Representable 1
Here: a short review of works by Sigmar Polke, Mare Nero, thinking with Jean-Luc Nancy…
In “Forbidden Representation,” Jean-Luc Nancy, speaking of the “unrepresentable,” between “impossibility” and “illegitimacy” of representation of the Holocaust, comes to the statement: “The criteria of a representation of Auschwitz can only be found in this demand: that such an opening—interval or wound—not be shown as an object but rather that it be inscribed at the very level of representation, as its very texture, or as the texture of its truth.” Here, Nancy is concerned with the problem of representing absence (an opening), or of representing that which is always outside of representation. Rather than pointing to absence as an object, didactically, and risking “illegitimacy,” Nancy values that an absence be the texture of a work, in order to provide a resistance to representation (a representation that is always already image).
Although his essay concerns the Holocaust, Nancy reminds us that the world of the Holocaust is still our world, and so it is important to be discerning about other events. And because Nancy is concerned not with the event, but with its representation, it might be instructive to turn to photography (lots of representation within this medium)—specifically Sigmar Polke’s Der Bärenkampf (1974).
Polke’s work contains fourteen sequential images from Afghanistan. Two dogs fight with a bear. Two images (3—a man pointing; 7—a man smiling ) are portraits. The final image, closer, contains two men pulling their dogs away from the bear. Many of the shots maintain similar framing, in a way that suggests, cinematically, an event unfolding. But what is notable is that each image is heavily processed: as if something went wrong in the darkroom, as if the images had been water-stained, as if the images had aged and been folded (a feature of Sigmar Polke). Throughout the sequence, the viewer strains to see an animal violence, where figures are rendered small and unintelligible. The images are literally “textured,” in a way that evades their capacity for straight-forward representation.
Because we are so used to seeing images as representative (these “mistakes” as mistakes) that the folds and chemical stains become not objects, but a texture to see through. It would have been possible to represent this event, using photography as description, if only Sigmar Polke “had done better in the darkroom.” But because these “mistakes” are not objects within the image, they communicate something less literal about the event (an experience of struggle in our own perception, just as the dogs struggle the bear…): a sort of violence towards representation that mirrors the violence of the animals depicted. Maybe here, we come closer to Nancy’s wounded texture…
(All of a sudden Nancy’s concern seems questionable, especially his focus on texture, for so many artists work between representation and ambiguity: there is a question, rather than playing on the surface of representation, of what a texture does. For Nancy, it allows a resistance to a ‘final’ or ‘definitive’ work…but it seems that in the case of each work, a reference to absence does something more…)
Like Polke, “Gargaglione and Fucili,” from the artist group Mare Nero, “have each put their mark on the photographs. They have spliced, doodled over, rubbed, and scratched out sections of the images, obscuring and effacing most of the people and much of the landscape that they occupied.” An image of a man with an underexposed face; others with neutral density filters obscuring parts of the photograph, “these images point to the ongoing destruction that has left an estimated five hundred thousand Syrians dead and another six million scattered around the world.” And yet, none, at least none in the article I can view, of these images point to the destruction directly (except some grave markers…). Where Mare Nero works with “memory,” (and later, religion in relationship to memory), it is a memory “absensed” (in Nancy’s terms) from literal representation.
At the same time, none of these “absenses” (in Nancy’s terms) are relegated to the “texture” of the images. Nancy could be if not corrected, then clarified here. There are, in two instances, blocks of shape and tone; another is a choice of tonality; others maintain elements of collage (all of these do texture, but they are not purely textural elements). What they do, more than texture, is displace the objects of the image, achieving Nancy’s goal of resisting a “final” or “definitive” work, and displaying, in a sense, a “wound” to representation.
It might, finally, be important to, beyond texture & contents of compositional (which still, as long as the image bears a representative function, are the “texture” of an image—or the event behind an image), find an instance in which absence is represented through an object “in” the image. So far, absence has not been figured: each instance relies on the propensities of the medium, rather than what the medium depicts. But here, finding absence within the image, we might run into the theoretical limit that Nancy refers to: that to image absence (an absence which, according to Nancy, representation excludes but that which representation is also determined by), is to image something “illegitimately,” risking “reducing representation to a mockery.” For although we may photograph that which is already absent, it will always retain its presence within an image. It is impossible to represent something as unrepresentable…
(I am working, this week, on a funeral slideshow: through images contingent on the memory a person who is now absent. The images are not photographs of absence; their context is absence, and it is through their context that they refer to absense. And I find myself clarifying images, so that these memories, for the friends and family, may be present once again. Yet, it may still be interesting to play with their slideshow.)
Finally, at the same time, Nancy sets up one more boundary. We must also “resist adopting the stance of an idolatrous mysticism of the ineffable.” In response to the “unrepresentable,” and in conjunction with Nancy’s call to texture, that which cannot be depicted must not be dismissed, hands-wiped-clean, as “ineffable.” We can still “eff” around it, using techniques that look like mistakes, that reduce our ability to grasp an image, and to give it a sort of communication (through the surface, through properties intrinsic to the medium and not what it depicts) towards that which is beyond depiction.
Which is where the blur trend comes in. Oh dear God, the BLUR TREND. Maybe it is sufficient to say, instead of a whole rant on the “blur trend,” which is mostly motion blur, (mimicking “authenticity” through “blur,” through either an intentional mistake, or, more realistically, an amount of blur similar to a cinematic blur: life as authentic and storied as a movie), that there are techniques intrinsic to photography that “texture” something. More on that later. Blur marks a limit and boundary of perception, and it is worth, eventually (next post) figuring out whether it can move beyond a vernacular “authenticity.”