Medium and Art: The Paradox of Photography by Jacques Rancière, Slides of Art

Download Medium and Art: The Paradox of Photography by Jacques Rancière and more Slides Art in PDF only on Docsity! PARRHESIA NUMBER 11 • 2011 • 35-43 WHAT MEDIUM CAN MEAN Jacques Rancière Translated by Steven Corcoran1 I will present some remarks here on the use of the notion of medium in art theory and the light cast on this notion by the case of photography. The notion of medium is in fact much more complex than it appears at first. Theorizations of medium as the crucial element of artistic modernity bring two apparently opposite senses of the word into play. First, we understand the word ‘medium’ as ‘that which holds between’: between an idea and its realization, between a thing and its reproduction. The medium thus appears as an intermediary, as the means to an end or the agent of an operation. Now, modernist theorization makes ‘fidelity to the medium’ into the very principle of art, inverting the perspective. This medium to whose specificity one must be faithful is no longer simply the instrument of art. It becomes the specific materiality defining its essence. This is certainly the case in the Greenbergian definition of painting as that which is faithful to its own medium—the two- dimensional surface and the coloured pigment—and thereby delivered from the servile tasks of representation. The medium, then, is no longer the means to an end. It is properly speaking that which prescribes this end. But the thesis which identifies the essence of art with the law of its medium can be read in two opposite senses. On the one hand, it says that art is art when it is freed from the tasks of mimesis, when it becomes simply the execution of its own idea in its own specific material. This is the statement that is usually remembered. But the thesis can also be stood on its head as follows: art is art when the constraints of the material and the instrument free it from itself, free it from the will to make art. The separation of art from mimesis, then, is also a separation of technē from itself: the separation of technē as the execution of an idea, or implementation of a type of knowledge, from technē as the law of the material and instrument, as the law of that which does not pertain to art. The thesis about the medium thus states two things simultaneously: the first is that art is art when it is only art; the second is that art is art when it is not only art. These two contradictory propositions can be synthesized in the following way: art is art insofar as it is possible that what is art is simultaneously not art. It is art when its productions belong to a sensory milieu in which the distinction is blurred between that which is and that which is not art. In short, the ‘means’ [le moyen] is also a means to achieve something other than its own end. It is also the means of participating in the configuration of a specific milieu. The tension between the medium as neutral means and the medium as specific substance, between the medium as instrument of realization of an idea of art and the medium as that which resists both idea and art resolves to a third term, a third idea, namely the medium WHAT MEDIUM CAN MEAN as milieu: the milieu in which the performances of a determined artistic arrangement come to be inscribed, but also the milieu that these performances themselves contribute to configuring. Suspending art from the law of the medium amounts to postulating the recovery of both milieus. It amounts to postulating a law of adequation between, on the one hand, artistic performances that are ‘true to their medium’ and, on the other, a new milieu of experience, a new technical world that is simultaneously a new sensory world and a new social world. Within this view, photography plays a privileged role. The photographic apparatus is, on the one hand, the pure instrument, the automaton at the service of any will, and in particular at the service of art insofar as it is the realization of a will to create art. But it is also the instrument which, by itself, executes the previous task of art, namely representation and so delivers the one who employs it from the concern to create art and from the pretention of being an artist. It is the technology of mimesis: and further still is often invoked as being the very technology that liberates art from mimesis, but also the one that liberates mimesis from art, that enables things to have themselves seen, freed from the codes of representation, from coded relations between visible forms and the production of meaning-effects. Walter Benjamin and Jean Epstein alike celebrated this machine-operated liberation—whether photographic or cinematographic—that gives access to a truth or an unconscious of the visible. If photography, which is the matter that concerns us here, is par excellence the medium that gives access to a new sensory milieu, then the photographer as artist who is ‘faithful to his medium’ is the one who captures this new sensory milieu, who inscribes the performances of his camera in its configuration. As Jean Epstein went on to say, the camera is the veridical artist. But the role of this veridical artist can be understood in two ways, as can the relation between its artistic power and its veridicality. On the one hand, the camera is the artist, because it produces a kind of writing, and more precisely because it has an impersonal power in it—the light—which writes. The sensory milieu, then, is one in which light and movement constitute a new writing. Yet, on the other hand, it is a veridical artist insofar as it does not write anything, insofar as all it yields is a document, pieces of information, just as machines yields them to men who work on machines and are instrumentalized by them, to men who must learn from them a new way of being but also domesticate them for their own use. The first idea is perhaps illustrated by an exhibition which took place in 2005 and marked the move of the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris to its