Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography [1 ed.] 0226035115, 9780226035116

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LATENESS AND LONGIN G

THE A BA K A NOW ICZ A RTS A ND CU LT U R E COLLECTION

LATENESS AND LONGIN G ON THE AFTERLIFE OF PHOTOGRAPHY GEORGE BAKER

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2023 by George Baker All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2023 Printed in China 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23    1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978–0-226–03511–6 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978–0-226–82138–2 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226821382.001.0001 The publication of this edition has been generously supported by an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a publication grant from the Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Baker, George (George Thomas), 1970– author. Title: Lateness and longing : on the afterlife of photography / George Baker. Other titles: Abakanowicz arts and culture collection. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2023. | Series: Abakanowicz arts and culture collection | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022006313 | ISBN 9780226035116 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226821382 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Leonard, Zoe—Criticism and interpretation. | Dean, Tacita, 1965– —Criticism and interpretation. | Lockhart, Sharon, 1964– —Criticism and interpretation. | Davey, Moyra—Criticism and interpretation. | Photography, Artistic—Philosophy. | Time and photography. | Photographs—Psychological aspects. | Cinematography and photography. Classification: LCC TR642.B336 2023 | DDC 777—dc23/eng/20220329 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006313

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Silvia

CO N T E N TS

Acknowledgments  xi

Introduction: Lateness and Longing



1

1



YOU SEE I AM HERE AFTER ALL: ZOE LEONARD



25

2

111





3





4

FILM AND OTHER FATIGUES II: TACITA DEAN

165



5

FILM AND OTHER FATIGUES I: TACITA DEAN

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC ECHO: SHARON LOCKHART

235

THE ABSENT PHOTOGRAPH: MOYRA DAVEY



319



Afterword: Late Criticism 



369

Notes 

387

Index 

425

It is not indifference which erases the weight of the image—the Photomat always turns you into a criminal type, wanted by the police—but love, extreme love. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

AC KNOW L E D GME N TS

I like to blame the artist Paul Chan for initiating this book. He will be amused by its belated completion, but it was Paul who first pushed me to confront Theodor Adorno’s writings on lateness, many years ago. Daniel Birnbaum then instigated things with multiple invitations to lecture and to write, especially for an underknown exhibition in Turin where a triumvirate of Italian art critics—­Achille Bonito Oliva, Germano Celant, and Francesco Bonami—­challenged me to see that the essay I had written was in fact, or should become, a book. In the process, the convictions formed in the 1990s by a young critic turned into long-­standing friendships with all of the artists at the heart of this account: Moyra Davey, Tacita Dean, Zoe Leonard, and Sharon Lockhart. I cannot adequately thank them for the ways in which they have supported this project and transformed my thinking on contemporary art and photography, aside from the public reckoning that this book represents. Another reckoning began upon meeting Kaja Silverman two decades ago, rather auspiciously after a lecture she gave at the Louvre on Hiroshima, Mon Amour. This book then developed slowly, in the shadow of a long dialogue. Others have been just as important: my colleagues at October, especially Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss; my colleagues at UCLA, especially James Welling and Catherine Opie; and a trio of fellow travelers of this project—­Walead Beshty, Mark Godfrey, and Matthew Witkovsky—­all of whom have written on the work of some if not all of the artists treated here, influencing my own writing along the way. The book’s title should recall one of the most important essays by Douglas Crimp, in a gesture of both memory and gratitude. Over its long duration, this project has been shared locally with audiences at the University of Southern California, Otis College of Art and Design, CSU Long Beach, ArtCenter College of Design, and the Getty Museum; and further afield

ACK N OW L E D G ME N TS x ii

at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Oregon, the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, Princeton University, SFMOMA, the University of Oslo, UNAM in Mexico City, and the Institut für Kunstkritik at the Städelschule, Frankfurt. At the project’s midway point, an invitation by Urs Stahel to compose a series of short essays for the Winterthur Museum’s photography blog, and another to lead a seminar on these ideas by my friend, the artist Gerard Byrne, at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, both changed the course of the book. For other invitations that supported my work, I wish to thank Matthew Simms, Richard Meyer, Sabine Eckmann, Tannaz Farsi, Jason Smith, Isabelle Graw, Stuart Comer, Johanna Burton and Ron Clark, Miguel Errazu and Mariana Martínez Bonilla, Adam Szymczyk, Carol Squiers, Adam Budak, Tevž Logar, Anastasia Leonova and IST Publishing, Alex Klein, Eivind Røssaak, Corey Keller, Tom Gunning, Jennifer Wild, Virginia Heckert, Manfred Heiting, Jan de Bont, the Getty Museum Photographs Council, and my friend Rick Ehrlich. Major support for this project came from an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a publication grant from the Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation. I also benefited from a series of UCLA Academic Senate Faculty Research Grants and aid from the Discretionary Fund of the UCLA Dean of the Humanities. The book would not have been brought to completion without the intrepid research assistance of Hannah Kahng, and at an earlier stage of its development, of Alex Nicholls and Madicyn Herbst. I have been helped by all of the galleries that work with the artists that are my focus here, including Frith Street Gallery, Marian Goodman, Murray Guy, Gladstone Gallery, and Hauser & Wirth; and by the artists’ studios—­I thank especially Krista Buecking, Jocelyn Davis, Nico Linnert, and Cleo Walker. I was touched by the generosity of Gerhard Steidl and Bernard Fischer in sharing a large number of images made initially for their own books; and by the sudden appearance of Tacita Dean’s friend and collaborator Martyn Ridgewell, with aid in design and image formatting. The web of gratitude for a project of long duration potentially has no end, knitting together a world. I am especially lucky in my current and recent graduate students, many themselves working on photography, as this project developed over years in the seminar room. Beyond Hannah, already thanked above, I have benefited from dialogues with Dan Abbe, Alessandra Amin, Tenley Bick, Doris Chon, Gökcan Demirkazik, Thomas Duncan, Joanna Fiduccia, Tom Folland, Andrea Gyorody, Natilee Harren, Benjamin Kersten, Christine Robinson, Zach Rottman, Paul Smith, Joanna Szupinska, Max Tolleson, Rachel Weiss, and Mika Yoshitake. I have been challenged repeatedly by artists working on the MFA at UCLA, especially in the photography program, including Lucas Blalock, Alexis Hudgins, Marina Pinsky,

AC K N OWLE D G M E N TS

Sean Sprague, and—­though he is a painter—­William Wasserman. My “art world” in Los Angeles would not amount to much without the support and friendship of Erica Redling and Shaun Regen. With typical selflessness, Steven Nelson introduced me to Susan Bielstein as this book began. I want to remember a beautiful dinner with them both at an anachronistic restaurant here in Los Angeles. The dinner was long ago, but Susan never hurried me or this project, and—­with her colleagues at the University of Chicago Press—­has supported it in every possible way, no matter the challenges of its final form. May editing be returned to the critical and beautiful process it achieved here with Susan—­like art criticism, such editing often seems under assault today, rara avis. Thanks, too, to Stephen Twilley, Tamara Ghattas, Dylan Montanari, James Toftness, Jill Shimabukuro, Isaac Tobin, Adrienne Meyers, and Rebecca Brutus. For everything else, I dedicate this book to Silvia DiPierdomenico. Really to Silvia and Carlotta and Fiammetta, my companions in “turning time around.”

x iii

Zoe Leonard, image from Analogue, 1998–­2009. Four hundred twelve chromogenic prints and gelatin silver prints on paper, variable dimensions, each print 11 1⁄32 × 11 1⁄32 in. Unless otherwise noted, all works by Leonard © Zoe Leonard. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; and Hauser & Wirth, New York.

F I GURE 0.1 

INTRO D UCTI O N LATENESS A ND LON G ING

The rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet’s equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect. Brockhaus Encyclopaedia

Like photography now, my epigraph is old, a voice from the past, previously used. It hovers over these pages like it presided over the opening of Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn, already an epigraph, and one that heralded the book’s profoundly darkening cast. Dürer’s Melancholia appears just a few pages later. And Saturn will return as a figure within the book. “As I sat there that evening in Southwold overlooking the German Ocean,” Sebald writes, I sensed quite clearly the earth’s slow turning into the dark. The huntsmen are up in America, writes Thomas Browne in The Garden of Cyrus, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. The shadow of night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if levelled by the scythe of Saturn—­an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.1

To begin a book on photography with this evocation of Saturn and its rings, Saturn and its lost moon, leads thought to the well-­worn trope of photography and the saturnine. “Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art,” as Susan Sontag once stated the case.2 But what follows is not a book (not just a book) on photography and melancholy, with the critic prepared to mount a stubborn mourning as the photograph’s

Introduction 2

analogue life fades away. We have heard this story before; we are familiar with its contours. I do, however, want Sebald’s epigraph to be read allegorically. I want the reader to hear in it a story, and a parable, of photography. For we might discern the lost chemicals and liquids of photography through the passage’s description of Saturn’s rings, composed of “ice crystals” and “meteorite particles,” frozen liquids and mineral remains. And we hear of a catastrophe, produced by a “tidal effect,” that seems particularly resonant with what we might call photography’s contemporary fate, as well as its historical actions, perhaps its “desire.” We read of a form, a lost object, forever driven to come close, to draw near—­too close, too near—­like the photograph’s fraught gravitation toward the real. As with the purported ancestor of Saturn’s rings, that inexorable pull now lies in ruins, with the photograph as we once knew it similarly subject to processes of utter fragmentation and dispersal. But the allegory also speaks to the recombination of these fragments. The story is one of an immense, catastrophic unmaking, but also a mutation or a metamorphosis, with the transformation of the shards and particles into a series of new forms. And these forms are a species of the luminous, the rings of Saturn, usually considered the most beautiful phenomenon in the entire solar system—­a cosmic space that, like photography, we name after light, or rather the source of all light in the sun.

Tacita Dean, Boots, 2003. Three 16 mm color anamorphic films with optical sound (English, French, and German versions), 20 min. each. © Tacita Dean. Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris.

F I GURE 0. 2 

L AT E N ESS AND LO N G I N G 3

One artist, noticing the increasing gentrification of her New York City neighborhood, picks up an outmoded Rolleiflex camera and records the dying traces of the old urban fabric that surrounds her home. Built from a series of analogue images whose now obsolescent photographic language belongs to the same historical era that produced the threatened urban space itself, the resulting archive provokes memories of Eugène Atget faced with disappearing Old Paris in the early twentieth century, or Walker Evans seeking out vernacular structures in the poverty-­stricken American South of the 1930s. We see signage, advertisements, storefronts. Another artist transports an elderly man from her native England to a grand but empty house in Portugal, upon the eve of its renovation. The aim of this difficult journey seems to be to document both the decaying architecture and the old man—­on what turns out to be the eve of his death—­in an anachronistic 16 mm film format, while the man moves slowly and awkwardly through the time-­drenched spaces. All the while, and in three different national languages, the man improvises an endless host of memories that seem, like the home, not to belong to him.

F I GURE 0. 3   Sharon Lockhart, Pine Flat Portrait Studio: Mikey, Sierra, 2005. Two framed chromogenic prints, 45½ × 36¾ in. each. Unless otherwise noted, all works by Lockhart are courtesy the artist; Gladstone Gallery, New York / Brussels; and neugerriemschneider, Berlin.

F IGUR E 0.4 

Sharon Lockhart, Pine Flat, 2005. 16 mm film, color, sound, 138 min.

Yet another artist locates by chance an isolated rural community while on a road trip away from her home in Los Angeles. Reminded somehow of the faraway place where she was born, the artist spends several years photographing the working-­ class children of this community in a borrowed tongue, turning to the anonymous, abandoned language of a specific rural American portrait studio from the early twentieth century. She then records the children in 16 mm film as well, while they perform nonactions such as reading, sleeping, and waiting in forgotten pockets of idyllic natural beauty. Each of these works—­by the artists Zoe Leonard, Tacita Dean, and Sharon Lockhart, respectively—­circles elusively around the concept of a home, be it endangered, infinitely displaced, or made the subject of fantasy. And each artist understands artistic practice as the forging of belated correspondences between form and content, between a medium and a subject, a connection occasioned in each case by the intimation of imminent loss. Correspondence and connection: in all

L AT E N ESS AND LO N G I N G

of these works, the medium in question happens to be either analogue photography or film, and sometimes both together. For the correspondence and the connection at issue here seem to arise at the precise moment a series of passing objects and experiences in the world find their echo in the fading of photography and film themselves, or at least the vanishing of the key paradigms and techniques, the substrates and the cameras and the analogue apparatus, that defined these linked mediums since their origins. World-­historical experience and aesthetic experience run parallel here, coming close together if they do not precisely meet—­a striking phenomenon, reminiscent of the so-­called “merger of art and life” that had always been one of the defining but unrealized dreams of modernism and the avant-­garde, long ago relinquished. This sudden, specific collision of the world-­historical and the formal is one of the primary subjects of this book—­and, one might say, its central stake.

With subtle shifts in emphasis and address, the coarticulation of lateness and loss has become a veritable paradigm in contemporary art since at least the 1990s, since the waning of the dominance of what we once called postmodernism in the visual arts. I want to argue this directly against the vaunted “contemporaneity” of contemporary art, against the issue of the contemporary as such that has come to dominate our thinking and historical consciousness in relation to the art made in our times.3 Think of William Kentridge’s film Felix in Exile, 1994, with its outmoded animation techniques picturing forth the artist’s alter ego stranded in a far-­flung hotel room, gazing at artworks arranged on the walls in homage to the forgotten utopian hopes of the early twentieth-­century avant-­garde. Through them the character attempts to witness the crimes and oppression visited upon the black South African population of the homeland from which he has been sundered, on the eve of the final end of apartheid. Think, slightly later, of Anri Sala’s Arena, 2001, a low-­tech video scanning the almost abandoned zoo in post-­Communist Tiranë, Albania—­the city of the artist’s birth—­an architectural object as stranded by history as the forlorn horse frozen in terror at the side of a highway, in the artist’s video Time after Time, 2003, or the solitary and impoverished old man in Milan Cathedral on the verge of falling asleep, in Uomoduomo, 2000. Think of Gerard Byrne’s paradoxically titled New Sexual Lifestyles, 2003, a video in which Irish actors play out a forgotten roundtable discussion among American “sex radicals” found in an old, worn-­out copy of the magazine Playboy, a ready-­made “script” that the artist staged in the context of a rare and empty modernist home constructed outside Dublin at about the same time as the publication of the roundtable.4 Or witness Byrne’s black-­and-­white photographs for the installation 1984 and

5

Introduction 6

Beyond, 2005–­7, where the artist—­noting the relative lack of now “old” structures from the twentieth century in his native Ireland—­photographs “modern” objects and sites in the United States that, because of the confluence between dated subject matter and photographic technique, appear like an archive of images actually made in the 1960s and 1970s (by Robert Frank, or Garry Winogrand, or Lee Friedlander). Think of Moyra Davey’s similarly recalcitrant and small-­scale analogue photographs of her own neglected domestic spaces, with their focus on the dust along a floorboard, spiderwebs under a bed, lost objects behind the furniture, empty liquor bottles and detritus all around, cluttered tabletops and shelves groaning under the accumulated weight of now retardataire collections of books and vinyl record albums. We are back, with Davey’s work, in the topos of the domestic, a project staked upon the space of the home. But it is a home whose clutter and outmodedness seem simultaneously cozy and derelict, presenting an almost apocalyptic collection of scenes, as if the old documentary mode of the street photograph had retreated to the interior, only to find the urban home space abandoned as well, if not completely destroyed.

For some time now, we have witnessed a general turn in contemporary art to the exploration of obsolescent mediums, outmoded forms, and discarded or abandoned historical objects.5 Anachronistic experiences seem privileged in such work; old age no longer remains an object of derision. Artists express interest in “slow time” as opposed to speed and efficiency, to progress and technology. The in-­between nonact of waiting or simply lingering, even languishing, fills out the sites of resistance or the stranded historical remnants reclaimed by such work.6 Redemption—­of failed or untapped historical processes—­seems the order of the day. Memory—­more collective or social than individual, and yet more wistful or improvised than monumental—­plays a central role, of course. Nonsynchronicities abound, and the temporal media themselves—­photography, film, video—­have come to the fore in recent years in ways stubbornly against the grain of the rise of new media, with which they uncomfortably coexist or are compared. It is clear that, while history was its stake, postmodernism as formerly conceived has little to teach us about the terms of this more recent “historical” turn. We are not witness any longer to the restoration of tradition, the resurrection of old masters, citation in the place of originality, schizophrenic pastiche instead of paranoid authenticity. Indeed, modernism is hardly canceled out in much recent work; instead, its utopian futurity seems now to be perceived as enigmatically historical, a recent, often necessarily unachieved past to be plumbed, investigated, and explored. “Modernism,” as one critic has put it, is “that which is obsolete in

F I GURE 0. 5 

Gerard Byrne, Untitled (from 1984 and Beyond), 2005–­6. Gelatin silver prints, 6 47⁄64 × 10 in. © Gerard Byrne.

F IGUR E 0.6  Moyra Davey, Dust Floor, 2007. Courtesy the artist; greengrassi, London; and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin / Cologne / New York.

modernity.”7 Consequently, history returns not as tradition, nor as a discourse of mastery; history is the process that has failed (the process that always fails), the fragile object left stranded, the breakdown in continuity that produces a spiraling series of discards and remnants. The art critic Hal Foster once suggested the term “aftermath” to name the current conjuncture that I have just described. “Our condition,” he writes, “is largely one of aftermath. . . . We live in the wake not only of modernist painting and sculpture but of postmodernist deconstructions of these forms as well, in the wake not only of the prewar avant-­gardes but of the postwar neo-­avant-­gardes as well.”8 In the condition of aftermath, when these various cultural dynamics have themselves seemingly come to an end, the critic diagnoses a need to imagine “what comes after these ends,” which Foster describes as potentially “not a repeating so much as a making-­new or simply a making-­do with what-­comes-­after, a beginning again and/or elsewhere.”9 “Aftermath” is one term among many that will be useful to me here. “Feeling backward,” to use the phrase of literary critic Heather Love; or the “off-­modern,” to

L AT E N ESS AND LO N G I N G

deploy a crucial notion of Svetlana Boym’s; or Aby Warburg’s now old art-­historical concept of Nachleben, or the “afterlife” of forms—­all of these ideas potentially speak to the anachronistic logic of the work that will be my concern.10 But rather than aftermath as a cultural condition, with its suggestion of a periodizing (or even anti-­periodizing) logic, I want to explore more directly the resistance to epochal transition in the recent work in question. Rather than yet another rupture or break, rather than another contemporary movement of the neo-­or the post-­, we seem to witness today a kind of internal slowing within time, perhaps even a falling out of sync of art and the times. As Foster details in his crucial essay, art was once supposed to “index” its time, like a barometer or a weathervane, a key to the substance and collective dreams (or nightmares) of the epoch. But that predictive and symptomatic tie between art and history now seems long undone, and this to most art critics’ dismay. Yet perhaps the nonsynchronicity, the slowing and unlinking of art and history both, can be redeemed, the sign of an art that now belongs to multiple times, and to multiple pasts, to that which it will not let go. Rather than fixating on contemporary art and its endless presentism, usually decried as part of a general fading of historical consciousness, the nonsynchronicity I want to discuss has become the sign today of what we might proclaim as a fully “hetero-­chronic” and thus paradoxically noncontemporary art.11 And this anachronistic turn has become the condition of certain mediums and forms now as well—­photography above all.

To describe or understand this “temporal condensation”—­the term is Anri Sala’s—­ I want to suggest instead the phenomenon of lateness or even simply belatedness itself.12 I use “late” here precisely not as a period term: late Roman, late capitalism, the decadence of an age of decline. Instead, I have become interested in the modernist transvaluation of the old humanist idea of a “late style” that we witness in the fragmentary, seemingly abandoned essays by Theodor Adorno on lateness, and in critic Edward Said’s last, unfinished book on the same.13 Lateness, for Adorno and Said, is less a period than a modality of form, a manner of provoking form to break anachronistically with its time. And as what I would call a modality of form, lateness provides a much-­needed set of conceptual tools for understanding the state of photography and film today. What was once claimed for “style” must now become part of the language for what we used to call a “medium.” Which we could immediately restate: What was once proposed as perhaps the most counterintuitive discourse on “style” that art history and aesthetics have ever produced can perhaps provide today a new concept of what we heretofore called a “medium,” seen against the grain, and after its vaunted decimation.14

9

F I GURE 0.7  

Zoe Leonard, Untitled, 1995/98. Dye transfer print, 24 × 18⅝ in.

L AT E N ESS AND LO N G I N G 11

You may remember Adorno on the phenomenon of an artist’s late style. He was writing, actually, against the idea of an “old age” style. He was writing, of course, about Beethoven: “The maturity of the late works of significant artists does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation. They lack all the harmony that the classicist aesthetic is in the habit of demanding from works of art, and they show more traces of history than of growth.”15 Rather than ripeness, the late work of art relinquishes culmination, the climax of a sense of triumphant artistic development, the logical progression of a lifetime worked out in form. Instead, Said has described lateness as manifesting itself in an overriding “sense of apartness and exile and anachronism,” something like a desperate flight “out of time.”16 In the late work of art, remnants of the superseded past return as stubborn thorns to irritate contemporary development; lateness insists on the forms of “anachronism and anomaly,” working against the grain of the time.17 In this, lateness is a kind of work, an activity more than a period, a labor, one whose temporal dislocation Said describes tellingly as a “form of exile.”18 On the one hand, the late work makes visible the losses of history; it stands on the side of the vanquished, the exiled, the minor, the losers of the historical game. In doing so, however, Said points out, this exile is also a form of survival; lateness, perhaps, is then a set of techniques for “surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal,” drawing out or slowing down the march of time.19 Survival is stubborn, a remnant, and so too is the late work of art. Opposed to development, the labor of lateness brings Said to emphasize the intractability of this dynamic: “Lateness includes the idea that one cannot really go beyond lateness at all, cannot transcend or lift oneself out of lateness, but can only deepen the lateness.”20 Lateness is thus a cultural form of exacerbation. The late work does not want to catch up with the times. It opens up a breach in time. But as with any exile, the work of lateness is, for Said, also a process of “abandonment”: the vision of the late artist—­Beethoven, in Adorno’s account—­ renouncing the fulfillment of a life’s work, abandoning his own most crucial inventions.21 Temporal dislocation, chronological exile, epochal abandonment: these are the phenomena that emerge from Adorno’s thoughts on late style. In analyzing Beethoven’s last works, Adorno resisted the psychological or biographical interpretation that sees the artist tearing apart his work in the face of his imminent demise. Instead, Adorno asserted, death appears “in art only in a refracted mode, as allegory.”22 And works of art are not organic beings; they do not literally die.

Introduction 12

However, death does operate upon the artwork in Adorno’s account. The late artist “abandons” the task of expression through form; artistic conventions come to the fore as objective historical things, unenlivened by the breath of the author. Turned away from the work by death, the author paradoxically sets the late work “free.” Abandonment produces freedom, a kind of undead or zombie autonomy—­a negative autonomy—­and lateness is the time of this leave-­taking. Adorno writes: The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. Of the works themselves it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself. Touched by death, the hand of the master sets free the masses of material that he used to form; its tears and fissures, witnesses to the finite powerlessness of the I confronted with Being, are its final work . . . The conventions . . . are no longer penetrated and mastered by subjectivity, but simply left to stand. With the breaking free of subjectivity, they splinter off . . . splinters, fallen away and abandoned.23

Subject and object, the unity of expression and convention, artist and artwork: all of this falls apart in the late work of art. Lateness is fragmentation, “unmaking,” and thus the late work, in the words of Adorno, “turns its emptiness outward.”24

With this, lateness begins to sound not unlike the labor of relinquishment that Sigmund Freud called “mourning.”25 Lateness is a specific form of the work of mourning, its temporal mode; we might call lateness the mourning of time, the paradoxical manner in which an artist or artwork takes leave of their time, moves on or away from the now. This is an observation that begs the question of whether a corollary exists for lateness, as it did for Freud with mourning. As opposed to the relinquishment of time, what of the contrary dynamic? What about those who won’t let go? Does lateness occasion a sibling, a sister dynamic involved in holding on to the past, a desperate clinging to time itself? Is there, in other words, a melancholia of time? This is, I think, an important question, given the artworks with which I began. For, as opposed to an aesthetic of destroyed fragments alone, restorative dynamics seem to thrive in the work of artists such as Leonard, Dean, and Lockhart. And while touched by the turning away or relinquishment characteristic of lateness, such work’s anachronisms often seem as determined by an inverse dynamic of turning back, and of holding on. Each project I want to confront here prioritizes the concept of home as much as exile (even if it is an idea of “home” under the sign of erasure).

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It is this focus on the home that answers my question about the melancholia of time. For the longing for home has a name; it is “nostalgia,” that “mania of longing,” in Svetlana Boym’s words, which is also an “ache of temporal distance and displacement.”26 Coined by a Swiss doctor in the 1680s to describe the ailment afflicting young Swiss mercenary soldiers suddenly removed from their native land, the term “nostalgia” combines two Greek words: nostos, or return home, and algos, or longing, sorrow, pain. Nostalgia is a form of homesickness. The nostalgic desires to return home, and yet this is always in some way a turning back of time, a desired return to an “age forever beyond . . . reach,” perhaps that of childhood or some other imagined, prelapsarian past.27 Boym describes this homesickness that becomes a time sickness in the following way: “At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time—­the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”28 Nostalgia is the melancholia of time. A “sadness without an object,” to use Susan Stewart’s phrase, nostalgia articulates not the loss of a love object, as in the classic accounts of melancholia, but a libidinal tie with time itself, the loss of an epoch as much as the space-­time of origin or of beginnings.29 Regressive in this way, nostalgia often gets bad press. From one critic, a typical example: “Nostalgia is to memory as kitsch is to art.”30 And yet for the artists I want to examine here, nostalgia is no longer only a bad word, or a taboo. It is a dynamic in the process of being transvalued. Thus Mike Kelley, one of the key figures involved in this contemporary dynamic, on what he has named “black nostalgia”—­like black humor, or the Black Irish: “Nostalgia,” Kelley admits, “is not a word I would use, because it implies a looking back to an idealized past.” Instead, “black nostalgia” refuses the belief that one can “go back” and “reclaim some longed-­for positive experience” from youth, and reexamines instead, “from an adult point of view, some aesthetic experience that I feel I was unable to understand at that time.”31 Thus too Moyra Davey, in her video Fifty Minutes, 2006: “In critical circles, nostalgia has a negative, even decadent connotation. But the etymology of the word uncovers other meanings. It comes from the Greek nostos, a return home, and algos, pain. According to Jane Gallop, after ‘homesickness’ and ‘melancholy regret,’ in the dictionary there is a third definition of nostalgia, which is ‘unsatisfied desire.’ And that is what the word has always implied to me: unconsummated desire kept alive by private forays into the cultural spaces of memory.”32 Or, as Susan Stewart puts this thought, the “point of desire which the nostalgic seeks is in fact the absence that is the very generating mechanism of desire.” She concludes: “Nostalgia is the desire for desire.”33

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And so we have two dynamics, two labors: lateness and longing, the one occasioned on the eve of loss, the other sparked by “unconsummated desire.” In what follows, I want to explore an artistic form of lateness that—­no matter how “expressionless” or “objective”—­does not disavow longing, an aesthetic work of belatedness that holds open the temptations and promises of nostalgia.34 And more than an achievement of any single aesthetic project or author, I want to explore such lateness as a potential afterlife of the threatened mediums of photography and film themselves, a potential condition of a collective social form. Like mourning and melancholia, lateness and longing are perhaps best seen as two sides of a single coin, each tempering the other: a dissident leave-­taking from the now, an impossible but insistent holding on to the past. That, at least, is the thesis I want to test by looking closely at the works with which I began, the recent projects of Zoe Leonard, Tacita Dean, and Sharon Lockhart. To these I will add the photographs and video work of Moyra Davey, whose project has evolved in close dialogue with or literally alongside several of the other central figures of this book, coming to critical attention slightly later, but seemingly for no other reason than the deep and anachronistic recalcitrance of the work itself, its temporal dissidence. In such work, relinquishment and the refusal to let go come together; both exile and a sense of lost belonging are acknowledged, in a pressing allegorization of time and desire. Bridging lateness and longing in this way, the works in question often display what would otherwise seem a strange mixture of detachment and care (Lockhart’s work, for example, seems motivated by almost nothing else, but this dynamic is shared by all four). Such work shows us that critique and affection, as Svetlana Boym has asserted of nostalgia, “are not mutually exclusive but reciprocally illuminating.”35 And indeed, nostalgia potentially becomes a critical—­as opposed to compensatory or reactionary—­gesture here. All nostalgia is belated; that is its condition. However, the nostalgia characteristic of a self-­conscious lateness faces the impossibility of any regressive return. The nostalgia of lateness differs, in other words, from the nostalgia occasioned by, indeed that became a cipher for, modernism and modernity.36 A nostalgia that explicitly comes after, it broaches no return (again, this is no postmodernism). Instead, such nostalgia, such longing, lives with the past as lost, history as decimated. It seizes upon the past not to be fixated there, to halt any further change, but, paradoxically, to experience the past as an opening. Longing in this sense—­Boym calls it “reflective nostalgia”—­attempts to hold on to the past as a set of fragments that will never add up to a whole or complete history “as it was,” but only exist as a set of disjunctive shards to be placed into ever new

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combinations, new relations, new constellations of what now might be, and what never in fact was.37 For Adorno, late style fueled catastrophic and incomprehensible compositions, thoroughly not of their time, riven by the incoherent resurgence of fragments of past forms and convention, but uncannily predictive of an art still to come, an art not yet arrived. The late work of art would be proleptic. Here, it is the past that does not satiate nor satisfy, but holds open desire for what one does not have. It is the past that “opens up a multitude of potentialities, nonteleological possibilities of historical development.”38 Art enters into history as a set of byways, detours, obstacles—­an endless wandering of the roads not taken. It is a way of confronting loss by getting lost.

Several times already, I have intimated that photography itself has some crucial role to play in the paradigm I am exploring within contemporary art, the project of a critical and indeed collective “late” form. I believe that Adorno has become—­at times to my surprise—­an important figure for thinking about the fate of photography today, especially considering his ideas on lateness and late style, and the potential such ideas about anachronism and untimeliness now might hold, given the present directions that photography takes. Initially, my notebook of critical reflections for this project was titled simply, “Thoughts on a Photography Not for These Times.” In this spirit, I want to return us to a thought on photography, a memory of photography. It comes from the era of the high modernism of the photograph. It comes from László Moholy-­Nagy, from his classic text Painting, Photography, Film, of 1925, as cited in another classic text, Walter Benjamin’s essay “Little History of Photography,” of 1931: The creative possibilities of the new . . . are mostly discovered slowly, through old forms, old instruments, old structures which are fundamentally injured by the appearance of new things but which, under the pressure of the new, emerging things, are driven up into a last, euphoric flourishing.39

Moholy-­Nagy is discussing painting when he mentions “old” forms, with photography then positioned as the “new.” Of course, we are now quite familiar with the endless, apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding painting’s coming destruction, the proclamation of the medium’s inevitable endgame. 40 As that modernist dream never quite arrived, so too should we beware of parallel claims now for the medium and practice of photography, or of taking these thoughts on late form as a celebration of photography’s imminent end. For such thoughts would be ludicrous. Paradoxically, and in the wake of its digitalization, photography has never

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been more generalized as a practice of everyday life, never more extensively a part of how we live and experience the world. I am thinking of the image swarms of Tumblr and Instagram, the miniature cameras in every activity and space of everyday life—­the endless, roiling image streams, the 250 billion photographs posted to the site Facebook, according to a statistic cited (already some years ago) by the artist Trevor Paglen.41 Instead, I think we can reverse Moholy-­Nagy’s terms today and begin to think quite simply, and less apocalyptically, about photography as what the modernist once called an “old” form. My project on contemporary photography does imply a certain sense of culmination, of development, of all the criteria for lateness, and of the need for a retrospective glance. But it also hopes to pose a simple question: When did photography become a backward-­looking medium? And what does it mean to think of photography in this way? What does it mean to think of photography as oriented increasingly toward the past, and perhaps, toward its past? Toward the lost? Toward the forgotten? One strain of photographic thinking always associated the medium with memory, with the retention and preservation of that which is gone, with the embalming of the archive and the frozen rigidity of the visual fossil. But we remember, with Moholy-­Nagy, when photography was associated with the New. It was a form of machinic vision, an all-­encompassing “New Vision,” to use the modernist’s term, a prosthetic sight, a technological and broadly utopian force that would recast the traditional forms of art and human sensation. And we can skip forward from modernism’s futurist fantasies: even more recently, the photograph was still seen as perhaps the central transformative engine of the critical aspirations of postmodern aesthetics, as that force of quotation, copying, and remediation that would again—­and paradoxically, in the face of its repetitions—­be hailed as a force of the New, transcoding and completely altering the cultural situation of art. Our situation today is different. What happens when photography is no longer necessarily a technological force of the New?42 More importantly: What occurs when its primary imagination and intrinsic fantasies seem to change direction, to look back and push toward the past in some (admittedly) new and fundamental way? A few years ago I was asked, along with many other artists, critics, and curators, to take part in a conference organized by a museum around the simple (apocalyptic) question: “Is photography over?” The question, I responded then, can only be described as hyperbolic, overblown. 43 And yet, there is today with photography undeniably what the great critic Frank Kermode called instead the “sense of an ending.”44 I am interested, like Kermode, in the directions and

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the possibilities that such narratives of photography’s end make possible; I am specifically interested in the connections that our current endgame stories about photography might make to other such narratives and other such moments in photography’s history. I think, for example, of Walter Benjamin predicting the “rebirth” of photography in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, of his hopes then for an anachronistic return to the forgotten potentials of the medium before its industrialization (in his 1931 text “Little History of Photography”). I think, too, of Walker Evans announcing the “reappearance” of photography in connection to the same historical events (in his essay “The Reappearance of Photography,” of that same year).45 I think of Roland Barthes, in his book-­length essay Camera Lucida, prioritizing similarly atavistic potentials of the medium in the wake of a later economic recession, that of the 1970s, which is also the moment immediately preceding the technological shift from the analogue to the digital that we have subsequently witnessed. We exist today in a moment not unlike these—­in the aftermath of the recent Great Recession, as opposed to the Great Depression, or the oil crisis; all moments of historical and economic crisis, perhaps even epochal transition—­moments that once provoked major rethinkings and reorientations of photography, both in theory and in practice. The Benjamin, Evans, and Barthes essays on photography just cited, with their stories of a fundamental possibility of the return of photography to its origins, amount to fantasies (nostalgias) of what we might call photographic atavism.46 They are primitivist as opposed to technological or utopian fantasies of the photograph, and the centrality of such nostalgias to the history of photography remains as yet underrecognized (no matter the canonical nature of the authors and texts). Return, repetition, turning back as the fundamental operation of the photograph: such is the very structure of what I have come to call photographic atavism, the eternal return—­ atavism, from the Latin atavus, grandfather of my grandfather, signaling today a genetic, well-­nigh biological eruption of a long-­past trait.47 Atavism connotes reversion, even retroversion; it is the historical throwback, the return of the lost object, the reappearance of that which has been thought definitively to have disappeared. Genes hide atavisms when they are not “expressed,” a biological mode of preservation, a kind of hidden secret. Photography’s preservationist powers seem hardly a step away, perhaps also its modes of obfuscation and opacity. But biological atavisms are also often considered “monstrous,” impossible hybrids: the hind leg on the back of the whale, the tail on the human fetus, an extra toe on a horse, webbed hands and feet in a land-­loving mammal. Atavism thus appears like a mutation (but it is not); it speaks instead of the inherent power of the past to produce transformation from its very inertia, its not-­

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F IGURE 0.8  Walead Beshty, A Partial Disassembling of an Invention without a Future: Helter-­Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench (9 October 2013–­8 October 2014) (detail), 2014. Ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide on cellulose-­based material, dimensions variable, 10,076 pieces. © Walead Beshty. Photo: Justin Piperger.

pastness, the shocking return that also signals a departure. And with this structure of resurgence and persistence, photographic atavism returns lost contents, forcing temporal hybrids upon the present, the intransigent past haunting the too-­confident future. And so I have become interested in photographic forms that stage some­ thing like the sense of the medium’s ending, a dispersal that is also—­strangely, paradoxically, impossibly—­a form of return, to lost or forgotten potentials of photography. A paradigmatic work in this vein would be Walead Beshty’s recent and monumental installation at the Barbican in London, with its equally monumental title, A Partial Disassembling of an Invention without a Future: Helter-­ Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench (9 October 2013–­8 October 2014), 2014. Inspired by a rambling lecture—­or proposal for a lecture—­by Hollis Frampton, where the filmmaker describes a work made of accumulated detritus, Beshty produced some 10,000 cyanotypes out of all the materials used up in or passing through the studio

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over the course of a year—­imprinting discarded objects or tools onto sensitized surfaces also recycled from the life of the studio (bills, movie tickets, correspondence, pieces of wood, cardboard packaging). The installation returned to one of the earliest forms of photographic inscription, to the camera-­less imprint, the photogenic drawing, translating its paradoxical and bygone artisanal craft to an almost impossible industrial scale. But the result was a pulsating blue field of endless fragmentation, so many remnants of objects and materials living on through the persistence of the earliest photographic techniques. In his lecture, Frampton opines on our relation to the early history of cinema and photography—­ and it is as if Beshty’s project answers this call—­that “there is one last thing we should stop doing. We should stop calling ourselves new. We are not. They were new. We are old, and we have not necessarily aged as well as we should.”48 These dispersals and returns can also be staged in forms rather far-­flung from the medium-­specific notion of a photograph; it is one reason why one of the artists central to the present account will be Tacita Dean, who does make and use photographs, but whose primary medium remains photochemical film—­and yet whose work in general carries deep photographic implications. This opening is the development I have tried to trace with what I have called more generally the contemporary emergence of “photography’s expanded field.”49 The present book should be understood as one extension of my previous work on the photograph’s expansion, one trajectory of that larger artistic transformation. It is a work and a labor that will, I hope, like the formal possibilities and developments at issue here, continue to stimulate research in many directions and never conclude—­for what follows is just one story of the photograph’s expansion. But as I have just invoked nature, biology, and the notion of atavism to better understand the processes of photography’s contemporary lateness, so too this expansion of form has much broader ramifications than in aesthetics alone. The notion of an art form or medium’s expansion has always seemed to me less a simply logical or even historical affair, than a symptomatic event, even a utopian situation, allegorical of so many other possibilities and processes of transformation, by which I mean subjective and political transformation—­the expansion of subjectivity and politics—­above all.

