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Consciousness Reframed 2003
Assimilating
Consciousness:
Strategies in Photographic Practice
Jane Tormey
A reframed
consciousness is explored within the context of contemporary art photography.
Three concerns have emerged in response to the complex debate provoked
by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, which have impacted
on the assumptions inherent in aesthetic consciousness – simplistically,
that there is no author, no essential meaning and no reality. The impact
has a more fundamental influence than oft-cited characteristics of post-modern
photography such as appropriation and depictions of false identity. The
paper proposes that artists are adopting strategies that reflect this,
which can be visibly seen in qualities that are oblique, ambivalent, ordinary
and expressionless.
Photography, Strategies, Aestheticism, Post-modernism, Non-determinacy
A model of reframed consciousness can be explored within the context of
contemporary art photography. If philosophical / theoretical discourse
concerning consciousness affects attitudes to ‘reality’, then
photographic practices visibly reflect changes in those attitudes and
present them in current artistic preoccupation. The inter-relationship
between photographic strategies and consciousness might be described as
an aspect of ‘post-modernism’, which Jean-Francois Lyotard1
defines as a radically altered understanding of reality. In the context
of art, he explains that successive reactions to knowledge test the rules
of existing aesthetic practice, provoking successive innovations –
resulting in a series of anti-aesthetics. Postmodernism is a recurring
state, where ‘beliefs are shattered’ where other realities are
invented, a period of attitudinal adjustment, coming before (ante) assimilation.
Typical reaction and assimilation now, centres around three premises brought
to the fore in current thinking - an understanding of the image as not
real (Jean Baudrillard,2), an uncertainty provoked by Jacques Derrida’s
repositioning3 and an instability arising from loss of the author
(Roland Barthes4). The profound influence of these ideas on information,
on knowledge, on our understanding and ultimately our aesthetic assumptions
(consciousness) can be seem in examples of photography – in strategies
that dictate the images. Methods of assimilation echo qualities, such
as non-determinacy, which circumvent the impossible task of making definitive
photographic statements – assuming methods of avoidance / obliqueness
/ blandness / ordinariness / artificiality / attenuation / contradiction.
Vilem Flusser describes our relationship to the world as dislocated due
to the impact of the image. Our understanding, mediated by photographs,
reflects a ‘second-order magical consciousness’5 that
has assimilated the inauthenticity of ‘reality’. In his discussion
of simulacra, Baudrillard identifies the problem for representation that
results from a reality constructed by the image and where we can no longer
distinguish between real and imaginary, original and copy, surface and
depth. He assumes that the real is lost and advocates that we ‘give
up representation’. ‘Hyperreality’ and ‘aesthetic
illusion’ have repositioned photographs as equivocal documents rather
than a reflection of reality. Our grasp of reality is thus key in the
evolution of photographic strategy. Because the indexical quality of photographs
has lead us to believe that what is presented is real, so photographs
easily disguise or contradict, bear no relation to reality at all and
can be entirely fabricated. In his writing on photography specifically,
Baudrillard proposes an un-definition of what is real.6 If the
central tenet that there is an authentic truth to be found through endeavour,
is no longer viable, then it becomes meaningless to pursue or represent
reality and logically one should actively abandon the attempt. He challenges
the photographer to ‘disappear’, to relinquish interpretation,
so that the depicted subject can speak. He proposes that the author no
longer searches for ‘essence’ or universal quality and accepts
rather, an authenticity mediated by the reader - a disappearing of the
photographer as subject. He empowers the reader and the subject depicted,
but not the author’s constructed idea of the subject. What Baudrillard
proposes and what much contemporary work adopts is a lack of control or
intentional meaning, allowing meaning to assert itself by way of the insignificant
and ordinary in the image, He turns the role of the photographer inside
out, uprooting the central role of the author as expressing herself. In
the face of simulacral confusion, he promotes an oblique re-emergence
of the real. Decentred, less complete, less focused.
