communication of present societies. What is actually at stake in them
is the job of transforming the meaning of the artistic in societies of
technical reproducibility. Or what amounts to the same thing: the fate of
transforming the meaning of the experience of the artistic in a context of
mass culture, in the framework of the generalised process of diffuse
aesthetisation of the contemporary world, in the historic moment of the
dedication of organised spectacle in terms of the industries of
consciousness. If I am not mistaken, and in accordance with the
transformations in progress, the present dominant means of organising the
distribution and reception of art - the spatialised means of public
distribution, the museum / gallery - lack the versatility that would really
be necessary to maintain much longer its indisputable hegemony, if not
exclusivity, in the context of such transformations.

With this I wish to say that the resolution of a critical question, that is
defined at the outset in the order of the ethics of discourse, or of the
ethics of the forms and the languages if that is preferred, necessarily
entails simultaneously broaching a pragmatic political question, in the
sense of how to organise its public social diffusion - in the last instance,
its "industry", the form of its reception.

The first - the ethical-formal question - determines that this problematic
territory constitutes the crucial crossroads of the "art" of our time, its
critical definition par excellence. But it is the second question, the
pragmatic one of its necessary industrial and institutional reorganisation,
that makes it totally problematic and absolutely unavoidable for
contemporary approaches related to visual communication.

I will attempt in what follows, and in a very sketchy manner, to place four
developments that in my opinion more directly condition the present
unfolding of investigation in this problematic field, offering some example
that illustrate it, and conclude by an appreciation of the tensions that
define the game and perhaps an attempt to make some future prediction
concerning the possible incidence of this whole group of factors in the
global redefinition of the modes of organisation and articulation of the
aesthetic experience and the system of art itself.

As will be seen, as I enunciate these factors I will always link the
development of a technical means with that of a specific problem of the
emergence of languages: not so much because I believe that technology is
destiny as that I believe rather that technology is language: or more
precisely since I am convinced that a history of the forms would be
impossible without considering the technological devices that articulate the
relation between symbolic production and the real world. To put this another
way: even if it is ridiculous to expect that every technical development
gives rise to an artistic form, it is equally inaccurate to think that an
artistic form may be born if it is not irreversibly tied to a technical
development - like writing of the relation of the parts to its system, as
***language effectively spoken among themselves by the "things" that inhabit
and structure the "world".


#


The first of these four developments has to do with what has been called in
the world of the cinematographic languages the appearance of post-cinema,
through the effect of the impact of the languages of television, publicity,
and the musical clip in the discourse of film itself - in a certain sense
post-fictional, post-dramatic. It should be said that we have finally seen
the breakdown of the border that has always been maintained between
television and film as well as between narration and information,
documentation and literature. To grasp that breakdown was, I think, an
obligation and a critical objective that played a part in the entire
practice of avant-garde cinema - thus, for instance, all the New Wave or the
cinema of experience cherished this outpouring of film into the flat,
post-literary paradigm of television: as much at least as all the
avant-garde uses of photography cherished the dimension of pure
documentation. The present appearance of a certain "cinema of exposition" -
for example, that of Douglas Gordon - or the whole current trend of film by
artists, would have been unthinkable without the previous appearance of
post-cinema, of a hybridised domain of image-movement in which the narrative
and post-narrative structures of the discourses of television and film
collided and saw its autonomous forms deconstructed. In this respect I
stress that the impact of the language of the publicity spot and above all
of the musical clip - in its extraordinary power of offering its own
"portrait of generation", in its capacity for composing a framework of the
collectivisation of experience, organising the figures of desire and the
whole projection of the self - these two microforms have played in every
case a fundamental trick.

As a small example of this influence of post-cinema within the area of
contemporary artistic practices we may propose the well-known monodramas of
Stan Douglas, short little pieces of approximately a minute, which construct
dramatic micro-fictions out of the flat incidental language,
post-cinematographic, belonging to the discourse of television and
publicity. Likewise we could propose numerous examples that would
demonstrate the impact of the clip and its language - all the language of
club culture - in the new visual practices.


#


The second is that of the development of a post-photographic field in the
exponential multiplication of the potentials of collage - of photo
composition, if that is preferred - which the help of the computer allows.
Thanks basically to this technical development - which acts as a kind of
second shutter, expanding the internal time of photography to widening the
time of capture in a second time of processing, of postproduction -
photography has become narrative, all the while that its time of exposition
has expanded beyond the abstract instant of capture. The expanded time of
the photographic unconscious, theorised already by Benjamin - as the
unchallengeable potential of the photographic eye for capturing the event as
it transpires - is thus converted into a concentrated time of narration, and
the vocation of narrating - of relating experience, smothered in the new
societies beneath the paradigm of information - finds in this expanded
now-time of the photographic instant the occasion to relate itself as
invocation as well, of a full time.

The specific potential of the technical medium used - the computer as a
second shutter, as a device for post-processing of the captured image - and
its capacity to unwrap the allegorical technique of recomposition and
collage, mimicking dressmaking, the interstices of the avant-garde
dissonance, gives as a result the effective reconstruction of a space of
pictoriality - unthinkable even in the pictorial field itself - understood
as organicity and structural completion of the representational space. As
examples of this type of post-photographic work that develops the
possibilities of a new pictorial narration in the photographic field we may
adduce many of the contemporary creations of James Coleman, Phillip Lorca,
di Corcia, Zhan Yuan - but above all Jeff Wall, undoubtedly the author who
as done the most direct work in this field of investigation.