A last note or postscript, then: that the chapters that follow focus on work made by women artists should be taken as no coincidence. For in the openness to be broached here, the dynamic of recalcitrant lateness and reflective nostalgia, we encounter an implicit feminist politics, one no longer tied to identity, perhaps—­my examples thus need not have been by women—­but to specific and hardly essentialist modalities of both form and desire.

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However, and in the spirit of immediate self-­contradiction, I will admit that I think it is telling that the most important bodies of work linked to the dynamic in contemporary art that I seek to delineate have been produced by contemporary women artists. I am speaking now as a critic, looking to the import of some artistic practices over others—­judging, in other words, in the somewhat muted, somewhat egalitarian way I (now) tend to do such a thing. Perhaps the desiring project at issue here is open beyond the constraints of gender, but its revelation seems more tied to those constraints than we might sometimes wish to be the case. And this raises other issues. While it may seem a provocation for a male critic to write a book focused solely on women artists, I do not mean it to be just a gesture. The origins of the book at hand instead emerged directly from the work at hand—­ from my conviction as a critic that this work amounts to some of the most important of the artistic practices of my own generation of artists, the artists since the 1990s whom I have as a critic most passionately followed, and with whom I have grown and developed as a critical voice. In presenting the book in progress to audiences, I have been asked, repeatedly, to clarify my feminist stance in relation to the current project. This is an old and persistent question, and a (welcome) dilemma for male critics.50 However, and no matter the dilemmas, I want to make no overarching claims for the feminist implications or political import of any of the art practices at issue here. The “overarching claim” is not part of the modalities of feminism that these works embrace and embody. Such artistic projects’ feminism and their politics, their feminist politics (not always the same thing), will emerge instead through the work, and through close attention to its demands. I daresay (I hope) that mine will do so as well. The kind of closeness and close reading, the form of attention to the work at hand, the belated formalism to which I am prone, is my feminist position, but of course it is a mode of writing on art with broader sources and import as well. Formalism has no inherent connection to feminism (usually the opposite is more true); the connections need to be forged, invented. But the poetics of the work to which I attend here argue for a set of strategies that put into play feminist forms, a category we could position beyond the aesthetics and politics divide, undoing a bit, perhaps, this impossible and recalcitrant opposition.51 Such forms call for both aesthetic and political or social unpacking, together, and this echoes the coming together of world-­historical experience and aesthetic experience—­the resonance of form and politics—­with which this introduction began. Coming in the wake of the 1970s and 1980s, in the wake of the feminist debates in artistic practice between essentialism and constructivism, the feminist innovations that have characterized art since the 1990s need much more detailed articulation. In the work to be explored here, classic feminist and political tropes return, and indeed,

F I GURE 0.9 

Zoe Leonard, Anatomical Model of a Woman’s Head Crying, 1993. Gelatin silver print, 16⅞ × 11⅞ in.

Introduction 22

perhaps this has been easiest to see with the work of Zoe Leonard. A certain set of explicit feminist concerns have structured her project from the start—­gendered histories of looking, constructions of female beauty, direct investigations of the subjection and oppression of the female body. And in addition to this, Leonard is the one figure in this account who has most directly contributed to political activism and queer politics from the initiation of her work in photography, through her crucial contributions to activist groups formed around the moment of the AIDS crisis and the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. And yet, while bodies and sexualities have been directly at stake for Leonard in her photography and her activism, they have accompanied other, perhaps more muted feminist tropes, such as a deep and abiding concern with gendered space, and specifically with the concept of home, the zone of the domestic. This more oblique feminist trajectory finds myriad responses in the work of all the artists examined here, in which not just the domestic sphere but feminism’s more broadly spatial, Oedipal, and psychic dynamics seem constantly at stake.52 In Tacita Dean’s films, for example, an insistent gendering has almost always been in play, but we face what must be called a recalcitrant gendering for a classic feminist practice, one that seems to investigate gender against the grain, as the artist focuses repeatedly in the work, almost obsessively, on male figures, on other male artists, and specifically on older men recorded at the end of their lives. In the myriad “father” figures that appear in Dean’s practice, we might see a broader concern with patriarchy and the patriarchal notions of aesthetic lineage and cultural tradition—­patriarchs within the field of the social and of form both—­and yet here too, as with Leonard, such feminist troping in the artist’s work has been elaborated more recently into an explicitly activist dimension. For Dean has become known for her worldwide campaign to save analogue or photochemical film as a practice, to have it declared part of the world’s cultural heritage, with UNESCO protection—­a political initiative of salvage and care, we might say, resonating not just with the psychic dynamics that feminism has most deeply studied but with other contemporary political struggles, like those around ecology and conservation.53 To understand Dean’s political position in this way immediately summons us to recognize this dimension of Leonard’s practice as well, for her feminist and activist concerns have always been accompanied by a way of treating objects and materials, as well as photographs and photography, that privileges ecology, salvage, recycling, and the sustainable use of resources and physical things. Such intersectional resonance and coarticulation—­of aesthetic issues, feminism, and other linked social and political struggles—­speak to the project of layered “feminist forms” named above. It is as if the postmodern embrace of the trope of the

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palimpsest returns, but now intensified as the increasingly complex manner in which forms and social or political practices must be brought together, read with and through each other. With Moyra Davey and Sharon Lockhart, similarly, the politics of care, the feminist issues around love and nurture recur again, staged especially through a particular and perhaps strange iteration (and transformation) of normative ideas of childhood and motherhood, and the forms of parental care over time. In Davey’s recent work, the deep, abiding interest that the artist has evinced in a thoroughgoing exploration of motherhood—­she is the editor of an entire book on the subject—­has shifted, now to an exploration of a sibling dynamic. And this represents a lateral move, from the parent to the sibling, that occurs repeatedly in all the artists at the center of this book—­leading Davey’s work into a reflection thus on the issue of feminist “sisterhood,” especially in a recent film looking back in part upon her actual sisters, titled Les Goddesses, 2011. In Lockhart’s work, as with Dean’s and Leonard’s, an aesthetic focus on the figure of the child, and on the time of childhood, has recently spilled over into and perhaps attached itself to more normative or classic political affiliations (the artist’s deep reflection on working-­class identity and the representation of the conditions of labor in a project like Lunch Break, 2008). And it has again been pressured out of the aesthetic sphere alone, and into the social and the political, in Lockhart’s very recent Milena, Milena project, 2013, and a linked project titled Rudzienko, 2016. For both have their origin in a situation where the artist has pushed past the fraught “collaborations” she often entertained with young female subjects in her work (the worker in the film Double Tide, 2009, for instance), to a direct situation of surrogate care for a specific young girl, an orphan, and of work, planned creative retreats, with other teenage girls and friends from a Polish orphanage. Ambiguously positioned between motherly nurture and sisterly friendship, this is a situation of care that has been at the center of Lockhart’s recent work and life, over a period of some six or seven years now. These particularities, these other politics—­these feminisms—­will come to the fore in the chapters that follow. But my subject ultimately remains a more general logic of anachronic dissidence and formal recalcitrance that subsumes or supports these various and myriad politics, and—­my most important claim—­that has served as a platform for their proliferation. In other words: there is a feminist and queer politics of time, a desiring politics of time, we might even say, and this turn in recent art—­its pressuring of the desiring modes of the image, of viewing, even of history and memory—­needs to be articulated. Lateness then, but longing too: lateness and longing.54

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Introduction 24

I am piling up fragments. It is the way and the method of this book. It is the way and the method of the work at hand, the paradoxical project of lateness. And so I am piling up the fragments. In the hope of their coalescence. Their coming together. Their becoming rings.

1 YO U S E E I A M H E R E A F T E R A LL

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. ­T. S. Eliot

I. We begin in darkness. Not the darkness of night, nor of cave, nor of womb. Not these. We begin in the darkness that belongs to photography, the medium of solar illumination, the tool for the “writing” of light. A moment earlier, we had been in the light. Gazing at small photographs pinned to the wall—­often pressed under glass, always printed full frame, with the black borders of the film still showing—­we confronted the signature format of Zoe Leonard’s work since its inception, in the early 1980s. And in this exhibition, a New York gallery show from 2012, these were images of the sun. With the camera pointed more or less directly at the source of all natural light, Leonard’s images divulged a series of hazy, indistinct skyscapes, filled at times with the random explosion of lens flares, with zones of intense illumination, the sun itself growing larger or smaller within the frame, never exactly centered, always displaced from that key point in a different way. Named simply with a day, a year—­by time, in other words—­the photographs attested to a daily, almost diaristic practice taken up recently by the artist, where she seems to be attempting to depict one source

F I GURE 1 .1  Zoe Leonard, 453 West 17th Street, 2012. Lens and darkened room, installation view (detail). © Zoe Leonard. Courtesy the artist. Installation at Murray Guy, New York. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York.

for the photographic image, its scientific or “natural” origin. We stare at a string of endlessly differentiated, absolutely singular images of the font of “light-­writing” itself, in an ongoing series embodied by Leonard’s characteristic black-­and-­white, grainy, and out-­of-­focus or now impossible-­to-­focus prints. Underlining and extending the insistent (persistent) black-­and-­white grain of her prints, Leonard accompanied the sun photographs with a space of utter darkness, an entire room plunged into obscurity. A New York Times critic, in a felicitous turn of phrase, called the two halves of the exhibition “ghost twin[s].”1 As I entered the blackened space, I knew what to expect. For some time now, Leonard has emerged

F I GURE 1 . 2  Zoe Leonard, August 4, frame 9, 2011/12. Gelatin silver print, 23¾ × 17¼ in. Unless otherwise noted, all works by Leonard © Zoe Leonard. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; and Hauser & Wirth, New York.

YO U S EE I AM HERE A F T E R A LL

as one of the key figures involved in what I have been calling photography’s contemporary “lateness” or, perhaps more provocatively, its “afterlife”—­a recalcitrant use of the medium that alters its fate today through a paradoxical reconnection to photography’s earlier histories, its specific and unrealized potentials. And I had heard Leonard when she visited Los Angeles not too long before this 2012 exhibition, where she spoke on her recent projects to a capacity audience at one of the city’s many art schools. She spoke then about her ongoing series of works that involved turning a given exhibition space, a gallery room, into a camera obscura. And this was one of the central gambits of this recent exhibition in New York. “What is photography?” Leonard asked, in the textual apparatus surrounding the show. “Is it a print or an object, is it a jpeg on your screen or does it only exist if you print it out? Is it a snapshot on your phone, a slide projection, or the image you see in your mind before you click the shutter? In short, is photography a thing, or a picture, or is it a way of seeing?”2 I thought I knew what to expect. As I entered Leonard’s camera obscura—­ with this work simply titled now by place, with the street address of the gallery’s physical site, 453 West 17th Street, 2012—­I was plunged into a seemingly unbroken darkness. I was not alone. For I had visited the exhibition with a close friend, and we stumbled about together in the unlit space. Other such installations by Leonard have come before and since; there are now six in total, seven if you count the camera that Leonard initially constructed in her studio: St. Apern Straße 26, 2011; Arkwright Road, 2012; Campo San Samuele 3231, 2012; 100 North Nevill Street, 2013; 945 Madison Avenue, 2014.3 With blacked-­out windows and a lens embedded in a small hole on the exterior wall, Leonard’s piece was simply a camera obscura like many that still exist—­now usually as curiosities, or fading tourist attractions, such as the camera obscura near the seaside in Santa Monica. Given the presence of similar tourist attractions in Leonard’s previous projects (for example, her Dia Art Foundation installation built from a collection of postcard images of Niagara Falls, You see I am here after all, 2008), and given the move within her previous work to reconnect with earlier moments of photography’s history—­its cameras, or its iconographies, or its film stocks, or its central authors—­one mode of understanding Leonard’s decision to transform art galleries into camera obscura spaces immediately asserted itself. Clearly, this was an archaeological move—­a return to one basis of photography as an apparatus and as a medium, a movement back to something like a long-­forgotten origin, held over from the past, persisting as a relic today, and not often privileged by our contemporary artists who focus on photography.4 “Today the camera obscura is an anachronism,” writes critic and curator Elisabeth Lebovici, “a revision of the accepted divide between an already fixed past and the present.” It could represent a “poetic tool for countering the

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supposed linearity of historical, teleological time.”5 And if Lebovici too then invokes Aby Warburg’s notion of “afterlife” to describe Leonard’s resurrection of the camera obscura as a structure within the work, the artist has herself long pointed to the deep links between photography and archaeology, citing another scholar on their inherent kinship: “Archaeology, like photography, is both art and science, a journey through time that arrests history in incremental moments. Close allies, each made major contributions to the other during their formative period.” 6 As I stumbled around in Leonard’s dark room, eventually huddling in a corner with my friend, my eyes habituated themselves to the obscurity of the space, and a faint image began to form. Upside-­down and precarious—­for the day outside was overcast and dim—­the image was seen by us projected onto the gallery wall and floor but not by the others we noticed walking into the room, disoriented by the darkness, and quickly making their way back outside. It was uncanny to have an experience you could watch others not having, but we had paid for our precarious image with time, earning it through duration and the slow habituation of our eyes to the cave-­ like space. Such is the strange way of the camera obscura, its dependence on the capacities and limitations of the human body: the longer you stayed—­the more you slowed down, the greater the duration you as a viewer allowed—­the stronger the image glowed. Another reading, then, of Leonard’s work suggested itself: here was an intensification of the artist’s move from photography (treated as a physical object, emphasizing its often neglected materiality, coupling this with photography’s intense attachment to other objects and materials in the world) to spatial or even sculptural concerns.7 Periodically over the years, Leonard has created installations of modular or quasi-­serial works made from materials such as salvaged suitcases and other objects found at flea markets. She has also employed organic materials such as fruit peels and, in several instances, an entire tree—­fragmented and torn apart only to be reconstituted as a construction, as sculpture. The move back to the camera obscura opened up the photographer’s concerns now directly to space, to the physical site of the exhibition, to the traditional domain that we think of in terms of sculpture. The logic of this move appears strange: hunting photography back to its origins took photography beyond photography, it would seem, to some complex form of medium sharing, or “intermedia,” as it was once called. But the work hardly had the look of intermedia, at least as formerly conceived. “I found myself trying,” Leonard explained of her turn to the camera obscura installations, “to think about photography in a more expansive way.”8 We now faced a spatial extension of photography, from which, nonetheless, the photograph had once set out or begun. It was a matter of an expansion and a return, of photography and sculpture—­of

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architecture too, of course, given the camera’s reliance on the gallery room, and the exterior city buildings’ infiltration of the gallery space inside, offering us less a fusion than a collapse of other binaries, other couples, as well, such as exterior and interior, public and private. But thinking of Leonard’s prior sculptures complicated my immediate reactions to or readings of the artist’s new work. Consider the sculpture 1961, 2002–­, an “autobiographical” work in the artist’s description, a jagged series of mostly blue but endlessly variegated found suitcases arranged in an ever-­growing row, like a wayward minimalist floor sculpture, a Carl Andre of the thrift store, with one suitcase added in perpetuity for each year of the artist’s life (the title refers at least in part to the year of the artist’s birth). Reframed by their titles as a series of sculptural “portraits” and figural memories, Leonard’s earlier sculptures made from these old, vintage suitcases also evoked tourism and spatial displacement, an almost mythical drive toward homelessness and travel, perhaps even exile, which was a common topos of her early photographs, too. But the sculptures were not only portable or mobile; they were also containers, devices for storage, a frame for the packing and holding of one’s possessions. Clearly, my experience of the artist’s camera obscura moved in the same direction. Huddled in the darkness, conversing with my dear friend, I had the experience of being physically touched by the obscurity that surrounded me, in the way that surrealist writer Roger Caillois long ago asserted that “dark

FIG U R E 1. 3   Zoe Leonard, 1961, 2002–­. Suitcases, multipart (one suitcase for every year of the artist’s life), dimensions variable. © Zoe Leonard. Courtesy the artist and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: Paula Cooper Gallery.

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space” has of pressing upon the observer, filling the surround, an experience of one’s environment as full and palpable, as opposed to empty and transparent to vision.9 I had the experience of entering fully and physically into Leonard’s latest instantiation of her thinking around photography—­of being literally part of the photographic logic, held bodily within its embracing camera or room, entered into its receptacle, received by the camera, part of its invitation to the world outside. Here was an “expanded photograph,” an ur-­photograph, too, in its way, and it was a photograph that now held its viewers within the apparatus, embedded within the photographic experience, receiving viewer and world both—­subject and object both—­in some fused or indistinct way. My experience, then, was unlike anything we learn from the usual rhetoric that has surrounded the camera obscura since its origins. It would seem Leonard reversed this traditional rhetoric as well, moving back to origins to produce transformation, not a statement of essence. Art historian Jonathan Crary has clarified the historical implications of the camera obscura most eloquently, in his magnum opus Techniques of the Observer. The camera obscura, according to Crary, is the visual device that instantiates Descartes’s notorious battle cry, the philosopher’s rejoinder to our more recent desires for embodiment and carnality, the mot d’ordre of metaphysics: “I will now shut my eyes, I shall stop my ears, I shall disregard my senses.” The camera obscura, in Crary’s words, “performs an operation of individuation; that is, it necessarily defines an observer as isolated, enclosed, and autonomous within its dark confines. It impels a kind of askesis, or withdrawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one’s relation to the manifold contents of the now ‘exterior’ world . . . The camera [sunders] the act of seeing from the physical body of the observer, to decorporealize vision.”10 It is the great device of visual separation. But my experience of Leonard’s experiment with the camera obscura was collective, not individuating. It was a social space of a kind. And given her prior work, one felt a distinct relational drive characteristic of Leonard’s understanding of photography—­a drive that holds, that insists on attachment, like a subject holding on tight to its objects, like a lover holding on tight to her love object. More radically even than this, Leonard’s camera space now insisted on an undoing of the kinds of separation that the camera has long been understood to found, to need, and indeed to embody. Separation gave way to incorporation; distance and individuation to relationality, to indistinctness, to a fusion between subject and object, viewer and image, looking and feeling, body and photograph. And this drive toward fusion and attachment seemed the more intense for Leonard’s abandonment of photography’s normative modes of preservation and fixation—­in the face of a kind of loss, the artist’s embrace of an endlessly fugitive image unfixed and never preserved by the camera obscura as apparatus. Like a stripped-­down,

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anti-­technological electronic image, the projection Leonard produced could be called “live,” though the more radical claim that it was “alive” might be more apropos. I begin with my experience of an example of photography’s expansion at the hands of contemporary art to underline how radically photography is now being rethought or reimagined in our present.11 The entire history of the medium, of its practice, its experiences, its central concepts, once more seems up for grabs—­in a way that I for one do not sense to have been the case for some time, since the classic years of postmodern criticism and photography’s reinvention in the 1970s and 1980s. My concerns with this reimagining have been various, but increasingly it seems that one of the shared stakes in contemporary art’s dalliance with photography has to do with transforming what we could call the “relational field” of the photograph. Despite the central position within photographic discourse of the social claims of what we call documentary, regardless of the old indexical destiny of photography to suture itself to the world and its objects—­puncturing the autonomy and separateness long claimed by the hegemonic forms of modern art—­photography has been conceptualized throughout its history as a profoundly un-­or a-­relational medium. The photograph is actively hostile to what I am calling relationality.12 Art historian and theorist Rosalind Krauss, for example, long ago attempted to think photography in terms of the semiotic operations of language—­colliding photography with the deep linguistic imperative to separate the sign from the thing signified—­describing ultimately what she called a theory of the “gap” or of “spacing” as the central experience of the photograph.13 The photograph, in this view, enacts an operation of visual isolation. We “frame” reality, we “crop” the photographic image, we “freeze” and slice up the continuum of that which exists in the great photographic logic of division through which our world has developed into so many atomized bits and pieces, an immense fragmentation. Any number of voices, the most eloquent of voices involved in thinking photography, could stand in here to instantiate these claims. I will turn to Susan Sontag, chosen as so often for the simplicity and directness of her claims. Here are some selected lines and passages from Sontag’s canonical essay “In Plato’s Cave” that illustrate her vision of the social dimension—­we might more accurately say, the profoundly asocial dimension—­of the photograph. In Sontag’s text, the photograph is described from the start almost sexually, as “insatiable”—­but the desire of the photographic image is only understandable for Sontag as “acquisitive.” “To photograph,” writes Sontag, “is to appropriate the thing photographed.”14 The profound a-­relationality of this form of appropriation

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rears its head in all of Sontag’s subsequent descriptions of the photograph as violent: “There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera”; we face the production of a “chronic voyeuristic relation to the world.”15 Reciprocity, deeper forms of relationality, have little place in Sontag’s vision of the photograph, it would seem, and her opening gambit to sexualize or eroticize our conception of photography does not fare well in the end. “Using a camera is not a very good way of getting at someone sexually,” Sontag concludes. “Between photographer and subject, there has to be distance. The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate—­all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.”16 Things get worse for photography after this moment in Sontag’s text. I’ll cite just one more passage. It is almost cliché, but I want it here; I want it on the record that this is the vision of photography against which I feel the need to take a stand. That I want to displace. And that I believe we are in the process of witnessing a grand displacement of, in the practice of our greatest photographers and contemporary artists. We return, in Sontag’s text, to the camera as separation, to the photograph understood as an essential act of framing, cropping, isolation, fragmentation: “In a world ruled by photographic images, all borders (‘framing’) seem arbitrary. Anything can be separated, can be made discontinuous, from anything else: all that is necessary is to frame the subject differently. . . . Through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, freestanding particles. . . . The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies inter­ connectedness, continuity.”17 If this was once our understanding of photography, it is an understanding that can no longer stand. If in terms of form, as a critic, I previously felt the need to sketch an “expanded field” for photography and its contemporary transformation, the corollary to such expansion is the need for a relational understanding of the medium as well. The autonomous and the separate cannot, by definition, “expand”; the expansion of form is always relational, a movement toward something else, a development with and into something else. What counts today is not the “being” or ontology of photography, but the acceptance of photography as a paradoxical form of “becoming.” Transformation, expansion, becoming: this is somehow what photography has always entailed, though this fact has often been denied, indeed repressed. Increasingly, and clearly, that repression no longer holds, and if photography will continue at all, it is only in the sense of its own dedication to the relational, to becoming. In what follows, I will consistently remember where these present thoughts began—­next to my dear friend, in the darkness of Zoe Leonard’s camera obscura,

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pressed upon by that darkness and by the light, by the space inside and outside the camera, by the layering of body and image one found there, and by the profound sense of being held by a version of photography, received or embraced by it, as it were, sharing some aspect of what photography is and means in a deeply physical and bodily manner. The nature of that embrace—­the nature of the physical, almost amorous tie between photography and the subject—­will be what this chapter most intimately explores.

II. In one of the earliest essays written about Zoe Leonard’s work, the artist Jutta Koether described Leonard as grounding her practice in two deeply outmoded—­ the word Koether uses is “penultimate”—­activities right from the very start of her career: photography and direct political activism.18 For the moment, I will not comment on Koether’s description of Leonard’s politics, especially with regard to the collectives in which the latter participated in response to the AIDS crisis.19 But it is hard to imagine how in the waning days of a triumphant 1980s postmodernism Koether had the foresight to cast photography as belated. For photography, it could be argued, was postmodernism’s hegemonic form.20 And yet Leonard’s emergence as an artist had been linked to what now becomes visible as a series of deeply anachronistic, if not atavistic, photographic moves. First, we could point to Leonard’s disjunctive choice to resurrect the small-­scale gelatin silver print in the heyday of postmodern photography, with its glittering Hollywood allure and ever-­increasing scale (and eventual digital apotheosis).21 Against the appropriated media images and critical-­documentary forms of postmodernism, Leonard returned to the central vehicle of modernist art photography, precisely the target of most postmodern critical assaults on photography’s recent history. In addition, while many of Leonard’s early images focused on cities and urban representations, just as many returned to the realm of “nature,” to the genres of landscape and still life, in the supposed postmodern moment of a turn to “culture.”22 Finally, and perhaps most importantly—­although seemingly least perceived—­Leonard began to resurrect a thoroughly nineteenth-­century model of “primitive” or early photography, the photography of the amateur, often associated in the past with women artists like Julia Margaret Cameron or Lady Clementina Hawarden. Having left school at the age of fifteen and essentially a self-­taught photographer, Leonard’s embrace of the tradition of the amateur makes a certain amount of sense. In this model, accident and contingency were embraced as inherent to the photographic process, and its physical, chemical, and indexical nature (its almost being a process of nature) prized above all things. Leonard’s work thus emerged as an unacknowl-

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Left, Zoe Leonard, Mirror no. 1 (Metropolitan Museum), 1990; Right, Zoe Leonard, Mirror no. 2 (Metropolitan Museum), 1990. Gelatin silver prints, each 41½ × 28¼ in.

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edged counterpart to the vision of photography sketched out in Roland Barthes’s great last book, Camera Lucida, an elegiac text as out of sync with the emerging photographic postmodernism as Leonard seemed to be.23 While many of Leonard’s early images harbor self-­reflexive ambition—­ photographs that seem to model ideas about photography itself, so many pensive, thinking images—­the photographs that the artist took of a pair of eighteenth-­ century Venetian mirrors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York embody all of these atavistic dynamics. Mirror no. 2, 1990, for example, joins a host of Leonard’s early pictures that seemed to be about pictures themselves, in the spirit of the contemporary art of their time.24 Within Leonard’s own practice, the photograph joins a host of representations of representations, photographs of maps and

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three-­dimensional models, of museum display cases and shopwindows, of all the social categories of photographic instrumentality—­fashion photography, tourist photography, and aerial photography all at once. Images of mirrors, after all, had been one of the oldest reflexive models for thoughts about picturing, for clarifying the mimetic model of the Western picture, in the older self-­consciousness of painting; and like many of Leonard’s reflexive works—­especially her documents of shopwindows, museum displays, and snapshots taken through the windows of airplanes—­the photograph captures a frame ensconced within the frame of the camera, a border within a border, an image inside another image. But this frame also embodies a problem. For here, in Mirror no. 2, it erupts in a decorative riot of natural ornament, shell forms and vines and dancing foliage, echoing the ornate flowers and domesticated nature of the period wallpaper upon which the object hangs. Excessive, even obsessive, in its attention to this collision—­or to this reverberation, we might instead say—­the photograph appears overly interested in the displaced nature found even here, in the mausoleum of culture that is the museum. Indeed, and in this rather not in the spirit of the contemporary art of its time, the work’s focus on nature echoes the photographic nature of which Mirror no. 2 seems itself a product, like a wild thing, a singular, unrepeatable creature or entity wholly opposed to the idea of the photograph as mirror image, as copy, as reproduction—­as machinic and duplicative, in other words, the image-­language of social documentation and objectivity.25 For Mirror no. 2 documents its excessive frame off-­center within the camera’s frame; the mirror sits askew within the image, the photograph taken at a slightly oblique angle. Such angled views implicate the subjectivity of the photographer, underline the presence of a viewer, as they simultaneously individuate the object here depicted. With what we might call this nonobjective approach to the object, the mirror cannot reflect back the apparatus of the camera, and itself captures an angled, oblique view of its surrounds. How does one, in fact, photograph a mirror? The problem, photographically speaking, is as intense as that faced later, in Leonard’s previously discussed images of the sun. How does one turn the camera upon an object that does to the world what the camera itself can be described to do? While the history of photography is chockablock with precisely this image-­trope—­this comparison, this reflexive iteration of the doubling machine that is the camera in the mirror images it surveys—­Leonard’s solution seems to turn potential self-­reflexivity into self-­difference, converting a narcissistic double into a heteronomous couple, a sibling, a more explicit relational dynamic.26 This coupling, as opposed to doubling, of mirror and camera then gets underlined by the fact that Leonard, as her title implies, made Mirror no. 2 as part of an explicit image couple, a pair of two photographs of separate Venetian mirrors. This is a recurring strategy in the artist’s work that itself resists, seemingly in the

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mode of a kind of stuttering regression or parsimonious stubbornness, the more common aesthetic structure of an elongated photographic series. Indeed, Mirror no. 1 presents a foliate-­framed mirror of a different shape, angled inversely to its sibling. The two photographs exist as asymmetrical echoes that will never coincide, but proclaim their contradictory relation to each other, as if entwined in an image chiasmus. And the photographs’ formal testimony pushes further: taken in natural light, like almost all of Leonard’s work, Mirror no. 1 and Mirror no. 2 give in to a shared photographic scene of intense over-­and underexposure, embracing a formal display of anti-­mastery, accident, and somewhat flat-­footed photographic de-­skilling. In Mirror no. 2 especially, we face a dimmed and hindered vision that leaves us gazing at a reflective surface that less captures another image than it intensifies the oblique, off-­balanced nature of its perspective, seizing upon the wayward smudges and the fingerprints, the scratches, specks, and particles upon the glass of the mirror itself—­ the “body” of the mirror itself—­as well as the “bloom” of the metallic backing of the mirror as an object, its evident age and decay ruining its capacity to still fully reflect the world outside. Of course, this metallic backing echoes the silver basis of the traditional chemistry of photography, a shared materiality, and a direct historical linkage or relation of another sort.27 And so we gaze upon a mirror where the reflected space and light combine with the physicality of the object reflecting them, fusing only in this disruption. As critic Mark Godfrey described the photograph: “A clean mirror would function as an obvious analogue for a documentary photograph, but Leonard’s mirrors are tarnished, scratchy, murky, and fail to reflect anything clearly. In the same way, her photographs of this period steer away from the transparency of documents and create an atmosphere of the macabre, the better to describe historical oppression.”28 We face an image that seems to emerge from the shadows of history, from a darkness that belongs to another time, or perhaps (in its informality and subjectivity) to a memory, even to the obscurity of the unconscious—­erupting from an inscrutable space as if deep within the history of a medium and a subject both. In its formal dynamics, Mirror no. 2 can be taken as a signal statement of Leonard’s early aesthetic, her sudden embrace within the postmodern moment, swimming in nonspecific but photo-­based “Pictures,” of a kind of wizened medium specificity, a photographic reflexivity of a special kind. We face a thickened photography, opaque but also obtuse, material, thingly—­an off-­kilter and eccentric document resisting its own resolution into the transparency of the documentary image. We face an aged, decaying, atavistic picture, a photography that recalls its kinship with older imaging forms, that remembers its origins in the depths of historical time, no matter its persistence, like a museum relic, in the present.

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I will return to the photographer’s earliest images, but these anachronisms—­and even, we might say, the larger, more general stakes of anachronism as such—­were only compounded in Leonard’s more recent project Analogue, initiated at the end of the 1990s. Anachronism now became, in a new way, a central stake of Leonard’s photography. An archive-­based work of monumental scope, harking back to the form and content of several major archival projects in the history of photography, Analogue

Zoe Leonard, image from Analogue, 1998–­2009. Four hundred twelve chromogenic prints and gelatin silver prints on paper, variable dimensions, each print 11 1⁄32 × 11 1⁄32 in.

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would ultimately comprise just over 400 photographs (edited down from upward of 15,000), both silver gelatin and chromogenic prints, both black-­and-­white and color images, upon which the artist labored for over a decade, from 1998 to 2009.29 The work’s anachronism sung out immediately from Leonard’s title, more immediately than ever before, as one meaning of the title was obviously technical. Indeed, the work’s stubborn embeddedness in older analogue techniques of photography would only come to feel more pronounced as its production carried on, as the years of its prolonged making witnessed the increasingly total displacement of traditional chemical photography by the digital image. Incipient at the moment of the project’s start, the full digitalization of photography was a historical transformation that seemed precisely to bookend Analogue’s production. It was as if the work were designed explicitly as a kind of swan song, to register a photography that would now cleave in two, leaving its older mode of production behind. However, Leonard’s standing concern with photographic atavism came to be just as insistently signaled, not by a prolongation and continuation of her own analogue investments and beginnings as a photographer, but conversely by an abrupt change in her initial artistic tools, by a sudden shift in cameras. Having previously (partially) abandoned the handheld 1970s-­era Nikon SLR with which she had shot the majority of her early work, to take up an older Leica in the early 1990s—­necessitating a relinquishment of some of her own most deeply earned and held photographic habits and techniques—­Leonard now turned the camera clock even further back in time, reaching deeper into the past of her medium and its practice. For in Analogue, Leonard adopted the square-­format image characteristic of an old 1940s Rolleiflex camera with which she now began to shoot, as if learning her practice over yet again. Perhaps this unusual abandonment was motivated by the putative subject of Analogue, especially in the early years of the archive’s compilation, as Leonard’s project turned to recording the urban spaces of a changing New York City at the close of its twentieth-­century life. The Rolleiflex was a device—­whatever its longer history—­that seems particularly attuned to the postwar generation of the “New York School” photographers, as well as the lived experience of the generation of Leonard’s parents, and the years of her own birth and childhood in New York, in the 1960s.30 Leonard’s camera had biographical and historical resonance. Leonard did point back to childhood in her initial thoughts on the project’s inherent anachronistic logic. “I remember as a kid how excited I was to learn the word anachronism,” Leonard wrote, in her first statement on the new work. “I thought it amazing that an object could be out of its own time—­that it could actually carry another time with it.” With her new (old) camera and its history, the artist proposed that her recent pictures were “about place and time. They are pictures of here and now, but also pictures of there and then. They look across place and across time.”31

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Zoe Leonard, Analogue (detail), 1998–­2009.