The premise of uncertainty and contradiction, allowed by Derrida’s
deconstruction and critique of logocentricism is central to a new kind
of ‘disinterestedness’ apparent in practice. Artists are seen
to be denying received knowledge / aesthetic convention in a way that
distances themselves from the ‘logocentric’ and are adopting
instead more circumspect and subtle strategies of non-linear narrative,
positional uncertainty, incidental view and a reliance on instinct and
happenstance. In Droit de Regards7, Derrida examines a series of
photographs and explores ‘interminable’ narrative, contradicting
and challenging our ‘desire for stories’ and resolution. His
analysis allows every detail to have significance, steering us away from
a definitive account, denying us the certainty of closure, demonstrating
methods of looking and understanding through his questioning of implicit
interpretation. He celebrates the lack of any one underlying meaning,
the uncertainty, the multiplicity, and the possibility of non-oppositional
contradiction. Such lessons in the reading of images as non-definitive
and contradictory are paralleled by photographers who avoid the obviously
‘meaningful’ and who approach the image obliquely, presenting
imploded depictions of consciousness, of indiscriminate ordinariness in
their subversion of traditional modes such as portrait and landscape.
Issues of authorship and authenticity effected in photographic work, have
a more fundamental influence than the oft cited examples of post-modern
photography such as the literal artificiality of depicting false identities
(Cindy Sherman), false origin (Sherrie Levine), false reality (Andreas
Gursky). More profound subversions of a traditional photographic perspective
extend logically by firstly fabricating the appearance of reality as the
ordinary, actively seeking a denial of the author as subject and using
artificial strategies to effect a disruption of roles or to present a
centre-less view and irrelevant content. Artists deliberately adopt strategies
to do this, by eliminating themselves and by avoiding the expressive,
or by being as inauthentic as possible. The attenuated work, for example,
of Beat Streuli and Thomas Ruff abandons expressive photographic intervention
or the search for expression in the depicted subject and reflects aspects
of Baudrillard’s ‘disappearing subject’. They are both
non-expressive and expressionless, having effected a subversion of direct
expression. The extreme deliberateness of Bettina von Zwehl and Ulf Lundin
contrive its total rejection. Ruff verifies Baudrillard’s impossible
realm of reality and provides an example of non representation / non meaning.
His authenticity lies with the primacy of the image over the photographic
event and his determination not to succumb to the illusion of being able
to represent. He presents a kind of ‘second order’ reality,
the ‘thingness’ of the photograph rather than a person –
the person as an abstraction.
A shift in attitude as a consequence of the ‘death of the author’
and the understanding that ‘objectivity’ is an illusion8
moves toward either an interdependence of subjects (photographer and photographed),
a confused intimacy or an avoidance of involvement altogether. Not only
has Barthes diminished the role of the author, but also in his subjective
exploration of the photograph that confuses theory with emotion (Camera
Lucida), he has encouraged a subjective exchange that confounds objectivity.
Photographers no longer have the certainty of their own authority or that
of objective vision. Self-consciously aware of this disrupted authorship,
they have adopted overt methods that divert any accusation of authorial
inspiration. In Thomas Struth’s case, he purposefully refuses to
allow his own subjectivity, his ‘idea’, to dominate, giving
no direction beyond determining the extent of the frame. Beat Streuli
and Philip Lorca di Corcia use photographic devices, which remove them
entirely from their subjects and set up a theatre of appearance. They
disallow any attempt to reveal the ‘real’ nature behind the
mask, presenting the appearance over anything else, without intentional
projection, structure or meaning, as far as this is possible. They present
in their ordinariness and non-event – an ontology of boredom an indifference
of seeing, and relinquish any inspirational or directorial determination
of the image. These images present the contradiction of an apparent translucence
of appearance and an opaqueness of subject matter and consequent emptiness.
They give us appearances that ultimately obscure.