#


The third decisive factor for placing everything problematic about the new
artistic practices in the field of the technical image is the rise of a
group of expositive practices associated with appearance of the video
projector - even, to be more exact, including the possibility of eliminating
the black box of the monitor. The forms of presentation of the so-called
art-video in museum spaces - in spatialised contexts - were at the outset
inexorably conditioned by the gross materiality itself of the monitor. The
solutions that address the objectiveness of that "black box" - trying to get
its presence in the context to adopt a merely instrumental character, like
any other object - are perhaps the pioneers in the emergence of this new
artistic form. The appearance of the video installation - as an effective
integration of the presence of video in the context of a disparate group of
significant elements - and the appearance of the whole new tradition that we
may call "screen art" is intensely nourished by this investigation into the
possibilities of the use of video, of the videographic image, finally freed
for its presentation-exposition from integration with the "monitor object".
We should even be able to distinguish two well-differentiated directions in
the search for formal solutions: on the one hand those that aim at plane,
two-dimensional configurations, approximating the pictorial model in their
presentational language (solutions of course intensely welcomed by the
museum); on the other, those others that better articulate the presentation
of the image in a volumetric arrangement, closer to a post-sculptural
treatment. Right now we have an infinity of examples of both. Regarding what
I've called screen art the examples have recently multiplied - consider, for
instance, Willy Doherty or Doug Atiken. In the second category some examples
are also needed: Gary Hill, and of course Tony Oursler.


#


Finally, there is a fourth determinant outgrowth of the contemporary
transformations in the field of the image, that has to do with the present
development of its technologies of diffusion, of public distribution. I
believe that one may speak of an unprecedented proliferation of the
possibilities of public media distribution of the image, in the growing
expansion of new systems of "technical reproduction" that permit the
expansive and effective development of new media as such.

On the one hand we have video and digital imaging as new means of capture -
we can speak now of light equipment and of a certain convergence of
professionals and amateurs - and on the other the multiplication of the
media channels - the proliferation of networks and systems of broadcasting
and propagating, the expansive development of cable and satellite, and the
proliferation of new kinds of broadcast (local TV, regional, private,
independent): and finally and above all the convergence of the technologies
of computerised post-production and telecommunication in the internet. All
this maps out possibilities of distributing the artistic forms and
approaches that we may classify as post-media, in the primary sense of
characterising it as an open panorama, decentralised, hierarchy-less, in
which the performances are difficult to be organised according to the
organisational objectives of the regulators by consensus of the sphere of
present media - in terms of the mass media, producers of large unified
audiences. The appearance of "do it yourself" media technologies, almost
home-made, that permit the tactical production of small micromedia devices
(on the internet, but also in the context of the "old media" of radio,
magazine, or television) assures a profound transformation of the space of
the technologies of public distribution of knowledge and artistic
practices - and permits us to imagine the development of independent methods
that, given their speed and presumably strategic effectiveness, will very
rapidly be in a position to reorganise the panorama of the mediations of the
artistic experience - and, further on, the domain itself of the public
sphere, rescuing the possibilities of working in the public sphere from the
sequestration to which it finds itself surrendered at the hands of its
contemporary media-isation.

In this respect it is not a matter of doing futurology, nor of giving
ourselves over to a utopian fantasy - it is obvious that there isn't any
redeeming, saving, or promissory panacea around this development - but it is
pointing out that in the emergence of this postmedia panorama -
understanding as such the growing expansion of a group of new devices that
are necessarily going to endure a radical reorganisation of the map of the
media - there is taking place at least potentially a context of profound
transformation of the means of producing, distributing, and receiving the
artistic experience.

The greatest challenge that artistic practices have in this context, from
this point of view, is not so much that of experimenting with the
possibilities of material or formal production and experimentation offered
by the new technologies; but rather that of experimenting with the
possibilities they offer for reconfiguring the public sphere, of
transforming above all the social means of distribution, with the
possibilities even of changing the modes of "exposition", of public
presentation of artistic practices. To cite a couple of examples of this
kind of (post) artistic practice that have given themselves the priority
mission of reconfiguring the public sphere, I should mention two projects.
First, that of "Hybrid Workspace" in the last Documenta - a space for
encounter and debate, physical and real, but also maintained in various
channels , a network of independent German and Dutch radio and TV station
implemented further with an internet forum. And a second example, that
likewise was presented simultaneously on the net and in a conventional
exhibition space - in this case, the Australian pavilion of the Biennial of
Venice - the project entitled "the immaterial labour" from the group
Knowbotics Research, consisting precisely of an analytic and collective work
about the possibilities of bringing about the construction of the public
sphere.

In any case this has nothing to do with making here any justification of
technique for its own sake, or of the new at any cost, nor of claiming that
in it is found some definitive solution for all problems, neither those of
art nor of the many others in our modern world. Far from it. I have only
attempted to point out a region in process of profound transformation,
trying to show in it something of the factors at work, some of the questions
that appear to us as decisive. Be what it may, the future is totally open
and undecided, and what seems most clear is that this demands our
intervention, pointing out our responsibility as the makers of our
collective destiny. Whatever the future is going to be, it is in our hands
to decide it. The responsibility of the creative artists, of the cultural
producer, as it is for each of us, is pled in the court of the future.
Finally, it is the polyphony of all our joined voices which finishes giving
life to "the song of our generation". And perhaps it is not just a matter of
listening to it. But now perhaps or also singing it, even "emitting it"


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