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With this old Rolleiflex—­a “leftover,” as the artist also put it, “from the mechanical age”—­Leonard began in earnest to document the shops and storefronts of her own New York City neighborhood, initially the Lower East Side; and then other areas of Manhattan, such as parts of Harlem close to where the photographer had lived as a child, or the section of Brooklyn to which she (like so many others) was forced to move during these years.32 As opposed to a discordance of place and time, Analogue at first sought out a correspondence, a continuity between form and content. Many of the shops imaged in the archive were founded during the same postwar years from which Leonard’s camera had emerged. They were of the same era and age. And like her increasingly outmoded analogue images, these shops by the 1990s now teetered on the verge of extinction, or were already closed up and shuttered, victims of the city’s then recent and undeniably massive gentrification. And so Analogue in fact begins with a great dirge of loss and extinction. In its full, installation version (a differently arranged and abridged book would be produced as well), the photographs in Analogue appear on the wall organized into twenty-­five gridded units, groups of varying extent and size, which the artist calls “chapters.”33 One of the largest of these chapters arrives first, a collection of photographs of shop fronts all similarly shuttered, their grates pulled down like so many eyelids closed either in sleep or in death, it is hard to tell. Nothing is open for business—­not the dry cleaners, not the television-­repair shop, not the hardware store, not the Spanish pharmacy—­but the signs over the opaque, blocked portals still stand guard, no matter how crowded out by spray-­painted names, graffiti tags, the dissolute stores having become the launching pad for wayward and layered signs of another sort. Ironically, or perhaps tragically, the old signs speak a language of optimism through their litany of all the endlessly different store names. A heap of language erupts in vibrant color and in every conceivable typeface: the unisex salon promises “New Images,” the clothing outlet store offers a “New Era,” the one-­hour photo lab is a “Memory Keeper.” Time seems at stake, and the out-­of-­business women’s boutique insists on itself as the purveyor of “Today’s Sportswear,” but the shops also seem through this dead speech to be personified, like beings, subjects, displaced people. They are modest, or they brag, in so many old-­fashioned expressions or so much New York–­style braggadocio: a discount center is “Dainty,” the neighborhood meat market named “Los Genios,” the geniuses. Even the coffee shop calls itself “Lucky.” But the dirge continues, and in fact it intensifies. An immediate second chapter steps up close to the shopwindows, focusing on a series of faded photographs captured within Leonard’s photographs. We are presented with irregular grids of posted images that echo Leonard’s grids, or perhaps inspired them, found arrangements of

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Zoe Leonard, Analogue (detail), 1998–­2009.

photographic snapshots of faces and hairstyles taped to the windows of hairdressers’ shops, bridal shops, and nail salons. The photographs are not young, nor are they new; rather, they too have been abandoned in the forlorn windows to be leeched of all color, pale and desiccated, withering like old flowers in the sun. They thus read not just as a deathly echo of Leonard’s own grids but as a pallid survival and continuance of the gridded faces in Walker Evans’s crucial and canonical documentary image Penny Picture Display, Savannah, 1936. This image has always been understood as part of Evans’s larger embrace of the anonymous, commercial photograph, inspired as he was by the archival projects of precursors like Eugène Atget and August Sander, equally emerging out of instrumental conventions of a photography that did not belong to them.34 The anonymous photograph provokes a model of authorship as

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reverberation, a return of conventions no individual photographer has a role in inventing, an aesthetic of collectivity over individuation. Leonard further echoes this photography of the echo. The documentary photograph persists, its collective audience and belonging live on; and if here the shopwindows erupt in a series of faces, as if the shops themselves were again strangely personified or person-­like, in subsequent chapters Leonard’s documents return to their focus on small businesses and signs that seem residually alive, and that may not all be completely shut down as in the opening chapter. And yet later chapters seem to focus on businesses whose signs, like the beauty salon photographs, have begun to lose letters or to fade themselves, presenting new,

F I GURE 1. 8   Walker Evans, Penny Picture Display, Savannah, 1936. Gelatin silver print, 9¾ × 7⅝ in. Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell. © Walker Evans Archive, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Zoe Leonard, image from Analogue, 1998–­2009.

unimaginable, and illegible words through the evident poetics of decay. Ultimately, a chapter arrives even more stark than the project’s baleful opening, with all the businesses once more completely locked up and shuttered, a resurgence or echo of where the project started, part of an internal rhythm within the work of repetition and return, with every gate slammed down. But now each sign has been torn down as well, or the riot of letters have gone entirely missing from empty panels, the last step in an incomplete process of eviction or removal. The names have all disappeared, and the optimistic language falls silent, like an ancient script eroded down to faint

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traces left in the urban grime by rain and sunlight and the sheer passage of time. These, of course, are the basic ingredients—­time, liquid, and light—­of traditional analogue photography as well. The signs parade before us as so many faded ghosts, absent witnesses pointing back to their former, almost legible lives.

In all of this, the comparison between the chaotic, singular, and decaying shops and the persistence of Leonard’s outmoded and untimely analogue photography comes to the fore. Before intensifying this connection, we need to register the potential strangeness of the alignment. For in placing the old forms of photography in dialogue with the fading of a type of urban commerce, with the passing of the little shops and immigrant businesses, many of them carried to New York City from elsewhere, Leonard was also comparing photography to a specific modern structure of social experience. Indeed, Analogue seems to focus, lovingly, on one of the most problematic class structures in any modern social analysis—­namely, that of the petite bourgeoisie, once lodged problematically and inconsistently between the working and middle classes, in a kind of hybrid class-­belonging, the little shopkeepers and small-­business owners that emerged from a social realm that served as a breeding ground of both historical fascism and bohemia all at once. It is this social structure that Leonard’s photographs seem to want to seize, perhaps to redeem. It is the social form to which the photographs compare themselves.

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Zoe Leonard, images from Analogue, 1998–­2009.

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By the 1990s, just as photography was about to undergo its vast modernization, New York City no longer seemed willing to tolerate the presence of this most embarrassing of classes and its social forms within the center of the city’s fabric. The immigrants were being forced out (artists too); bankers were moving in. But Leonard’s camera insists on belonging to this form of belonging; it insists on belonging, that is, in this now anachronic social space, focused on the residual traces of this confusing social category—­of this class experience—­through the ciphers of a dying urban world: used-­appliance stores and rag-­trade suppliers, dry cleaners and television-­repair shops, old camera vendors and photo studios, aged beauty salons and mom-­and-­pop corner stores, windows filled with fried chicken or “back to school” shoes, fading signage, homemade placards, spreading graffiti, and handwritten price tags with their numbers all different sizes. Deeper than a surface citation, an appropriation or formal echo of historical precedent like the photographs of Eugène Atget and his infinite concern with the shopwindows of Old Paris, Leonard’s gesture seems to insist instead on a continuance, a participation in a larger social and photographic logic. For the lesson of Atget’s work—­a lesson that Leonard’s more recent archive helps us to see—­is that he photographed from a position most often inside and continuous with the social world of the little shops, his photographs a product of his own working-­class origins and what could be called a small-­business model of photographic “authorship.” It is this specific social world, as opposed to any single form or image-­trope, that Leonard reclaims as central for photography—­a revelation of a longer, deeper confluence of social structures and photographic form than art history has been able to reveal.35 Thus, while various image types and categories do emerge in the movement through the different chapters of Analogue, one experience alone remains unchanging: uniformity seems almost nowhere in evidence. Remaining “unchanged” is the one thing Leonard’s archive cannot do, the collection an escalating riot of unique or singular solutions to the small businesses and shopwindows themselves, so many assertions of a stubborn or recalcitrant individuality. Like the inconsistent social forms at its heart, Analogue betrays a photographic attraction to the shops’ eccentric materials and a deep investment in materiality, the photographs displaying through this their inherent resistance as photographs to all forms of duplication, repetition, and standardization. In her earliest statements on the work, the artist voiced this attraction as a form of belonging to the social world preserved but also made persistent—­made to remain—­within her photographs. “There was a kind of beauty I lived with for years that I had never really noticed as beauty,” Leonard wrote, while actively working on the project. “I loved it. . . . It was only as these old shops began disappearing that I realized how much I counted on them—­that this layered, frayed, and quirky beauty underlined my own life. I felt at home in it.”36

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Zoe Leonard, image from Analogue, 1998–­2009.

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Zoe Leonard, image from Analogue, 1998–­2009.

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Layered, frayed, and quirky: the artist again could be self-­reflexively describing the aesthetic of her own photographs. But it also bears remarking that the issue of “home”—­“I felt at home in it”—­has been at the core of Leonard’s endeavors from the earliest moments of her work. If the confluence of photography and social experience was at stake, Analogue made explicit a long-­standing dynamic for the artist that needs to be traced. In Leonard’s first photographs, prior to Analogue, we face many aerial images of cities, or of models of her native New York; photographs filled with rows upon rows of homes, urban and suburban, as well as traditional and ancient (European villages, houses clinging to a hill in Istanbul or in Cappadocia). Some “homes” were even natural, like in the photograph the artist once made of a honeycomb at the center of a beehive (Untitled, 1987/90). In Leonard’s aerial images—­sprinkled with a thick, film-­noir grain—­the homes that she recorded seem necessarily and impossibly distant, or at times outmoded and threatened, displaced and noncontemporary in a way that made them the logical counterpart to Leonard’s simultaneously produced images of air travel, wistful snapshots like lo-­fi Alfred Stieglitz photographs, uprooted memories of his modernist Equivalents series. Leonard’s works instead captured momentary cloud formations from the air, from the passenger window of a plane. And it also bears stating that Leonard would begin her Analogue project only after a long self-­exile to the wilderness of Alaska, where she lived and made photographs for several years in the mid-­1990s. Along these lines, Leonard cited James Baldwin in her crucial essay for the Analogue project, the essay a piece of writing that might be described like her photographs as a congeries of naked citations of other authors, other writings: “You don’t have a home until you leave it, and then, when you have left it, you can never go back.”37 Analogue thus began with what was a return to New York, which was also a return home, only to realize that no return at all was possible: “New York was Yesterday,” to use the artist Gregg Bordowitz’s (borrowed) phrase.38 But perhaps so too was photography. And consequently, as Leonard turns to this obsolescent or anachronistic documentation of her threatened neighborhood, a home that is fading away never to return, we actually see few or no domestic spaces, but only register the labor of the artist now herself displaced into the city streets, in a self-­conscious echo of the central tropes of documentary and street photography. And as opposed to the sedentary or static qualities we may associate with home, Leonard’s documents of her lost one—­her poignant attempt at a now impossible return—­see the artist turned into an endless wanderer, a ragpicker of the image, perambulating urban space day after day.39 Eventually, as the chapters of Analogue unfold, this wandering or exile takes the artist away from New York altogether. At roughly the archive’s midway point, just

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after the chapter that showed us the closed-­down stores and their missing, ghostly signs, Leonard reaches large again, with a giant grid or chapter, one of the most extensive, that presents a seemingly endless profusion of lumpish objects, packages of some kind, themselves internally gridded and striated by their wrappings, but still strangely shapeless and forlorn. We are shown fifty-­four photographs of vaguely human-­scaled bundles like forgotten abstract sculptures sitting on the sidewalk or in a back alley, thrust out like the photographer into the city streets. These deformed geometries—­we gather from inscriptions—­are bundles of donated or recycled clothes, soft-­form packages or containers separated by clothing type and readied for shipping from New York to markets in the so-­called third world. And so in the final chapters of Analogue, Leonard now takes leave of the shopwindows, and follows the displaced wares of the closed-­down neighborhood stores, especially those involved in the “rag trade,” to such far-­flung locales as Kampala, in Uganda, or Ramallah and Jerusalem, Mexico City and Havana, Budapest and Warsaw. In this, Leonard’s archive not only traces but literally enacts an operation of exile, becoming itself an instantiation of a kind of “migrant image,” to use the critic T. J. Demos’s phrase.40 But Analogue embodies a migrant image against the grain of the forms of circulation and display that the contemporary digital regime has invented or embraced. And as always in the project, the photograph’s “migration” allies itself with, and seems based on, the exile and migration of a set of social forms. We see new, hand-­painted signs in African markets, and new, increasingly colorful and inventive arrangements of the used goods for sale, mostly outside, divorced of the old architecture and frame of the New York urban tenements. And yet, however newly vibrant and colorful the displaced wares seem to be, as both time and the archive stretch on, we seem to stare at a more reduced, even more insistently material form of commerce, circulation, and exchange, a profusion of so many bare, naked objects. The archive in fact comes to its climax by looking down—­at the ground, at the earth and the dirt, at so many used wares, or broken fragments thereof, arranged in a rowdy profusion on blankets and plastic tarps, laid out in an urban market at the level of one’s feet. Presented as mostly without consistency or category, as the shattered remains of objects now grouped together merely through their status as remainders, the market photographs where Analogue comes to its conclusion happen to be mostly from the city of Warsaw, Poland. But this conclusion brings us back to another inescapable biographical and historical resonance. For the artist’s maternal family originally came from Warsaw, driven ultimately to New York by the displacement and decimation of the events of the Second World War and its aftermath.41 The migrant images of Analogue reach in this a more intensive form of exile, a kind of redoubling: a contemporary exile that reaches back to earlier, historical experiences of exile, a

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contemporary fragmentation that spirals into horrifying alignment with earlier moments of violence and destruction, resonating and echoing across the years. And paradoxically this exacerbation of exile in the final and most far-­flung images in Leonard’s sprawling archive becomes readable as simultaneously an even deeper sign of a photographic journey directed at an impossible return to a lost home. We face a conclusion and a movement forward that is also a turning back, in the face of extreme historical violence and decimation, where both exile and nostalgia work necessarily together by perhaps inverting their more familiar logic. For they are now transformed: exile returns one “home,” but to a place one has never been; and nostalgia leads one far afield, far away, only to find there so many familiar objects, so many fellow migrant things, like banished time travelers from one’s own most intimate past.

If the longing to return home is the engine of what we call “nostalgia,” the evident dynamic of deep photographic exile evinced by the structure of Analogue does have a formal counterpart in Leonard’s project. For a long time, Leonard has been thinking of the photograph as a kind of receptacle, something like a waiting, perpetually

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Zoe Leonard, Nest no. 1, 1994/97. Gelatin silver print, 13½ × 19⅛ in.

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empty container, a black hole crying out to be filled. If such was my experience in Leonard’s recent camera obscura installations, I already sensed this trope in the first large assembled group of photographs by Leonard that I remember seeing in person, a series of quiet and yet beautiful images of bird nests that she exhibited in a show in Paris in 1998.42 This was also, of course, the year of the artist’s initiation of Analogue. And here the nests themselves—­another “natural” avatar of the notion of a home, a place of birth or origin—­were temporarily abandoned, and yet each was filled with waiting, potentially orphaned eggs: the receptacle of the nest filled with the container that is an egg, both of them filling the frame of the photograph, in a self-­reflexive echo that also seems a kind of gentle manifesto, containers within containers within containers. Like the sun in photographs eventually to come, the eggs in these nests were never captured at the exact center of the image. Instead, the photographs remain subtle in their endless differentiation, as opposed to modeling a sense of repetition and replication—­egg after egg, photograph after photograph, with natural reproduction compared to (and transforming) mechanical reproducibility. Sometimes a single egg huddles alone, like a rock in the sun (Nest no. 1, 1994/97); sometimes they are gathered together in twos and in threes (Nest no. 5, Nest no. 6, both 1994/98), in nests that seem of a piece with the bramble and bushes that surround them, spreading like the sea, small depressions and concavities—­boats or islands—­within what reads as a continuous but infinitely variegated field of natural forms. This is, in fact, how Leonard once photographed the surface of a body of water, perhaps the sea, some ten years earlier—­in the key images Water no. 1 + Water no. 2 (diptych), 1988. The work presents us again with the most basic form of a photographic series, its most reduced version—­but perhaps, too, its place of origin—­what I want to call an image “couple,” a common strategy of Leonard’s various early photographic projects.43 We confront two images of shadow and light, markedly different and yet substantially comparable to each other, a pair of photographs simply and utterly filled to their edges with the play of light on liquid that is also the photograph’s own, its most basic language. “I just love the ocean. I think perhaps we all do,” Leonard asserted in an interview given during the making of Analogue. “It’s  .  .  . the most beautiful, most primal element to me. The surface of it, and the mystery of what is beneath: the depths, the lives, the animals who live below the surface, the rich diversity below . . . and how little we know of it.” And she concluded, with a seeming nod to the shopwindows she was then recording in Analogue: “I love the skin of the ocean because it’s the border between two elements: air and water. Perhaps I’m also drawn to its opacity—­it is a window through which we can’t quite see. I think I often photograph what I don’t understand, or what I want to understand. I photograph in an effort to understand.”44

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As the light caresses the surface of the water, and inscribes itself as the skin of Leonard’s two photographs, we experience an almost abstract field of folds and wrinkles, moving from deep black to pure white. The photographic inscription transforms the fluid striations of the liquid and its unceasing movement into something rocklike and solid, a basic figure of the dimensional, with a sense of minimal relief that is almost sculptural, a photograph once again become thick. The photographs seem drawn to the surface of the body of water as an avid receptive material, one that ceaselessly reacts to its physical surrounds, in waves and eddies, in ripples, in tides, in currents and in flows. And when captured, the endless reactive movement of the water settles into an experience of endless difference, unsameness, the infinite shifting and transformation of a form that remains, ultimately, formless—­and that photography here attempts to seize, but also seems to want to become, to identify with. For it is also liquid from which the photograph originally emerged, and even in its long-­heralded dedication to freezing and petrifaction, photography seems to carry along with it this lost origin in the transformative magic of its chemistry, its washes, its baths.45 It is the sea with which these photographs want somehow almost tragically to compare themselves, or with which—­perhaps erotically, perhaps in the modality of desire—­they want to fuse. And it is the sea in turn to which Leonard once looked for a metaphor, an analogy, to describe in words her difficult, intransigent relation to the eminently photographic phenomena of repetition, doubling, and seriality themselves. The formal trope that the artist developed by the time of Analogue, of the photograph as receptacle—­a kind of container seeking to hold other containers—­needs to confront precisely this, for the trope itself seems designed to confront former notions of photographic reflexivity and medium specificity, older ideas about the doubling that photography enacts, and to which it can be compared. The form of photography’s self-­definition now needed to be (re-­)defined. In a recent essay, Leonard writes: Repetition is doing or making exactly the same thing, over and over again. I think of seriality as making or doing something from the same starting point, but each time allowing for a slightly different result. The starting impulse, or the genesis of the gesture, is the same, but as it travels through the material world it is altered, rendered specific and particular. . . . I am reminded of looking at the sea, the way one watches waves come to shore. Each wave comes in, and breaks, and slides up the beach, and falls back. We can see and feel the waves as a steady presence, a rhythm, a constant. But one can also watch a single wave, discerning how different it is from the others, how much water it moves, how high it gets, where it breaks, how far up the beach it travels.46

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Zoe Leonard, Water no. 1 + Water no. 2, 1988. Gelatin silver prints, each 17 × 23½ in.

Water no. 1 + Water no. 2 offers up two photographs whose formats may be entirely the same, but everything else about this image couple, this almost series, arrives before our eyes as entirely given over to difference. The two scenes appear to claim the status of doubles, but capture instead a roiling liquidity—­carrying with it an echo of the liquidity that used to determine the photographic medium—­an assertion of an idea of a photography facing and modeling itself upon a world, upon materials and physical entities, that will not stand still. It is perhaps for this reason as well that Leonard began to think the photograph as a receptacle, a kind of container, dedicated to the impossible task of holding on—­a place of rest, and of respite, like a home. Her photographs of eggs and nests asserted a field simultaneously of variance and continuity, of infinite natural difference and variegation edging into a continuum of visual form, with no borders, no division, no internal separation. Or perhaps instead: borders and edges are initially foregrounded in the photographs, in the eggs and nests and the black photographic frames themselves, only to be overrun, exceeded by the teeming visual field, the open receptivity of the receptacles and containers modeled therein. This is precisely how Leonard came to photograph trees during these same years of the 1990s, in a well-­known series of images where fences and barriers that call up regular and standardized grids are seen to be absorbed and exceeded by the irregular, almost formless, spreading bark of the urban trees planted nearby (most of the photographs in this series came simply to be titled Tree + Fence, 1998). And this may be why Leonard in fact exhibited these tree photographs alongside the nest photographs I have been describing, as part of the same French exhibition at the end of the 1990s,

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their shared topos of nature linked by a set of deeper conceptual concerns, or by the kind of “nature” photography might be seen to embody. Paradoxically, it seems that the eruption of difference, the model of the photograph as inherently self-­differing, propels the very search for congruence and correspondence that we might take as the destiny of the photograph thought of in comparison to a natural container. Like the eggs nestled within nests that themselves appear as part of (participating in) the material and actual appearance of nature—­but erupting in endless incongruence and difference nonetheless—­the container, the receptacle, seeks a double; it seeks that which it will shape and hold, like a photograph. But the double never arrives. For none of these things that Leonard represents are doubles. They are, instead, relations—­couples, open-­ended but formed along a fraught aesthetic axis of comparison and variegation, sameness and difference.47 It would not be far-­fetched to invoke the psychoanalytic concept of what Freud called (after Romain Rolland) the “oceanic feeling” to describe this photographic dialectic of openness and enclosure, of limitless expanse and focused selection, of that which can and cannot be framed—­or to use the word perhaps better suited to Leonard’s photographic forms, that can or cannot be contained.

We are far from the fields. Far from the bramble and the nests. But receptacles run everywhere through Analogue. They seem to arise in order to underline, even intensify, the dynamics of exile and nostalgia, displacement and belonging, that color Leonard’s vision for the project. We might say that the shopwindows at Analogue’s heart are, for the artist, a kind of framing device—­another frame within the frame—­to which the photograph seems inherently attracted, and can also be compared.48 But the shopwindows do not only frame, they also contain; they are receptacles for the widest accumulation of objects upon which Leonard trains her camera: a profusion of the used, abused, neglected, and handmade. And as the material objects pile up, we sense that containment parallels what is for Leonard an insistently physical conception of the photograph, as opposed to the purely optical concerns that would otherwise seem to be the priority of the camera and its dedication to visual framing. Another image-­manifesto: we are pushed up tight against a shopwindow, too near, in fact, to see the window’s full frame or edges, which also sit askew within the photograph, crooked and wobbly, resolutely overrunning (and perhaps contradicting) Leonard’s camera and its insistent, squared-­off frame. This window has been filled with discarded televisions, but they too sit askew, piled one atop the other and turned in every direction, contrary to the laws of commerce and display. It must be a repair shop at which we gaze—­a place of care about which no one but Leonard anymore seems to care—­but we are too close this time to glimpse the signage.49

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Zoe Leonard, image from Analogue, 1998–­2009.

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In the glass, like another self-­conscious echo of Atget’s photographs of cafés and shopwindows from a century before, we can see the spectral reflection of the artist. This kind of visual noise or disruption happens often in Leonard’s photographs of the shopwindows, as it did with Atget in Paris, but nowhere in the archive can we see the artist reflected more clearly than we do here. She is bent over her Rolleiflex, looking down into its intimate depths, and we see that when this camera is used, it must be pressed against the body, as opposed to the head or eye, held tight against the heart, the chest, the torso. Rather than a simple return to the iconography of the figure often referred to as “Père Atget,” Old Man Atget, Leonard’s image allows something else to erupt from the canonical tradition of documentary, and from its paradoxical photographic patriarch (“Don’t put my name on it,” Atget grumpily and notoriously insisted about his work to the surrealists, rejecting the patronymic; “These are simply documents I make”).50 This is a disruption emanating, however, in all its difference from deep within that tradition itself, like speech or slang in a minority language, the emergence of what Deleuze and Guattari might call a “minor” form.51 In fact, the claim has been made that Atget’s photographs were already a making “minor” of the imperatives of the document, photographic speech diverted repeatedly from the document’s central forms and rules, its pure and rigid instrumentality. Leonard cites precisely this claim, from the art historian Molly Nesbit, in the essay for Analogue, which includes an entire section devoted to quotations of texts about Atget and the documentation of Old Paris: More than anything, [Atget’s] L’Art dans le Vieux Paris provided evidence, concrete evidence of Atget’s defects, evidence of how habitually he had come to fidget within the regulation forms of the document, angling his perspectives more than necessary, not always aiming for perfect symmetry, making heavy contrast and uneven lighting his trademarks, allowing traces of later historical time to appear. Repeatedly, we see doors left open, signs posted, horse manure in the street.52

As she does in her photograph, Leonard draws our focus with this text to the wayward status of what might be called Atget’s own “bad” documents and photographic form, which Leonard seems to want to make over into a specific photographic language, as if “minoritizing” the minor language yet again, the most paradoxical form of the potential inheritance of a canon, a tradition, a photographic father figure.53 For in this image of the television-­repair shop, and in this image of the artist’s reflection looking down into a camera held tight against her body, it is now as if Leonard wants to stress the affective, as well as the maternal, almost womb-­like nature of her apparatus, and the receptive cavity that it embodies. Looking down and awry, Leonard’s gaze into her camera divorces itself from the trick cameras and

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voyeuristic devices of the history of street photography. It is as if we were looking now at looking itself, seeing a vision placed in the second degree, the artist herself watching the gazing of the camera, and one is reminded not of visual mastery but of the looking awry of dogs and other animals, their gesture of submission before the gaze of the other, a kind of laying down of the eyes before the spectacle of the world. The posture is unavoidably humble, like an honorific bow. It is, too, as if Leonard’s camera and its “taking” of photographs were actually involved—­as a receptacle—­in a form of amorous incorporation, an internalization of the image not unlike the melancholic’s incorporation of their lost objects. And the image that her camera receives is of the receptacle of the shopwindow, in this case holding its own boxes and receptacles, the televisions that may once have been technologies of radiant projection, but were also themselves analogue receivers. In their broken-­down state, this is now in fact all the televisions seem to do: they accept reflections from the outside world, receive the cars and the buildings and the street reflected in the shopwindow that also appear like ghosts, flickering faintly upon the televisions’ long dead screens. But they flicker more strongly, and appear most clearly, at precisely the places where the urban architecture with its objects and incident comes to be reflected through the shopwindow and onto the television screens, redoubled and ramified, like light passing through a lens to be focused on an emulsion. Indeed, all of this waywardness, all of this openness, all of these excessive layers of reception and reflection, belong now to another analogue receiver, to the apparatus of Leonard’s outmoded camera. And perhaps, too, all of this has been aligned with the figure that we cannot help but see, the reflection of the artist, a body infiltrating the windows and the screens and the boxes, a psyche caught up too in a frenzy of incorporation. The photograph sings a litany, reciting what can be described as an open-­ended chain, with each element standing in for (or alongside) all the others: body, psyche, camera, photography, shopwindow, out-­of-­commission analogue receiver, broken-­ down screen.

“Accumulate, collect, compile, amass, assemble, stack, gather, gather together, group, bunch, cluster.” Leonard is singing a litany, making lists, thinking in the form of writing about the work of another artist, in a recent text, on the work of outsider artist James Castle.54 Ultimately, and by now typically, her litanies consider the collective form that characterizes a litany itself: “A set, a suite, a series, a stand, a block, a bunch, a group, a band, a drove, a school, a crowd.”55 Piling up a series of series, a chain of chains, Leonard’s manner of writing here echoes others, the minimalists, for example, the concrete poetry of a Carl Andre,

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the Verb List of a Richard Serra. And, like her photographs, the words circle back in time in another sense, to a memory and a moment of her childhood—­when she “understood language in a particular way,” the artist tells us, when every word, so she thought, “had a color, a weight, a shape. A visual and material presence. A scent.”56 Castle made “hundreds of constructions,” Leonard relates. And the lists return: “Coats. People. Birds. Ducks. Doors. Window frames. Chairs. Chests of drawers.” Along with the time of childhood, the domestic has returned, or we have returned to it, to the space of the home. Objects of a particular kind pile up in such a space. It is a form with which we are now also familiar: Pitchers. Bowls. A kettle, a pot. Containers. Enclosures. Vessels. Not the contents but the box. Not the meal or the cooking but the storage.57

But this is where Leonard’s essay had begun. With forms of collecting and gathering we have confronted before. With an endless and endlessly different, infinitely particular, litany of the container, a poem of the receptacle. A bundle. A package. A packet, a parcel, a bindle, a sheaf, a bale. A heap, a stack, a pile, a bank, a body, a bunch. A box, a receptacle, a container, a holder, a carton, a chest, a crate, a bin, a compartment, a nook, a niche, a cubby, a cubbyhole, a pigeonhole. A pack, a trunk, a suitcase, a case, a jacket, a cover. To wrap, to wrap up, to tie up, to truss, to encase, to jacket, to cover, to bundle, to bundle up, to embrace, to coat, to surround, to sheath, to girdle, to garter, to swathe, to swaddle, to cuddle, to bind.58

The essay was written in the immediate wake of the completion of Analogue.

We seem to be skirting the self-­reflexive forms and tautological logic of medium specificity, but typically, the “model” of the photograph that we confront in Analogue may have come, for and to Leonard, from outside photography altogether. We face instead a dual articulation of forms and an expansion of photography’s field, like the persistent lengthening of Leonard’s chains of words. This is medium specificity’s other, the becoming-­other of medium specificity. For if receptacles run everywhere through Leonard’s prior work, they are most evident, even inescapable, in her photographically inflected nonphotographs, her

Zoe Leonard, Strange Fruit (detail), 1992–­97. Orange, banana, grapefruit, and lemon skins, thread, buttons, zippers, needles, wax, sinew, string, snaps, and hooks, 297 parts, dimensions variable. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with funds contributed by the Dietrich Foundation and with the partial gift of the artist and the Paula Cooper Gallery, 1998. © Zoe Leonard. Photo: Graydon Wood.

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“expanded photographs,” or (in other words) what art history might want to call her sculptures—­like the imperfectly reconstituted and emptied hollows of the work the artist called Strange Fruit (for David), 1992–­97. And this obviousness cries out to be confronted. Leonard’s sculptures—­already themselves an expansion of her earlier photographs—­must be seen in turn as the key precedent and the engine of the later transformation of photography enacted by Analogue. Strange Fruit embodies a collection, like the photographic archive sub­sequently engaged (immediately after) in Analogue. And comparable as well to the 400 photographs ultimately to be selected there, Strange Fruit encompasses some 300 small objects, as small as photographs, really—­desiccated and decaying skins or peels of previously consumed fruits, partially sewn back together after having been

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taken apart during the process of their consumption. We see zippers and wires and buttons and colorful stitches of string or thread suturing up the fractured, blackening remains of oranges, bananas, grapefruits, avocados, and strangely (painfully) lemons. Their bitter insides, or the other fruits’ sweet flavors, have been used up; and the inedible remains are recycled into hollowed-­out shells, their reconstitution as sculpture calling up Leonard’s later return to outmoded and previously used cameras, or her attention in Analogue to thrift and the commercial recycling of clothing and other physical materials. But the fruits are wounded, sutured fragments, and monstrous in their way, like undead remains, with all the horror and violence that implies. Leonard’s title for this work, of course, appropriates the well-­known song by Billie Holiday, and the protest poem at its heart, a lament aimed at American racism and the terror inflicted by the lynching of African Americans: Southern trees bear a strange fruit, (Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,) Black body swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. Pastoral scene of the gallant South, (The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,) Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh, (And the sudden smell of burning flesh.) Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck, For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop, Here is a strange and bitter crop.59

Like Analogue and its cycling back to historical moments of exile, like its echoes of prior violence, Strange Fruit carries this protest and remembrance into resonance with the contemporary domain. I will return to this in a moment, but with Leonard’s title it seems impossible not to think as well of Adorno’s first words on late style, for the philosopher too evoked fruit immediately in his quest to define this long-­misunderstood modality of artistic form. Made through a concerted (disconcerting) process of (auto-­) destruction and (self-­)fragmentation, the late work of major artists would not, per Adorno, “resemble [the maturity] one finds in fruit.” It would not entail a ripening. The challenge of late style consists, for Adorno, in works that are “not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation.”60 As if arriving at a new way of working, Leonard’s Strange Fruit took apart and re-­formed the very vehicle and metaphor of sweetness

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and sustenance, and this would occur like the labors of late style in a work fully informed by the confrontation with loss, and indeed with death. But now unlike Adorno’s ideas, and perhaps altering (deepening?) the paradigm of lateness itself as an aesthetic category, Leonard’s sculptures emerged not from the confrontation with her own death and demise, but in the aftermath of the loss of an other, of many others, of a community, and perhaps in relation to the aging of a set of borrowed or appropriated sculptural forms. Rather than centered on the self, the confrontation with loss was fully relational. For the violence that Leonard was internalizing and placing in resonance with the history of racist murder in Strange Fruit was the mass death that accompanied the AIDS crisis. Dedicated specifically to Leonard’s close friend and fellow artist David Wojnarowicz, who had died from AIDS, in 1992, Strange Fruit seemed to model the activities of mourning and melancholia themselves—­a sculptural work formed through paired acts of destruction and incorporation, repetition and attempted restitution. In the classic account of melancholia, the ego identifies with a lost object, and identification for psychoanalysis was based primordially on the logic of incorporation, literally the “devouring” of another object; however, in melancholia this impossible identification with that which is lost results in a destruction that gets turned around upon the self. In a famous passage, Freud asserts that melancholia involves “an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. In this way the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, which could now be condemned by a particular agency as an object, as the abandoned object. Thus the loss of object had been transformed into a loss of ego.”61 Melancholia involves a form of self-­abnegation in the face of loss, an internalization and thus echoing of that loss itself. In the face of a loss in the outside world, it provokes a hollowing-­out of the self, a kind of hole within the ego, deep within the subject. The result of this psychic as well as aesthetic process in Leonard’s hands was a series of endlessly different and unfixed (decaying) organic forms that will themselves ultimately be lost, but each in the new guise of a kind of empty container, a fractured shell, a wounded receptacle, held hollow, cracked, and (at times) partially open, with nothing left inside. Some time later, confronting a prior sculptural process of threading and weaving not unlike her own here, Leonard would reflect on the intense bodily investment and labor involved in the production of Eva Hesse’s minimalist and postminimalist works. But instead of the Hesse sculptures that most resemble the fragile and organic materiality of Strange Fruit, Leonard would—­from all of Hesse’s production—­seize upon the work Accession II, 1968, a stark industrial and geometric form pierced by holes through which the artist threaded soft tubing, like hairs. Leonard emphasized the extreme amount of labor that the making of the sculpture involved: “I think of Eva Hesse, kneeling or bending over the metal cube to make Accession,” Leonard

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Eva Hesse, Accession II, 1968 (1969). Galvanized steel, vinyl, 30¾ × 30¾ × 30¾ in. Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Friends of Modern Art Fund, and Miscellaneous Gifts Fund, 1979. © Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, New York. Photo courtesy the Detroit Institute of Arts.