Insert Ulf Lundin, from the series Pictures of a Family,
1996
Both Lundin’s Pictures of a Family and Annelies Strba’s Shades
of Time give us visions of family life in parenthesis. Lundin’s via
avoidance and Strba’s via intimacy. We associate photographs of family
with event and interaction. Lundin’s images document non-event, highlighting
relationships by showing us the lack of interaction. They focus on remnants;
what is normally left over and discarded. They look sideways at a life,
indicating the incidental and the ordinary, what is not said. They present
us with a fragmentary, aslant view of what we are looking at, an emergent
awareness of individuals. Strba closes her eyes when pressing the shutter,
not seeing, ‘disappearing’, denying the intention of the ‘photographic
eye’. It is a method that relinquishes power and a substantial part
of the traditional position as photographer, by not preparing images for
the viewer. Both assume the validity of photographic series, replacing
the dualism of essential being and appearance and emphasise a process
where there is no ultimate end; where all one can find is a series of
manifestations; where beings change and will present themselves differently
at different times. Dialogic imagery is dependent on singular individuality
and the specific detail of context, approaching a sort of meaninglessness.
By giving us the ordinary rather than the extra-ordinary (literally outside
the norm) bereft of a directed expression, dilemma or passion, their work
begins to undermine the presumption that the photographer has something
to say or find; it undermines the search for resolution and significance
through metaphoric reference, a shared, greater meaning. These are more
discursive, are more overtly inter-subjective, unrehearsed, uncontrolled
methods. They lead us away from the presumption of ‘presence’
to a more open field.
Insert Annelies Strba, Sonja with a Glass 1991
These images present little allusion to other than what is there, little
scope to render the subjects as anything beyond themselves. But despite
the eschewal of the ‘captured’ moment, despite a kind of metaphoric
minimalism, as Derrida demonstrates, the ‘metaphotographic event’
is impossible to avoid; what went before; what comes after; what is imagined;
metaphor; metonym is held in each of these ordinary eventless moments.
In reading these images, even the most simple statement, such as Sonja’s
right hand hovering over the glass, leads us elsewhere, to our imagination,
penetrating ‘the abyss of these metonymies’. The viewer is thus
assigned a speaking role that can speculate and position, where ‘there
is reversibility, irreversibility, diachrony and simultaneity’. ‘The
fragment should remain ‘discreet’,9 if it is to retain
any potency. It is neither central to the image, nor significant in itself,
even irrelevant, but without the glass of water, the image would be either
meaningless or more meaningful. Baudrillard has suggested that ‘poetic
order requires that the event should not exactly take place’10
and advocates that the activity of taking the photograph itself be pivotal,
be kept crude and uncontrolled rather than the prospect of the resulting
image being in the forefront, thus avoiding ‘photography that is
aestheticised, calculated and composed’.11 Recognising that
an accidental or unassuming image can equally be eloquent leaves the photographer
with the ironic possibility that artifice or lack of artifice may be equally
deceptive or meaningful. What is ‘real’ need no longer be elevated
or even made beautiful. Much contemporary work embraces this contradiction
by deliberately looking crude or abrupt (Boris Mikhailov) or deliberately
incidental (Ulf Lundin), or deliberately chaotic (Nick Waplington).
A ‘traditional’ or modernist photographic aesthetic has been
amplified by the notion of the ‘photographer’s eye’, demanding
the specialness of the author, control and vision in a representation
of the event and moment - a revisioning of the everyday. Not only has
photography now been absorbed as a legitimate mode of artistic production
but the assimilation of the snapshot as a genre disrupts the seriousness
of photography as it does not conform to the ethic of artistic distance,
a prerequisite for ‘objective vision’. Liberated by the snapshot,
a democratic seeing has been assimilated into our aesthetic and directorial
subjective expression has been replaced with a subjectivity that can confuse
intimate and professional roles, can be careless and ugly and approach
bad taste.