new location at Jeu de Paume. The exhibition was called Eblouissement. Spectators were able to see, in one and the same room, the following: Charcot’s clinical photographs of the ill, a picture from the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Man Ray’s solarizations, a double exposure by Maurice Tabard, a photogramme by Raoul Haussmann, photographs by Brassai, a ‘decomposition’ and a ‘moire’ by Eric Rondepierre and photographs of the Serpentine Dance by Loïe Fuller. So it exhibited nothing but photographs, but photographs of very different natures and statuses: photographs taken with or without camera, documentary photographs and artistic photographs, simple and elaborate photographs, and possibly extracts taken from other supports. This seemingly heteroclite collection was unified by a specific idea of the photographic medium: the photographs gathered together in it all attested to the discovery of another sensible world, to the world of captured movement and of light which writes itself, a world that machines had discovered inside the world of ordinary everyday experience; an interior of the sensible, but also the new lived world of movement and electricity; a world where there is continuity between the light of the street lamps and the flash of Brassai’s camera as it discovers the hieroglyphs of dreams on walls. It is this identity between a new physis and a new lived world that is composed by gathering together Loïe Fuller’s luminous dance, Brassaï’s nocturnal fairytales and Man Ray’s rayograms or solarizations. The photographic medium is the means of recording this new world of machines but also of contributing to its formation: a world of technology, but one where all technologies are indifferenciated: a calligramme by Apollinaire or a painting by Boccioni would have been equally at place in it. Indeed, the idea of the medium clearly exceeds the idea of the apparatus. And there is no doubt that rather than speak of medium, it would be better to speak here of mediality, understood as the relation between three things: an idea of medium, an idea of art and an idea of the sensorium within which this technological apparatus carries out the performances of art. The mediality envisaged here implies the immediate unity between the power of an organon and that of a sensorium. Photography—including in its cameraless forms—and cinema are the arts of this new sensible world where light and movement are directly and simultaneously both experimented upon and experimenters: a world of intensities and speeds where matter JACQUES RANCIERE immediateness, is in fact constituted by the conjunction of two things: on the one hand, a knowledge about the history of a figure; and, on the other, the very texture of the photograph, its colouration, is indicative of the fact that it is an old photo from the past, a photo of someone who, in any case, is already dead as we view it. So ‘singularity’ takes on another meaning entirely. More than incomparable being, what constitutes it is the fact of having been there, therefore of no longer being there. The singularity of photography, then, is that of the Latin imago, of the effigy of the dead, which with Barthes, becomes the effigy of death. Photography becomes a messenger of the beyond. And this determination falls back on the medium relation alone, which produces the real affect of the photograph: in the case of Lewis Payne, not the knowledge that he will die, but on the contrary a non-knowledge. At first sight, we do not know who he is, why he gazes in this way. And even if we know who this young man is, we are still unable to know the thinking that animates this gaze, which expresses neither fear nor revolt, neither resignation nor repentance. Similarly, we are unaware of what the photographer was thinking, and whether it was at his request that the detainee is seated on the border of light and shadow, his gaze turned intensely toward the camera. When all is said and done, the affect of this photo comes from the impossibility of establishing any determinate relationship between the modality of this gaze and the imminence of death, between the present of the way in which it affects us and the age of the photograph, between singularity and anonymity. The ‘having-been’ in fact decomposes into a plurality of relations whose indefinite relation renders, for us, the aesthetic quality of photography. Now, Barthes folds this plurality down onto the sole image of death. Death becomes a name for the Unique and is the medium power of photography because it is the pure relation of that which is to that which no longer is, a power on which that dimension of collective sensible experience referred to as history came crashing down. The second way of understanding the law of the medium that I mentioned above, leads to another form of reduction. On the face of it, however, this way is the exact opposite of Barthes’ view. It maintains in effect that the medium is an instrument, a means of reproduction and nothing else. The artist who uses it does so specifically as such, which is to say he utilizes its resources qua apparatus, without pretending to turn it into a milieu or a sensorium. This thesis defines an idea of photography which is encapsulated in the title of an exhibition and accompanying publication, edited by Jean-François Chevrier and James Lingwood: Another Objectivity. Their text redefined the specificity of the photographic medium as its ‘ontological poverty’, as the absence of any strong ontological consistency required for the medium to become a milieu. The photographic apparatus, on this view, is a means of providing objective and reproducible information about what is placed before the lens. So seen, the essence of the medium condemns two other uses of photographs: the virtuous use based on ‘subjective availability and visual equality’ and which associates the apparatuses ability for immediate reception with the artist’s ability to grasp the visual event, which marks his mastery; and the emotional use that puts affect