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wrote, “stuffing plastic tubing into the holes of the metal cube and pulling them through. She had the cube fabricated, the holes drilled. But she threaded the plastic tubing. I remember reading in Lucy Lippard’s book that there were some thirty thousand holes in the cube.”62 While emphasizing labor and process, Leonard seems simultaneously drawn to the work’s open, pierced nature, to its movement between inside and outside, to its myriad holes; and indeed, beyond its almost infinite piercing, Accession II presents an open-­faced metal box that amounts to a sculpture into which one inevitably imagines reaching, as if into a bodily cavity, an open volume in the form of an insistent if uncanny container. Something crucial about Leonard’s understanding of sculpture—­about her very turn to sculpture—­becomes clear in this

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choice, in this belated pointing back to Hesse’s work (to this specific work), and it is an understanding that would change the course of Leonard’s photography, as well. For the hollow vessel was an even more insistent aspect of Leonard’s subsequent found-­suitcase sculptures, another collection of literal containers that, moreover, evoke the displacement from home that otherwise exists alongside this model for the artist of the artwork as a receptacle. In the moment of minimalism’s emergence, the notorious critique that the new sculpture received at the hands of art critic Michael Fried emphasized precisely the formal trope that Leonard’s more recent sculpture now exacerbated. For Fried worried over his distinct “impression . . . that [Donald] Judd’s and [Robert] Morris’s pieces are hollow.”63 Describing a later idea of artist Tony Smith as producing works that would be “hollow with a vengeance,” Fried clarified that his issue with such a structure would be its betrayal of abstraction, its latent and potential “anthropomorphism.”64 Tony Smith’s sculpture Die, 1962, described by the artist as sized so that it would read as neither a monument nor an object, comes to be seen by Fried instead as “something like a surrogate person—­that is, a kind of statue.”65 Indeed, the critic understood the new sculpture ultimately as a series of stand-­ins for “entities or beings”: The entities or beings encountered in everyday experience in terms that most closely approach the literalist [Fried’s term for minimalist] ideals of the nonrelational, the unitary, and the holistic are other persons. Similarly, the literalist predilection for symmetry, and in general for a kind of order that “is simply order . . . one thing after another,” is rooted not, as Judd seems to believe, in new philosophical and scientific principles, whatever he takes these to be, but in nature. And third, the apparent hollowness of most literalist work—­the quality of having an inside—­is almost blatantly anthropomorphic.66

Acting like a “surrogate person,” minimalist sculpture and its frequent hollowness also entailed a kind of duplicity for Fried, a doubleness. “It is . . . as though,” Fried concluded, “the work in question has an inner, even secret, life.”67 Such “duplicity” seems transvalued—­a history returned to and transformed—­in each and every sculptural project on which Leonard embarked. Turning to the most object-­bound form of artistic production, Leonard explicitly pressured each of her sculptural projects to embody instead a model of the subject, to become explicitly something like a “surrogate person.” Strange Fruit understands sculpture as the production of a series of reconstituted lost objects—­objects after objects, and failed reconstitutions thereof—­that simultaneously mirror a lost subject, or that inescapably model a devastated, fractured ego. Ten years later, Leonard’s suitcase sculptures each embodied varied “attempts at using objects to make a portrait,”

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a found object to figure instead a subjective space of memory.68 Other sculptural projects would emphasize even more directly the act of sculpture as an act of loss: for example, Leonard’s haunting work entitled simply Tree, 1997—­which involved an actual tree, a dead tree, submitted to fragmentation (the process par excellence of lateness), sawed into pieces and then sutured back together, in the gallery space, as a sculpture, like Strange Fruit. Inescapably deathly, defining sculpture as a literal stand-­in, as the impossible reconstitution of a once-­living object, Tree would find its own direct echo a few years later in another sculptural project involving found objects, Leonard’s installation Mouth open, teeth showing, 2000. A kind of panorama of the stand-­in or the surrogate, Leonard’s collection of sculptural objects now involved actual human substitutes, an arrangement of used and abandoned dolls. The logic of the “surrogate person,” of objects with a “secret,” or “inner” life: Mouth open, teeth showing announces the nature of this sculptural act, this operation FI G U RE 1 .1 8  Zoe Leonard, Mouth open, teeth showing (detail), 2000. One hundred sixty-­two dolls, dimensions variable. © Zoe Leonard. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: Jack Louth.

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of substitution. For the doll installation could only be described as constructed from a series of human effigies, confronting the viewer like a massive crowd; but the more general logic of the effigy by now inhabited Leonard’s sculptural work in every instance. Predicted long ago and with great anxiety by Fried, and shared in Leonard’s own moment by other key models of sculpture, and other crucial artists (perhaps most notoriously Mike Kelley), the artwork as effigy prioritizes a logic of loss and substitution, usually in a deathly or violent mode.69 Mouth open, teeth showing proclaimed that violence directly in its title, and the accumulated human surrogates called up a whole series of Leonard’s earlier black-­and-­white photographs, one group of which had circled obsessively around antique medical models and female anatomical figures and body parts in institutions like medical schools and wax museums. The substitutional logic of the effigy had been at the center of Leonard’s thoughts for a long time. Zoe Leonard, Effigy, 1995. Gelatin silver print, 7 × 5 in.

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Leonard’s photographs of these anatomical models, and the doll sculptures in their wake, as literal human effigies, amount to the artist’s most direct evocation of the aesthetic model of the stand-­in, the artwork as a substitute subject. (Or almost: in fact, in 1995, Leonard exhibited a photograph that she directly entitled Effigy, of what seems a human doll or mannequin strung up like a lynched subject from a leafless, winter-­season tree; the photograph was first shown alongside the initial exhibition of Strange Fruit, underlining even further the image’s deeply sinister connotations.) The work leading up to Analogue and produced during its course would only intensify this trajectory as the more general logic of Leonard’s forms, and the artist always claimed that the models of the female body that she photographed early on were objects for her of intense psychic identification. 70 More, the effigies return us quite directly to the logic of the artwork as hollow, a shell emptied out, a used container or receptacle waiting to be refilled, literally a body opened up and eviscerated, insides exposed to the outside. For the artwork as effigy performs a labor of substitution, of surrogacy; as a stand-­in it proclaims the work of the aesthetic to be a modeling instead of a subject. But it performs this labor most often in a violent mode (the effigy is usually something we destroy, an object that we burn), a substitute subject in the mode of decimation.

The sculptural projects I have been discussing exist both as prelude to Analogue and as coeval projects made during its long course. And they raise a simple set of questions: Are the hollow forms, the effigies and reconstitutions, to be compared to the receptacles and containers that spread everywhere through the photographs? In other words: In Analogue, does photography itself become a kind of effigy? The archive involves quite palpably the work of mourning, and clearly for something greater than a lost neighborhood, a once-­upon-­a-­time home, a vanishing New York. Coming in the immediate wake of Strange Fruit, the photographs of Analogue also then come in the wake of Leonard’s experience of the AIDS crisis and should not be separated from that history. With the crucial exception of a few ghostly reflections of the author in glass windows or screens, the utter absence in these photographs of almost any people has struck critic after critic of Leonard’s project. The emptiness of the photographs seems intense, almost apocalyptic, at times. We are reminded of Walter Benjamin’s description of Atget’s Paris, photographed like the “scene of a crime,” emptied of all persons.71 “Remarkably,” Benjamin wrote, “almost all these pictures [by Atget] are empty. Empty is the Porte d’Arceuil by the fortifications, empty are the triumphal steps, empty are the courtyards, empty, as it should be, is the Place du Tertre. They are not lonely, merely without mood; the

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city in these pictures looks cleared out, like a lodging that has not yet found a new tenant.”72 With a nod to the trope of the home, Benjamin describes an emptiness that comes in the wake of a loss, or in anticipation of a future subject, not yet arrived. It is very much in this way that Leonard’s Analogue hollows out the photographic image, the “street” photograph, the urban scene: the overwhelming emptiness becomes the inevitable sign of the subject behind the image in each work, or better, the subjectivity that the photographs model in effigy, and as an effigy. Even in the face of Atget’s voided urban scenes, Benjamin concluded, “To do without people is for photography the most impossible of renunciations.”73 The art historian Svetlana Alpers notes that, as so often in still-­life paintings, the objects and physical things in Leonard’s Analogue testify to the presence of the human subject behind them: “Each [photograph] is a still life,” the author of The Art of Describing writes. “Things are in and people are mostly left out although a human presence is palpable in objects. People set out the goods, painted the signs, parked a bike, they use the brooms, have worn the clothes, took off the shoes.”74 But the photography historian Margaret Iversen has more directly attached Leonard’s archive to the AIDS crisis itself. The work involves an indirect mourning like Strange Fruit of the collective loss that AIDS involved: “The AIDS epidemic . . . decimated the community around [Leonard], and the lack of public mourning for its victims made it harder to bear. The deserted streets of New York in Analogue refer to this traumatic emptying out, as well as to the closure of familiar neighborhood shops.”75 As had already occurred with Strange Fruit and its resonance with and recollection of racist murder, a loss now opened onto other losses, a hole onto a further series of holes. The empty streets, the emptied shell, the hollowed-­out form: everything in Analogue is staked upon this initial emptying-­out of the photograph’s urban scenes. Leonard has given voice to this experience of loss and its persistence and extension, relating it to the devastation of AIDS, at least once. It is the experience of all who lost loved ones in this period to AIDS; but more, it is the experience of anyone who came to a city like New York or San Francisco in the immediate aftermath of the worst years of the disease. And it is the experience of our entire culture, this aftermath, in relation to a generation that should now be with us, here, still, and is no longer. Leonard writes: Because they died so young, far short of an average lifespan, many who died of AIDS in the 1980s and 90s would still be alive today. And so, this community of us, now, is empty of their presence. Not only who they were, but who they would have become. There is a vacuum: of missing friends, acquaintances, lovers, teachers, mentors, a multiplicity of voices unspeaking.

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The friends we lost, back then, are not only lost, then, in the past. Their absence is ongoing, daily and present. Though we may not always be aware of it, we continue to lose them every single day.76

It is in relation to this loss that Leonard’s Analogue enters into the workings of the effigy, and opens onto a kind of radical and inescapable lateness. It is this loss that opens up the photographs’ late dynamics, more than any engagement with nostalgic themes of home, or anachronistic film technology and cameras. Becoming a kind of formal encasement, imaging other containers and receptacles within it, the photograph in Leonard’s hands comes to be emptied out, like an excavated cavity seeking that which might once have completed it. This emptying, however, completely transforms the paltry “hollowness” that Michael Fried once attributed, like a pathology, to minimalist sculpture. Leonard’s sculptures that preceded and then accompanied Analogue show the consistent voiding the work engages in to be a structural emptiness, a formal device of some eloquence, an emptying out that also exists as the first condition of a kind of opening. Adorno’s heartrending phrase on the operations of late style—­that the late work, abandoned by the subjectivity of its author, would “turn its emptiness outward”—­now becomes the almost impossible logic of Leonard’s photography. It was as if she were hollowing out the photograph, seeking not just to model the photograph’s desire to hold but to figure the photograph as an evacuated field, a literal hollow. But this hollowing, this mourning, this loss of self that also was then extended to the photograph, and to photography, began to allow something else and something other to emerge, in the face of the effigy’s destruction itself. Such is the passion of the effigy, of photography as an effigy, whose etymology is precisely this: ex-­fingere, to form or shape from the outside. For now it would be the explicit task of the photograph to “turn its emptiness outward.”

Let us look again at the photograph from Analogue described above, the image in which the photographer appears reflected in spectral form, in fact almost the only photograph in the entire archive in which a person—­as opposed to an effigy of the same—­appears at all. (There are some shadows, some stubborn, ghostly inhabitants ensconced deep inside the shops and businesses, but they are exceedingly rare; there are instead hand-­painted faces, fading prints of pinned-­up photographic portraits, dismembered mannequins, and the dissolute vision of almost bodies, absent bodies, in the form of hanging clothes.) Much later in the archive’s organization, Leonard appears reflected clearly once again, in a photograph of a broken-­down analogue-­television set now being transported in a wheelbarrow, like a wounded

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Zoe Leonard, image from Analogue, 1998–­2009.

patient in a once-­upon-­a-­time war, an image taken in Trinidad, Cuba, in 2001. The two photographs were thus actually taken around the same time. But the Brooklyn photograph is the very first image in the selection from Leonard’s archive as it has been published in book form. As indeed a manifesto, then, or at least a place of origin, of beginnings, the starting point of one version of the entire photographic series—­as a photograph of the reflecting screens of the dead televisions, embraced by the receptacle of the shopwindow, enlivened by the permissive mirroring of the

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window’s glass, aligned with the open box of the camera, held tight against the physical body of the artist—­the image announces that Leonard’s photographs are receptacles, but it also pushes further: it proclaims that she as an author, like the televisions and shopwindow before her, is a “receiver.” Leonard has always stressed this. “These are things that move me,” Leonard has stated, explaining the desiring nature of her photographic choices. “For me, photography is intrinsically about observation. It’s about being present in and having a certain perspective on, the world around me. It’s not so much about creating, or my imagination—­as drawing, for instance, may be. It’s more about responding.”77 Or again, in another interview: “I think my work is less about creating and more about observing.”78 While these statements may at first seem clichés of photography’s vast documentary inheritance, Leonard’s work intensifies their present and potential meaning, and their inflection throughout Analogue. To call her a “receiver” is to pressure these statements in a very specific way. For as the “manifesto” photograph intimates, Leonard approaches the model of “authorial divestiture” that Kaja Silverman has recently named the “author as receiver.” It is another modality of the work’s lateness. Silverman elaborated this idea in relation to what now seems a classic example of “late” style, the perplexing work of filmmaker Jean-­Luc Godard from the 1990s, as opposed to the classic years of his work in the 1960s and 1970s. Writing on these later works by Godard, such as the (anti-­)autobiographical film JLG/JLG, 1994, Silverman points out that the “author as receiver” is attracted most often to images that use natural light, focus on found objects, and relish all sorts of documentary detail.79 Silverman follows Godard in imagining a kind of conceptual transvaluation of the outmoded technical support that we might think of as an analogue receiver—­“And now Jeannot, Jeannot,” Silverman quotes Godard from JLG/JLG, remembering his childhood name, “which rhymes with stereo.” The rhyme continues, inspiring what Silverman calls a “more profound relation”: “I, who listen and watch,” Godard says, referring to his stereo, “am here, because I receive this projection as I face it.”80 In this model, for Silverman, the artist can be conceived as “not properly a creator, but rather the site where words and visual forms inscribe or install themselves,” a “receptacle,” in other words, or a surface where the world finds its inscription. (“I have recourse,” Silverman explains, “to the metaphor of inscription as well as that of installation because Godard himself sometimes thinks of the artist as a receptacle, and sometimes as a writing surface.”81) A kind of authorial detachment, then, is key to such work, for “where the authorial ego reigns supreme,” Silverman writes, what is negated is “the place where the world should be.” Echoing across the years the long-­ago proclamations by Adorno on the authorial “abandonment” of late style, she continues: “It is consequently only

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insofar as the artist succeeds in negating himself as a biographical personage that he can truly be said to be an artist.”82 Thus Godard, in a 1983 interview: “I am a person who likes to receive . . . The camera, for me, cannot be a rifle, since it is not an instrument that sends out but an instrument that receives. And it receives with the aid of light.”83 And perhaps more enigmatically, but beautifully, in the film JLG/JLG: “I love. That is the promise. Now I have to sacrifice myself so that through me the word ‘love’ means something, so that love exists on earth.”84 Like nostalgia, reception is a notion, Silverman admits, that has been thought of as “problematic” within politics and aesthetics. We want authors (and their audiences) to be “producers”—­active agents not prone to the “resignation,” “inactivity,” or even “passive acceptance in the face of the ‘given’” that, Silverman points out, are the main associations with reception in the cultural domain.85 And yet the “author as receiver” is a model of transformation as well. Explicitly, it transvalues a set of technologies, such as the receiver, and analogue sound and image devices, in the precise moment of their crisis and attenuation. But implicitly, it involves a dynamic even more radical than the limited project of rethinking notions of the author and artistic “making.” For we face a model of subjectivity here, as well, a rethinking of the very notion of what constitutes the subject, and the forms that subjectivity might take. At its most intense, Silverman’s understanding of “receiving” describes how one might conceptualize a holding of oneself open to the world, which solicits our desire and potentially transforms it, and is reciprocally transformed by it. For receiving, in this model, is an aesthetic labor that depends on the workings of desire and memory; the Freudian notion that “the finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it” is this labor’s motto.86 Like Leonard’s impossible return in Analogue to a lost home that then creates a spiraling series of new attachments to urban objects and spaces, and ultimately takes her endlessly away from New York and across the world, the author as receiver follows the opening of desire, but not back to the (implicitly maternal) “lost object” of origin. Instead, turning back moves one forward, as the world responds to that desire for the lost object, the absent origin, and expands upon its demand, opening up for those who will listen entirely new pathways for desire to displace forward, entirely new “associational field[s].”87 In allowing the love once occasioned by the lost object to be displaced onto new objects in the world—­to be, in a sense, libidinally recycled and reused, the fate awaiting so many of the obsolescent objects that Leonard tracks—­the author as receiver ennobles that at which she gazes. To receive is to add value to the objects in the world, a paradoxical generosity where the “past” lights up the “present.” The author as receiver is also a model of generosity that makes space not only for the world but for the viewer. The openness and the displacement that receiving

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enacts also involves a displacement of the self. Silverman states: “The artist should not just receive; she should also be the relay for other acts of reception. . . . In this way, one look can make possible a potential infinity of other looks.”88 Leonard, writing of, for example, her found-­suitcase sculptures, has embraced an entirely analogous understanding of these works’ address, which might mistakenly be seen at first as a group of works centered narcissistically upon the self, as object “portraits” of members of the artist’s family, or as “self-­portraits” of the artist herself: There is no real narrative here, no story, but perhaps a set of associations. I seek to trigger the viewer’s own memories and associations, whatever they may be—­e.g., travel, vacation, airports, transience, pleasure, uncertainty, nervousness, anticipation, freedom, excitement, displacement, leaving, being left, movement and change. Of course, I have my own, but I am not trying to tell my story with these sculptures, but rather to show how these suitcases can serve as a repository, a bag, vessel, or sack for emotions and thoughts. I’ve been writing here about my process, how one idea followed another and I came to make these sculptures, but I do not think anyone else would look at Robert and see my father, or look at 1961 and see me, rather I think these suitcases can trigger the viewer’s own memories or associations. What I’m interested in here is how objects can hold a story. That we use things, objects to communicate complex ideas, feelings; it is a dense, compact, potent language, the language of the found object.89

Creation through receiving leads to other acts of reception. It is in this sense that Leonard’s Analogue not only depicts the artist as spectral, under erasure, reflected weakly in the act of image incorporation as her image is reciprocally received and absorbed by the objects and spaces around her. Much more radically, the archive begins to read as a displaced “self-­portrait,” in Godard’s specific sense from JLG/ JLG—­the opposite of an autobiography (“I am not trying to tell my story,” as Leonard just averred)—­and a self known only through the acts of displacement and desire that may open themselves to the other, to the desires and memories of many others. “Godard calls into question not only his own authorial agency, but also the notion that this film is ‘about’ him,” Silverman writes, in “The Author as Receiver.” “JLG/JLG is not an ‘autobiography,’ he maintains in [an] interview, but rather a ‘self-­portrait.’ And a self-­portrait [Godard says] ‘has no “me.”’ . . . ‘Self-­portrait, not autobiography,’ he insists late in [his] film.” 90 So it is with Leonard’s Analogue as well. But with one crucial caveat: for Leonard the self-­portrait intimated by her archive also seems at various times to be that of the medium of photography itself, like Godard with the cinema. Subject and object, artist and medium, creator and

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Zoe Leonard, images from Analogue, 1998–­2009.

spectator strangely seem now to align, to edge toward each other, to “open” themselves to each other. A series of photographs from Analogue, spiraling like so many others into resonance, across their distant placement from one another in the larger archive: the first approaches a repair shop on Avenue B in New York City, “Roger’s T.V. Service,” but along a sharp and radical oblique. “Video Cassettes Recorder,” the shop’s sign cries out, “T.V.’s All Brands,” “AM/FM Stereo Receivers.” Three televisions of different makes and sizes sit outside on the street, squatting on the sidewalk, reflecting (receiving) the light of the world; others inside vie with the receptive surface of the shopwindow, the old televisions projecting programs, the glass window absorbing the dim view of the urban street all around. “Repair,” another photograph cries out, via a stand-­alone sign slouching like a passerby outside its shop’s front door (the image was taken at Broadway and Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn in 2001). The sign rattles off the technologies of the receiver—­“tv, vcr, amp, cd, radio”—­in blood-­red spray paint, quickly stenciled, drips and smudges still visible, the portable sign evidently repurposed, painted over, thick with its prior messages and lives. Angled along another radical oblique, the sign’s litany of receivers finds itself received, reflected in the darkening shopwindow, even in the icy metallic sheen of the exterior and solid architecture surrounding that window itself. The photograph receives the reflections, embracing that which has already been received. And then, leaping forward some years, another ramshackle structure, captured again on the teetering oblique: the photograph shows a wooden hut, a vendor’s stand with one window and one door, both closed up tight against any possible commerce.

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We are now in Kampala, in Uganda, to which the artist traveled in 2004. And the blood red of the previous images has been transformed, but only by a degree, burning now more brightly in the incongruous guise of an exterior coat of the hottest pink paint. A perforated hollow, the shack has been emblazoned with a sign. “artist,” it reads, and its missing owner takes his or her place in the list of broken-­down objects, of receivers and recorders in need of repair, arriving as one of the last in the long line of stand-­ins that the author as receiver embraces.

There had been other lessons from the Lower East Side, earlier lessons, prior engagements with the New York City neighborhood and urban space that later culminated in Analogue. Leonard’s New York home had provided a context for her earliest work, even before the transformed “street” photographs where the neighborhood repeatedly appeared, but often obliquely, in a number of series that the artist eventually made like spin-­offs from Analogue, or as immediate preludes to its long and passionate course: photographs of plastic bags caught up in the branches of dormant, winter trees, city trees; or the images of bubble gum flattened to the layered grime of New York City sidewalks; or the documents of written messages scrawled as urban graffiti, spreading like so many emotive exclamations from and across the city’s walls, as if the city were itself speaking, its architectures standing in for an absent denizen; or indeed the photographs of “melancholy” and “confinement” evoked by Leonard’s forlorn Tree + Fence series.91 Before all of this, there had been even earlier lessons from the dissolute and decaying urban space that eventually surfaced in Analogue, seemingly to proclaim (to model) the project’s breakdown of the traditional figure of the photographic “author,” its deep unworking of the medium of the photograph.92 For, before Analogue, Leonard had also made an earlier archive, approaching her medium not through the tight image pair or the looser photographic series, but through photography’s more drawn-­out archival logic. Analogue was not the first. Collaborating with filmmaker Cheryl Dunye in 1996, Leonard produced what might otherwise seem the most eccentric work in her oeuvre (there are, in fact, some other contenders), entitled The Fae Richards Photo Archive.93 Here, Leonard constructed a dossier of fictional historical photographs, to “tell the story” of the character Fae Richards, conceived by Dunye as part of her first major film, The Watermelon Woman, 1996. Imagined as an African American Hollywood actor from the cinema’s “golden” age, consigned to racist bit parts, and as a lesbian artist and subject in an era of deep sexual prejudice and regulation, Richards’s lost history emerges through a garrulous string of photographs, the making of which saw Leonard employing, as in the cinema, an entire cast and crew. Utilizing as well all the tools of older photo-

Zoe Leonard, The Fae Richards Photo Archive (detail), 1993–­96. Seventy-­eight gelatin silver prints, four chromogenic prints, and six pages of typewritten text on paper, dimensions variable.

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graphic techniques and darkroom manipulation, Leonard’s fictional archive seemed to travel through time, history, and memory, and claimed to stretch from the 1920s through the 1970s, from posed studio portraits to cinematic production stills, to an endless stream of more personal snapshots.94 These are the inversion of “straight” photography, in every sense of the term. And in the last or the “latest” photographs in the constructed archive, purportedly dating from the 1960s and 1970s, we see, finally, the Lower East Side—­the glass shopwindows, the handwritten signage emblazoned across the entrance to a Laundromat, in a pair of photographs of Fae Richards now appearing gray-­haired and old, posing with a “friend,” a character imagined as “June Walker,” with whom Richards, we are told, lived for the last two

Zoe Leonard, The Fae Richards Photo Archive (details), 1993–­96. Image © Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Robert Gerhardt and Denis Y. Suspitsyn.

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decades of her life. Or we see Richards depicted alone, wizened, white of hair, sitting with a cane, in some elegiac winter scenes set off against the barren trees, against the grime and snow of the recognizable urban squares of Leonard’s Lower Manhattan, with one form of aging (a subject’s) set off against another, against a space of urban decay. As The Fae Richards Photo Archive closes with these portrait images of an elderly African American woman, we seem to face a project that could be described as the opposite of Analogue, from which the human subject is so conspicuously absent. But perhaps it would be more accurate to consider the work as a neglected foundation for Analogue, another prologue, this building-­up of a subject from the construction of a photographic archive—­a project in which Analogue perhaps participates as well, even more radically, no matter the lack of people. To connect the projects in this way would be to admit the inherently constructed nature of Leonard’s photographic documents, even in Analogue, and consider that it is only more explicitly that The Fae Richards Photo Archive played with history and chronology, in its presentation of so many fictional and contemporary images as if they emerged from another time, a different epoch. It would allow Analogue to be inflected by the prior project’s collaborative sense of authorship, between Dunye and Leonard, a labor between mediums as well—­between cinema and photography—­that gets echoed within the project by actors who inevitably seem to exist as uncanny “doubles” or displaced avatars of the authors themselves.95 Dunye does appear in at least one of Leonard’s staged photographs, but otherwise seems echoed by the character Fae Richards herself; the female Hollywood “director” imagined by the project as “Martha Page,” who cast Fae Richards in her work but also came to be her lover, is “played” by an actress whose resemblance to Leonard (at least to this writer) makes one think at first that perhaps Leonard had actually photographed herself, too, throughout the archive’s earliest images. But we are facing another authorial displacement, and there were other displacements, other connections, thrown out by the project—­to the cinema, most obviously; but also, like Strange Fruit before it, to a specific African American history; and to a specific historical experience of sexuality, of lesbian subjectivity, lesbian life, (re-­)constructed in the face of historical erasure.96 We face another structure of resonance, of layers, of “intersectionality,” as we now might say. The Lower East Side serves as a backdrop to all of this, to Leonard’s first attempt to construct a human “subject” from a string of photographs—­precisely the project that comes to be continued and transformed in the haunting effigy images of Analogue.

A series of quite precise formal operations register the state of “reception” established by Leonard’s work. First, the images in Analogue seem to adopt the

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“neutral” or impersonal conventions of conceptual art, and of the photographic projects associated with that movement, most often characterized by their own dependence on the ready-­made social conditions of the archive. But there is also evident parody in Leonard’s parasitic attachment to or appropriation of such conventions. “That’s it, I thought.” Leonard is relating a moment of inspiration, a eureka, the photographic idea that led to the Analogue project: “If I photograph every single product in the world, every item we have extracted, refined, manufactured, every item that is bought and sold, the pictures would contain the story of who we are, what kind of society we have become.”97 Leonard’s inspiration seems a parody of the logic of the archive, its will to totality, its relentless drive to collect and to categorize—­a portrait of a society given by a complete inventory of all of its objects. Some forms of conceptual art had already, of course, parodied precisely this drive, and we think of Douglas Huebler especially, of his never-­finished, impossible-­to-­finish Variable Piece #70 (1970), and of its aim “to photographically document the existence of everyone alive.” But Leonard’s archival ambitions only mount, spiraling into alignment with her evident excitement: “All would be revealed in this—­the political alliances and trade agreements, the stories of slavery and sweatshops, the stories of rubber plantations and sugar plantations, of coffee and tobacco and cotton plantations—­the endless story of human progression from subsistence economies to capitalism. From hunting and gathering to Kmart and Target. From isolation to trade, from imperialism to colonialism to globalization.” And then emotions begin to weigh in, some flat-­footed comedy, perhaps: “I remember thinking,” Leonard concludes, “This is going to be a pretty hard project. Photographing every single thing in the world, salt and oil and wood and diamonds, coal and bricks and lime and steel I beams, potatoes and oranges, soap and clothes and handbags. Everything we mine or extract, or farm or collect, everything we pick or package or sew or assemble.”98 Analogue, of course, represents a mitigation of this initial archival gambit. But the engagement with conceptualism will not be relinquished: in its full exhibition format, the photographs are displayed in strict, regulating grids. Each image foregrounds a more or less unchanging, frontal view of its subject. (And yet inconsistencies do erupt: the precision seems weak at times, spotty, and here and there, as we have seen, oblique approaches interrupt the frontal views. Many of the photographs, even when frontal, can only be described as “crooked,” slightly askew.) The light is even, as if the photographs were taken only on overcast days (but again, sometimes “too” overcast: in a few photographs, at least, it is snowing), a monotone disallowing the breaking open of the distanced or “objective” stance of the image with subjective shifts in lighting and contrast, one of Leonard’s most

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cherished prior tactics. These formal strategies register a certain passivity, a kind of repetition and relinquishment, a systematic approach to photography that in conceptual art had already initiated a kind of voiding of the “author function,” most notoriously, perhaps, in the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher, and of the Düsseldorf School of photographers that followed in their wake. And yet while the passivity of this gesture may be key, here the distance and detachment of conceptual art is not achieved. The overcast views in Analogue seem more melancholic than dispassionate, a sign of subjectivity erupting through the very tactics and language of objectivist photography, subtly undermining the poignant belief that one could achieve an uninflected document. For we hardly find ourselves gazing at “neutral” objects, but rather objects of desire, and objects of loss. To receive, for Leonard, is to want to bring the new object close, almost to draw it into the void of one’s camera—­to incorporate the image, again, like one internalizes a lost object. And in the photographs, we feel this drive everywhere enacted: physically, corporeally, psychically. We feel it, for we are most often positioned too close to Leonard’s shopwindows, her discarded, overused objects, to achieve the distanced analytic aim of a conceptualist or archival typology. “I’m interested in what we make and what we leave behind,” Leonard explains. “I want to see the clues and the signs, the flaws and the beauty. I know the world will never look quite this way again, and I feel that I want to look closely, to hold it near.”99 And so we bend over a pair of shoes laid out upon the ground (of Praga Market in Warsaw, in 1999), press our faces up against a windowpane (on Fifth Avenue, in Brooklyn, also in 1999), kneel down amid the jumble and the chaos of Leonard’s found and chosen objects, the glass windows, the signs, the stores. Intimacy and proximity emerge from the very gestures that once secured the detachment and objectivity of conceptual photography.100 This is the formal tactic that I want to call in Analogue the work’s principle of proximity. We experience it repeatedly in the overattachment to a photographic detail within a larger scene (the lettered-­script sign on a glass window in the photograph captioned, in Leonard’s Analogue book, “Eldridge St., New York City, 2001”); the tight framing or cropping by the camera so that context, signage, identifying labels come to be excised, with the severed storefronts spilling out toward the spectator (the yellow storefront and stacked food containers of “Pitt St., New York City, 1999”); the pressuring of the photographic image to its very borders, a filling of so many of the archive’s images right up to their edges, pushing the viewer ever closer to the photographic depiction (a storefront window filled with cigarette ads, simply captioned “Brooklyn, 2001,” or the photograph offering up an army of cleaning products and a misspelled sign for the New York City baked-­ goods company Entenmann’s).

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Zoe Leonard, images from Analogue, 1998–­2009.

And yet the receiver does not only draw things close; another operation intervenes. I want to call this second trope the work’s principle of correspondence. To think of the photograph as a receptacle, the photographer as a receiver, is to realize that containers seek out what will correspond to them. And they do so not in the old manner of what was once called “self-­reflexivity,” nor through the simple reiteration of the photographic image-­as-­double or the closed-­off logic of formal tautology. As Analogue pierces the conceptualist myths surrounding the photograph and its archival objectivity, so too does it alter the modernist devices of autonomy, reflexivity, and medium specificity, the prior guarantors of the medium’s purity.

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Zoe Leonard, images from Analogue, 1998–­2009.