Lyotard states that the project of modernity as ‘the realisation
of universality’ has been relinquished. One can see this destruction
in process, in the avoidance of universal appeal and a preference for
particularity and insignificance. Western philosophy is habitually driven
by the goal of finding or achieving a unifying principle and it follows
that what has been seen as ‘good’ art pulls things together
in some sort of synthesis. Western aesthetic has assumed an ‘objective
vision’. If aesthetic trend is reactive, then we are reacting now
with the adoption of the unremarkable and the awful as ‘good’,
relinquishing formalism and the supremacy of the intentional ‘photographer’s
eye’. A deliberately crude realism is one logical step to dismantle
this hierarchy. ‘Post-modern photography’ is typically and ‘essentially’
goal-less, disregarding the long held assumption to unite and to complete,
together with the modernist assumption of photography that must define
or mythologize. The construction of a changing (anti) aesthetic is not
reliant on universal certainties or knowledge, is less certain - is malleable
rather than ‘ fixed or permanent’,12 moving towards forms
of local specific knowledge that can be seen in choices of subject matter.
An aesthetic has arisen, which assumes methods accordingly, avoiding interaction
and expression - hiding, closing eyes. There is now a distrust of the
author and the image as representing any sort of reality and an insistence
instead that the image is constructed by the reader, culture and history.
There is in effect almost an abdication of authorial responsibility, an
undercurrent of denial – an aesthetic of ‘without’. Denying
an underlying truth or essence or anything to be revealed or told, there
is no ultimate description, no definitive image, no ‘moment’.
Contemporary photography has abandoned reality and adopted an ‘idea
of reality’ and is abstract in the sense that it focuses on the idea
rather than the form and the substance – the frame and the composition
– photographic ‘aesthetic illusion’. It displays an imperative
to avoid direction and to avoid definition – typical characteristics
of post structural / post modern texts, of interrupting and subverting
traditional forms. The photographer knows that photographs are not real
(like Baudrillard), ‘mixes’ with the subject (like Barthes),
interferes and obscures (like Derrida).
1
Lyotard, J.F. 1984. The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
Trans. Bennington, G. and Massumi, B., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
2 Baudrillard, J. 1997. Objects, Images and the Possibilities of
Aesthetic Illusion. In Zurbrugg, N., ed. Art & Artefact. London: Sage
Publications, pp. 7-18
3 Derrida, J. 1973. Difference. In Speech and Phenomenon. Trans.
Allison, D.B. Evanston: Northwestern University Press and originally published
in the Bulletin de la Societe francais de philosophie, LXII, No. 3 (July-September,
1968), pp. 73-101
4 Barthes, R. 1977. The Death of the Author (1968). In Heath, S.,
ed. Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press, pp. 142-148
5 Flusser, V. 2000. Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983),
London: Reaktion Books, p.17
6 Baudrillard, J. 1997. The Art of Disappearance In Art & Artefact,
pp.28-31.
7 Derrida, J. 1989. Right of Inspection. Trans.Wills, D.Droits
de Regards. In Art & Text, 32, Autumn 1989, pp.10-95
8 Flusser (2000), p.15
9 Derrida (1989)
10 Baudrillard, J., 1999. It is the Object that Thinks Us. In Wiebel,
P., ed. Photographies 1985-1998. Hatje Cantz
11 Baudrillard, J. 1997. The Ecstasy of Photography. In Art &
Artefact, pp.32-42
12 Moxey, K. 1999. The History of Art after the Death of the “Death
of the Subject” In [In [ ] Visible Culture, http://www.rochester.edu.in_visible_culture/issue1/moxey/moxey/html,
[cited 1/2/2003]
Jane Tormey lectures at Loughborough University School of Art 7 Design,
where she is programme leader for Foundation Studies. She co-edits the
electronic journal TRACEY – Contemporary Drawing Issues and has work
published in iJADE and Pictorial Shift, ed. IRIS (2003). Her principle
research is concerned with constructions of psychological focus in the
photographic portrait and is currently engaged in an AHRB project researching
the late Polaroid portraits of Walker Evans.
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