in the place of information, as in ‘humanist photography’. This twin prohibition, ascribed to the medium, is enough to show that this idea of objectivity is itself also an idea of art, a way of defining the adequation between the essence of photography and that of artistic ‘modernity’. Only the problem is that there is more than one idea of modernity. And the idea of photographic objectivity oscillates between two ideas of its own specificity, which themselves also amount to two ideas of modernity. On the one hand, the specificity of the medium is assimilated to its reproducibility. To be faithful to the medium is then to be faithful to its multiplicating essence. But it is hardly an easy matter to discern the specific quality held by an image due to its being reproducible. It is indeed even less so insofar as the very existence of photography makes every image infinitely multipliable and comes to us massively in the form of copies. The same holds, from this viewpoint, for the young English noble painted by Holbein as for the Italian apprentice photographed by Paul Strand. With Chevrier and Lingwood, too, this multiplicating essence is displaced from the idea of multiplying a one to that of the multiple unit. Reproducibility thus becomes seriality. Whence the exemplarity of Becher’s works, which comprise series like August Sander’s. The problem, however, is that Sander’s series constituted typologies. For Benjamin their value involved the formation of physiognomist meaning. These series of German social types were means of identification and struggle, enabling the combatants to know who they WHAT MEDIUM CAN MEAN had before them and to get used to the reverse. Obviously no such service is to be expected from the Bechers’ series of water towers and disused industrial sites. Benjamin’s critique would actually have no difficulty in trapping these series in its purview: the photos of factories say nothing about the social relations manifest in them. The interest of the series therefore cannot reside in what it is they have us understand about social relations. It consists essentially in the ethical virtue that is granted to the multiple as such, insofar as it parries the conjuring tricks of the one and the aura, of the unique instant and ecstatic contemplation. This principle is a purely negative one, just as with Barthes, even if its meaning is the exact inverse. Its artistic ‘positivity’ therefore comes from a second way of thinking about the medium’s ‘objectivity’. Chevrier and Lingwood capture this way with the single notion of ‘form-tableau’, as exemplified by Jeff Wall’s luminous backlit photographs. But what relation can we conceive between these great scenes in the form of history tableaus, and the rectangles which make the sight of the Bechers’ blast furnaces resemble teaching boards? None, perhaps, except for the Greenbergian idea of the surface which encloses the artist’s performance and prohibits it from going out of itself, from showing empathy for its subject or from taking itself as a form of social experimentation. In this sense, the Bechers’ abandoned industrial sites are a way to ward off the dreams of artists—those engineers and builders of factories in the age of Peter Behrens—just like Barthes’ fascination for the Danton collar served to repress the engagement of photographer Lewis Hine alongside those doomed to factory work or to living in hospices. Here the ‘essence’ of the medium is once again a way of settling accounts with the period in which the medium was conceived as the organon of a new collective world. The only thing being that this settling of accounts is more complex in case of the Bechers’ and the theoreticians of ‘objective photography’: the expulsion of the constructivist dream also amounts to an assertion of fidelity to the values linked to the industrial universe and to worker struggles; the sobriety of the documentary gaze which repels humanist pathos, the formal principles of frontality, of uniform framing and presentation-in-series serving to link scientific objectivity with the effacement of artistic subjectivity. It remains that what this objectivist bias fundamentally presents us with is an absence: instead of classes and social types, it presents disused edifices. It is possible to interpret the photographing of absence in two ways: first, as a way of showing the programmed departure of the world of industry and workers; but also as a way of playing on the aesthetic affect of disuse which takes us back to Barthes’ ‘having-been’. This tension of the ‘objectivist’ idea of the medium is even more palpable in a series made by a follower of the Bechers, Frank Breuer. Here I am thinking chiefly of his series of containers presented, along with those of warehouses and logos, at the Rencontres photographiques d’Arles in 2005. His medium format prints were presented in the transept of a former church. Seen from afar they looked like abstract paintings or reproductions of minimalist sculptures. By drawing closer, however, these rectangles of colour on a white background could be seen to be containers piled up on a large deserted space. The impact of the series obviously dwells in the tension between this minimalism and the meaning it conceals. These containers were to be, or to have been, filled with merchandise and unloaded in Anvers or Rotterdam, products that were probably produced in a faraway country, perhaps one in the Asian South East, by faceless workers. In short, then, the containers were filled with the absence of these workers, an absence which also is that of every worker occupied with unloading containers and, more distantly, of the European workers replaced by those distant workers. The medium’s ‘objectivity’, then, conceals a determinate aesthetic relation between opacity and transparency, between the containers as brute presence of pure coloured forms and containers as representatives of the ‘mystery’ of the commodity, that is, of the way in which it absorbs human labour and conceals its mutations. It consists in the