For correspondence can only be conceived as a form of relation. Like the archival document, it too entails a kind of desire, a kind of drive. And in this search for correspondence, not everything will “fit.” Leonard seems to allegorize this condition with the many photographs in her archive of used shoes in Eastern European and other international markets. The photographs are crucial, for they come at the conclusion of the project, where the archive finds its open-­ended “end”: shoes seeking out or arranged side by side with their “partner,” shoes awaiting the absent body who will give them a second “life.” We see a lone shoe on a hand-­painted sign in a market in Uganda. But so many of the shoes are orphans, armies of dislocated orphans, many of them severed even from their

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once-­upon-­a-­time partners—­single shoes now, less than pairs, all different, and all empty and alone. Or, if still part of a pair, the shoes are never precise doubles, but rather siblings, with each shoe worn down slightly differently, one perhaps with its identifying brand label, one without; or stained in their own individual ways; or perhaps turned away from each other, inner curve about-­faced, left shoe to right and vice versa, opening out the strict enclosure of a given pair. The shoes, like the photograph more generally in Leonard’s hands, “turn their emptiness outward.” And they are simultaneously memorials to a former user in the past and signposts holding themselves open to what we might imagine as something like the Cinderellas of time, the bodies in the future that they might come to fit. And this, too, must be understood now as Leonard’s vision for and version of photography, a photography not holding on endlessly to the past, to an indexical and singular referent, but holding itself open, like the recycled, abandoned shoes—­an aging thing devoted to being held and filled again in the future. Leonard describes these last photographs: “In a market in Warsaw,” she relates, “blankets spread with goods: old alarm clocks and radios, crucifixes and porn magazines, dolls and stuffed animals, eyeglasses, hammers, wheels.” The effigy, even the precise semantic landscape of an artist like Mike Kelley’s work (porn, dolls, stuffed animals, crucifixes), rears its head again. Leonard continues: “On a small square of blue plastic, two pairs of brown shoes. One with laces, one without, the imprint of the former owner’s feet pressed into the insole.” 101 Leonard’s description imagines a scene of loss, as well as of an imprint, an index, a trace, a double; we are in the presence of the classic tropes of photographic form. But Leonard’s photograph also transforms these older photographic notions. The photograph in question ends the short essay with which Leonard initially introduced the Analogue project to the public. And it ends the book form that the project ultimately took, coming as well in the final grouping or chapter of Analogue as an installation. We are in the presence, then, of another manifesto piece, like the book’s opening salvo, the image of Leonard reflected in the repair-­shop window and its disused analogue screens. The shoe photograph, captioned “Praga Market, Warsaw, 1999” (Leonard has also captioned it “Two Pairs”), calls up earlier Leonard images, like the series of bird nests and eggs, rhyming with their open cavities and receptacles, laid out upon the ground. Two objects press close to each other, two shoes, in correspondence and proximity, and then press close in turn to another pair of side-­by-­side clingers. The two pairs are off-­center and off-­kilter within Leonard’s frame, and their proximity refuses mirroring, precise doubling, insisting on difference and particularity in the face of all their evident similarity. A certain history of appropriation art and its questioning of authorship may be called up by the photograph—­not just in its evocation of an absent body,

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like a missing author, but through the precise invocation of the early work of artist Sherrie Levine, who once worked with the sale of used shoes as well.102 A thoroughgoing obsession with the pair in Leonard’s own prior work erupts—­with the artist’s early display format of image pairs or “couples,” as I have called them, echoed by all the photographs of object couples that then emerge within individual photographic images in the artist’s work. In the final chapter of the installation version of Analogue, alongside “Two Pairs,” other pairs of previously used objects abound: a pair of cell phones, a couple of pairs of wheels, two typewriters, coupled crosses, and twin television monitors, along with mismatched, aspirational partners, as if hoping to represent an object category through the simple addition of a second version, a sibling and companion: two different overcoats, two dissimilar printers, more mismatched shoes. These final couples had been foreshadowed: in an earlier scene from Analogue, two wooden chairs sit side by side outside a Laundromat; they are used, worn down, one slightly larger than the other, one more rigid of design and one more curved (“Ave. A, New York City, 1999”). They are far from the only object couple that the archive finds—­other pairs of disused chairs had preceded them—­and Leonard’s photographs before Analogue had long been seeking out such couples in the world at large. In Leonard’s prior images, before Analogue: two toilets, without partition or barrier between them, press unusually close together in a public restroom, almost doubles, with one toilet seat in black, and the other, of course, in white, as if calling out to photography itself (Two Toilets, 1994). Two hearts beat side by side, inscribed by hand on an old tombstone, in Gravestone with Two Hearts, 1981/95. In all of these photographs, we witness a concern with the couple form itself, something that reaches beyond the photographic mirror image or double.103 The shoes, the pairs, in Analogue, represent the apotheosis of a formal dynamic. As siblings in space and as objects stranded between loss and reuse in time, the shoes appearing in the final images of Analogue model Leonard’s understanding of photography. The photograph as receptacle or container seeks out affinities in the world, a spiraling series of correspondences and analogies. The objects it seeks out are almost doubles, but Leonard’s photographs understand this once self-­ reflexive photographic trope in an entirely new sense. We deal here not with the photograph as (postmodern) copy, but with photography understood as inherently relational—­affective and loving—­its operations not just the indexical fixative of the double or the trace, but the unending (desiring) quest for similarity, comparison, connection, and analogy.104 We are called to imagine what it would really mean for a photograph to “turn its emptiness outward”—­which now begins to sound like a voiding of the indexical fixative that we formerly took to constitute the singularity of the photographic event. We are called to imagine a photograph suddenly and

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Zoe Leonard, Two Toilets, 1994. Gelatin silver print, 4¾ × 7 in.

even catastrophically remaindered, but also thereby opened up to a scene of further capture, to further inscription, to the chain of association and desire of the model of the “receiver.” Hardly the end of the indexical trace that the rhetoric of digitalization has long trumpeted, this sudden transformation might be imagined as rather the index in an expanded field, a form of indexicality in excess, opened almost impossibly to a host of new functions, new destinies. In her recent work, in the wake of earlier notions such as the author as receiver, Kaja Silverman has become involved in a rethinking of photography itself as fully analogical. An analogy, of course, embodies a comparison, a relational form, a seeking-­out of similarities between at least two things. For Silverman, photography should be conceived neither as a mere representation or picture, nor as an index or trace, an image double or mechanical copy. The photograph is, rather, what the theorist calls “an ontological calling card.” As an analogical form, photography reveals for Silverman that Being—­what I would still rather call “subjectivity”—­is to be understood as itself comprised of a “vast constellation of analogies.” Photography reveals the nature of subjectivity to us by partaking in this model of subjectivity’s very structure. “The photographic image is an analogy,” Silverman writes, “rather

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than a representation or an index,” and “analogy is the fluid in which it develops.”105 Silverman cites Walt Whitman: “A vast similitude interlocks all / All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets . . . all souls, all bodies though they be ever so different. . . . All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe, / All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future.”106 Silverman asserts: “It is only through this interlocking that we ourselves exist. Two is the smallest unit of Being.” Photography analogizes, for the author, such analogies. And Silverman clarifies analogy’s structure, which is neither sheer duplication, nor absolute difference, but the interplay or relation between them—­relationality as such. Silverman writes: “Every analogy contains both similarity and difference. Similarity is the connector, what holds two things together, and difference is what prevents them from being collapsed into one. In some analogies these qualities are balanced, but in others similarity far outweighs difference, or difference, similarity. One of the most miraculous features of an analogy is its ability to operate in the face of these imbalances: to maintain the ‘two-­in-­one’ principle even when there is only a narrow margin of difference, or a sliver of similarity.”107 Photography has been claimed by Silverman as a modern form that carries forward a more ancient truth. It is an inheritor of the understanding that “resemblance, not difference,” as Silverman asserted in her earlier work, had once been “the organizing principle of the universe.”108 These are grand claims. For my purposes here, their grandeur seems far removed from the humble address of so many of Leonard’s diminutive images, or her mitigation of the monumental ambition of photography’s hegemonic structure par excellence, namely the archive. And yet Leonard’s redefinition of photographic form, especially in Analogue, always seems to move toward similarity, toward the at-least twoness that Silverman understands as structuring all relationality. As opposed to sheer duplication, so crucial to former understandings of photography, Leonard’s photographs show one object pressing close to another, meeting and modeling the other’s shape and form. This is what the image pairs, the image couples, “do,” in Leonard’s work, in Analogue and beyond. And this quest for affinities produces the “worldliness” of Leonard’s project, as her archive of fading New York becomes a political mapping of the global exchange of the used and obsolescent, a following of the routes of the discarded New York things to their destinations in the second and third worlds. This displacement produces a counterpoint to hyperreal narratives of capitalist globalization that is as materialist in its Luddite anachronism as Allan Sekula’s project Fish Story, 1988– ­95, with which Analogue should be compared.109 “It is a feeling of connectedness to the rest of the world,” Leonard states: “We are connected through coffee and tuna fish, through sugar and cigarettes.”110 Her own displacement was inevitable, as the shopwindows that were the project’s start in New York in fact testify to the

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“home” of immigrants who are from other places, filled with objects that have been brought here from far away: “The deeper I look, the more I realize that in looking into these shop windows, I am also looking out at the rest of the world.”111 This political analogy rests, however, upon a more atavistic photographic mode of analogy, an almost primitive modeling of its images on a never-­ending search for siblings, for connections. And so in Analogue we see image after image of “like” objects—­clothes of all the same type, men’s oxford shirts hung on a groaning rack to the point that they become “one” object, like an infinite but absent crowd, pressed impossibly tight together (“Orchard St., New York City, 1999”). Or we see the photograph

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Zoe Leonard, images from Analogue, 1998–­2009.

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as receptacle seeking out an endless chain of analogous empty vessels, parallel containers of every basic sort or type: in Leonard’s archive we confront a string of images of stacked buckets (“Graham Ave., East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 2003”), or more vibrant multicolored buckets, washbasins, and plastic crates for sale (“La Merced Market, Mexico City, 2007”), even paintings of buckets, effigies of buckets, alongside other handcrafted depictions of valises and purses and containers. There are more empty shoes, “back to school” shoes (“Manhattan Ave., Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 2000”); bulging pillow cases (“East Harlem, New York City, 1999”) or oversize sacks, each impaled with a broomstick or two or three (“Ramallah, West Bank, 1999”); plastic-­wrapped cabinets set outside against a red-­brick wall (“Leonard St., Brooklyn, 2004”); a trio of household appliances on the sidewalk—­oven, washing machine, and dryer—­their doors slapped shut (“Broadway and Stuyvesant Ave., Brooklyn, 2001”). We face innumerable images of the disconsolate ghosts that are used clothes, towers of plastic stacking chairs or Styrofoam cups, a mountain of aluminum tins for holding fast food (“Pitt St., New York City, 1999”), the broken box of a television resting in the welcoming embrace of a wheelbarrow, a row of lidded garbage pails (“East 12th St., New York City, 1999”). And of course, these containers are all effigies of a sort, again—­shells, hollows. But they have now also become the containers that the photographic container comes to contain, the receivers that it receives, and they are everywhere and every time different. For they are not doubles, not mirror images of each other or of the photograph itself, but analogies. Unlike in photography as we have heretofore conceived it, the receiver seeks its siblings, its worldly echoes, and the open displacement this search entails allows Analogue to erupt, paradoxically, in an infinite riot of difference.

“As a culture, we have never been able to deal with difference,” Leonard has stated, in an interview some years ago.112 In the shadow of this thought, I simply want to ask some questions. At this point in my argument about Analogue and the “receptacle,” about Leonard’s photography and the receiver, about the photographic and the analogical, can one avoid discussing Leonard’s somewhat notorious documenta installation Untitled, from 1992? I have avoided it thus far, assiduously, or so it seems. This was Leonard’s first participation in documenta, her second being a display of Analogue exactly twenty years later, in 2012. But in her first documenta installation, Leonard showed a series of black-­and-­white photographic prints, the works that some critics refer to as her “vagina” photographs, that were actually a series of close-­up photographs of vulvas (of her friends, of volunteers), and that one imagines the artist would simply call her “pussy” pictures.113 In Kassel’s Neue

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Zoe Leonard, Untitled (detail), 1992. Nineteen gelatin silver prints installed within five rooms of the Neue Galerie, dimensions variable. Installation view, documenta IX, Neue Galerie, Kassel, Germany, 1992. Photo: Markus Tollhopf, Kassel.

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Galerie, where artists had been asked to respond to installations of Old Master or historical paintings, Leonard removed all of the canvases that did not contain a central female figure, replacing each with a small photographic print, pinned to the wall, each a close-­up view of women’s genitals—­labia, clitoris, thick tufts or thin wisps of pubic hair, some probing fingers entering the frame, some hands. Male faces went missing, displaced each time by a photograph once more standing in for a subject, hanging alongside all the painted female nudes and formal portraits, the depicted women’s bodies and faces, creating through this stark substitution a kind of totally gendered and female space. But the questions: Can a male critic talk about what seems a direct and evident alignment of the female body, of the sexed and gendered body in its most vehement and intense difference and specificity, with the photograph and

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the camera, and with the medium of photography? Well, I have already compared Leonard’s camera to a womb. But perhaps the pussy analogy is more appropriate, more “fierce,” to use another word from the artist’s lexicon, more linked to an economy of difference and desire. Given my consideration of an aesthetic of the receiver, and of the photograph as a receptacle, do not the “pussy” pictures announce precisely Leonard’s photographic project in the years to come? Is the pussy—­but the singular is wrong, in Leonard’s photographs the pussy is always “pussies,” never singular, never one, and clearly in each and every photograph never the same—­is the pussy the model for Leonard of the photograph? How to think this? What would it mean? Isn’t it the pussy, the pussies, for Leonard, that first figure the endless forms of openness, of in-­gathering, and the infinite physical variety and material difference that the photograph in her hands seems dedicated itself to model, indeed to create? But this hardly goes far enough. Can a straight critic speak about the queer logic that this analogy also implies, and that Leonard has made emphatic? And here one would be pointing not only to the pussy photographs as evident avatars of sexuality and desire. Can one avoid registering how the pussy photographs underline a wild eruption of bodily difference that simultaneously follows from and reciprocally allows a thinking of the quest and desire for the “like,” for similarity, for the same (that is never the same), a chain of female objects of desire created by a woman artist? And is this not as well the “logic” of Leonard’s photography? In other words: Do we not face a kind of rebounding, a stark alignment of photography with the homo-­logic of queer desire? Isn’t this, for Leonard, where the principles of proximity and correspondence begin? Where the quest for similarity and analogy originates? Such is, of course, one of the most common origin stories told for Leonard’s practice, and for her work’s sudden intensification in the wake of the queer activism with which she engaged by the late 1980s and early 1990s. But the story needs to be told in a slightly different way. At this moment, the pussies truly spread everywhere in Leonard’s work: we witness the disturbing, excessive merkins, fake pubic hair for the female genitalia, included incongruously in so many of the wax anatomical figures that Leonard photographed by 1990—­eviscerated figures of the bodily cavity in effigy, opened up and offered to view. Or we notice, even more disturbing, the inescapably labial appearance of the sutured skins, the seams and openings, of so many of the rotting fruit peels in Strange Fruit. And then: “I [heart] pussy,” a graffiti photograph cries out (I Love Pussy, 1994), the words not entirely substituting themselves for the visual image of the female sex, the scratched letters and signs reading inevitably as bodily, somehow wispy, like so many insistent pubic hairs themselves. And then there would be Beaver Guts, 1997, from Leonard’s Alaska sojourn, one of

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Zoe Leonard, Wax Anatomical Model, full view from above, 1990. Gelatin silver print, 30⅞ × 44 in.

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many photographs that Leonard made of beavers, dead beavers, beaver parts, this one of the animal’s body eviscerated, another cavity opened up, with the gash of the final wound, the moist spilling outward of the innards, calling up—­obscenely, impossibly, and comically—­the spreading of the female labia, beavers (as the slang instructs us) of another sort. We are facing yet again an evident series of displacements, and the resonance would stretch further still, right into the heart of the receptacles and containers, the string of open forms, in Analogue. The queer logic, the “pussy form” of Leonard’s photographic form, doesn’t allow itself, however, to become a singular “logic,” with the modeling of the pussy as a kind of master term. It becomes instead an analogical device, as with the idea of the formal container or receptacle, an engine of formal openness and displacement. It becomes another way of describing the embrace of and the eruption of difference, of the photograph as a quest for similarities founded upon difference. The pussy is a distinct form in the panoply of Leonard’s photographic forms—­coming, as it did in 1992, in the place of a series of painted portraits, as a displaced form of the portrait (of the subject), like so much of the artist’s larger project. But the pussy is also, for

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Zoe Leonard, Beaver Guts, 1997/98. Gelatin silver print, 19½ × 14 in.

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Leonard, a model of photographic form, of a concern with likeness and openness itself that Leonard has continued to work out in her photography, and as part of her transformation of the photograph. And the thought experiment could continue: the photograph as fold, as bodily orifice, as self-­touching form, as thick and tufted, as layered, as a model of surface and of depth, as a sometimes liquid form. . . .

But this returns us to the project of Analogue again, and differently. The following words hopefully signify more deeply by this point: Analogue could ultimately be described as a search for continuities in a decaying, fragmented world. This understanding is crucial, for continuity is the very stake of the analogue image; as opposed to the breaks inherent in the digital image, an analogue image presents a representation that is continuous with its referent. An analogue, Leonard tells us, “is a representation of an object that resembles the original.” She is speaking, again, in a borrowed voice, through another writerly vessel, citing in this case an encyclopedia entry in her essay on Analogue, itself entitled “A Continuous

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Signal.” The citation in question gives Leonard’s essay its title: “Analog devices monitor conditions, such as movement, temperature and sound, and convert them into analogous electronic or mechanical patterns. For example, an analog watch represents the planet’s rotation with the rotating hands on the watch face.” The appropriated text continues: “Telephones turn voice vibrations into electrical vibrations of the same shape. Analog implies a continuous signal in contrast with digital, which breaks everything into numbers.”114 As with Silverman’s notion of the author as a “receiver,” a technical support comes now to be recoded as a conceptual strategy. In Analogue, for Leonard, the obsolescent analogue photograph opens onto the quite ancient rhetorical mode of analogy. This quest for continuity may strike one as regressive, both politically and historically, another form of the work’s anachronism. And yet this regression is legitimated by a historical reality that is also one of the most important of the continuities or analogies explored in Leonard’s project. The reflexive coupling of the receptacle of the photographic image and the string of empty, open vessels that it seeks out may seem like a return to medium specificity, even an anachronistic move back to some kind of photographic modernism (as with the references in Analogue to Atget, to Walker Evans, to Diane Arbus). But what is actually articulated by Leonard in this continuity is another analogy, not a recursive self-­analysis: it is only at the moment of the analogue photograph’s historical demise that it comes into correspondence with, and becomes an analogy for, a social world in crisis (this is not, then, “victim photography,” traditional humanist documentary). It is only at this moment that photography can be shown to have always been a medium of both longing and loss. When the analogue photograph becomes late as a form, it manifests lateness in the world; Leonard’s images and the world that she documents are analogues for each other, both of them sharing the same historical fate. “There is something more here than quaintness, or nostalgia,” Leonard wrote, while still working on her archive. “It is a feeling of connectedness to the rest of the world: to language and economy, to history and struggle—­to the endless supply of human solutions to the problem of survival.”115 And so the “medium specificity” broached (or discovered) in Leonard’s Analogue is that of nostalgia, of longing. It is a “specificity” that paradoxically reaches outward, beyond the photograph—­a longing for connection, for a specific kind of recalcitrant holding on and retention, for the irreplaceable materiality of a time past. Receiving—­finding analogues and affinities, leaning in and pressing close—­this is now what photography does, and what it longs for. We might better call it the form of photography’s “desire.” The photograph embodies a longing to become other. Articulating this condition may provide Leonard’s images with the sheen of traditional concepts of medium specificity. But Analogue, exemplifying lateness in its very form, in fact unleashes a particular kind of nostalgic mode: only when the

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medium is itself threatened with loss does its inherent focus on loss become truly palpable. A nostalgic, belated photography seeks out its siblings, the lost objects and threatened sites of its world. Rather than self-­reflexive, such photography is fully analogical, not a doubling, but an endless search: photography will never truly find what it seeks. Instead, it longs for longing. This is the nature of the analogical drive—­it cannot be “completed,” and its openness knows no closure. As opposed to the self-­presence of modernist reflexivity, Leonard’s photographs are better seen as a series of holes seeking out other holes, absences into which the absent may in turn vanish. They do not circle back on themselves, like modernism was supposed to do; they remain perpetually “open.” We sense once more the rightness of Adorno’s words in his description of the askesis of late style, a formal dynamic embodied here by a specific use of photography, the relentless drive of a form to “turn its emptiness outward.” Unlike the photograph’s status within modernism—­indeed, even postmodernism—­photography as a late form can hardly be considered here as the ground of Leonard’s project, the foundation back to which all of its images refer. It does not become the sole origin and motor of the workings of analogy and reception, locating in a secondary way its many avatars and siblings in the world, all pointing back to the master term, and the medium logic, of photography. For photography will also be changed by its belated desires. As we already asserted of Leonard’s Untitled documenta installation, there will no longer be any master term. Late style represents a form of dispersal. In this light, and no matter her importance (her centrality) to the thoughts broached here, I cannot agree with the larger import of Silverman’s more recent claim, that the essence of photography is analogy (as opposed to the established discourse around the nature of the photograph as index, copy, double, the document, or the trace).116 Analogy cannot be called the “logic” of photography. Rather, constructed tactically, and legitimated historically, the analogical—­we realize with Leonard’s project—­can emerge as a possibility of photography, but only in its turn away from the photograph’s hegemonic forms, and from the very proclamation of a kind of “logic.” Or rather, photographic analogy arises as a specific turning of these hegemonic forms away from their former modes of operation (archive, document, double, trace): to a minor mode, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of the term, a making of photography other than what it once was. For photography was formerly defined by its status as index and copy, double and trace. If it no longer steadfastly remains so today, this is not because we have mistaken and repressed all along the photograph’s essence, misdescribed its “ontology.” And it is not because of the contemporary digital metamorphosis—­the uprooting of photography’s former processes and modes of operation, its once-­upon-­a-­time technological logic. It instead has more to do with a much broader process of destruction, of photography and social forms both—­of what, here, I have been describing as

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the exile of lateness. It has to do with a late form’s fragmentation, dissolution, and anachronistic breakdown—­which produces, simultaneously, the affinities of longing and the photograph’s quest for transformation. The photograph, in Analogue, becomes a force of endless comparison and analogy, a scene always in search of similitude. The fragments gravitate back together, moving toward one another, in a vast analogizing of photography to all that we see in these images—­to the previously repressed signs of a specific kind of social life, to a specific class structure, to the signs, the writing, the glass windows, the doors and the portals, the commodities, the used goods, the temporary architectures, the market arrangements and provisional collections. In these dimming images, there is also the almost apocalyptic analogy of photography to a vast host of the lost—­of missing people, decimated subjects. It becomes explicitly the project of Analogue to attest simultaneously to a historical and a photographic experience of exile and absence, a testimony that—­beyond attaching itself to just the archive’s visible objects and city spaces—­argues even more strongly that the photograph now stands in like an effigy for the missing populations of the urban. The photograph becomes a kind of substitute, a being in effigy, a medium now somehow uncannily “alive,” like a subject snatching connection from the jaws of lateness, with its voracious appetite for dissolution. Such are the dissonant possibilities of the dispersed state of lateness itself: for in this quest for affinity and correspondence, in the founding analogy of a fading image finding its echo and continuance in a fading world, an absent author resonating with the dead and the lost, the initial gesture of nostalgia comes to be transformed. We confront a world both opened up and colored by the open wound and the necessarily unconsummated nature of photographic longing.

In this light, it seems deeply telling that Leonard bookended the catalogue for her first retrospective—­mounted at the moment of the completion of her archive—­with three photographs that were not part of Analogue, and which, indeed, within her work are seemingly altogether hors-­série.117 At the start, at the outside or the margin of the book, we are given two images, one of Leonard’s grandmother and another of her mother. The photographer is in a car with them, traveling. She looks forward, and sees the back of her grandmother’s head, the wild tangle of her hair, as she gazes off into the distance (Babunia in the Front Seat, 1979/97). The photographer looks back, and sees the front of her mother’s face, her head held high and looking forward, beyond that which the camera sees (Misia in the Back Seat, 1979/97). Images of gazing at gazing, both photographs focus just as intensely on the body, and on the waywardness, the absolute disorder of hair—­in the shadows, or caressed by luminosity, by the resolute over-­and underexposure of Leonard’s scenes. These

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Zoe Leonard, Babunia in the Front Seat, 1979/97. Gelatin silver print, 18⅛ × 23¾ in.

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Zoe Leonard, Misia in the Back Seat, 1979/97. Gelatin silver print, 15¼ × 21 in.

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Zoe Leonard, House, 2001/2. Dye transfer print, 17¼ × 24 in.

were older images, first photographs, evidently returned to and printed by Leonard just as she was about to begin Analogue, and then returned to again, at the moment of the project’s end. In the last pages of the book, at its other margin, another photograph: we are given an image of a home (House, 2001/2). The building seems abandoned or run-­ down, perhaps in the process of partial demolition. It is a home stripped bare, with an ancient flatbed truck parked before it, as if the home were about to be loaded onto the vehicle and slowly shipped away (parts of the absent chimney, fragments of brick and cinderblock, have been strapped to the truck’s front bumper).118 Here, then, are the classic motors of nostalgia, the maternal and the domestic. But both are now “on the road.” Between this Scylla and Charybdis of feminist aesthetics, Leonard’s photographs lie. But they, too, are Wandering Rocks.

III. A thinking of attachment and care. A connection of photography to connection, to holding on and being close. An imagining of photography as an eviscerated and

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thus emptied form, but also, then, an open form, a form dedicated to incorporation and containing or receiving. In all of this, I have been insisting that we face Leonard imagining and radicalizing not just a mode of photographic authorship, but a specific model of photography that also intimates a larger model of subjectivity, and of the subject. The receptacle-­objects of Strange Fruit or Leonard’s suitcase sculptures can explicitly be considered as subjects or even portraits, models of subjectivity or being in effigy, invested with memory and desire. And so it is for the stranded receptacles in the anachronistic, dissolute photographs of Analogue. The photographs are effigies, and not just of the figures through which the project speaks, the appropriated photographic languages, the historical references that point back to the work of Atget and Abbott and Evans and Arbus. They are effigies, more broadly, of a kind of late or fading subject (the effigy is always of a subject), precisely the entity the archive itself never images, its impossible (non)referent. One could immediately say that modeling subjectivity in this way itself amounts to an anachronistic, late move: for us, no longer Freudians, it now seems like it is too late in our current debates on art and its social implication for the claims of desire and the psyche. But the parallel—­the analogy—­between photography and subjectivity: I want to call this Leonard’s most pressing project. Indeed, it forms a project much larger than the recent labor on Analogue. In different ways, such an impulse goes back to the artist’s earliest work. In Leonard’s first photographs, we face different forms of atavism, as well as different reconnections to earlier moments in the history of the photograph from the return of Analogue to the Rolleiflex, to the New York School and its most notorious camera, to street photography and documentary. This is a difficult claim to make, perhaps to think, and yet: the lateness of Leonard’s recent work has been a paradoxically consistent strategy, in all its internal variation, its dedication to dissonance, to self-­ contradiction, and its arrival early on in the photographer’s oeuvre. Many of Leonard’s first photographs did seem in line with postmodern aesthetics, as they focused on institutions and structures of knowledge, categories of representation: museums, libraries, maps, models, cartographies, aerial images, spatial overviews. But what works against and ultimately betrays the representational model of Leonard’s early works as “pictures” in the postmodernist sense is their overarching photographic form, their borrowed or appropriated photographic aesthetic. Printed by the photographer herself, insistently full frame with the negative border showing in every print, pinned under glass when displayed like material specimens, with dimensionality and physical presence underlined, the works simultaneously embraced a photographic model of the precarious, the anti-­ masterful, or the minor, an aesthetic of de-­skilling that has to do with accepting the photograph as subject to accident, to flaws, to mistakes.119 Consider the murk

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Zoe Leonard, Simone at the Beach, 1985/97. Gelatin silver print, 11 × 14 in.

that surrounds and almost drowns the planetary models represented in Globe, 1987, and also Globe, 1989–­90, or the burned-­out overexposure of Untitled Aerial (Roads), 1986, or the airplane’s dirty window film and light flares obscuring the landscape of Untitled Aerial, 1989. Consider the barely legible window display, seemingly captured at night, in the early prophecy of Analogue that is Cakes in Window, 1987, or the utter disinterest in proper focus that plagues Simone at the Beach, 1985/97. There is a general air of the anti-­technical that manifests itself most strongly in the images’ darkening grain, in the consistent play with inconsistent over-­and underexposure, and in the acceptance of a general stylization that seems persistently blurred. I want to assert that this style, this mode of decimated image that Leonard first evolved, proposed itself as a kind of atavism: a repetition looking back and reconnecting with a specific genealogy of the photograph, rethought in and for our time—­a genealogy resistant to the hegemonic models of art and photography both. One could trace the genealogy of the flaw in photography, the model of the photographic amateur and the anti-­technical photographic image, in a host of different ways. The art historian Carol Armstrong has imagined an entire genealogy of the photographic

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flaw—­embraced as a value, even a model or “essence” of photography, and linked to the work of women photographers specifically, looking back from the work of Diane Arbus to that of Tina Modotti, Gertrude Käsebier, Julia Margaret Cameron.120 In this model, Armstrong’s focus has been on the physical and even bodily, also chemical, nature of photography, an intensification of what has been understood as the medium’s sheer indexicality. We face a privileging of the trace, of the process, of the liquids involved in photography, a story upending most priorities of canonical photo histories in its embrace of the chemical side of photography over the medium’s optical parameters. And if the chemical nature of the photograph attests precisely to what has been voided today in the current shift to the digital, there is a sense of urgency to the genealogy Armstrong has traced, the alternate lineage of woman photographers she has prioritized. We register a cry of protest against the formal perfection of central modernist models of photography, strictures that find their apotheosis today in the digital image’s total disclosure of the camera as apparatus, a triumph of technology and of the device. Too quickly, I want to claim that while participating, surely, in the above dynamic, Leonard’s early photographs point us insistently toward a different, and differently urgent, genealogy. The blurred image is, of course, primarily about focus and motion; it produces a quite palpable analogy to a weakening or now distant human vision; it imagines or reimagines a specific way of seeing and of seeing photographically. The genealogy of the blurred image in the history of photography compels us to rethink the optics of the photographic image, the optical side of the chemical-­optical divide in that history, and for the same reasons and at the same moment of intensity as Armstrong’s account. In Leonard’s precarious and contingent photographs, we see the embrace of a long history wherein photography contemplates the breakdown of the visual from within, imagining a form of photographic seeing gone bad, a photographic optics become suddenly wrong. The key moments in Leonard’s atavistic genealogical move would be at least three, as I see this. First, her early images evoke the originary, primitive attempts at photography, the most common form of photographic atavism today. Whether we look at Niépce or Talbot or Daguerre, in the earliest photographs the blur attests to the technical limitations of the medium. Indeed, in such origin images the photograph could only be experienced as a limited, precarious entity—­not yet technologically triumphant, surely not everlasting or fixed for all time.121 “I have been turning more and more to 19th-­century photographers like Daguerre, Le Gray and Talbot, as well as Watkins, Muybridge and O’Sullivan,” Leonard stated in a recent interview. “I’m increasingly interested in these early days of photography, before the medium was standardized. At the time, there were vehement debates over the nature of photography. . . . A spirit of experimentation—­a sense that everything was

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up for grabs—­animates that early work, and in many ways makes it seem less old-­ fashioned than some contemporary photography.”122 Leonard describes here the direction of her recent photographic projects, after Analogue, the sun photographs and the camera obscura installations, but we sense already in Leonard’s earliest work this kind of atavism, a return to the first photographic images, barely emerging into visibility, struggling against the full technical challenge that photography originally presented. Exposure times, lenses, developing: to reconnect to the first photographs is to attempt to recover this precarious phenomenon itself, to think photography as involved in a contingent vision, and thus a fungible image. The atavism characterizes Leonard’s work at its start and also again, now, at the precise moment of the triumph of technique represented by the digital. We are witness to a fungibility increasingly and precisely set against the infinity of digital recoding—­a reclamation of a vastly different model of the photograph than the technical regime under which it currently operates. A second genealogical moment would be the anti-­machinic images of photographic pictorialism, where the blur came to encompass a first experience already in the medium’s history of photographic atavism, of turning back against the tide of technology and modernity both, a drive to recapture something lost. The blur in pictorialism, most often the product of play with the gum-­bichromate process, was meant to evoke the art status of painting and the painterly brushstroke. We are familiar with this story; but importantly, for my purposes, it also testifies to a key moment in which we sense photography reaching for and opening itself up to other mediums and other forms, becoming itself what I have called an open or expanded form. Modernism would go on to denigrate pictorialism for precisely such seeming hybridity, miscegenation, misguided nonspecificity. But that there is an allegory of the subject and of desire in such opening of one form to another was often signaled in pictorialism’s themes themselves, themes of love and eros, almost above all else. Such was one of the great, underappreciated achievements of pictorialism that we only now can fully comprehend. Clearly the grain and blur in pictorialist photography has also been understood as the mark not just of “art” but of the “artist.” As opposed to skill, however, it finds itself embodied in the photographic equivalent of de-­skilling, and here its full paradoxical nature emerges. More than the mark of the artist, the blur in pictorialism comes to embody the trace of subjectivity, of the hand and body in the machinic apparatus, and this gets folded into this aesthetic’s general concern with a photographic image that could connote pastness and memory themselves. The burgeoning forth of subjectivity now becomes the key legacy of the blurred image, the sign of the backwardness of the memory image, in the history of photography.

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Sid Grossman, Aguadulce, ca. 1945. Gelatin silver print, 4⅝ × 3⅝ in. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Ron New, 2009.1566. © Howard Greenberg Gallery.

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The apotheosis of this legacy arrives with the anti-­technical images of the New York School, my third genealogical moment and the photographs most closely tied to Leonard’s own appropriations. From teacher figures such as Alexey Brodovitch and Sid Grossman to the likes of William Klein and Paul Himmel, practitioners of the blurred or out-­of-­focus image among the New York School self-­consciously hoped to turn the new small-­format cameras and the play with movement and exposure times into the signs of not just authorship but subjective expression. Similarly, the openness of photography to other forms, as in pictorialism, was continued; its key referent shifted, however, from a fraught comparison with painting to one with cinema. Though Leonard has always mentioned figures like Lisette Model and Arbus as key to her development, I personally want to attach my remarks to Grossman, a touchstone for me and a photographer just now beginning to get his due. In the opening pages of the posthumous collection of his images Journey to the Cape, Grossman’s collaborator Millard Lampell allegorized the precise breakdown of the visual that I am here contemplating. The first words of Grossman’s photographic collection read: “We all carry our share of blindness. We are born blind, and in a week or two our eyes grope into fleeting focus; we see a dim shape, a moving shadow.”123 This origin story, however, could serve as a precise description of Grossman’s most celebrated, darkening images, proudly

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flaunting their underexposure and imprecision, grabbed by candlelight or in the face of the spontaneity of young children, such as Black Christ Festival, Panama, 1945 or the talismanic image Aguadulce, Panama, 1945. We see much more than a kind of painterly “expressionism” in the New York School’s embrace of accident, chance, and the blur. We face the fraught moment when photography confronts its potential transformation from an individual vision, what Helen Levitt called a “way of seeing,” to a mode and model of openness and desire. We encounter a photographic vision that would be self-­consciously contingent or limited, and thus connected to what is beyond it—­beyond its capacity to record or to image—­registering everywhere the experience of difference, of otherness and the unknown. The anti-­technical, blurred image in the New York School represents what many have seen as the downfall of documentary, the rise of a fully aestheticized auteurism, the becoming-­subjective of the social document, consigned ultimately to the image realms of fashion and the commodity. But this dedication to the breakdown of the document, to its becoming-­subjective—­the photograph grasped as embodying a model of subjectivity—­with its dedication to otherness and the unknown: this is precisely what needs now to be redeemed. And it is the phenomenon to which Leonard would come to dedicate her work—­the shift of the photographic object to a more general mode of subjectivity, to an ethics, in its way.

This achievement of Leonard’s early photographs brings us back to the present, to the artist’s most recent work in the wake of Analogue. First, there was a hiatus, a cessation, another abandonment, the five years during with Leonard made no or hardly any photographs at all. The cessation was an echo, of course, of the exile and abandonment that had preceded the project, the turn away from New York and, indeed, from her early work itself before Analogue began. But with that early work now before us, we can understand and position anew the recent work’s focus on the optics of photography, on (impossible) perception and (delimited) seeing, and on an alternate and resistant genealogy of the same. For of course, Leonard’s camera obscura installations are premised on a form of photography newly sundered from its chemicals, and yet stubbornly returning in the mode of recalcitrant atavism to the moment before the chemistry of the medium, at the precise moment now just after its eclipse. But the works are neither analogue nor digital. Instead, the camera obscura installations transcend this fraught photographic dichotomy, finally, to become not some new sublation of the antinomy, but a late form, an anomaly, fully eccentric to recent imaginings of the medium. Rather than focus on the threatened chemistry of photography, Leonard’s camera obscura pieces prioritize the work of the lens and of light inhabiting space, with optics and seeing

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explored as if for their own sake—­and yet differently now than in the artist’s early photographic visuality, creating a new artistic mode of literal being or existing in the photographic, as it were, as a space, and a form of being there with others. It is as if some new form of photography’s insistence on openness and connectedness were precisely what was desired. Leonard’s sun images return more directly to her earliest works, and to the genealogy of photographic atavism just traced. In an interview with fellow artist Shannon Ebner, Leonard acknowledges Liz Deschenes’s prior attempts at photographing the sun, as well as the precedents of James Welling’s Light Sources, 1992–­2001, and Craig Kalpakjian’s underknown images of lens flares. “Taking photographs of the sun was a way to work both within and outside the conventional logic of photography,” Leonard explains. “What does it mean to photograph something that is impossible to really see? Maybe it was also a kind of defiance. Turning to the sun breaks every rule—­it’s not only the textbook ‘Don’t shoot into the sun,’ but also a more primal rule, ‘Don’t look at the sun’—­since, as you say, it will burn your eyes out.”124 As literal “bad photographs,” shot into the sun, breaking like so much of the artist’s former work the most basic technical rules of “good photography,” the works nevertheless prioritize as never before the condition of light behind the “light-­writing” of the photograph.125 And yet these “self-­reflexive” gestures seem to imply potential images of madness and pain as well—­the subjective connotation of staring into the sun. “I was curious,” Leonard continues. “What is this thing we can’t look at? Traditional photography happens in a triangle: there’s the photographer, the subject, and a light source. What does it mean to cut off this triangle and turn the camera directly onto the source?”126 We are presented with a photography of light that emphasizes again the optical side of the medium, but in a new and problematized way, creating images of emotions and fundaments simultaneously. For these blurred and imprecise images have gone now literally to a point beyond, to the state where the blur can only be experienced in and as excess—­they are almost abstract images, in a way—­but only by returning to origins and to photography’s source, atavistically: pointing forward and pointing back, toward a beyond and toward an origin, simultaneously first images and last, images again both after and before, photographs of all or nothing. One horizon, then, of Leonard’s camera obscura works and her sun photographs proclaims itself to be the loss of the chemical basis of the analogue image. As with Analogue, it is in part the triumph of the digital to which these works react. But the conditions of this massive shift—­the triumph of the optics of the photograph, with the entire history of photography suddenly retooled as the history of “lens-­based aesthetics” alone (as a well-­known curator of photography once put it to me), a

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medium of digitized light—­here give onto new forms of experience, through the return paradoxically of the old. For instead of the potentially simulacral conditions of the digital image, we face an art of phenomenological presence, temporal extension, and observational intensification. Pushed to their limits, such looking and observing open onto the precise opposite of the digital photograph’s dematerialization and endless mutability. The Leonard camera obscura works imagine a new and vivid connection to the physical world paradoxically as image. “The camera,” the artist has stated of these room-­based works, “reflects what’s happening outside, [and] so it asks us to engage with the world.”127 And if the sun images return to the source of photography and explore this origin as endlessly changing, always different, and ultimately elusive, such transformation remains a function of specific conditions of the physical world and the actual situation of the photographer and camera—­ day after day, month after month, year after year. We face a third path between two increasingly prevalent options for photography, reactions within recent artistic practice to the hegemony of the digital image: I am thinking of younger photographers like Ryan McGinley who have embraced the history and practice of the de-­skilled, anti-­technical photograph as their own, producing, however, an endless simulation of spontaneity, or a staged return to the body and nature.128 Or, on the other hand, we have the artist Hito Steyerl’s exploration of the digital implosion that she names the “poor image,” the image subjected to and degraded by the necessities of digital transport, quantity, and speed, the passion of the JPEG (a condition modeled in artistic practice by a figure like Thomas Ruff and his JPEG series, which blows up the degraded digital document to monumental scale, wallowing in the painterly sublime of image decay, as in jpeg ny02, 2004).129 Leonard’s “poor images,” by contrast, show us what “cannot be seen”—­that which is behind the photographic medium, reaching as well for that which is behind vision itself. They turn to the source of photographic light, itself unrepresentable. In doing so, these photographs become the sign, we could say, of a photography that aims to push toward a beyond—­of vision, of sight, of light—­of the basic conditions of photography at large, and far from the digital’s annihilation of the former modes of the photographic image. Rather than the destruction of the photographic medium, Leonard’s recent work reaches for the beyond of medium specificity. But annihilation and lateness nonetheless remain the work’s condition.

