(Lecture given to FdA students at Stroud College on the 21st October 2008 introducing my research interests
in my academic and practice-based work)
The Photographic Documentation of Art: An Interplay of Memory and Experience
Both my artwork and my academic research are part of
an enquiry into the process of how we develop an understanding of our relationship with the world of phenomena.
This investigation has focused on photographic documentation of art. I am interested in the place
that the visual record occupies in an experience of the artwork – indeed its role as standing in for the artwork, or
its function as a signpost to the work’s meaning. In thinking about what it means to reproduce an object I make representations
which utilise memory as a process, in the drawings and paintings, I remember the photographic process when attempting to create
an equivalent image to the object, but importantly do not use photographic support material to achieve that image.
This enquiry has a broad range of manifestations; photographs, paintings, drawings, sculpture, installations and discussion
events. The thread that connects these diverse realisations in form, responses to differing contexts, is the desire to
recreate. It is an examination of the vital living force that Henri Bergson, writing at the end of the nineteenth century,
calls ‘active memory’. This memory, drawing on recalled experience, is how we make decisions
about future actions, how we live in the present. In my opinion, recreation is immanent to all experience
– in the sense that meaning is constructed and not given. The registration of phenomena is a way of sensing that the
world is an echo of underlying forces – it is the repetition or shadow, not the real per se, but an indication that
the real exists. My project is underpinned by a desire to believe that the real experience is possible,
even in the face of evidence by the deconstuctivist Paul de Man for example, which maintains that all sensation could be artificially
manipulated.
I began to be
interested in these issues of real experience at school while studying for A Levels, looking at existentialism, Camus and
Sartre and Heidegger. However, as I was working towards 4th term Oxbridge entry I made the decision
to focus more on art as I saw there was more flexibility for intellectual experimentation and philosophical enquiry. After
Foundation course at Cheltenham, in 1989, I enrolled in a joint degree in art practice and art theory at Goldsmiths College.
I feel strongly that the combining of practical and research interests is appropriate for education in contemporary
art. At Goldsmiths I began applying ideas that were initiated in one area, the art history studies to studio practice and
vice versa from studio practice to theoretical studies. By the end of the course I had focused on the context
of production, the studio and its inductive power which formed the work, as the subject for my degree show. The
space of the artwork was the negative spaces left on the walls during the process of painting and smearing detritus from the
canvas. This mirrored an interest in the Art History side of the course in the work of Richard Hamilton
as taught by Sarat Maharaj as our special subject. The particular visual reference material that I used
were Hamilton’s ‘soft pink’ and ‘soft blue landscape’ paintings from the 1970’s –
seen here recreated as a studio environment and then further recreated as my degree show. The particular
aspect of Hamilton’s work that I was fascinated by was the scatological. The references to fecal
smears in the blurred stain –like marks in the landscape paintings are markers of presence – specifically a living
presence. At Goldsmiths I was also very influenced and captivated by the teachings of Tag Gronberg whose
speciality was early twentienth century Modernism in Paris, and the writings of Walter Benjamin. I was
particularly engaged with the discussions around Benjamin’s 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’ and its subsequent importance for following art movements. In the essay Benjamin
describes in somewhat hopeful (to our 21st century ears) utopian terms, the change in the social conditions of
art’s reception due to developments in reproduction, especially photography. From being an elitist/aesthetic
experience akin to quasi – religious devotion, by the end of the nineteenth century this had been transformed, through
film, into being a collective, uplifting and enlightening engagement for social good, aligned with the efforts of communism.
I tested out my theories on reproduction in the aforementioned recording the studio space and showing the framed images
opposite the paintings whose absences were marked on the studio walls, in my degree show, thereby setting up a dialogue between
absence and presence in relation to photographic documentation. When I left Goldsmiths I concentrated on
the smear/stain motif – but developed it into discovering representational images through a process of layering very
faint pencil lines to gradually allow an impression to emerge. This led to many years of studying why and
how there exists a desire to represent, to acknowledge the registering of visual stimuli in concrete form, initially in relation
to the landscape and latterly in the form of the figure in its broadest sense. I found that it was important
to articulate concepts within the conventions of the language of art because this language was just as much part of society
as photography, film and ‘mass culture’. For instance, much fashion photography makes reference
to old master painting. The history of art is constantly used for visual referent in consumer mass culture and its products.
