My column, "Message Pictures: Adventures in Reading Images," continues in the Fall 2011 issue of BlackFlash. The content is not on-line, so here is the unedited text below:
Message Pictures
Adventures in Reading Images, Part Two
By Michael Davidge
The following is the second in a series of three texts that focus on
the pleasures and frustrations, the rewards and dangers, of reading images and
imagining readings.
As the last issue
of Blackflash proved, there is plenty
to be read in an image by Rodney Graham, and the triptych The Gifted Amateur, Nov. 10th, 1962 (2007) is no
exception. When I encountered it
at the National Gallery, the giant backlit tableau of the staged photograph was
a feast for the eyes on a cinematic scale. In the picture, Graham’s persona, dressed in pajamas, is
engaged in the creation of a painting in the middle of his living room, leading
me to wonder if there is an “allover” composition at work. I sensed that the scene depicted had
been art-directed to its very last centimetre so that everything my eyes might
discover had been deliberately placed there, in advance, by the artist. All of the easily legible titles on the
spines of the books scattered about the autodidact amateur’s makeshift studio
will certainly be significant. If Tintin
is the hero of the comics’ mysteries because he is the best reader of the
clues, then Graham’s work as an attempt to “faire Tintin” is masterful, placing
his person at the centre of its composition and its interpretation. Can such a
literate image be dialogical like a novel, as in the literary theories of
Mikhail Bahktin[i], wherein
marginal voices can be read against the grain of the master narrative? Captured
by this image, one might do best by remaining silent.
Playing the
investigative journalist, I was inspired to do a little of my own sleuthing and
look for a fissure in the verisimilitude of Graham’s impressive façade in order
to unravel a bit of its mystery or its mastery. The detail I was most
interested in was the date on the newspapers splayed on the gifted amateur’s
floor, placed there in order to catch any drips of paint that might stray from
the Morris Louis-type painting in process. Sure enough, the date is contemporaneous with the title of
the photograph, making an airtight case. The confirmation of this detail felt a
bit like the denouement of a film I recently watched, Call Northside 777 (1948), where [Spoiler alert.] a wrongly-accused man is exonerated by a detail in
a blown-up photograph: the date on a newspaper. Both scenarios rely on the credibility of photography as an
historical document. Of course,
the Rodney Graham photo is a put-on that calls into question the veracity of an
image that has a top of the line degree of high fidelity to its time
period. Continuity is broken when
we recognize the artist in the photograph. In this regard, Graham’s picture hews most closely to a line
that measures photography as art rather than machinic process, and might be
best filed under the category of history painting. Such a categorization
suggests that its narrative is probably more epic than novelistic, thereby
diminishing its heteroglossia (cf. Bakhtin). I’m tempted to read the image
symbolically, though, and make the newspapers underfoot a kind of base to the
superstructure of the artist’s activity. On the front-lines of the avant-garde
after photography shouldered the burden of representation and mass reportage, abstraction
in painting doggedly pursued its own self-determination. If, as I established
in my previous column, we can compare Rodney Graham to Tintin, who sent
photographs of his adventures back to the home office, then we have another
vantage point for viewing the embedded journalist. The impression given is that
Graham’s barefoot amateur is thoroughly embedded in this scene of combat.
The typical view of the embedded
journalist is that he or she is attached to a military unit in order to get access
to areas of armed conflict. Embedded journalists are often viewed as being
completely dictated to and controlled by the military, the results seen as
little more than propaganda. If
information is another front of warfare, then military forces are becoming as
sophisticated in their public relations as in the technology of their weapons,
and very often artists are enlisted to engage in the battle for hearts and
minds. In such a situation, can someone voice concerns from the margins? Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin
are London-based artists who were embedded with the British Army in Afghanistan
in June 2008. Their practice often plays on the tension between “embedded”
artists and their hosts, as they actively present themselves as photographers
in order to gain access to institutions that might not otherwise be open to the
kind of critique the artists have in mind. Their project with the British Army presented them with many
of the challenges posed to the embedded.
In an interview, Chanarin stated, “In Afghanistan it felt like the army
was lifting our camera, composing our pictures, and clicking the shutter.”[ii] The only way they felt
they could be subversive in this scenario was by engaging with it not at the
level of the image but at the level of the apparatus, engaging rather with the
very structure of embedding and refusing to produce an image that would clearly
reiterate a narrative the Army controlled. The outcome, in an exhibition of
works entitled The Day Nobody Died (2008), resembles an absurdist theatre of war,
wherein Broomberg and Chanarin even refused to handle their own materials and
had soldiers troop a 50 metre roll of photographic paper out to the front-line,
where seven metre sections of it were unrolled and exposed to sunlight for 20
seconds. The results can be seen
in their photograph entitled The Press Conference, June 9, 2008: an abstract colour field
that challenges conventional representations of conflict.
The photographs under
examination are both carefully dated by their titles, but beyond that they
diverge in their strategies of address: Graham appears to be in complete
control of his transparency, exposing every surface to be read; Broomberg and
Chanarin take a different tack and pursue a strategy of illegibility in order
to retain control of their image.
By placing himself front and centre in his composition, Graham
implicates himself in the scene of the crime, if it is one. I do not want to suggest, however, that
Broomberg and Chanarin are innocent by contrast: as Chanarin admits, an important
touchstone in the artists’ work is Janet Malcolm’s book The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) which paints the
titular relationship in shades of grey.[iii] Tom McCarthy
links Tintin to Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950), through the coded radio
messages of the French Resistance that echo in the works and through the two
respective characters’ ability to write without writing, and I suppose that
means writing without giving anything away.[iv]
Broomberg and Chanarin are resistance figures too, but I’d link them with an
even darker film, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (1969). Melville’s film about the French
Resistance, which features an extraordinary sequence where the ruthless hero
does nothing but sit and read through a stack of books on the philosophy of
mathematics, offers one cold observation: Even those who peddle abstraction cannot avoid
getting their hands dirty.
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