Some of the camera obscura spaces that Leonard constructed have clearly been elegiac, like 945 Madison Avenue, which memorialized the space and setting of

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the Whitney Museum of American Art at the moment just before the museum abandoned its own original home, moving to a more contemporary architectural structure at the heart of the gentrification that has transformed New York’s downtown. Like Analogue, then, again, and like photography as Leonard has practiced it, the work instantiates a physical, unfixed, precarious image in the quest of an art of memory and in the face of loss. Leonard has often discussed her return to the camera obscura in terms of the way this protophotographic device has usually been understood as a model of the mind and the unconscious—­an analogue to the eye of the observer, an architectural modeling of the workings of human perception, but also of the obscurity and interiority of the human psyche, pierced by the world outside.130 And through duration the camera obscura image grows, it glows, its dim light intensifying with the accommodation of the eye of the observer. The image persists but it also moves, it wavers and it changes, never to be frozen in the monumental and mortuary pose we have attributed to photography throughout its long life. But in this intensification and flow, it is as if photography had resurrected its own prehistory, as if it had become a force of the undead. It is as if the photograph had come to life, unleashed upon its audience, unfettered like a subject or a being now itself, attached to and living fully in the subjective experience of the observer. Worked out once more in relation to another medium, painting, and to another woman artist, Agnes Martin, Leonard has spoken contrariwise about this interplay of photography and life, the medium’s potential contemporary animation. At first, we hear words traveling down the exact opposite path from the image’s intensification that we experience in the growing luminosity of the camera obscura. We hear of memory images, perceptions that carry a marked and continuous diminution of vivacity and the light. We hear of time and decay, of mortification, an inescapable visual fading. We hear echoes of Leonard’s photographs of the Lower East Side, the trees and nature that she once documented there: I think of a recent morning. I wake up and open my eyes and there is a bright yellow outside my bedroom window. A locust tree turning color. A vivid, sharp yellow against cerulean blue. The light at a morning angle. The yellow glows impossibly bright against the blue. Almost shocking in intensity. And it is there again the next day. And the next. And the next. But there is some slight, imperceptible shift each day, and a week later I see that it is not really yellow anymore—­or it is not that fresh yellow—­more of a soft, warm, light ocher. And the leaves are sparse. Impossible to say when it happened, with each wind a slight thinning of the leaves, a little more, and then the tree is almost bare, and then bare.

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And it’s autumn. Almost winter.

Responding to Martin’s paintings, Leonard’s words allegorize her own notions about photography. And she continues: as opposed to the accommodation of the observer to the camera obscura, we hear now about an experiment in closing one’s eyes. We learn of a new relation of the image to animation, vividness, life. We understand this as a description of what it might mean to invent a photography of difference and of lateness, a photography paradoxically that “lives,” like a force of becoming: As a child, of maybe ten or eleven years old, I tried an experiment. I wanted to see whether it was possible to experience absolute stillness. I found that I was able to slow way down. With closed eyes, I got very close. But there was some quiet motion I couldn’t halt. I remember being a little confused, annoyed. And then I realized that this was just breath. My own breathing. My own heartbeat. It was the simplest thing, but I’d never realized it before, felt it. Of course I couldn’t stop it. It was life. This was the baseline. This was the lowest common denominator. This was the soft sound of blood coursing through veins. True stillness does not exist while one is alive.131

For the most part, I have been working my way backward through Zoe Leonard’s work. This has not been easy. But the potential confusions are to be welcomed. For in doing so, I hope to echo, to create an analogy for, the strange nondevelopmental development of Leonard’s “career,” as the art world persists in calling it. As should by now be obvious, Leonard’s trajectory has been the opposite of a career developed in the mode of continuity, or in a linear fashion. We are confronted, instead, by the authorial mode of lateness, and a photographic corpus worked out in a rhythm of caesura, of exile and return, of gaps and abandonment. I will end, then, simply, with a title. With my title for this garrulous chapter, whose end, it might seem, would never arrive: You See I Am Here After All. But of course, the title is not “mine.” But neither is it Leonard’s. It is an appropriated phrase that Leonard herself borrowed for another image collection that she constructed, this time of historical postcards of the tourist attraction and natural landscape of Niagara Falls. It is a phrase the artist found scrawled by hand on the front of one card in her massive photographic collection, which amounts, like Analogue, to another, but different, kind of archive. “You see I am here after

Zoe Leonard, You see I am here after all (detail), 2008. Vintage postcards, 3,851 parts, 11 ft., 10½ in. × 147 ft. © Zoe Leonard. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. Photo: Bill Jacobson, New York.

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all,” the postcard exclaimed, and so the work was named, installed at the Dia Art Foundation in 2008.132 It was a message, perhaps, of love, perhaps of defiance. But the phrase breaks down quite easily, it seems to me, into at least three separate statements, three credos in a borrowed voice from the past, that seem now to be the artist’s own. But they also seem to be photography’s own. As if photography, like a subject, here speaks to us. And the statements underline a photography that prioritizes vision and observation; but also physical copresence; and all of this with the condition of a photography looking back, confronting history, lateness, aftermath. You see. I am here. After all.

2 F I LM A N D OT H E R FAT I GU ES I

WAN DE RMÜDE

Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one’s own precursor? W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

In an exhibition in London in 2007, Tacita Dean associated a new word with her art, displacing a little the terms that had begun to accumulate around her practice, with its focus on analogue film, or outmoded found photography, terms like “obsolescence” or “loss.” The word that Dean now embraced instead was “fatigue,” along with its synonyms—­tiredness, exhaustion—­signaled in the German title she gave to her exhibition of 2007, Wandermüde. It was a designation that entailed the opposite of Wanderlust, the drive to travel or to wander. Instead, at the moment that saw the British artist’s own self-­exile from the United Kingdom and a move to Berlin, Dean’s title spoke of fatigue in the face of displacement, an exhaustion with wandering. Wandermüde. Tired of wandering.1 The exhibition included then-­new films, like one devoted to the émigré poet and German translator Michael Hamburger. Dean’s film Michael Hamburger, 2007, was originally commissioned for an exhibition organized in part as an homage to the writer W. G. Sebald, who dedicated a section of his novel The Rings of Saturn to Hamburger (a section from which my epigraph to this chapter is drawn), and Hamburger in turn translated some of Sebald’s writings.2 In the film, which begins in a windswept orchard, Hamburger refuses to discuss his own history, his displacement as a child from Nazi Germany, and instead speaks at length about his British home and garden and its extraordinary collection of apple trees, their endless variety, where each came from or from whom it was a gift, the history of

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these transplanted and displaced but salvaged, at times increasingly rare, trees and fruits.3 A pair of monumental overpainted photographs of ancient British trees also populated Dean’s exhibit, along with a second film, Darmstädter Werkblock, 2007, made in a key Joseph Beuys installation in Germany, the so-­called Block Beuys in the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt. Clearly, with the trees and the focus on male writers and canonical male artists, some form of patrilineage was being invoked, a “family tree” of possible affiliation and descent. But in the Beuys film, Dean’s camera never touches the work itself, moving laterally, as if distracted, endlessly turning away from the German artist. In static shot after static shot—­like a series of strangely living photographic stills, a warped slide sequence of durational but frozen images—­the film lingers instead on the frayed and fading jute that covers the walls surrounding the Beuys installation. And then the camera casts its eye down toward the floor, to the decaying carpet and wooden casings that support or frame the artwork in the Block Beuys, a movement from the patrilinear or the vertical to the low and the adjacent, a movement literally awry or aside. We follow Dean’s repetitively motionless camera on a journey of endless veering.4 When interviewed in the wake of her exhibition, and asked whether her attraction to a poet like Hamburger was because he was “obsolete” like many of the abandoned objects in her earlier films, Dean replied: “I’d qualify the word obsolescence. I’m fascinated by . . . old people because they hold so much knowledge in their minds and their bodies.” The issue of entropy was raised, and Dean continued: “Hamburger’s old house is porous, inside and out; entropy, certainly, but more a sense of nature encroaching and taking over the house of the nature poet.”5 Dean’s film amounted to another artwork centered on a home, with its structuring role in the activity and broader meaning of nostalgia. But this was again a home given over to a logic of displacement, a home in exile, and it was riddled with “holes,” overrun like an illegally crossed border. In her text on the film for an artist book that she produced, Dean described Hamburger’s home: “The outside was unusually present inside, but of late, it had begun transgressing further, as creepers crept in under the doors and around windows. Michael seemed at home with this, content to surrender to his wasteland and almost bidding it enter. He realized, he said, that he could no longer stem the tide of entropy and had begun acquiescing to old age.”6 We will need to ponder further what this “surrender” and “acquiescing” might mean, and what it might mean to be “at home” with such self-­abandonment; but in the film Hamburger himself spends time considering “linkages” instead of boundaries, connections like those made by his apples, some of which were gifts from friends, the most important from the poet Ted Hughes. “I was very taken by this apple,” Hamburger

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Tacita Dean, Michael Hamburger, 2007. 16 mm color anamorphic film with optical sound, 28 min. Unless otherwise noted, all works by Dean © Tacita Dean. Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris.

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explains of a rare variety, the “Devonshire Quarantine,” with its extraordinary and restrictive name (Hamburger seems to take poetic license with this apple’s actual name, which is in fact slightly different).7 It was an apple that he found growing in Hughes’s Devonshire garden. “It is just about the darkest apple that I had ever seen,” the poet marvels. From the pips of one of the fruits, Hamburger grew two trees in his own orchard. “I did so mainly because I like the look of this apple but also because Ted Hughes was a very good friend and it was a kind of link between us.” He underlines this: “If I could have this apple in a Suffolk garden, where it didn’t really belong, that was a kind of link between us.” Hamburger then reads for the camera a poem dedicated to Hughes, in which the “Devonshire Quarantine” plays a key role, just as Dean’s film itself seems a cinematic poem dedicated to Hamburger in turn. And many of Dean’s individual shots seek out linkages analogous to the connection that Hamburger self-­reflexively describes. Most often, Dean’s camera captures the poet from behind, too close to his back to see much of his figure, or blocked by trees in his orchard when outside, a tangled, clogged visual portrait, edging toward the condition of unseeing. We are given close-­up shots, partial details, but often the views are “too” tight and proximate, almost too intimate to function visually, like a shot of Hamburger’s nose and mouth while he is speaking, and then another of the poet’s hands, and only his hands, arranging his harvested apples. The lesson of such shots seems to be a (literally) touching connection between the apple skins—­described by the poet at one point in terms of their toughness or commercial undesirability—­and the old man’s own skin, with its evident signs of age. Alongside these “haptic” or insistently physical shots of the poet’s body, Dean’s camera most often peers through and beyond the borders that the architecture of the home sets up. We look through a line of rooms in the domestic space, to see that nothing in this house is aligned or straight anymore, every wall and bookcase and lintel slanted, crooked, or leaning in its own particular way. Several shots appear like specific citations of the photographs Sebald published of the house in The Rings of Saturn, focused on the entropic accumulation of the poet’s books and papers, or a line of letters spreading across a desk, like a living organism growing beyond all bounds.8 We look out repeatedly through the home’s windows, to the orchard and the nature that surrounds it, like a glowing and verdant but windswept sea. Most often, in a shot that appears repeatedly in Dean’s other films, the camera inverts this dynamic, and has been positioned outside the home, peering in through the glass skin of its windows, external to the scene and the man we see within. This structure of what might be called the “externality” of the filmic shot seems inordinately important to Dean, a kind of literal exile of her camera, always pacing its subject from the outside, from beyond the confines and the borders of the home.

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This is a common trope in experimental cinema, perhaps its most famous instance a brief shot of Maya Deren in Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943, with the author pressed against the glass confines of a window, peering out (the image has in turn come to serve as perhaps the iconic image of Deren). In Michael Hamburger, however, these external shots perform a kind of impossible linkage, perhaps also a “leakage,” a cinematic entropy, where the interior and exterior spaces and objects and denizens of the home come to meet. For as Dean’s camera lingers outside the home, gazing in at the poet engaged in domestic (in)activity—­perhaps eating a meal, or waiting for poetic inspiration, reading or smoking a cigarette—­the windows through which we look simultaneously capture and mirror the fading exterior light of the late summer or early autumn day, the wavering foliage on the surrounding army of trees, the incidents of sky and cloud. Transparency and opacity work together cinematically, as the window and mirror functions of the picture align. Again and again, we see both the inside and the outside of the house at the same time, and in the same shot. Like a kind of found or living collage, the film underlines through this a whole series of lateral correspondences that can only be revealed in the visual simultaneity of the exiled, external shot—­of nature and architecture, trees and man, outside and inside, film and poetry (perhaps)—­a kind of analogy, a (be)coming together.

Five years later, for documenta 13, in Germany, and then in a subsequent gallery exhibition in New York, Dean embraced exhaustion yet again, producing a monumental series of her now signature “blackboard” drawings that were given the title Fatigues, 2012. Dean had been producing such drawings since the early 1990s, alongside the initiation of her films. Often large in scale, like a cinema screen, and usually produced in series, the drawings entailed a process of erasure and flux—­of marking, partially deleting, and re-­marking a surface, ultimately left unfixed—­that seemed to tie the works to representations of fluidity itself. The majority of Dean’s early blackboard drawings were of the sea.9 But now, in the Fatigues, a series of depicted landscapes emerged, alongside the wavering scrawl of disparate words. The entire endeavor, the artist explained, was the product of a failed film project, a “blind” film where Dean had hoped to work remotely with a cameraman in Afghanistan. When that idea came to naught, the drawings Dean made came to seem instead like plans for an impossible future film, or, perhaps simultaneously, imagined records of the abandoned one. Many verbal inscriptions called out in the language of cinematic construction or direction. “Blind Film,” one board explains, the white letters swimming in the inherent obscurity of the blackboard, while another landscape is identified with the simple label “scene setting.” And then: “A pan,” a different board cries out, aligning its extreme horizontal or stretched

Tacita Dean, Fatigues, 2012. Chalk on blackboard, six parts, 7 ft., 6 in. × 36 ft., 5 in.; 7 ft., 6 in. × 18 ft., 3 in.; 7 ft., 6 in. × 25 ft., 5 in.; 7 ft., 6 in. × 36 ft., 5 in.; 7 ft., 6 in. × 18 ft., 3 in.; 7 ft., 6 in. × 20 ft., 2 in. Installation view: documenta 13. Photo: Nils Klinger.

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format as a drawing with the lateral movement of a film camera. On another board, we read “narrative direction,” with a diagrammatic arrow pointing us physically to the right, along the drawing’s lateral path. “I call them dysfunctional storyboards,” Dean has stated of her blackboard drawings generally. “They are non-­chronological. They do not work in any way as storyboards, they could not function as storyboards. They also have the quality of post-­production stills as well. They are a mixture of the two.”10 Stressing their “hybrid quality,” the artist concludes: “They do not function in the normal world in any way really.”11 Exacerbating this hybridity, the drawings present an unchanging format of white marks on a black surface, rhyming with the inside-­out look of the photo­ graphic negative, precisely that aspect of photography that the digital image has discarded, an analogue form that captures the image in a state of latency or storage, an inverted matrix for the future production of prints.12 And exacerbating the work’s inherent “dysfunction,” Dean explained, the series harked back to a British military catastrophe from the nineteenth century, an event of the Second Afghan War—­inscriptions on the drawings point to this as well—­tied to the history of British

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colonialism in the region of Jalalabad and Kabul, its aftereffects still very much with us today. The landscapes follow the path of the Kabul River, from its source, high up in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, down to the plains below. Dean’s landscapes thus hardly succeed in leaving her topos of fluidity or the sea behind, and river and water representations increasingly overtake the blackboards, in the modality of violent inundation, like a flash flood. The Fatigues were at first arranged at documenta in a physical analogy to the Afghan landscape itself, in a multifloor open space where the mountain images could be hung on high, leading then down to the depicted floodplains below. But when hung again as a gallery exhibition, Dean embraced the architectural constraint and allowed the work to spread laterally, to move once more against the vertical, and toward the potentially narrative or somehow inherently cinematic spread of side-­to-­side-­ness. It was a device that seemed to signal as well the work’s conceptual embrace of expansion, from drawing and painting to photography and film, from landscape to history, from image to text. Paradoxically, however, this expansion was once again associated with exhaustion, with the title Fatigues. The British military history the work called up involved a disastrous attempt during the Afghan War of 1878–­80 to ford the Kabul River at night, in utter darkness, during which many of the soldiers were swept away and died. “Snow melting,” “river swelling,” “tension rising,” Dean’s inscriptions on one board agitate. Unlike stories of military triumphs, it was a debacle perhaps destined to be forgotten, swept aside, until memorialized in a jingoistic poem written by Rudyard Kipling some ten years later, “Ford o’ Kabul River,” 1890. Kabul town’s by Kabul river—­ Blow the bugle, draw the sword—­ There I lef ’ my mate for ever, Wet an’ drippin’ by the ford. Ford, ford, ford o’ Kabul river, Ford o’ Kabul river in the dark! There’s the river up and brimmin’, An’ there’s ’arf a squadron swimmin’ ’Cross the ford o’ Kabul river in the dark.

Given this military history, Dean’s title carries, of course, another resonance as a word. For “fatigues” in English can also refer not to tiredness, but to a military uniform, the muted and faded tones of which often function as camouflage. As with Hamburger and his home and apple orchard, another poetic device of the breakdown of barriers—­through entropy, exhaustion, but also the undoing of limits—­seemed to

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be heralded here. Flux, flood, and flow: with Fatigues, we move from film to drawing, both modalities of the analogue for Dean; and then from drawings that appear like the key analogue form of the photographic negative to words, from light-­writing to graphic inscription. Perhaps a new form of relationality itself was being explored. But this movement between forms finds its occasion in remembering a history of militarism and defeat, a failure of masculinity, a story of the excessive flow of water overcoming soldiers, the loss to the raging river of so many young men, so many male bodies. And so the drawings give us marks of erasure, of deletion, of water, wave, and flow; but not a single male body seems to be in evidence, no soldiers anywhere or anymore to be seen. We think back to the title Fatigues, to the form of visual fading and disappearance the military meaning of the word summons. The undoing of the separation between a person and their surrounds, their borders, their boundaries: This was another understanding now of the word that Dean attached to her art, the word “fatigue.”

Long before I came to know this series of 2012, the idea of “fatigue” had begun to inform my own understanding of the potential strategies of Dean’s work, and it was a term I myself came to through film theory and film theorists. I want to point yet again to a long passage from an interview with Kaja Silverman, from long ago now, an interview itself looking back to one of her early books devoted almost entirely to the cinema, the 1990s text titled Male Subjectivity at the Margins. The connection of this passage to my topic here will seem elusive at first, perhaps. But this is where my own engagement with such ideas began, and it is the task of this chapter to bring Dean’s artistic project into alignment with the following set of thoughts. Describing her earlier film-­history project, Silverman explains one of its central concepts: The phrase “ideological fatigue” comes from Siegfried Kracauer. When writing Male Subjectivity at the Margins, I was fascinated by the idea that ideology can become “tired,” and I wanted to look at some instances of this tiredness. I therefore focus . . . precisely on that category of films discussed by Kracauer, the films made in Hollywood in the wake of World War II. I argue there that these films attest to an even larger crisis of belief than Kracauer himself registers: they speak to the “fatigue” not only of US values, but also of traditional masculinity. It is therefore possible to see in them things which are not usually exposed to our view—­to apprehend, for instance, that lack is as constitutive of male as it is of female subjectivity. . . . I thought for a long time that our own age is more radically and permanently “tired” of traditional masculinity than was US culture of the late 1940s. However, I have

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become more pessimistic of late. I think that the vast majority of people living in Western culture have had enough of ideological fatigue, and have either renewed their commitment to “manliness” or are searching for a way to do so. No doubt this renewal of belief is occurring once again in response to an ideological solicitation, but it also speaks both to the intractability of the human psyche, and to another kind of tiredness—­to a tiredness within feminist theory itself. I have experienced this last weariness keenly myself. Like many other US feminists, I felt for a number of years as if I simply could not go on endlessly writing about sexual difference. I longed for broader intellectual horizons. It also seemed to me as if many of the battles had been won.13

Thus the weariness of the theorist, of the critic, and—­to use the militaristic metaphor again here employed—­the fatigue with certain now entrenched intellectual “battles.” The promise of these words involves seeing the stakes of feminist art practice differently; the task remains to put this psychic and also formal exhaustion otherwise. These are words from 2006, from around the moment of Dean’s exhibition Wandermüde. They set the scene for the stakes of all that is to come.

But I will start over again, for the moment with the old words, the central terms that have been taken to characterize the first twenty-­five years of Dean’s art. “For me,” the artist has stated, “making a film is connected to the idea of loss and disappearance.”14 Consider, then, Dean’s signal work Noir et Blanc, 2006. The work began when Dean realized that a specific black-­and-­white 16 mm film stock that she used was being discontinued. Upon contacting a Kodak factory in France to see if any more film could be made or purchased, she learned, too, that the factory was soon to cease its analogue-­film production altogether. And so Dean obtained permission to film the workings of the factory on the eve of its demise. One product of this was Kodak, a forty-­four-­minute-­long elegy to the obsolescent industrial production of celluloid, recorded in black-­and-­white and color 16 mm film stock that both now teeter on the verge of utter extinction. While surely constructed retroactively in the process of editing, Dean’s film seems to record a single day in the late life of the Kodak factory and its activities. We see celluloid being coated with emulsion or drawn through liquid baths; we see different formats of the film drying on spools and on racks; we see the workers—­in lab coats, like scientists, beginning their various labors, or smoking a cigarette on their break, or leaving the factory en masse near the film’s end. Indeed, Kodak begins with the factory still sleeping, completely devoid of human presence, before the start of the workday, with no

Tacita Dean, Kodak, 2006. 16 mm color and black-­and-­ white film, optical sound, 44 min.

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activity, a scene of utter desolation. And it circles back to this abandonment at its end, as we track once more the empty factory spaces, absent of its workers, left in silence. We find disorder all around, a mess of detritus and broken signs in need of repair, empty hallways, abandoned machines, discards and remnants of newborn pieces of film lying all over the floor, in a tangle or in fragments, like so much dust breeding, the quiet aftermath of a disaster.15 But more poignant, even, than this trajectory of ruination was the conceit of the constrained, almost miniature Noir et Blanc, just four and a half minutes long. For if to make these films Dean took the last five reels that could be purchased of the now discontinued black-­and-­white stock and returned them to the factory where they had been born, Noir et Blanc focused on the discontinued stock itself, using it to film the reflections and the light glinting off the roiling celluloid still being produced in other formats and for other usages, in the very last moments of its production. This is a deeply nostalgic move, in the most literal sense of the term: nostalgia, the “ache,” as the etymology of the word informs us, for “home” or origins, algos and nostos. Dean returns the last examples of her film stock to their place of origin, to give witness to the end of analogue film’s “birth.” Longing inflects what would otherwise seem an almost flat-­footed medium specificity—­film filming film—­turning reflexivity into a form of lamentation, a “modernism” to leave you weak-­kneed. For what seems like reflexivity again turns out to be a platform for analogy or correspondence. Kodak transforms the entire film factory into a massive movie camera, the celluloid production line and the spooling of film in the camera or projector all closely aligned. Repeatedly, as Dean’s camera tracks the obscure, dimly lit spaces of the factory’s expanse, we find serial structures like office cubicles or garage-­door openings that seem to share the segmented form of the 16 mm filmstrip and its geometric string of frames. Close-­up shots of the celluloid in production turn proximity or intimacy again into visual opacity, as, perhaps surprisingly, the industrial, machinic process begins to rhyme with all types of natural phenomena. In both Kodak and Noir et Blanc, we witness the newborn film rippling like water in a pond or echoing the waves of the sea, or wobbling a bit like skin or the physical body, even seeming to take up the living rhythm of an organ like the heart—­the body and its pulsatile beating, or its breathing. And another, even more rending analogy colors all, even the melancholic colorlessness of Noir et Blanc, as both films turn their own obsolescence into a modality of empathy with objects in the world soon to be lost. Film films film—­or forms of labor, or machines and technology, or architectural space—­but what we really witness is a discontinued film filming another type of film soon to share its fate. Throwing out connections, seeking forms of affinity and affiliation—­in the face of death—­the films seemed staked once again upon a consideration of relationality itself.

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Thus the nostalgic logic of Noir et Blanc undoes the potential solipsism of its initial recursive gesture—­the last examples of a type of film given over to recording the last moments of the existence of their site of origin. As opposed to identity and self-­sameness—­the old modernist landscape of formal autonomy and its self-­referential gestures—­analogy devotes itself, passionately, to difference and multiplicity, to a spiraling series of echoes that are also transformations. Dean’s work gives rise with its structure of analogy to a series of what we might even call “erroneous representations,” as early commentators often described the phenomena of nostalgic affliction. As the critic Svetlana Boym writes, in her key text The Future of Nostalgia: “Nostalgia was said to produce ‘erroneous representations’ that caused the afflicted to lose touch with the present. Longing for their native land became their single-­minded obsession. The patients acquired ‘a lifeless and haggard countenance,’ and ‘indifference towards everything,’ confusing past and present, real and imaginary events. One of the early symptoms of nostalgia was an ability to hear voices or see ghosts.”16 Indeed, Dean’s Noir et Blanc produces a kind of discordant landscape of sound and vision, an enigmatic, almost unreadable scene, with the light glinting off the moving celluloid birthing an image that at times resembles nothing more than a modernist abstraction, a painting from perhaps the 1950s or 1960s. Kodak, too, evokes the epoch of modernism, especially late modernism, and the abstract paintings called “color field.” Dean’s nostalgic move turns film back upon itself, and back upon its origins, only to move us laterally away from film itself: from the moment of its demise to another time, perhaps its glorious heyday; and from solipsistic reflexivity to communication with another form, another medium altogether—­in this case, the freedom and autonomy of abstract painting. But this is abstraction seized as a resource of discord and difference, of self-­reference breeding relationality. Rather than a return to origins, a closing down, a “truth” to form, Dean explores an expansion, an opening of form at the moment of its passing, and an immensely moving “falsifying” of both her medium and time.17

Despite the precision focus of Kodak and Noir et Blanc on the concrete nature of the obsolescence of analogue film, we might call these works of “abstract” nostalgia. This redoubles the discordant modernism to which they seem drawn. Nostalgia inhabits their process, their structure, their formal procedures. But as we have seen already with Michael Hamburger, the domestic or return-­to-­origins logic of nostalgia has been “thematized” in many of Dean’s films, which often focus on the home, or nostalgia’s other classic avatars. We could point to Dean’s breakthrough films Disappearance at Sea, 1996, and Disappearance at Sea II, 1997, with their attention to the rotating lamps of

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Tacita Dean, Disappearance at Sea, 1996. 16 mm color anamorphic film, optical sound, 14 min.

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lighthouses, solitary beacons marking the British coast and potentially calling lost sailors home. Critics of these films have focused on the extremity of their reflexive devices, as Dean now spurned the narrative conceits and voiceovers of her earliest films. For both works positioned film as a kind of “lighthouse,” its rotating spools echoing the spinning beacons with their summons to home; or, with Dean’s camera then mounted in the rotating lighthouse, the filmic apparatus and its radiant projection aligned with the lighthouse’s lamp casting a beam out to the infinite sea. But again, reflexivity opens onto analogy, likeness onto difference, which seems in part the “point” of making two versions of the film, self-­reflexivity erupting into inversion, self-­difference, a transformative rhyme. In one, Dean’s camera watches the spinning of the beacon closely, too closely, pressed tight in several shots to the glass architecture of the lamp that sparkles and flares like a lens. The form amounts to an early version of Dean’s long-­held interest in an exilic, external shot, looking in at the light source through the glass as, all around, night gathers, and the sun eventually sets over the ocean. And then, in the second film, Dean’s camera enters the structure, and spins along with the beacon gazing out to sea, in an almost sickening, continuous spiral. Plaintive, or dizzying, the films were connected by Dean in texts she wrote alongside their production to the ill-­fated story of a man named Donald Crowhurst, who entered a contest in the 1960s to sail from the United Kingdom around the world.18 Unprepared, he failed in his attempt, but engaged in falsifying his journey to the British public for a time (Dean thus compares him to herself as an artist, surprisingly identifying with the doomed male figure, as the creator of an imaginative fiction). In the end, he never returned home, perhaps going mad in the midst of the immensity of the ocean in which he became lost, throwing himself overboard. The Disappearance at Sea project plays with a nostalgia thematized and then overrun, a longing to return to origins as twisted in the end as the endlessly spinning lighthouse that the film gives us to see, the infinite torsion of the cinema. We could think, too, of Dean’s film Bubble House, 1999, where an abandoned, unfinished home on a Caribbean island is filmed before a gathering storm. Here again is the nostalgic master signifier of the home, but now as pure desolation: the film emerged, in fact, as an eccentric footnote to the Crowhurst works, with the egg-­shaped or ovoid house found by chance during a trip by Dean to the island of Cayman Brac, where the doomed sailor’s wrecked boat had been dumped by a later owner, left derelict and rotting on a nearby beach. The adjacent “home” appeared just as forsaken—­a futuristic design abandoned to the elements after its original owner, a French entrepreneur, was jailed for fraud.19 And once more the empty shell of this home would be compared to the “shape” of film form, as Dean lingers especially over the home’s horizontal windows framing views onto the sea, with

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Top, Tacita Dean, Bubble House (Exterior), 1999. Color photograph, 38 31⁄32 × 58 5⁄64 in. Bottom, Tacita Dean, Bubble House (Window), 1999. R-­type photograph, 23 27⁄64 × 33 5⁄64 in.

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the largest appearing seemingly CinemaScope in parameter and scale. Her film circulates through the Bubble House’s rounded sculptural expanse, again tracing a resonance with the spinning, circular movement of her medium. And then there is Sound Mirrors, 1999, Dean’s documentation of the massive, otherworldly cement structures built in the early twentieth century to protect the British “homeland,” by amplifying sound waves to warn of any approaching war planes. Almost immediately dysfunctional—­due to the indiscriminate echoes and resonances the mirrors collected—­and then made obsolete by the development of radar, the structures occasion a set of analogies not just with contemporary sculpture, like a found version of the artistic idiom of minimalism; or with architecture, like an uncanny, militaristic precursor of postwar brutalist form; but with analogue film, appearing at times like cinema screens or approximating the anamorphic wide format in which Dean usually chooses to work.20 And perhaps most telling, the film was made in Dungeness, along the Kent coastline of the United Kingdom, which for Dean involved a return to the area near her childhood home, the place where she was raised.

F I GURE 2. 6   Tacita Dean, Sound Mirrors (location photograph), 1999. 16 mm black-­and-­white film, optical sound, 7 min.

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This focus on Canterbury (Dean’s birthplace), on Kent, on an area like Dungeness, erupts repeatedly throughout Dean’s career, from the early films onward. It is as if a link emerges between the seemingly reflexive devices of her analogue films, and nostalgia itself, the recurrence of anachronistic modernist strategies only a surface sign of deeper reflection on the return to one’s own origins, an almost autobiographical reflection on the self, even perhaps (an admittedly grand claim) an attempt to plumb something like the origins of subjectivity. Usually, in Dean’s later writings and projects, any fantasy of return is immediately canceled out—­for example, in her essay on the Swiss but exilic photographer Robert Frank, the author of The Americans, with Dean’s essay written as she watched him work on a book while back in Europe. “I knew he’d been in Switzerland wondering whether to return there to live and that such a decision seemed to be fatiguing him,” Dean writes, stressing exhaustion once more. “Maybe he was beginning to feel his exile,” she concludes, titling the essay “Robert Frank: You Can’t Go Home Again.”21 But this would be precisely what Dean would then act out, in a film made in the same year as the Frank essay, seemingly also a work that brought full circle the nostalgic dynamic from the Disappearance at Sea films of a decade earlier. “I have left England and to return is by sea,” Dean wrote, from her own Berlin exile, on her film Amadeus (Swell Consopio), 2008. A silent film, Dean’s work recorded the slow, laborious crossing of the English Channel from France back to the area of Britain where she was born, traveling on a fishing boat named the Amadeus en route to Folkestone, England, a port lying between Dungeness and Dover that has been all but abandoned in the wake of the construction of the underground Chunnel. “I might have set myself up badly as prodigal,” Dean averred, “but I did as all Kentish people should do, I suffered the sea to get home.”22 Over the course of fifty minutes, the 16 mm film follows the slow progress of the boat, the flight of seabirds, the rocking and pitching of the waves, announced in the film’s subtitle with a Latin word—­disused, ancient, referencing obsolescence, but also sleep. Consopio: to make obsolescent, to stupefy, but also to lull or rock to sleep. We are returning home with Dean, and the voyage seems mythic and ancient, the medium and conveyance obsolescent, and yet the work insists on infancy, on the newborn, on being rocked to sleep like a child.

No film within Dean’s oeuvre has clarified this recurrent nostalgic logic more than her work titled Boots, 2003, which has emerged as perhaps Dean’s most enigmatic production. It is another film about a home. But the work should be seen as a kind of turning point. Its origins seem simple enough: invited to exhibit at the Serralves Foundation in Porto, Portugal, Dean became interested in the Casa de Serralves, a singular

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Tacita Dean, Boots, 2003. Three 16 mm color anamorphic films with optical sound (English, French, and German versions), 20 min. each.

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Tacita Dean, Teignmouth Electron, Cayman Brac (General), 1999. Color photograph, 26 49⁄64 × 35 3⁄64 in.