I followed Tag
Gronberg’s teaching to Birbeck in 1999 with an initial proposal to research fashion photography, having worked as a
creative consultant in that world, with Isabella Blow, since 1995. My final dissertation, in fact focused
on the use of photographic documentation in an Arte Povera exhibition catalogue from 1993 entitled ‘Gravity and Grace’.
I looked at current approaches to photography in the wake of Benjamin’s essay. [Of particular interest were Roland
Barthes’ theories] Of key relevance were the theories of Celia Lury, Catherine Keenan and Linda Haverty Rugg who looked
at Benjamin’s theory that the work of art’s theory the artwork’s ‘aura’ ‘withers’
in the age of mechanical reproduction, with a more nuanced approach. This involved the relationship of memory to personal
photographs – expanding on the more subjective aspect of uses of photography. I maintained that,
far from being a wholesale embracing of the death of ‘aura’, what Benjamin qualified as ‘the unique sense
of distance, however close at hand’, the capacity of painting to absorb the viewer, Benjamin simultaneously mourned
this loss ‘with bombs the aura is killed in another way’. In looking at the way that photographic
documentation of art is used in the art catalogue, I proposed the idea that it is, in fact, the evidence of the desire
to believe in the veracity of the image which gives it authority. The desire is evident in Roland Barthes
‘Camera Lucida’, his musing on the photograph of his late mother. He is aware that he is actively
willing an inextricable connection between the photo and her former presence – that the photo is in fact an ‘absence
of presence’ and ‘presence of absence’ which gives it such a mesmerizing quality. My current research work
at the University of Bristol is a deeper enquiry into the desire for the photograph to refer to a real.
On completing the MA I continued to work for the artist
Damien Hirst – including a year as in-house photographer. I also continued to read about philosophy
of memory in David Farrell Krell’s ‘Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing, On The Verge’ (1990) which led
to Edward Casey’s ‘Remembering’- a phenomenological study (1987) while my practice involved a process of
displaying and photographing found objects that seemed to speak to memory entitled ‘The Remains Project’. I applied
to a History of Art research post graduate degree because I wanted to try out further the methodological approach begun at
Birkbeck in analysing the development of Benjamin’s theory to its use in Post Modern theory – to understand theories
of photography in historical context, aligned with contemporaneous art movements. Rather than the (anachronistic)
reception theory method of applying a theory to an artwork because the context is seen as contemporary and not needing to
place and artwork in its social setting. I had been very taken with how Stephen Bann, in a lecture at the
2004Serpentine Cy Twombly conference had been able to use the examples of Poussin and Ian Hamilton Finlay to discuss Twombly’s
classical references in his work. The method was visual in the first instance and art theory and art history
was used to illuminate rather than deconstruct the work. This is an approach attractive to practice as
an artist – I hoped to employ to effect in my research studies.
My initial proposal to Stephen Bann was to focus on Marcel Duchamp’s use of photographic
documentation of his ‘Bottlerack’ readymade in collaboration with Man Ray. The original object
had been lost from his studio in 1919 when he moved to New York from Paris so when it had been required for a surrealist exhibition
in the 1930’s (date) the pair went out and purchased another bottle-drier and photographed it, then presented the photograph.
The resultant image is both documentation and autonomous artwork. Seen in conjunction with Duchamp’s
urinal image by Steiglitz – also an individual artwork by and acknowledged photographer – made me consider whether
there was a critique of the status of documentation – implying the impossibility of impartial objective recording –
as the authored image stands in for the work – much like a photograph, in Susan Stewart’s ‘On Longing’
narrative, can stand in for memory, in fact replacing memory. Duchamp’s embracing of the negation of the real object
is seen in his ‘last’ painting ‘Tu m’’ (1918) where the focus is on the illusion of shadows.