relation of a presence to an absence, in the twofold relation of a visible form to a signification and to an absence of meaning. The idea of ‘ontological poverty’, then, must be carried through till the end. It does not mean that photography’s lot would be its ‘poverty in being’ as that which determines its artistic possibilities. It means, conversely, that it falls under no law of specific ontological consistency that would be linked to the specificity of its technological apparatus, that it therefore take part in ideas of art which are part of a history that is in excess of it. We can understand this through an analogy with Eisenstein’s analyses on cinematographic montage. His analyses show us how montage accomplishes something than other arts have either dreamt of or else realized with their own means, for example, painting in Serov’s portrait of the actress Yermolova: the JACQUES RANCIERE motionless image of painting must translate, in the artist’s portrait posing before the painter, the energy of the actress in action. The painter accomplishes this by including, thanks to the mirrors and trimmings in the room, several different framings for the parts of his body, several ‘shots’ in a single one. Cinema makes explicit, thanks to the technique of montage, a power of signification in time that painting approaches through the fragmentation of its space. Photography authorizes an achievement of the same order by realizing, conversely, a power of motionlessness by which literature strove to suspend the movement of its phrases or a power of the involuntary that painting has to recreate through the artifice of the distribution of dashes. Photography’s ‘poverty’ permits it, in short, to effectuate this inclusion of non-art, which literature and painting were obliged to mime using artistic means. This can be illustrated by a photograph that is situated in the interval between Barthes’ ‘having-been’ and the objectivity of the Becher school. This photograph, by Walker Evans, presents a detail in a kitchen on a farm in Alabama. First, then, it performs a documentary function, a function it took on as part of the major inquiry that had been commissioned by the Farm Security Administration. However, something more is going on in the photo, something that goes beyond our merely being informed about a situation of misery: a kitchen with neither sideboard nor dresser, tinplate cutlery in a makeshift rack, a thin lopsided wooden plank nailed across a wooden wall made of disjointed and worm-eaten boards. What retains our attention is a certain aesthetic disposition marked by unevenness: the parallels are not parallel, the cutlery is haphazardly arranged, and the objects on the plank up high (which functions as a shelf) are dissymmetrically placed. This dysfunctionality composes a harmonious dissymmetry whose cause remains uncertain: is it an effect of chance, of the fact that things just happened to be arranged in this way before the lens? Is it an effect of the photographer’s gaze, of his choosing a frame honed in on a detail, thereby transforming a completely random or simply functional arrangement into an artistic quality? Or else is it the aesthetic taste of one of the premises’ inhabitants, creating art with the available means by hammering in a nail or placing a tin here rather than there? It may be that the photographer had wanted to show the misery of the farmers. It may be that he simply photographed with he found before him without any particular intention, and that his photo thus benefitted from the beauty of the random. It may be that he took pleasure in seeing in it a quasi-abstract minimalist canvas or that he wanted, conversely, to underline a certain beauty of the functional: the sobriety both of the horizontal plank and the rack in fact can satisfy an aesthetics of design, one that is fond of simple and raw material and the arts of living and doing that simple people pass down from generation to generation. The photograph’s aesthetic quality resides in short in a perfect equilibrium, a perfect indecision between the two forms of beauty that Kant distinguished: the beauty which adheres to a form adapted to its function and the free beauty of finality without end. Before our gaze there henceforth lies neither simple, objective information about a situation nor the wound of this has been. The photo does not say whether or not it is art, whether it represents poverty or a play of straight lines and diagonals, of weights and counterweights, of order and disorder. It says nothing about what was in the mind of the person that arranged the boards and cutlery, or about what the photographer had wanted to achieve. This game of multiplied gaps provides an exemplary illustrations of what Kant designated with the name ‘aesthetic idea’: ‘that representation of the imagination which induces much thought, yet without the possibility of any definite thought whatever, i.e., concept, being adequate to it’. The aesthetic idea is that indeterminate idea which links together the two processes left disjointed by the destruction of the mimetic order: the intentional production of art which pursues an end and the sensible experience of beauty as finality without end. Photography is exemplarily an art of aesthetic ideas because it is exemplarily an art capable of enabling non-art to realize art by dispossessing it. I do not want to draw any general conclusions from these rapid reflections for the point of validating or invalidating the thesis that serves as the argument for this encounter: that of a ‘technological turn’ of aesthetics. But I do think some questions can be drawn from them that serve to clarify what is at stake in this issue. What is at stake obviously is first of all to know what is being referred to as technology. This name in fact designates at least five things. First of all, an ability to produce specific operation; in the second place, the general model of rationality in terms of means and ends; third, the ability of an apparatus to substitute operations for human