French-­style art deco villa in the foundation’s care, used as a secondary exhibition site but originally built as a private home. Emptied of its original furnishings and thus redolent of abandonment, the house also came replete with a melancholy history, having been built before the Second World War by a Portuguese industrialist for his French wife, a model named “Blanche” who “pined for Paris.”23 The art deco home evidently did not soothe this nostalgia, for it was lived in only briefly and then sold off, with the stipulation that it could not be changed. At the moment of her exhibition, Dean became aware that the foundation was soon to renovate the otherwise untouched structure. Stranded in another time, suspended between the modern and a pretense toward the aristocratic—­an almost Lampedusan relic—­the impending demise of the home’s original state precipitated Dean’s desire to film it in the 16 mm anamorphic double-­wide format that is her most frequent choice of medium.24 Boots thus seems a logical outcome of the representations we find in the previous decade of the artist’s work, where her camera and analogue film were most often

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turned on stranded objects, anachronistic forms, and, especially, abandoned architecture. To the unfinished, futuristic but ruinous home in Bubble House, or the obsolete but almost Kubrickian monoliths of the film Sound Mirrors, we could add the sea vessel of Teignmouth Electron, 1999, another work in Dean’s Crowhurst suite, which documented the ill-­fated sailor’s stranded boat, beached on Cayman Brac. Or we could point to Fernsehturm, 2001, made within the rotating restaurant at the top of the television tower in the former East Berlin, a once futuristic structure from the 1960s persisting today in the face of the ruination of the social utopia that it proudly marked. The art deco villa in Boots shows us a home now stranded in this paradoxical way. We face a home that gives testimony not to origins and foundations, but to the inevitability of displacement—­the villa having served as a substitute structure for a subject in exile, a French-­style import for a French woman pining for home. And it is a displacement and a substitute that failed, a nostalgia style that only exacerbated the phenomenon of nostalgia, and from which the inhabitants were long expelled. Or, conversely, it seems a home that they abandoned, forsaking the object in this way, opening it up to its extreme feeling of being voided, somehow even more intensely emptied than simply being without furnishings. The feminist author Germaine Greer describes this emptying of the house in Boots. Her words cast Dean’s project in the proper gendered and feminist light: “We have got used to Dean’s commemorating settings from which a hero has departed, leaving broken monuments to his failed enterprise.” We have, she continues, got “used to her way of filling the emptiness left by his passing with a cool, detached pity for the misguidedness of it all, as if it were a woman’s eye view of a masculinist agenda.”25 She could be describing just as much Dean’s earlier films devoted to the tragedy of Crowhurst, Dean’s earlier project to find and document Crowhurst’s trimaran in the work Teignmouth Electron. The film not only locates the boat, beached and remaindered, abandoned to the elements, out of place and out of time; but also emphasizes its form, closely mapping in filmic terms its present structure—­an empty hull, poked full of holes, a kind of husk or shell. The home recorded in Bubble House was much the same: all external crust, just a brittle envelope or exterior skin, a hollow shell. We seem in the presence of an allegory of the subject, riddled with holes, opened up and voided—­either through incompletion or ruination, or both. We are reminded of the allegorical structures of late style, with the late work’s formal elements “abandoned” by the breath of their maker, turning their emptiness outward, a gesture of pure exteriority. The art historian Briony Fer has described Teignmouth Electron in analogous terms: If the trimaran stands as a monument to anything, I would say it is to the missing narratives that touch upon, but are ultimately severed from, the film that we see.

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The “thingness” of the trimaran, the awkward shape of its three peeling hulls—­with holes through which water now drips—­is very far from the streamline we might associate with a boat built for racing. It looks more like the outer shell of a giant crustacean, beached and decaying. The shell-­like structure of the trimaran (or, for that matter, the bubble house) seems to reflect back on the way narrative functions in Dean’s work. Narrative content is not to be found inside the films, but always in some tangential relation to them, as if film itself becomes some kind of empty shell or leaking vessel.26

Here, Fer echoes the filmmaker’s own words, as, in Dean’s writing around Teignmouth Electron, she once described Crowhurst’s boat as having “the look of a tank or the carcass of an animal or an exoskeleton left by an errant creature now extinct.” But as Fer asserts, Dean also here seems to be describing her filmic form: “It is at odds with its function, forgotten by its generation and abandoned by its time.”27 An analogy emerges between the stranded objects and architecture being documented, on the one hand, and the lateness of film as form, on the other. Such was the shared project of so many of Dean’s early works. And so, with Boots, in an interview recorded in its wake, we hear the artist characterize the abandoned home: “Because of its emptiness, it just calls out for cinema.”28

But Boots amounts to an obvious departure from Dean’s early films. While people sometimes entered as incidental players in her architectural documentations—­the female bathers in the Old World spa of Gellért, 1998, for example, or the diners in the slowly spinning restaurant of Fernsehturm—­now Dean added a specific human layer to her project. It was as if she were turning more globally from work focused on a built structure or a natural setting to an explicit filmic portrait—­from projects that could be described as still life or landscape to the portrait, in terms of genre. Or, to put this more radically (and perhaps accurately): it was as if we witnessed now a turn from the object to the subject. This turn in the work was actually initiated a year prior to Boots, with Dean taking up for the first time a direct portrait subject for a film, in the documentation Dean produced in Italy of the artist Mario Merz in 2002, shortly before his death. Dean has repeatedly confessed that she felt compelled to film the Italian artist because he reminded her overwhelmingly of her father.29 We will come back to this. But it was a major shift, and in Mario Merz, Dean edited the film into a final eight-­and-­a-­half-­ minute format, her homage as well to Italian cinema and to the director Federico Fellini, it would seem. The gesture is somewhat slapstick, and with its miniature duration also parodic, for Dean’s work stands opposed to Fellini’s endless narrative

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Tacita Dean, Mario Merz, 2002. 16 mm color film with optical sound, 8 min., 30 sec.

exuberance—­“He dances,” as Orson Welles notoriously replied to the question of what he thinks of Fellini, playing the character of a director being interviewed for the camera in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film La ricotta, 1962, a film about the making of a film (about a painting). Welles acts as a corpulent stand-­in for Pasolini himself, as he ponders, makes a bemused facial expression, in the Italian way, and then says again: “He dances.” While Dean’s frontal approach to Merz also echoes the canonical interview format, she instead creates a portrait of the Italian male artist where an interview would not be possible, as the soundtrack of the film—­buzzing summer cicadas, wind and breezes, church bells and rambunctious passing scooters, nature sounds—­gets in the way of the random mumbling of the fierce old man and his lion-­like visage. Sonic opacity overlays the visual opacity of Dean’s insistently physical approach to her subjects, nature sounds literally drown out the artist’s words, and Dean’s camera repeatedly focuses on details of Merz’s appearance that seem too close, too partial, like his rosacea-­inflamed cheeks; or his proud, anachronistic sideburns; or his scalp; or his extra-­long eyebrows, so many wayward tufts of pure white hair. A year later, Dean’s film Boots involved asking an extremely old man, a friend of her family, to “animate” her filming of the Portuguese home, the architectural object still at the center of her film. “He was somehow the perfect anachronism,” Dean has stated of Robert Steane, the family friend who was also godfather to Dean’s sister, and whom the artist had always called “Boots,” due to “his rather baroque appearance.”30 With one leg shorter than the other due to a childhood illness, he wore a heavy, outsize orthopedic boot, walked with two canes, was blind in one eye and also cross-­eyed, and wore the signs of age like a seemingly gangrenous spot upon his nose, with a detached, otherworldly air. He had been an architect and was also tenuously aristocratic, his own father possibly the illegitimate son of King

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Cover of the book Boots (Göttingen: Steidl, 2003).

George V (“He looks exactly like a Windsor,” Dean has said).31 Boots’s father had also been an important silent movie star in Germany. Immediately, then, in Boots, we discern the scent of Oedipal drama, a subtext as in Mario Merz of connections—­however subtle or underground—­to the psychic figure of the father. This is biographical again, and literal—­Boots the man was a godfather to Dean’s sister. And Dean has related in various moments that her own father had also wanted to be an architect, linking the two men in an indirect way.

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That Boots had been an architect was one connection that seemingly motivated the bringing of the old man into the architectural documentation of Dean’s film. But these connections build toward something more than the merely biographical, with a general air of patriarchal tragedy and failure coloring all, a psychic figuration of the father of a rather particular, if at first unnamable, sort. Dean’s father was disallowed from pursuing architecture by his own Oedipal drama with a difficult father—­in fact a somewhat famous father, Basil Dean, the founder of Ealing Studios—­and he instead became a lawyer, ultimately a judge. But Boots’s relationship to the figure of the father intensifies and exacerbates this conflictual dynamic. For Boots carries with him an even more tortured father tale, as his actor father, his “illegitimate” aristocratic father, turns out to have been historically a “minor traitor.”32 Under the pseudonym of “Jack Trevor,” working in the silent film industry in Germany, Anthony Steane had ultimately been pressed into service by the Nazis, recording English-­language propaganda for the Reich. Receiving much of this obscure, somewhat repressed story via Boots himself, Dean has admitted that she once contemplated writing up the family history in Boots’s obituary. This did not come to pass, and the film stands in place of such a text, but Dean has summarized the murky tale repeatedly:

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Postcard of Jack Trevor found in Berlin.

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The whole truth is that [Boots’s] father collaborated with the Nazis. Whether under duress or not, it was still a scar on the family’s history. He was British, but as an actor living in Berlin, he broadcast English-­speaking Nazi propaganda out of the Rundfunk [radio station]. Not on a large scale but Boots even remembers meeting Lord Haw-­ Haw on the steps of the Rundfunk as a child. He was prosecuted for treason and according to my mother spent four years in Pentonville Prison. According to Boots he got off, so I haven’t quite got to the bottom of it. I tried to look him up on the Internet actually and there’s only one reference to him concerning this matter. His name was Anthony Steane. He was almost definitely the illegitimate son of King George V. Almost definitely, well, definitely, except that they never had any proof.33

The film Boots seems connected to the Anthony Steane / Jack Trevor story not just tangentially, or even tendentiously, as if it were an excuse to highlight an underground resonance within Dean’s own extended family with the history of cinema, a fact that will be explored in other of her works. The familial connections that hover over the work like a storm cloud instead seem aimed at a more general invocation of a wayward father, a father figure in excess, one might say; a father of a specific, even shameful variety; a father tainted by treachery and failure, and submitted ultimately to punishment for his crimes. We smell the whiff of Oedipus indeed. I want to claim that—­while nowhere mentioned or touched upon in the film itself—­this waywardness comes to be folded into the structure and the process of the making of Dean’s film, like the nostalgic logic enacted by Kodak and Noir et Blanc. After laboriously transporting Boots from England to Portugal by train—­he was unable to fly, due to a pacemaker—­Dean invited him to imagine himself the original architect wandering through the Casa de Serralves, giving “a fictional architectural account of the peculiarities of the villa.” But after his long voyage, Boots refused to play the part of the architect, no matter his own past as one—­he “hated” the house, Dean later remembered, due to its stylistic impurity, as he had been trained (in part under Frank Lloyd Wright) as a true modernist. We sense, in retrospect, the patriarchal horizon coloring this decision, a refusal tinged with the idea of redemption or reparation—­given the web of resonance around Boots’s history, and also Dean’s own. The refusal of the (paternal?) figure of the architect, the figure of origins, of foundations, also underlines other aspects of failure and waywardness signaled by the architecture of the villa itself. I turn again to the reading of the film by Germaine Greer, who throws a jaundiced eye on the “aristocratic” art deco home: Though it is tempting to believe that through the 1940s Casa Serralves remained one of the few places where cosmopolitan high society could disport itself, the house is undeniably small, more like an hôtel particulier for the mistress of a prince than a

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princely dwelling designed for entertaining on a grand scale. The first Count of Vizela had been an industrialist, there are no links to be presumed between his heir [the villa was built by the Count’s son] and European aristocracy. Porto is a provincial town rather than a great capital. The 18-­hectare park is not part of a great estate, we see no more of it than the manicured terraces close to the house. The most tranquil moments are punctured by car horns, the night sky split by aircraft. The house is made of stucco rather than marble, with steel-­framed windows. The interiors are stripped except for odd and sometimes discordant detail. As Dean’s camera takes us from room to room we begin to suspect that the grand scheme never did come together. Ruhlmann, the ensembliste, died in 1933, [and] the project was actually finished by local architect José Marques da Silva, designer of Porto’s main train terminal.34

In the face of all this, Boots refused to play the role of architect, and instead imagined himself as a former lover of the unsatisfied, “pining” mistress of the home, calling up a host of unscripted and completely fictional memories of his affair and past visits to the site. With his memories improvised in a cosmopolitan mix of the languages that Boots could speak, in English, French, and German, Dean later cut the film into three different twenty-­minute versions, one in each national language. One film becomes two, as in Disappearance at Sea. And now three: Boots exists only as three completely different films. They are to be shown simultaneously, but in separate spaces; there is no single or unitary version of the film.

While Dean would publish architectural plans of the home in the book that accompanied her project, the films that make up Boots never allow a total apprehension of the site.35 In fact, whole areas of the villa, like the chapel, are simply ignored. And each of the three films stresses some rooms over others, though strangely all three wind up “climaxing” or converging in a parallel scene in the villa’s master bathroom, upstairs, a flamboyant room of pink marble and ornate detail, but still an anti-­monumental space given over to lowly bodily functions. “In the English version he goes into the study,” Dean explained, “in the French, the dining room, in the German, the library and then they all go upstairs to the pink bathroom.”36 The rooms highlighted by each version of the film seem, then, not entirely random, perhaps motivated by stereotypical characteristics attached to the national language in each case. And rather than “mapping” the architectural space, each film version constructs a different voyage through the home, allegorical more generally of the voyaging and questing that Dean’s work has always engaged—­her failed road trip to find Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, her seeking out of Crowhurst’s beached racing boat, her repeated attempt to film a solar eclipse, or her search for the elusive natural

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Tacita Dean, Boots, 2003.

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Tacita Dean, Boots, 2003.

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phenomenon of the “green ray.” But the voyage in Boots is clearly no Odyssey, hardly an Anabasis, the long wander out of exile, the return to home. Boots instead sets himself up as a “suitor,” like the interloping mythic characters of Homer’s tale, the transgressors of the home space. And the wandering here is of another, perhaps interminable sort. In stark contrast to the work’s slow but repetitive drift, Dean’s camera remains stationary. In other words, her film form remains characteristically photographic, a still film, and one has the overwhelming feeling that it is the medium of photography that finds an afterlife in Dean’s frozen, decimated filmic shots.37 “Dean’s films are figures of the freeze frame,” Jean-­Christophe Royoux writes, in an early important account of her art. “Here, filmic time is not the time of a development that goes somewhere, but a time of apprehending, the time of a shot.”38 And for Royoux, Dean’s frozen shots work differently than the ruination or deadening we usually associate with an allegorical mode: “By simply duplicating an unprocessed fragment of reality, it reanimates and reactivates: quite literally, it gives it a new life,” Royoux asserts. Dean’s art “gives life to dead objects and situations using techniques—­like 16 mm film—­that are themselves almost a thing of the past.”39 As opposed to mortification, Dean’s stationary camera somehow creates what can be read as a “living” still, like a photograph given duration and life, a reanimation of the image.40 We need to understand the workings of this revivification. Along with the frozen stillness, Dean’s camera in Boots focuses yet again on many close-­up views. It presses in and holds tight: a parquet floor, an iron grill, the ornateness of the art deco details. When it steps back, the villa is shown most often through deep angles, oblique positions. If centered within the space, the camera then shows room after room receding far into the distance. Dean’s camera languishes and it lingers; there are no tracking shots. Instead, Boots begins to move slowly and laboriously through the building, often traversing at an almost painfully slow speed the entire distance from left to right across a static wide-­angle shot, or—­the shorter distance—­from top to bottom of the frame. It is as if he is traversing the film, the screen, and the camera as much as architectural space. Before we see him, we can hear him, the clump of his heavy boot and his canes marking time and echoing throughout the empty space. Echoes spread everywhere, a function of desolation and abandonment, of what becomes possible when sound fills voids. Sometimes Boots speaks—­on or off frame—­but most often we listen to the echo of his uneven, outsize step, like a stubborn, failing metronome, its resonance slowly filling the home in parallel with the golden light of the late-­day sun that pierces the villa throughout the films, all of which seem to have been recorded at the moment when day is done. With the indolence of Dean’s camera, its pressing close and holding on to partial details, we recognize that she, too, approaches in her work the model of “authorial

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Tacita Dean, Boots, 2003.

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divestiture” that Kaja Silverman has named the author as a “receiver.” The author as a site where the world can “inscribe” itself, “install” itself, like a receptacle or a receptive surface: we have returned to this dynamic. Much of the criticism that Dean’s work has received underlines something of this approach, a form of making that involves absenting the self, a production through reception. Thus Greer, again on Boots: “The artist is on one level demanding and directing an extraordinary degree of attention [from the viewer] and on another absenting herself altogether, so successfully that even sophisticated viewers fail to register how every aspect of the anamorphic film is manipulated, how the colour is pushed and pulled, how the sound is a complex mosaic of actual and appliqué effects.”41 Or we hear critics like Fer speaking of the “self-­effacement” in many of Dean’s films (she specifically discusses Pie, 2003, made the same year as Boots). She describes the action of a film—­in this case Palast, 2004—­as being “a kind of receptacle,” one in which the “screen is filled” with a building’s structure but also “the remarkable light of the sun.”42 Frequently, Dean herself outlines the reorientation involved in embracing the model of the receiver, but typically in another mode of her own self-­effacement, her tendency to explicate her own project by dedicating herself to writing on another artist and their work. She writes on a specific project of the artist Rodney Graham: “He happily ceded normal artistic control. I don’t know of any other artist who can quite do this, or who is willing to vacate their auteur self so completely, and then take up another role.” She concludes, with a ceding now of visual art itself to other modes of cultural expression: “It requires a level of surrender not normally undertaken by the artist, but one studied by the acting profession—­to become the vehicle for someone else’s expression.”43 The author as receiver entails a labor of desire and of memory, a process that has been compared to a psychic “journey,” a wandering, an attempt to turn primordial loss into an engine opening up new pathways for desire to displace forward. Here is another description, by Silverman, of the model of memory that subtends her idea of the receiver: By “memory,” I don’t mean everyday recollection, but rather what psychoanalysis calls “displacement.” When we transfer libido from one thing to another, we do so on the basis of affinities between the two things. An object-­choice consequently constitutes an act of recollection. We can displace in two radically different ways. We can savour that within the new object which replicates the old object, and discard everything which is in excess of that relation; or we can privilege what distinguishes the new object from the previous object. In the first case, displacement is fundamentally conservative; it points backward in time. In the second case, displacement is trans-

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formative; it reconceives the past in the form of the present. . . . I am interested in the second rather than the first kind of displacement, and in a kind of memory which is more on the side of forgetting than memorialisation. When we recollect in this way, we are worldly; we make room in our psyche for new objects and things. This kind of memory is also aesthetic in the most profound sense of the word. It celebrates earthly forms for their shape, colour, and patterns rather than for their latent meaning. I call this kind of memory the passion of the signifier. When we are passionate about the signifier, we do not merely savour each new object in its specificity, we also connect it to ever new memories and perceptions; we create an associational field around it.44

To receive is to allow love or affect to be displaced, to become an engine of displacement. To receive is to allow the lost (non)object of desire, the origin of desire, to be reincarnated in other forms, to be recycled libidinally, to be reused, a description that immediately rhymes with Dean’s attraction to so many of her obsolescent structures, describing perhaps even her attention to the medium of analogue film itself—­a medium deeply embedded in her own family history, even her individual biography. But in opening up such a dynamic, the author as receiver makes space not only for the world, but for the viewer. Perhaps paradoxically, the openness and the displacement that receiving enacts also involve a displacement of the self. Citing Silverman on this dynamic again: “The artist should not just receive; she should also be the relay for other acts of reception. . . . In this way, one look can make possible a potential infinity of other looks.”45 Thus, in Boots, with Dean’s filmmaking, chance events are captured—­a passing cloud causing the light to die within a room and just as quickly to revive, a black cat running across the frame, the flitting of a butterfly or an airplane slicing through the sky. Dean describes this as a form of “openness,” and it is at the heart of her artistic method: “The idea of chance has always interested me,” she states, “but I think it depends as much on a facility to notice—­being in a state of grace—­as anything else, so that you are open to it. When you are actually immersed in something you do notice . . . connections.”46 And so what has been seen as Dean’s programmatic return to the tactics of “structural” filmmaking—­the static camera held as still as a photograph, the fixed frame, the subtle play with repetition and long segments of time, stretched filmic duration—­all of this should be seen as twinned with an entirely other artistic legacy, the surrealist interest in “objective chance” and the found object.47 Her filmic “structuralism” is in fact an abdication of control, a receptive passivity that models a quite different linkage of the image to desire: the openness of the model of the author as receiver, and its subterranean quest for libidinal displacement. Displacement edges into expansion, of film into photography, and vice versa; or of artist into viewer, one subjectivity toward another. For this openness also makes

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F I GURE 2.1 5   Tacita Dean, Palast, 2004. 16 mm color film with optical sound, 10 min., 30 sec.

room for the affect of the viewer, upon which Dean places inordinate stress. Asked about the “perceiver,” about whether “the perceiver makes the image appear,” Dean answers: “I have always thought that art works best when it is open to this subjectivity, when it is not bound by too much direction and intent. After all, it can only ever exist in the subjective experience and biography of the perceiver. There is no other place.”48 And so we serve as witness, repeatedly, to Dean works that reflexively film other receptacles, like the curved hollows in Sound Mirrors, built “like big ears in the landscape,” the film’s sound produced in and by the resonances attracted by the mirrors themselves, which Dean seems to treat like a group of living beings: “I actually used the sound [captured by the mirrors] throughout the film, like ‘this is what they were hearing.’ This is what the sound mirrors hear.”49 Or we gaze at the mirrored surface of the glass architecture of the building in the film Palast, 2004, absorbing every ray of light of the setting sun, echoed by the “light trap” that is Dean’s analogue film and camera. Or we follow the linear pathways of Dean’s singular modes of drawing, such as the Alabaster Drawings, initiated in 2002, around the time of the film Mario Merz, where Dean simply highlights and passively

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echoes the veins in the natural material itself, bringing a line that preexists her own ever so gently into focus, a form of making as rhyming. Or we register the increasing number of works that Dean has now dedicated to other artists, often depicted in the process of “ceding normal artistic control,” like Merce Cunningham directing his dancers, or Cy Twombly talking with his studio assistants, or Julie Mehretu collaborating with hers. Or, finally, there are the spiraling series of works she has dedicated to other artworks: the traces of activity left in Marcel Broodthaers’s once-­upon-­a-­time Düsseldorf studio, now used as a museum storeroom, in Section Cinema, 2002; the objects and pottery from his still-­ life paintings preserved in Giorgio Morandi’s workplace, filmed like otherworldly bodies or ancient beings in Day for Night, 2009; an entire film, Buon Fresco, 2014, devoted to close-­up shots and details of Giotto’s frescos in Assisi—­a film devoted, that is, to seeing a fresco otherwise than how it is normally meant to be seen, from afar, embracing instead the opaque form of sheer proximity; a film devoted, even more, to the devotional life itself, the life of St. Francis, dedicated to nature, animals, and all earthly or worldly creations.

What allows for and encourages a chain of displacements? How can it be loosed? How does this movement begin? What kind of control must be surrendered to open the artwork enough so that the world can enter, to inscribe itself in a new form? How can one establish a new “pathway” for desire, a new “journey” as it displaces forward? This is crucial to understand—­to find the motors of displacement in Dean’s project, and the ways in which Boots focused this dynamic. For subjectivity and desire are at stake in Dean’s film; in Boots the newfound focus on an “anachronistic” human being—­as opposed to an inanimate structure—­literally announces this dynamic; and it is the resonating, outsize step of the old man that immediately makes this apparent. Sound is excessively important in the film Boots, and it was in sound, in Dean’s work, where we first in fact encountered Dean’s elderly friend. A year before the film, Dean produced a “sound piece” titled Berlin Project, 2002, for BBC Radio. She imagined it, impossibly, as a sound piece “about silence,” and near its beginning—­ like the later film Michael Hamburger—­we hear a recording that sounds like a violent wind, and then perhaps the calm or silence before a storm. Berlin Project becomes a portrait of the city to which Dean had then moved, through a vast collection of ambient sounds and found recordings—­the sounds that emerge when one is listening instead of speaking, collecting sounds instead of producing them. But it also edges into a displaced self-­portrait, an autobiographical sonic collection, tracking through a kind of edited cinematic soundtrack a life lived—­precisely to the degree that Dean

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absents herself from the work as a figure or “character.” We hear, as Dean had heard, the sound of a zeppelin in the Berlin summer air, a vacuum cleaner doing its job, the squeal of tramcars or trains, church bells or a carillon playing in the distance, ringing out the unofficial anthem of Berlin that is “Berliner Luft,” or “Berlin Air”—­from the operetta Frau Luna, about a voyage to the moon by balloon (it is a song that will erupt again in the sound piece, in other recorded forms, becoming the “anthem” of Berlin Project as well). At one point we hear a much more plaintive melody on the piano, someone playing the musical wander of Erik Satie’s melancholic Gnossiennes. We hear Leonard Cohen beginning to sing, only to have the record skip, repeating the words “old and bitter” over and over again. We hear drizzle and rain, perhaps the sizzle of cooking, the cheerful banter of an attendant in a public ladies’ room (at the department store KaDeWe) punctuated by the clink of coins, the sound of flushing toilets, a fart emanating from one of the stalls. We hear footsteps, high heels on the sidewalk, the labored breathing of someone (Dean?) slowly mounting a building’s stairs, a key turned in a lock. We hear a German voice announcing subway stations to passengers, an accordion on the street, the creak of a rusty hinge, a telephone ringing, an answering-­machine beep, the ruckus of traffic and horns. If the sound piece already puts us in mind of the nature sounds in Dean’s later film Michael Hamburger, it also looks back on Hamburger, in a way, resonating quite strongly with Sebald’s account in The Rings of Saturn of the poet’s displacement from Berlin—­as a child of nine and a half, in November 1933. Hamburger’s father had been a professor at the Charité, the Berlin hospital, an institution mentioned by name by a speaker—­in fact it is Boots—­in Dean’s Berlin Project. But Dean’s sonic traces rhyme with the tattered remnants of physical sensation that, as Hamburger tells Sebald’s narrator, are all he has left after the “disappearance of his Berlin childhood”: How little there has remained in me of my native country, the chronicler observes as he scans the few memories he still possesses, barely enough for an obituary of a lost boyhood. The mane of a Prussian lion, a Prussian nanny, caryatids bearing the globe on their shoulders, the mysterious sounds of traffic and motor horns rising from Lietzenburgerstraße to the apartment, the noise made by the central-­heating pipe behind the wallpaper in the dark corner where one had to stand facing the wall by way of punishment, the nauseating smell of soapsuds in the laundry, a game of marbles in a Charlottenburg park, barley malt coffee, sugar-­beet syrup, cod-­liver oil, and the forbidden raspberry sweets from Grandmother Antonina’s bonbonniere—­were these not all merely phantasms, delusions, that had dissolved into thin air? The leather seats in Grandfather’s Buick, Hasensprung tramstop in the Grunewald, the Baltic coast, Heringsdorf, a sand dune surrounded by pure nothingness, the sunlight and how it fell.50

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Like Sebald’s indirect discourse filled to overflowing with Hamburger’s testimony, other voices, reading ancient passages, recounting memories, are heard in Dean’s autobiographical sonic collection. At the work’s start, there is Dean herself speaking, but the words are not her “own,” as she instead reads a passage from early Greek philosophy on the cosmic connection of all things, constantly in various states of transformation into one another. A short while later, we hear a sigh, air passing from the body in exhaustion, a ticking clock, and then a voice, mechanically laying down a line close to the beginning of Berlin Project that nevertheless sounds like an end: “But this hasn’t followed the path that one wanted it to at all.” While an early British critic of the work identified the speaking voice as that of an elderly woman, any viewer of Dean’s later film can now recognize in retrospect the voice of Boots. Berlin Project includes many snippets of conversation with Boots, interviewed by the artist. Boots’s proclamations, at times his memories, punctuate the piece, returning rhythmically and repeatedly during its forty-­four-­minute-­long duration. I will return to this, to Boots’s statements and his voice in the prelude to the film Boots that is the Berlin Project. The works are folded into each other: in the eponymous film, Boots obliquely references the Berlin Project in turn. In the German version of Boots, speaking about the air in the Portuguese villa, the old man suddenly exclaims, “Berliner Luft, Luft, Luft,” recalling the chorus of the anthem “Berlin Air” that Dean’s sound piece leans upon repeatedly. All of this serves to underline that, in the film, sound only intensifies in importance, and it cannot be overstated how powerful a through line in Dean’s work sound has come to be, no matter the focus of most of her critics (I include myself ) on her seeming central concern with analogue film, with 16 mm film—­which is, of course, silent, a medium to which sound must later be added.51 It is then time to acknowledge that the artist’s first name, “Tacita,” means literally “the silent one,” and so the Berlin Project described as a sound piece “about silence” keys the work to displaced self-­portraiture in yet another sense. This displacement spreads (as displacements are wont to do) to Dean’s subsequent film, to Boots, which Dean once described as an attempt at “choreographing the silence of the building with the particular sound of [Boots] walking.”52 The echoing sounds that Boots produces as he travels through the empty, silent (or silenced) villa can be seen as one of the overarching tropes of Dean’s film. For in Boots, echoes emerge everywhere. Dean’s static shots resemble photographs, rhyming a form of cinema with that of photography. The villa appears constantly pierced by light, or thrown into momentary obscurity, like the camera obscura of Dean’s filmic apparatus. At times, elements of the villa, such as its glass doors, function like an aperture, framing a view like a lens; at others, they echo the

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cinema screen, serving instead, mirrorlike, as a receptive surface for projection. Just a year after making Boots, in the work Palast, 2004, one of the artist’s key “German” works, like the Berlin Project, Dean elaborates this echo of architecture and photography or film into another overarching trope of her work, and the sign or metaphor of the condition of the “receiver” as I have been discussing it. Palast makes the condition of the author as receiver self-­reflexive in an inescapable way, as this film made of the soon-­to-­be-­demolished Palace of the Republic of the old East Germany focuses in on partial details of the condemned building and relishes the imperfect, aging surfaces of its bronze-­mirrored windows at twilight. Dean thus records less the architectural object than its crepuscular, fading, almost extinct “receiving” of the mirrored image of the cityscape and the natural world around it. We watch birds, clouds, and sun; we gaze at sculptural monuments and other nearby buildings (like the Fernsehturm); we witness traces of history and the passing of time, the infinite visual incident of another late day edging toward twilight, received and reflected on the surface of the outmoded governmental building until darkness swallows all.53 Palast also embodies and isolates Dean’s play with what I have previously called the “externality” of the filmic shot, in something like its pure form. We are outside the architecture along with Dean’s camera, exiled from the structure recorded by this specific film in an absolute, unchanging way, and our view of the building usually follows a particular oblique. The nonfrontal view also presses too close to the structure—­proximity opacifying the visual again—­for us to understand in any totalizing way the building’s form. Instead, the close-­up shot fragments the form, cleaving to a set of black-­paned window frames that further segment the building’s exterior. This brings another form of externality, of outsideness, into view, as it is the gap between the individual frames in a strip of celluloid film that is usually named by theorists as the medium’s “outside,” the absence that links and founds the cinematic image.54 However, that externality seems now to be figured within Dean’s frame, in the form of the mirrored windows’ blackened, voided lattice, and as a force of intense fragmentation of the filmic image that remains. So often, in Palast, we seem to be looking at a view, through a window, perhaps, to a glowing world beyond. But in reality we are in and of the outside captured in the film, watching a reflection scintillate in the various quadrants that here split the image asunder, as if into so many filmic particles—­an image of the particular kind of multiform echo and receiving that film specifically can perform. But all of these tropes were already in place in Boots, which has its own connections through its titular figure to Dean’s subsequent German films, her specifically German works. In Boots, we see a series of windows during interior shots framing a moving world outside; we see the same windows during exterior (or external) shots

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Tacita Dean, Boots, 2003.

mirroring the passing clouds and setting sun. Either echoing Dean’s camera or positioned in analogy to a cinema screen, the villa’s architecture becomes a repository for the world around it, an apparatus understood as a medium like film, a medium that receives. The pink light of the late-­day sun not only bathes but absorbs and echoes the villa, which is painted pink, as if the villa and the late day—­the villa and crepuscular light itself—­had “attuned” themselves to one another. In each version of the film, a “climax” arrives as Boots lumbers toward the upstairs pink bathroom, making his way around the clerestory at the heart of the home. Framed by a horizontal row of the rectangular gaps between the clerestory’s columns, we seem to see the movement relinquished by Dean’s camera taken up by Boots and the architecture. The clerestory, pierced like the villa’s windows by light, amounts—­as Kaja Silverman has observed of photography and film—­to a “technology of radiance.”55 It seems now to take its turn echoing and transforming the segmented film frames of Dean’s precious celluloid, as if the substrate of 16 mm film had been materialized in space, the analogue of a strip of film made physical before our eyes. Many other architectural details perform the same filmic echo, as if we could “see” film everywhere we look in the villa, in its segmented doors, in the repetitive geometry of some of its steps into the surrounding garden, in the rectangular shapes of a railing that girds an upstairs balcony. And, of course, all of these analogies are “grounded” in a more foundational one, the move that led Dean to place the fading villa into correspondence with her analogue medium, and both of these with a beloved and aging old man. “It had to be him,” Dean explains of her choice to invite Boots to be in the film, “no one else would do.”56 And so here, a home and a human being and a form of film

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Tacita Dean, Boots, 2003.

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“find” one another—­an object, a subject, and a medium. Like a spiraling series of discovered coincidences, each is analogical to the other, each is “like” the other—­in their decrepitude, or “openness,” or age, or slowed speed. But clearly there is no equivalence in such a chain; analogy displaces, founding itself on multiplicity and difference above all. Narrativized weakly as a return to a home, Boots may position the old man in correspondence to the villa and to the analogue film, but he does not “belong” to them. He is a loping interloper, imagining himself in the person of a one-­time habitué of the villa but also—­in the guise of an imagined and illicit “lover”—­as the person who was a force of disruption and disintegration within its story, its history. Picturing a home that is “found” more than that to which one returns, an enigma more than that which is familiar, Boots often sounds confused during his wander, forgetting where he might be as often as he invents a memory of Blanche or the home. “I’m standing here. . . . I believe I’m now in the library . . . but I’ve completely forgotten . . . where the books were,” Boots admits in the German version of the film. “What a cunting fool!” he declares, at the end of the English version. The movements of Boots thus eschew the traditional nostalgic logic of a return to origins, exchanging this for a series of analogical moves, of like attuning itself to like, expansions and connections across the vast chasms of both distance and time. Coming together in this “improper” way—­with none belonging to the other, no sense of “belonging” evident at all—­Boots can take his filmic voyage through the aging villa as if endlessly, and he can “invent” the past, improvise his memories, opening up a falsifying history that perhaps never occurred and occurs in each meeting of Boots and the villa differently. The old man has wandered far away, to arrive at a home through which he will only continue to wander, with no rest in sight.