I began, under Bann’s advice to consider the legacy of attitudes to photographic documentation, particularly
with relevance to the use of Duchamp in the 1960’s to give authority to a break with both tradition Modernism and with
Europe in the post – Greenbergian New York of Rosalind Krauss. How was it, I wondered, that representation and illusion
in photography could be acceptable, even desirable in the recording of conceptual or earthworks artworks and yet also seen
as breaking with the history of art? What then were the underlying beliefs that gave credence to this new
art historical approach?
In the conventions of art history I chose to concentrate on a case study, Ian Hamilton Finlay
to anchor my research. Finlay is appropriate because his use of photographic documentation reveals an attitude which neither
rejects nor adheres to tradition; instead he negotiates inherited forms and produced work which allows the creative act to
be the interpretive stance of the viewer. I have looked at Finlay’s use of ph. Doc. Within his practice
as there is no clear dividing line between images as a record and images as the work. For instance, in
the 1980 exhibition and booklet ‘Nature over again after Poussin’ he presented photographs commissioned from Scottish
landscape photographer Dave Paterson of ‘corners’ of his garden ‘Little Sparta’ ‘Scotland’s
greatest artwork’ which is the repository and laboratory of Finlay’s interventions into landscape.
Each Landscape is ‘signed’ with the monogram of a well known painter from the Western Tradition according
to its quality, its atmosphere. The stillness of the pool is evocative of Nicholas Poussin, the animated
movement of trees brings to mind Claude Lorrain. What is crucial in relation to Finlay’s use of photographic
documentation. Is that the images read as references to the style of painting and thus invite the viewer to collapse or problematise
the distinction between photography and painting. This reminds us that early photography aspired to the status of landscape
painting. Finlay – by making the scenes only possible as pictorial by use of the camera’s framing
capacity – makes the act of reception of the work only possible through a process of interpretation. We
can only see records of parts of the garden through the filter of styles, types of landscape, implying that there is no pure
natural environment to be referred to as outside human and thus cultural translation. The natural, is for
Finlay, a Romantic construction of an ideal ‘other’ in contrast to urban civilisation. This
is crucial to our understanding of photography, as from its inception it has been seen as the ‘pencil of nature’
as Fox Talbot famously remarked. The photograph has been seen as a way of letting the world speak for itself.
This tradition developed particularly in America where it was espoused as the modern art form and canonised at MOMA
in 1940 with a show of Brandt, Adams et al. Finlay, by using a photographer from that tradition, as Paterson
acknowledged in interview with me last year, makes it impossible to read the images as being authorless reproductions –
with intentionality – which is in effect the job of the documentary photographer. In conversation with Stephen White
the job is to ‘not be there’.
I needed to look at Finlay’s other use of photographic documentation and particularly
how it interacts with other art movements, so I studied the first introduction of photography into his work in 1966 with the
poem booklet ‘Autumn Poem’. Timing of this work is crucial as it is contemporaneous with conceptual
art’s use of photographic documentation which the essay ‘the photograph as information in the context of art ‘
by Robert Morgan describes as not being subjective or even part of the art work. What is clear about Finlay’s
Autumn Poem where the photograph of bare earth is combined with the text on transparent paper that interleaves and sits over
each image, is that the viewer is encouraged to read the work as both documentary image like a conceptual recording, and also
replete with association – as it stands for ‘the earth’ as in the planet earth like a drawing or painting
would previously have functioned. Here I found the opportunity to look deeper into the history of theory
of photography to understand how it came to be regarded as purely a reproducing tool and how this philosophy has underpinned
divergences in art historical readings of the 1960’s.
