Dan Flavin: Pink out of a Corner – To Jasper Johns
Flavin vs. CWS vs. Phylis Johnson
light envelopes
corner box-
delivered!
(to Dan Flavin)
(photo: CWS/light: Dan Flavin/poem: Phylis Johnson)
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I got this image from The Photomania Virtual Art Gallery. It’s of a Dan Flavin work. It’s by CWS. On “Photomania” people take photos of modern art (in the Museum of Modern Art) and these become new art works. Wonderful idea! Robyn Kenealy and I were talking about this just recently. When we study “art-history” at school, or university, we do not (often, if ever) study the actual painting in the flesh. What I study is photos of paintings (and even photos of photos) as they are displayed in an environment (a gallery). Classical art-photos (used to see the art) have a particular feeling: they do not want me to look at the photo itself, but to pretend it isn’t there. These photos want me to look at the art in the photo, not consider the photo art as well (there is only one genius here!) In terms of Gilles Deleuze’s breakdown of perception (the mode of making images mean) the “classical art-photo” is an “objective” perception (the photographer is absent, there is a suspension-of-disbelief).
The photos on Photomania are not objective, but “subjective.” They acknowledge the fact that they are snapped. People pose by the works. No genius? Or everyone is! They make me aware that the photos are photos, but also that they are photos of art! They fill both functions. No longer just a snap-shot, and not an “art-work” on its own. It takes on art in the process of viewing art. The Photomania project, and these kinds of photos in general (when displayed as art) turn the process of viewing art into the art: capture still life!
This has further interest if we take into account Michel Foucault’s notion of the “institution.” For Foucault each institution (like an art-gallery, a university) holds “power,” and through “archiving” selects 1) who will be allowed/visible, and 2) who will remain forgotten/invisible (who we study in school, and who we don’t, what Foucault calls a “power soaked binary”). In an “art gallery” we are traditionally not meant to take photos, and we are meant to be silent, as viewers. This takes away our power as spectators (the rules of the gallery are a “power binary” ensuring there are ways to restrict activity in the gallery). I am not encouraged to talk to my friend as I view it, to exclaim my wonder (or disgust). I am encouraged rather to keep quiet, and to buy an image (a photo) to discuss later. This means that I am unable to discuss the painting as phenomena (I only have a second-hand image to go by, to go buy, two goes bye).
On Photomania the spectator is empowered by the act of seeing. Foucault speaks of statements (art-works) as positioning us (this is their power). This position is ensured by the separation of me (the spectator) from the institution (I cannot choose what to see, and what not to see, the experience is not “by me” – I can only make a selection from what has already been selected “for me”). In a classical art-photo I am positioned as objective, and the work of art is an object. On Photomania this relation is reversed, and turned on its head. The artist is no longer the painting (sculpture, photograph) on the wall, but the photograph of the art. It includes the viewer in the experience-
The photos on “Photomania” are not like the photos in art-books, trying as hard as they can to appear objective, without any intrusion from the photographer. Classical art photo’s are of art, they are not art in-themselves. However, Flavin’s art works cannot be “objectively” photographed (as if the photographer is not there). Because the light splays out at all angles, and cannot be restricted to the frame of the photo (it flows out of the frame) my perception is not restricted to looking in the frame, but travelling the edges of the frame, sensing the light as it hits the photographers body behind the camera. The off-screen space is heightened for my experience. Images in art-books, and those art-works on the wall of the MOMA are all part of what Laura Marks, after Foucault, calls the “official archive” (an objective archive). The work of Foucault’s archaeology is to undo the official archive, to examine its methods of positioning us (primarily to become art consumers, not art makers). This archive determines what is art, and what is not (according to institutional learning). The photo’s on Photomania straddle the line between art, and snap-shot, a kind of space Laura Marks calls “intercultural cinema.” Intercultural cinema, or here, intercultural photography, takes place between two sites of culture. Photomania takes place between the personal and the public, the object and subject, the “art” and the “experience” (the art of experience). Marks contrasts the “official archive” with the “virtual archive” (Photomania is a “virtual” gallery!). The “virtual archive” exists in memories and minds, a space located between personal experience and public institutions, just as the virtual archive mesiates a space between public and private viewings of art.
There is finally an “intersubjectivity” created by these photos. Vivian Sobchack descibes intersubjectivity in film (after Maurice Merleau-Ponty) as the moment when I become aware that the frame of the film is an “eye” which I see through, rather than a story I look at. This can be done by the spectator, or initiated by the film itself (through making me aware of the frame). This makes me aware that a “body” frames the image, that it is both a perception (the photo) and an expression of this perception as perceived (the person taling the photo). When I see the above photograph I see “through” the photo, and am aware that it is “subjective” (in classical art-photography I look “at” the art work in the photo, the photo is merely a frame, an “objective” presentation of an “object”). Here the photo is the art and there is art in the photo. Rather than no frame (which presents an object) the frame is visible, an embodied “framing device.” In a classical art-photo the photographer does not say “I see the painting” but rather “The painting (is there to be looked at)” (the “frame” is invisible, the “I” which took the photo is unsaid). In the above photo (and others on Photomania) I am drawn to the frame, I experience the photo as happening “there” in the room with the Flavin work (the frame is visible). The photo says “I see the light,” not just “The light.” This is not a photo, but a static “eye” which I look through. This eye “sees,” and is wrapped in the light extending beyond the photo-frame, making me aware of the framing-device, what Sobchack calls the “eye/I.” These effects in linguistics are called “shifters.” A shifter is important for two reasons: it makes me aware that the image/art-work is subjectively created, and existentially present to the event of its creation. It also enables the work to be perceived by me as a perception-in-itself (rather than an “object” of perception). When a poem is told from the perspective of an “I/my” (both “shifters”) and when an image is from the perspective of an “eye,” I (as spectator) am able to experience this position as my own, and as the authors, and as any number of other viewers which I might imagine framing the experience which I am given. When the poem says “He/she walked” (non-shifters) I look at someone, rather than walk with them, or finally, to do the walking myself-
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Reading List:
Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye (Princeton, 1992)
Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (1969: Routledge, 1995)
Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film (Duke University Press, 2000)