In the 1960’s many artists were interested in theories originating from linguistics
and semiotics – using them to counter existing inherited values; such as challenging the idea of the artist as genius,
as inheritor of a linear development of western art which was seen as ascending from the Classical period, through the Renaissance,
and culminating in Modernism. For example, in 1923, Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture had regarded
the standardization of Modernity apparent in the motor car and new architecture as not only inheritor of Classicism, but also
its refinement. “Phidias would have loved to have lived in this standardized age. He would have admitted
the possibility, nay the certainty of success. His vision would have seen in our epoch the conclusive results of his labours.
Before long he would have repeated the experience of the Parthenon.” In America in the 1950’s the critic
Clement Greenberg extended the European model of ‘progress’, championing Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists
and applied the theories of Clive Bell and Roger Fry to advocate the Formalism of Morris Louis and David Smith.
The quality of the work was seen to be an intrinsic value, actually latent within the painting or sculpture.
However, in the late 1950’s artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were challenging the view of
the autonomous artwork. The artwork came to be seen as a set of signs, with the structure of language to be interpreted by
the viewer. The social and cultural conditions, the position from which the artwork was viewed were seen
to affect the reading of the artwork’s meaning. Figures such as Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes employed
semiotic readings of not just art but of popular culture. Semiotic theory stemmed from the writings of
the nineteenth century pragmatic philosopher C.S.Peirce who divided signs in to three categories, the icon, the index and
the symbol. The icon was a likeness of the original subject, the index had a physical relation to the subject
and the symbol was the final behaviour change effected in the reader of the sign, the understood meaning of the sign.
Peirce gave as examples of the index, the symptoms
of an illness, the weather vane indicating wind direction and smoke as it indicates the presence of fire. However, it was
the photograph that has come to be seen as the seminal example of the index. The photograph is an imprint
of the world and by extension a revelation of the workings nature. The index spoke of a truth, not constructed
by human understanding, but evidence of the real external to human consciousness. In the move from Abstract
Expressionism in artists like Rauschenberg we see the use of the index, the imprint of the world and the visual relations
within the painting closer to language than the ideal of the purely visual. Marcel Duchamp was invoked as the progenitor of
this approach, by selecting found objects and presenting them in a deadpan manner. Ultimately, the most telling use of the
legacy of Duchamp (who died in 1968) was by Rosalind Krauss, who, formerly a student of Clement Greenberg, turned wholly against
his theories in order to create new point of origin for a unilateral view of American art of the 1960’s.
She wrote inserting an authority into the view that the new art movements, minimalism, conceptualism and land art broke
with the European tradition. Central to this was the use of the authority of Duchamp and his relation to photography and the
use of the index. Writing in October magazine in 1977, she saw his last painting, Tu m’
of 1918 as a ‘panorama of the index’ an illustration of theory of the imprint of reality, particularly the presence
of the imprint of ‘fixed’ shadows without their objects. Krauss also looked at Duchamp’s
notes for the Large Glass 1915-1923 for evidence of his use of the index and particularly his reference to photography. She
cites Duchamp’s use of the term ‘snapshot effect’ and the work’s function; she says ‘It is about
the physical transposition of an object from the continuum of reality in to the fixed condition of the art-image by a moment
of isolation, or selection.’
In establishing an unequivocal view of Duchamp’s relationship with photography and its indexical status Krauss
created a strong lineage for her history of new movements of the 1960’s. She uses as examples Dennis
Oppenheim’s land art and Lucio Pozzi who made installation/intervention works at the P.S. 1 building in Long Island
City in 1976. She also established the position of Robert Smithson and Richard Serra as post-modern artists.
Yet the crucial factor is her use of the veracity of the photographic document as evidence which confirms the desire
to believe, that it refers to a reality – not only that the image has a direct connection – but also that
there is, in fact, an external reality at all, outside of perception with which to connect. Krauss’
tone, for instance referring to ‘the index pure and simple’ strikes me as fundamentalist in its desire for a truth
that was still under discussion in the art of the 1960’s and not yet decided on. For instance, Carl
André who had been a great advocate of photography at the beginning of the 1960’s, by the end of the decade having
seen its co-option by the gallery system, turned against it regarding it as ‘a catastrophic invention’.
But it is clear when looking at Krauss that her polemical tone comes from the desire for simple truth – not negotiation
with existing traditions. She quotes Peirce in presenting examples from the P.S. 1 project in 1976.
“Photographs, especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive, because we know that they are in certain
respects exactly like the objects they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having
been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point to point to nature.
In that aspect, then, they belong to the second class of signs (indices), those by physical connection.”
She makes an equivalent of the position the photograph asserts with the new forms of artwork that exist after the canvases
that prioritise the flatness of Greenbergian Formalism. The artwork is a presentation of the world itself
–uncoded –uncultured – language. She says “It is the order of the natural world that imprints itself
on the photographic emulsion and subsequently on the photographic print. This quality of transfer or trace
gives to the photograph its documentary status, its undeniable veracity is beyond the reach of those possible internal adjustments
which are the necessary property of language. The connective tissue binding the objects contained by the
photograph is that of the world itself, rather than that of a cultural system. In the photograph’s
distance from what could be called syntax one finds the mute presence of an uncoded event. And it is this
kind of presence that abstract artists now seek to employ.” Krauss had drawn on Roland Barthes’
idea of the photograph being a ‘message without a code’ – the transposition of the world into an image rather
that its transformation and its accompanying cultural associations. However, this period of Barthes’
writing was from 1964, The Rhetoric of the Image, his structuralist phase. As we have seen his last work,
Camera Lucida, attempts to cover a more complex account of photography’s ‘undeniable veracity’.
As I looked at
the relation of memory to photography to examine further Barthes’ journey in Camera Lucida, I returned to the idea of
Place Memory of Edward Casey, combined with a visit to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden ‘Little Sparta’ last
year to explore the way photographic document operates in relation to memory. The key element to place
memory that accords with the function of photography is that the viewer ‘inhabits’ the place through physical
embodiment and the viewer of the photograph mentally implaces themselves into the scene through imagination. Casey
identifies several aspects of place memory which I identify as being significantly present in an experience of visiting Little
Sparta, in relation to photography of the garden. The aspects are; containment, limits, i.e. the horizons,
variegation i.e. interest, nostalgia, pathways, radiant visibility – a kind of ecstasy of vision. I looked at the comparison
of the imagine experience of being in the garden compared to the actual experience of being in the garden – importantly
there was much discrepancy in assumptions that I had made about how the garden, the place, would feel. Crucially,
the disparity centred on the feeling that the place was more intimate and less spacious than intuited from reproductions.
There was also no delineated division between the environment which surrounded one artwork and that encircling another
– in fact artworks could be simultaneously engaged with in the same context. This indicated that
the framing and editing of the site of an artwork for the photograph had allowed the viewer to inhabit intellectually the
meaning of the work and thus create an idea of the surroundings beyond the containing frame of the photograph in publication.
I maintained that all the attributes of place memory
could be applied to the photograph as a place for the mind to both inhabit and make familiar – make home.
Indeed referring to Victor Burgin in his book ‘On Photography’ he says
“ a photograph is a place of work, a structured and structuring space within which the reader deploys, and
is deployed by, what codes he or she is familiar with in order to make sense’. The mental movement
through a photograph actively making meaning as the ‘journey’ progresses forming a landscape through the joining
of a chain of ‘horizoned moments’ – which have ‘aura’ for Casey, forms into a scene, a place
of action. Thus the comparison of the documentation with being in the garden reveals much about the function
of photographic documentation of art. Beyond simple evidence, Krauss’ ‘undeniable veracity’,
the photographic document is a set of ingredients from which the viewer can construct an inhabitable world in which the artwork
sits. The artwork too then is a set of relations, a potential for a landscape of possibilities for the
viewer to explore.
As I have previously said, my current practice involves the process of memory in creating a record of the incidental
fall of light, I am fascinated by the idea of the index, the poetic notion which derives from André Bazin writing on
cinema in 1967, of the photograph as a mould or trace. I am making work whilst conscious of registering
the fall of light. In a sense I am trying to understand at what point there is a shift from recording to
invention, when we bring in associative readings of an object or event –where shadows fall from an object and give a
scene meaning. In some ways I think of myself as a camera (I am a camera ref?). I realised
that when you try to manually make a photographic imprint, I found out a lot about our desires and beliefs that we have for
the medium, as well as our relationship with reality. There is a strong urge, which I equate with a kind
of Romantic sublime, to be completely absorbed in nature in its broadest sense of a world external (and therefore without
meaning) to human consciousness. The hope that a medium such as photography can indicate the operations
of this nature is made apparent when, as a viewer in certain circumstances one can only barely tell whether an image is photographically
derived or not. The photograph, every photograph, symbolises a kind of evidence that there is not only
a world beyond consciousness, but that also we can access it.
The process by which I make the drawings is to lay down fine thread like marks onto smooth
(hot-pressed) hand made paper working initially with the very lightest 9h pencil. I almost feel, sculpt out the place where
the lines of the object and its shadow fall. I gradually allow progressively denser pencil marks, through
3h, h, hb, 2b, to accrue like sediment, finally finishing with the darkest black of 8b to give the subject a weight. I let
the image emerge like the way an image emerges on the photographic paper in the developing tray during wet photography.
I choose objects to study which I have already seen as drawings, wiry shapes that either I have found or more recently
others have found, recognising from my work that these objects are like drawings. This process began in
2000 when I decided to focus my attention for photographic documentation on one object from the previous 5 years’ accumulation
of found objects, kind of memory-moulds that I had formed into an installaion in the converted cow-barn next to the former
stockman’s cottage which I rented from the Blow family near Painswick. My work involved a documentation
of each object and when I came to an image of the mattress springs, it seemed to articulate the workings of memory, the patterns
of thought and also looked like a Twombly painting. The springs image also looked like it could be a shadow, an imprint itself,
a trace of movement, but in a still form which allowed the mind to move at the eye explored its complexity. In
1998 I had made a film for the Edinburgh festival at the Richard Demarco gallery in which I began to explore movement in and
image slowed down to appear still. In 2003, I made a video work entitled ‘Suspender’ at SVA
which explored the slowed passage of the camera’s progress over a section of the springs. The title
suggested many things, connoting the frozen, the hanging, erotic and gravity-defying aspect of the photograph of the springs.
I projected the piece against a wall and to activate the space I performed a painting each day as visitors came in.
The performance was an attempt to remember and depict the patterns of the suspender video at three stages – the
single, the double and the multiple rounds loosely evoking the idea of bifurcation and cell division, connecting to the idea
of reproduction both of life and of photographic images in relation to an interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s seminal
essay. Following the event, I continued to think about the memory of the photographic – this time
in relation to Roland Barthes’ subjective approach, employing nostalgia, memory, loss and the attempt to create presence.
So I continued the Suspender paintings series which, in the attempt to connote springs, were very expressive
abstract works, culminating in Suspender VI on which I performed physical acts, leaving paint as smears, scraping
marks and remnants of many materials and gestures. In 2004 I was very ill, recovering slowly over a year
and I was considering what way I could regain my practice. On submitting the mattress springs object for
display at Stroud House Gallery, the curator Lynn Cluer Coleman asked me if I ever made drawings any more. I
was curious, rather than simply continue making photographs of the mattress springs, to see what the challenge of drawings
would result in. I chose the position of the video stills to draw from and rekindled a technique
which I had last used at the end of my BA at Goldsmiths which allowed form to emerge as I used to draw the gaps between trees
in the Chelsea Physic Garden. This had led me to attempt to create a sustained body of work, which recently
in the last year has incorporated the use of paint as an experiment in making drawings on a larger scale whilst also exploring
the complexity of sensuous associations – more physical and less cerebral – that paint stimulates compared to
pencil’s more sober aspect.