In Boots, the “nostalgic” signifiers of a return to home or origins instead move laterally; analogy is about contiguity, about comparison, about movements from side to side rather than the verticality of the return to origins, of “truth” to form (analogy “betrays” form, moves one form into correspondence with another). The lateral, indeed, is one characteristic of that modality of nostalgia that Svetlana Boym has named the “off-­modern,” thinking of those objects, styles, and authors who held to the tenets of neither modernism nor tradition but instead confused their valences. Many of Dean’s subjects are “off-­modern” in this way. In Boots, we could, of course, say that art deco itself is a prototypical off-­modern object or style, a kind of nostalgia moderne that is also, then, a temporal hybrid, looking backward in the language of the future, or forward in the language of the past. The off-­modern, for Boym, offers “a critique of both the modern fascination with

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newness and the no less modern reinvention of tradition.” The off-­modern takes neither the road forward nor the return to the past, but instead “confuses our sense of direction,” opening up the exploration of “sideshadows and back alleys rather than the straight road of progress,” allowing a “detour from the deterministic narrative of . . . history.”57 Boym explains that “off ” here means both something like “aside” from the modern, and also “off-­stage,” “extending and branching out from,” “somewhat crazy and eccentric,” “off-­key, offbeat, occasionally off-­color.” It is a tradition within modernity that shows that “cultural evolution doesn’t always happen through a direct line from parents to children, but through a lateral line, from uncles and aunts. Marginalia of a given epoque doesn’t simply become its memorabilia; it might contain kernels of the future.”58 Dean is an artist whose modality is the lateral move. The lateral inhabits her very choice of form: she films most often in an anamorphic, wide-­screen format, a stretched horizontal form that pushes laterally, travels wide, holds objects together almost impossibly from side to side. With her films, given their eschewal of narrative or storytelling conventions, she usually writes accompanying texts that range alongside her cinematic explorations, and which she always calls “asides.”59 A recent film by Dean documenting the connections of her own family to the history of cinema in the United Kingdom is called simply The Uncles, 2004.60 In the one movie in the immediate wake of Boots that she has made about old women as opposed to old men, Dean stresses the sibling, the lateral relation, focusing on a lingering order of Irish nuns in a film titled Presentation Sisters, 2005.61 This lateral movement, the tactic of the “aside,” is the figure in Dean’s art of her dedication to formal expansion. We are constantly moving aside, turning awry, moving beyond—­from work to wall, in Dean’s Beuys film, the Darmstädter Werkblock; from architecture to the surrounding city space, in the gloriously dimming reflections of Palast; from stasis into ceaseless sideways motion, with the infinite lateral push of the rotating anamorphic lighthouses of Disappearance at Sea or the slowly spinning dining room in the television tower of Fernsehturm. With each subject of Dean’s films further analogized to filmic form itself, spinning, projecting light out into the darkness, spreading wide, ticking or clicking, roiling like celluloid or ocean waves, we begin to register the deeper sense of Dean’s understanding of and attachment to film, as a medium. For film is a medium to which Dean does not simply want to cling, nostalgically, as she is often depicted or described—­to which she wants to return or which she wants to salvage. Dean’s understanding of film instead seizes the form as an engine of expansion, a machine of analogy and transformation, signaled repeatedly by its lateral moves, its asideness, its being paradoxically central to the modern tradition, but simultaneously, and now ever more emphatically, “off.”

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Which brings us back to Boots. I think it is important that Boots refused to play the architect in Dean’s film, and instead insisted on identifying with a “lover.” For in this, he rejects the role of originator, creator of the villa’s form, even though this was his actual profession in his own life. “Architect” emerges as a word from the Greek, its etymology pointing to the terms for “master” or “chief ” and “builder.” But it also rhymes with the Greek word arche—­the origin or first principle of things. Dean has in fact played with the notion of the arche in her work, literally, and quite specifically. The opening verbal passage of Berlin Project finds Dean reciting from the Greek philosopher Anaximenes, on “air” as the arche, or elemental principle, of being, a constant underlying all surface forms of transformation and change. We hear Dean’s voice: Being made finer, air becomes fire. Being made thicker it becomes wind. Then cloud. Then, when thickened still more, water. Then earth. Then stones. And the rest comes into being from those. As our soul being air holds us together and controls us, so does wind or breath and air enclose the whole world.

The arche, or origin, stands at the origin of Berlin Project. And yet this work’s sonic enactment of unending transformation seems more a parody of the very notion of foundation or constancy. The arche as origin, the architect as master or ruler of form: this is precisely, too, what Boots rejects. Subsequent to Boots, in the wake of Mario Merz, a flood of aging men seemed to be unleashed across the face of Dean’s films. One suspects, immediately, a chain of displacements. Some of these men were already lost, now dead artistic “father figures” to be mourned: in her works, Dean has attempted to find Robert Smithson’s long-­destroyed Partially Buried Woodshed and the (then) submerged Spiral Jetty; she has lingered long in the abandoned space of Broodthaers’s Düsseldorf studio, and in the petrified wasteland that is the Italian workplace of Morandi; and as we have seen, she has filmed the decrepit, rotting walls around a Beuys installation in Darmstadt, the flaking, cracked surface of a fresco by Giotto. Some men were instead captured, like Boots, in the last moments of a long life, like Mario Merz just before his death, which came by the fall of 2003. Dean has also dedicated a film to Sensaku Shigeyama, a traditional Japanese comedic actor then in his eighties, deemed by the Japanese state a “human treasure” (this then became the title of Dean’s 2006 film); and there is the film of Michael Hamburger in his home and apple orchard, captured

Tacita Dean, Line of Fate, 2011. Vertical line of four black-­and-­white photographs and one color photograph, 118⅛ × 35⅜ in. Photo: Agustin Garza.

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only just before his passing, at age eighty-­two, in the summer of 2007. More recently still, Dean has devoted works to Cy Twombly, to Merce Cunningham, to the art historian Leo Steinberg, all of whom are now gone. And to Claes Oldenburg, who is not: “Obviously I have a father complex,” Dean has joked in an interview.62 The Steinberg images, for one, give the lie to the joke, or complicate its potential meaning. Creating a photographic work titled The Line of Fate, 2011, Dean shot images of the impossibly eloquent art historian writing laboriously on yellow-­lined paper in longhand, with his left hand, light-­writing following closely the path of graphic inscription; she documents Steinberg at the Picassoesque age of ninety, busy trying to bring to completion a life’s project on Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo. My own first encounter with Steinberg outside print had been a public lecture on the tondo some twenty-­five years ago titled “The Boys at the Back,” but Dean recounted how she had instead been attracted by the art historian’s even earlier essay “The Line of Fate in Michelangelo,” about the particular compositional organization of the artist’s fresco of The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. Dean’s approach to her aging male subject once more bears down upon the physical body, in a series of almost parsimonious close-­up and partial shots of Steinberg’s hands—­his notorious burning gaze ignored, his storied glamour nowhere in evidence. And while Dean arranged five of the photographs she took of Steinberg in a rare and assertive vertical format—­like a standing body or a column—­her arrangement places Steinberg’s hand in motion, in the manner of a sequence of film stills or a strip of celluloid, tracing a long oblique vector that moves against the drumbeat of the vertical, that pushes laterally in image after image, as Steinberg follows his notepaper’s lines, that moves aside. As if through luck or sheer coincidence, the oblique vector—­the “line of fate”—­that Steinberg claimed to find in the composition of Michelangelo’s work now surfaced as Dean followed his thoughts with her own, passively retracing his steps, the movement of his body, like one follows a well-­trodden mountain trail. And that redoubled vector emerges not just as a phenomenon of blind chance, but as a modality of the lateral, a movement toward the oblique, an emphatic enactment of the aside.63 It is useful to cite the entirety of Dean’s exchange about “fathers,” from an interview with the author Marina Warner: WARNER: There are a lot of fathers in your work. DEAN: I know. W:

What do you make of it?

D:

Obviously I have a father complex. I have noticed a few things. I know I say that I am very blind to what I do but I do have a lot of disappearing men in my work, a lot of disappearing male artists as well, which is interesting. Again, it is something

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I didn’t consciously seek. There is Marcel Broodthaers . . . Robert Smithson . . .

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Mario Merz . . . Donald Crowhurst . . . W:

Some of them are voyagers, Odyssean questors. When you say a lot of men in your works have died, that sounds as if you are setting yourself up as Oedipal in that way. But I would have thought you were trying to restore them, rather than make them disappear.

D:

I think that is what I do anyway. Sometimes when I have a film like Mario Merz all I can say about it is that I am really glad it exists. That is what I can say about The Uncles too: that I am really glad it exists, that it traps something that really is disappearing. All the things I am attracted to are just about to disappear, more or less. Now it is people, but before it was—­

W:

Objects and buildings?

D:

Yes. Even lighthouses are verging on obsolescence.64

“Obviously I have a father complex”: Boots shows this to be not exactly true, at least in the traditional sense. Dean’s interview intimates reparation or restoration, and in Boots the figuration of the father through the old man’s journey can only be described again as strange, errant, wayward. Or perhaps as prodigal: at the beginning of the French version of the film, Boots simply cries out: “Merde!” It is his first word, and the curse invokes a kind of vengeful and bitter patriarch, but as a starting point it also rhymes very specifically with a textual source, another opening line, the notorious beginning of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi and the neologism that starts the play: “merdre!” Nonsense, illogic, and violence knot together, as Boots sets himself up as a great descendant of Jarry’s ur-­figure of the despotic patriarch or ruler, a modernist or absurdist primal father, and yet Boots’s prodigality begins to birth other phenomena.65 We remember the underground murmur of Boots as the son of a disgraced father, a punished father, and we witness Boots give himself over now to multiplicity, to transformation, to metamorphosis—­ rather than to the solidity of the patriarchal rule. In each of the three versions of the film, he seems to “become” a different person, with an entirely different character. “It’s basically three languages,” Dean has explained of Boots. “People think it’s the same film in three languages, but it’s actually three entirely different films. Boots becomes three people, not consciously, but when he spoke a different language he changed; there is a metamorphosis.”66 Repeatedly stressing that what drew her to him for the film was his “cosmopolitanism,” Dean has insisted on his “urbanity,” on Boots’s ability to transition between cultures and languages both: “I wanted to use Boots’s perfect dated urbanity, that in some ways he carried in his body that period of western culture when many were polyglot and somehow Europe was less divided in a strange sense even though now we have the European

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Community.” She continues: “Then people would freely move between cultures and be multilingual. . . . What I love is that he changes with the language, which is so beautiful. In the German version, he is a bit fascist in a way. . . . Whereas the French version is much more romantic, the English is very wistful.”67 The prodigality continues to spread, and often through Boots’s speaking voice. He seems continually to give his sound and body and ultimately his words to the home, underlined in all the repeated extreme close-­ups of the villa’s details that Dean films, usually accompanied by Boots’s off-­camera voice-­over—­where it appears uncannily as though we were listening to the villa itself speaking, the empty home itself remembering its former life. And the prodigal father becomes excessive in even more visceral ways. Rejecting the role of architect and taking on that of the lover, Boots fills the home with amorous memories, and yet here again there are complications: the memories often veer toward the sexually explicit. In the French version, he imagines Blanche nude in her bathtub. In the English, upon viewing the bedroom, he remembers their avoidance of “simple sex”: “She was quite a good lover. . . . I remember it well. . . . We did some quite interesting things together which I liked doing.” And he is not done: “Simple sex doesn’t amuse me. . . . It didn’t amuse her either. . . . [laughs] . . . God . . . what memories . . . huh.” Upon seeing his reflection in the many mirrors of the villa’s bathroom, Boots exclaims: “All those . . . mirrors . . . make you into a sexual pervert.” Pervert: to corrupt, turn the wrong way, turn about. Boots’s mirror reflections travel in multiple and opposed directions. With this, Boots seems to signal that Dean’s work is also a labor of the pervert, which perhaps could be spelled père-­vert: a father-­veering or turning, but also a turn away from the father.68 Father-­turning, film spinning: We might wonder whether Boots amounts to a perhaps radical exploration of a lost, non-­Oedipal father (if this is

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Tacita Dean, Boots, 2003.

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conceivable); perhaps even an attempted escape from the logic and the Law of the father (if this is possible); or a deeply paradoxical extolling of a wayward, exiled father, an elegy for his prodigal wandering. All of this, again, was telescoped just before the making of Dean’s film, in the audio piece that is the Berlin Project. I want to do something typical and terrible, which is to cite the last seconds of this recording—­the last minute or two. I want to bring us to the end or climax of the whole piece, and the last snippet of the recorded interview that we hear the artist conducting with Boots, in segments interspersed with the other found audio of the work, the music, the city sounds. We hear Boots’s last words, in Berlin Project. They are last words about last words: I remember Mommy’s last words, too, she said [whispering]: “It’s like going down a rabbit hole. . . .”

A raucous, climactic version of “Berlin Air” begins to ring out. Boots continues speaking: It’s good, isn’t it?

The music builds, the chorus begins to sing, we hear the repeated cry of “Luft, Luft, Luft.” Then all concludes, and the work returns to silence. We hear Boots, still speaking: I’ve told you a lot of things I’ve never told anybody else. That’s because you’re Tacita, my twin. . . . Isn’t it, darling? [Sigh, exhaustion] There. . . .

Hold on to this assertion. Hold on to the sigh, the evident exhaustion at the end of all. Hold on to the arche, the “air” that runs as a structuring element through the entirety of Berlin Project, erupting now at the end as it did in the beginning, a final as opposed to first principle, the arche expressed in the mode of exhaustion and fatigue—­as a sign of exhaustion and fatigue. “That’s because you’re Tacita, my twin . . . ,” Boots sighs, as if signaling a secret complicity. And consider a last set of coincidences, perhaps analogies. Usually Dean details in writing the uncanny chain of events that led her toward and around a given project; this is the task of each of her essays she calls “asides.” Boots,

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however, is one of the few films for which Dean has not in fact written a single (or singular) aside. Like the phenomenon of coincidence itself, Dean’s attempts at an aside would be multiple: There would be a full book published along with the film—­but containing a simple transcript of Boots’s complex, tripartite spoken monologue, and a listing of the film’s individual shots, a range of reproduced stills. In the wake of the film’s first exhibition, there would be a printed interview essay that was developed into an aside. But this aside, too, would not be left alone. It would itself be developed, printed in a version prior to the death of Boots, and then intensely revised in the aftermath of this loss, resulting in an almost completely different text.69 It is as if Dean’s aside(s) on the film had to undergo the same kind of transformation that Boots would himself perform, in each of his prodigal appearances in the three different versions of the film. But there was also, perhaps, a process here for Dean of psychic revision, too. And we might, with these repeated changes, wonder if the coincidences and phenomena evinced by the work—­even if initially obscure and unplumbable for their author—­were more intensely personal in this instance, perhaps more intimately related to Dean’s biography than the distanced meditation of the film initially suggests. But a chain of correspondences exists. First, for Dean, Boots was not just an abstract father symbol or figure; he was biographically positioned for the artist this way, as a father, but once again of a particular and strange kind: he was her sister’s godfather, a social rather than biological relation, and a fact that relates her to him laterally through her sibling, and then laterally again, in a move outside any traditional familial, or Oedipal dynamic. He had been an architect, like Dean is now an artist. And indeed, Dean has admitted to a kind of deep identification with him, but not the kind of identification that pertains to a father and a child. Instead, in newspaper articles and interviews, Dean has noted that Boots had the same exact birthday as herself; she always considered him, and in fact calls him (as we now know he called her), her “twin,” no matter the chasm of the years. We hear again the words of Boots, in Berlin Project: “That’s because you’re Tacita, my twin. . . . Isn’t it, darling?” And we read a similar confession in Dean’s first version of her aside for the film, in a line that would, however, be completely excised in the later revision of the essay: “Boots and I share the same birthday,” Dean related. “I have always been his twin and him mine.”70 Boots calls her, and Dean calls him, a twin, a kind of sibling—­but of the most intense kind. Compounding this, Dean had long thought Boots a romantic, “glamorous” figure, and with his exaggerated limp and huge orthopedic shoe even a Byronic one—­for the Romantic poet had a club foot—­but with this, Boots again became an uncanny precursor, for now in her own life Dean suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, usually a disease of old age. “All that limping is interesting because now

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I limp,” Dean has admitted, noting the arthritis that has caused the swelling and deformation of her own limbs. 71 And this last correspondence raised for Dean an entire set of Oedipal stakes as something like pure coincidence. But an Oedipus gone awry, an Oedipus gone strange. For the name “Oedipus,” Dean has pointed out, means “swollen foot,” playing the game of etymology to which we have had frequent recourse thus far. As an infant, the mythic character’s feet were pierced and bound, the child abandoned—­by his father, king and ruler, to whom it had been prophesied that a son would spell his doom. In Boots, Dean takes the name Oedipus literally, but also, in a manner we now recognize as a recurrent strategy, she locates the meaning of Oedipus with this historical memory back in the physical body, in matter, in the low and ignoble, in an afflicted foot, a bit à la Georges Bataille. And this is where Dean’s connections to Boots become rather strange, tortured, almost impossible to conceptualize or follow. Biography rears its head again, no matter how potentially illegitimate as a hermeneutics. For it is in fact the case that Dean’s sister is named Antigone. Antigone, Tacita, Ptolemy: these are the rather unbelievable names of the three Dean siblings, the names chosen for them by their father. As a name, “Antigone” would be perhaps the most fraught, for this was the name of the daughter of Oedipus. This wild convergence seems to confirm Boots’s position in Dean’s work as a father figure, as Boots-­Oedipus, Boots–­Swollen Foot, relates as godfather to Dean’s Antigone, her real-­life sister. But, of course, things are infinitely more complex. For Antigone was not only the daughter of Oedipus; she was also his sister, the fruit of his blind crime of unknowingly killing his father, of inadvertently sleeping with his mother. And this turns Oedipus, at the myth’s origin, into an avatar of a monstrous, deeply hybrid relation, of course, both father and brother at once.72 Which we could restate in a more utopian way, as perhaps Dean does in her film: Boots is a father-­brother, Dean a sister-­daughter, and in the film the lateral, oblique relation of the sibling, of the “twin,” overtakes the linear and vertical logic of the parent, of the father.73 Indeed, in the psychoanalytic scenario, the Oedipal father embodies a logic of renunciation, not participation; the Oedipal father insists on the Law as a principle of division—­of male from female, self from other. But Boots memorializes an aging man who opens up endless analogies between himself and his surrounds. The film amounts, then, to a portrait of Dean herself, but seen through her time sibling and her “twin,” the “lover” who is also a “father-­brother,” an impossible vision in an imagined future tense occasioned by a fantasy of the historical past. A self-­portrait: Dean has often stretched the genre. Once, in an extraordinary exchange with the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Dean admitted to wanting to “finish” her own father’s autobiography, a project he never completed, using his

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Tacita Dean, Boots, 2003.

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name as a pseudonym.74 Her own experiment with curating other artists’ work, an exhibition named, of course, An Aside, is peppered with altered self-­portraits, like a bust of Joseph Beuys where he portrays himself as a woman, or an almost abstract Gerhard Richter painting, which Dean insists on seeing as “an invisible, or possibly submerged, self-­portrait, effaced, or lost, beneath deep, dark forest undergrowth.” 75 Boots seems to read, in the end, as a kind of submerged portrait of Dean herself, and this is only logical. For the author as receiver is always creating self-­portraits, but only as the self opens itself up to the world, only as the self becomes other. Her self-­portraits are thus the portraits of others, too. To return to the conversation with Marina Warner, one might immediately ask: What kind of feminist vision is this? Psychoanalytically speaking, Dean’s work hardly seems a transgressive war on the father, an activity of pure negation. Nor does it engage the “pre-­Oedipal”—­as much recent feminist work has done—­in any concerted way (Dean is no “bad girl,” as the art world unfortunately calls this strategy of performed psychic regression).76 But neither is it “anti-­Oedipal,” and this in an obvious manner (the father is everywhere). Perhaps we could call it “post-­Oedipal,” but only in the most radical sense of this term. By which I mean the following: Dean’s focus on old age and old men, on late subjects as well as late objects, seems to register what we might begin to conceptualize as a specific “Oedipal fatigue.” In Oedipal fatigue one does not return to the father as origin and as progenitor; instead, Oedipal fatigue gives witness to the running down and the old age of subjectivity. Now, the father abdicates his role and no longer functions as a patriarch, nor as a symbolic avatar of “patria”—­nation or homeland. Instead, Oedipal fatigue emerges like a Deleuzian “line of flight,” an evacuation of symbolic authority, and with it the father becomes—­through sheer exhaustion—­an exile and a wanderer, displaced from a symbolic domain. Often occasioned by the softening of age, and even more by the confrontation with one’s mortality, Oedipal fatigue transforms the father from a psychic figure of Law and renunciation, of punishment and retribution, into something else: a repository, perhaps; a “human treasure,” at times; a ruin, ultimately, like Walter Benjamin’s vision of the same, “merging with the setting” or with nature. “In the ruin,” Benjamin writes, “history has physically merged into the setting.”77 Oedipal fatigue presents us with the ruins of the father, and these ruins can be wonderfully capacious, giving, and open. It is the sign of the opening up of subjectivity itself. Perhaps it is the sign in Dean’s work of the new form of relationality that she has repeatedly been seeking—­for the subject, for all objects, and for aesthetic forms like photography and film and drawing as well. And so, as each version of Boots ends with the setting of the sun and the coming of night, Dean has called her project “a valediction.”78 It amounts to a farewell. Dean

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describes this not as a loss, but as a process of getting lost, a disorientation: “The role [Boots] chose to play,” Dean writes, “. . . if it was a role, was that of the lover of the mistress of the house whose name was Blanche. But as he moved slowly through the empty rooms on his two walking sticks, Blanche became repositioned in the melee of his own memories. Gazing around at the clerestory and out of windows, he shifted between the three languages of his childhood, and the identities he had assumed in life, and with his disorientation came valediction.”79 In the English version of the film, Boots waves to the villa and says with great frailty, indeed almost like a child: “Bye, bye.” In the French version, as he departs the climactic bathroom, he breaks into Italian: “Ciao, ciao.” The villa would be renovated shortly after the making of Dean’s film; Boots himself passed away a few months thereafter. But it is not just analogue film, an architectural object, or a treasured old man to which or to whom we bid farewell in this valediction: it is also a symbolic order, a way in which the image—­photographic and filmic—­has been “ruled.” Instead of origins and returns, the image will be displaced by the lateral, by openness, by analogy; it will be riddled with the entropy of Oedipal fatigue, and the unraveling of historical time, paternal time (what we call “Father Time”). Oedipal fatigue thus amounts to another kind of abdication, a leave-­taking—­ both in terms of desire and in terms of aesthetic form—­and it also opens onto a form of love, an aesthetic of attunement and affection like the bathing of Boots’s body in Dean’s vision of golden crepuscular light. It is a form of love—­for the aged, for the father—­that we hardly have the tools to understand. But Dean’s focus on old age and on lateness amounts to a way of registering this Oedipal fatigue. It is a fatigue with the linear, with the vertical, in terms both of time and of desire; a movement otherwise and laterally, toward analogy and likeness—­an aesthetic of siblings and twins. It is a fatigue, an exhaustion, that is the first condition of the expansion of Dean’s cinematic form.

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F ER N WE H

The painter stumbles like a blind man in the darkness of the white canvas. And the light that slowly appears is created paradoxically by the painter laying down black lines. Henri-­Georges Clouzot, Le mystère Picasso

In 2009, Tacita Dean created what she described as an “improbable” landscape, a photogravure edition cobbled together from old photographs found at the flea market. She gave the edition a name, in German, signaling another new term for her art, perhaps another turn in its long course. The broken, colorless image of a strange vista combining cliffs, sand dunes, and forest—­peppered by handwritten words, some almost illegible scrawled phrases—­was baptized with a title chosen in homage, Dean said, to Goethe and his travels. It was given the “obsolete” name Fernweh, which the artist explained is “discontinued parlance for a longing to travel, an aching to get away.” A desire was being expressed, a kind of longing, somehow directly opposed to nostalgia or homesickness. “Farsickness,” the word could instead be translated, the deep need for a place where one has never been. The work was to “be approached” through its title, Dean averred, through the term Fernweh, a word entirely “different . . . from ‘Wanderlust,’ which is a more spirited desire to be in the landscape. It is the etymological opposite of the German word, ‘Heimweh,’ which means homesickness. We do not have a single word in English for this more considered desire to be gone.”1 The old found photographs had been reproduced and sutured together, like an analogue version of the Photoshop aesthetic of the digital image, an echo of the old composite techniques of the pictorialists in the nineteenth century. But then the whole was broken down again, the vista subjected to a jigsaw of eight square

panels, which need to be pieced together to make up its full horizontal or screenlike expanse. The desire to be somewhere one has never been, this need for a place one has never seen—­the longing that is Fernweh—­finds its aesthetic enactment in an intense fragmentation, a recombination of the photograph, a world-­image reimagined from the shards of the past, but then broken down again into so many disparate pieces.

Let me guide you, father your steps are dark 2

This chapter means to be self-­consciously excessive, perhaps extravagant, a digression or wander away from the argument at hand, the reading of Tacita Dean’s work and the film Boots just advanced. Less a fully formed essay, this continuation should be read as a postscript, and a post-­postscript, a whole chain of after-­words, a sputtering admission of the inability to write the last word, or the desire to have—­ again and again—­another last word. For what follows is surely not a “theory” of Oedipal fatigue, if such a thing were possible. It is not a tracing of something like the Lacanian “fading” of the function of the Father, hardly a utopian treatise on the world without a Father to come. Perhaps, however, through the dissipation and breakdown, the self-­shattering, of Fernweh; perhaps by following through on this longing to be gone, this drive

Tacita Dean, Fernweh, 2009. Photogravure in eight parts on Somerset White Satin 400 g paper, each part 39⅜ × 46 29⁄64 in. (90 35/64 × 196 27⁄32 in. total framed artwork). Unless otherwise noted, all works by Dean © Tacita Dean. Courtesy the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris. Photo: Ellen Page Wilson.

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to be far, we can register something like the shape of a world that does not exist. The task will be instead to trace the performance, the enactment, of the Oedipal fatigue that recurs in Dean’s work—­its precursors and signs and progeny. But not in the form that a “theory” must take—­the shape of Oedipal fatigue appears too multiplicitous for that, the impossible figuration of an alteration of the father function that differs, and defers, changing in each instance where it arises in the work. For really, this digression on Oedipal fatigue is about the aging not just of the father but of form itself, and the lateness of an aesthetic strategy. And this lateness has had its effects. The argument the last chapter proposed cannot yet end, for we need to confront the stark metamorphosis of Dean’s work since the suite of films involving aged male subjects that Mario Merz and Boots initiated. While Dean is most often figured in writings about her work as involved in an unchanging and nostalgic fidelity to the analogue and to photochemical film, the reality that we must trace is that the artist’s work has been utterly transformed. The turn occurs around 2009 or 2010, around the moment of the production of Fernweh. The logic of Oedipal fatigue takes on new forms. And the only way that I can see of mapping this alteration is to allow my own text to wander, like the thoughts of old age, rambling and possibly incoherent (or pointing to a coherence for which we are not yet prepared)—­a great digression as the form of an expansion, a circuitous and wandering tangent on the wandering and the exile of the father.

“A heart is perhaps something unsavory. It’s on the order of anatomy tables and butcher’s stalls. I prefer your feet.” 3

Like northern ice that suddenly thaws, freeing a ship or an object imprisoned for years, Dean’s quiet (silent) film The Friar’s Doodle, 2010, arrived like a jolt. For suddenly the frozen frame of Dean’s camera was released, the string of still shots relinquished, and we face a film where the camera now seems endlessly in motion, surveying a landscape of drawn lines from above, in the manner of aerial photography. The film literally films another work of art—­it is thus, again, a work about receiving—­a copy of a drawing in Dean’s collection that she named a “doodle,” a kind of errant sketch usually made without purpose or finality. The film devotes itself to an excessive and wandering graphism, a form that connects so many random pictorial integers to mark out time until the drawing fills the page. Dean has documented other errant graphic forms, illegitimate anti-­or nondrawings, like the graffiti left at ancient archaeological sites (Lord Byron Died, 2003; Insert Egypt, 2010); and this is what she did here as well, for Dean’s film was occasioned by an invitation

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to exhibit in a Spanish monastery, and she produced a set of photographs of shallow incisions, like illicit carved drawings, made into the architecture by long-­ago monks, upon which she superimposed partial tracings of the more recent doodle recorded in her film. With the ephemeral layered on top of the lasting, the altered photographs thus became modern versions of the palimpsest, a structure of temporal extension and anachronistic cohabitation that also enacts a literally blocked view, a burial of the original image. This was also the effect of Dean’s film. As always, Dean’s camera presses too close to her moving target, a heaving and physical proximity that prevents the visual survey of the drawing from ever allowing a glimpse of its full expanse, from ever becoming a cinematic form of mapping or total surveillance. Instead, the camera loses itself in the drawing’s myriad pathways, following its lines with what seem like parallel camera movements. Made with a rostrum camera, The Friar’s Doodle may ultimately still have an anchored shot, but this cannot be experienced as such; the entire device functions to set the still image and the camera into motion relative to each other, a tool of animation used to bring movement to static images. And so the

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Tacita Dean, The Friar’s Doodle, 2010. 16 mm color film, silent, 13 min.

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film shares its vectors with the drawing that initiates them, as the close-­up and the ceaseless pan of film form are given over to the graphic meander. We have taken many “journeys” before, errant journeys, with Dean’s films—­the obscure questing of Teignmouth Electron or Bubble House, the touring of the doomed factory space in Kodak, or the abandoned studio space in Section Cinema, or the aging museum rooms in Darmstädter Werkblock. We have pitched along with her ungrounded camera on a moving ship, in Amadeus (Swell Consopio). And yet Dean’s film camera was almost always photographically hobbled, as if “paralyzed” by an amorous cinematic desire (or pathological self-­destructive drive) to approximate its parent form, its earlier technological foundation. All of this was now in turn abandoned. As opposed to the furtherance of the “still” film, The Friar’s Doodle enacts an endless wander, following in the footsteps of another’s art.4 As another aside from the film, Dean pointed in a short text to the fact that the work was in some complex way still an Oedipal meditation, no matter the seeming absence of elderly male subjects from its purview. Or indeed, perhaps because of that very absence: the film and its meander could be read as a complex form of mourning, for it was made at the moment of the death of Dean’s father, earlier that year. Dean underlined this in her text, the link a family story of the long-­ago conversion of Dean’s father to Catholicism, which Dean suspected was, in her father’s case, for “aesthetic” reasons, an attraction to the Latin Mass. But it meant, of course, that Dean herself was raised Catholic, and her text traces a series of “aesthetic” connections to a Franciscan order in Canterbury, local to where she was raised; and to a young, seemingly posthippie brother or friar who was studying there, and once gifted to her as an adolescent the drawing used in the film, the strange and long-­saved “doodle.” “This January,” Dean writes, “during the cold weather that gripped Europe, my father died.” Direct and achingly matter-­of-­fact, she continues: “I was there when the hospital priest came and gave him last rites. Recently he had been seeking out places, which still performed a Latin Mass, and even successfully encouraged his local priest to learn it. At his funeral, he managed to have a full Tridentine Requiem in the Anglican parish church.”5 One cannot help but think now of the burial of the older drawings in the overpainted photographs Dean made alongside her film, an aesthetic structure of occlusion ramifying with her own father’s passing. And in relation to this event, Dean then shares another early memory, of her winning an art prize while a young student, and the money going toward the purchase of a book. The book that Dean chose was by another local Franciscan, a scholar named Father Eric Doyle, and its title takes us, like all these memories of the friars and their students, to the idea of the sibling placed alongside the Oedipal, the notion of the

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Top, Tacita Dean, Walt Whitman Died (from Lord Byron Died), 2003. Folders with six black-­and-­white photographs on baryta paper, 15¾ × 23⅝ in. Bottom, Tacita Dean, Silos Overpainted (The Friar’s Doodle) 4, 2010. Gouache on gelatin silver print, 16½ × 23¼ in.

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“brother” alongside the “father.” Dean chose Doyle’s book titled St. Francis and the Song of Brotherhood, its cover (at least in my edition) displaying a whimsical drawing of a rather countercultural long-­haired saint staring lovingly at a humble bird, that seems to bow its head in unison with the man, sitting on his hand pierced by the stigmata that Francis “received” or “shared.”6 In this book, Doyle focuses especially on St. Francis’s poem-­prayer titled “The Canticle of the Sun,” composed while he was ill—­and possibly blind—­in praise of the visual beauty of nature and creation (no

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matter his affliction), where the saint addresses the various phenomena of nature as family, as “Brother Sun” or “Sister Moon,” as “Brother Fire” or “Sister Water.” It was in her copy of this book that Dean held on to the younger friar’s doodle, where she “folded it in two and kept it . . . for thirty years.”7 And so we move from the Father to the Brother, or indeed to the Father-­Brother; and from a major loss to a treasured memory and a belonging, as Dean’s film follows the curve of a line, swinging itself in a circle, or turning right, or climbing upward. We confront close-­up visions of stairs, spirals, and miniature forms that erupt like body parts—­eyes, breasts, and boot-­like shards. “I look at the swirls and ducts,” Dean writes of the doodle, at the “stairs and passageways, voids and cul-­de-­sacs, and at the bulging heart, crosses and stars that make up its composition.” The “doodle has no exit,” she concludes, a “continuing cyclical journey,” and so we follow graphic pathways, ladders, vectors, spinning along with the lines; circling, like a rudderless ship, traveling along so many undulations, tubes, and tunnels.8 We watch as the drawing becomes an infinite field of metamorphosis, as the film enacts its wander, as the form echoes a kind of unending exile. And next to all of this, the relinquishment of filmic stasis, the wander of the shot, we listen to Dean’s memories, a set of linked associations where the Father cedes to the Brother, where a father, a real father, really is lost.9 And all of this unwinds in cinematic silence.

But this hasn’t followed the path that one wanted it to at all . . .10

Years earlier, at the start of her career, Dean had based a film and suite of works on another image found in a book. The Friar’s Doodle—­its story and its structure—­ echoes this incunabulum. The prior image was a photograph that struck the artist, reproduced in an out-­of-­print tome about old sailing ships. It depicted a young woman with a boyish haircut and clothes, who had once stowed away on a windjammer traveling between Australia and Great Britain. Long before the aging men, long before the elders and patriarchs captured in the fading golden light at the end of a long life, there had been young, even transgressive, women. There had been the early film The Story of Beard, 1992, imagining a shop where severed or displaced male beards, like the old religious relics, were collected, bought, and sold—­a film that in part restaged a canonical painting by Manet, with a bearded woman standing in for the notorious nude in Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863. (“To disembody a beard from its owner was not my idea,” Dean wrote around the film, thinking of funeral rites and religious fetishes. “Remove it from its context and it becomes ridiculous, whereas before it became the embodiment of power and mastery. . . . Put it on a woman and the effect is curious.”11)

F I GURE 3.4  Tacita Dean, The Jean Jeinnie, Jean Genie, Jean Genet Trilogy, 1994. Dye-­sublimation print, 7 in. vinyl record, and paperback book (all framed), 10 7⁄16 × 7 43⁄64 in., 10 7⁄16 × 10⅝ in., 10 7⁄16 × 10⅝ in.

And now there would be Girl Stowaway, 1994, where Dean’s work seems to begin with an androgynous but also errant female subject, and an attempt “to document her strange, illicit voyage.”12 Long before the Oedipal wander, there had been the wayward woman—­a female subjectivity seized in the modality of the prodigal, the exile, the lost. Inspired by the stowaway, a kind of uncanny precursor or double, Dean allowed the work to follow a series of further coincidences, another mode of wandering. The girl stowaway was improbably named Jean Jeinnie, her name itself a form of the redoubled; and Dean was later struck, while photocopying an article about the ship on which the stowaway hid, by the playing of David Bowie’s “Jean Genie” on the copy shop’s radio, and then by a conversation later that same evening with a man named Genet that strays to talk about the writer Jean Genet. Traveling with the windjammer book to Scotland, the bag in which it is stowed by Dean gets mislaid at airport security, and finds its way to Ireland—­which Dean believes to be the ultimate destination for which the stowaway had been headed—­before being returned to the artist by the airline. Searching out the coastal site of the wrecked ship on which the stowaway had once traveled, Dean and a companion encounter a young woman on the cliffs who tragically turns up murdered the next day, with the artist one of the last people to see the woman alive, before the crime. The entire project becomes a “journey through an underworld of chance intervention,” Dean relates, a story “about coincidence, and about what is invited and what is not.”13 It becomes a search for echoes and coincidences, about what Jean-­Christophe Royoux describes as the manner in

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which “objects resonate together and enter into correspondences.”14 And while it produces echoes that persist in Dean’s work until the present, the work itself comes to be structured by the echo, of the artist aligning herself with a historical personage, however marginal or forgotten, and encountered as if by chance; and of that person’s own alignment, however illicit, with an Oedipal logic of exile and wander, the criminal female voyager standing in for and displacing the male, at the beginning and the origin of all. In Girl Stowaway, Dean’s work finds its devotion to the forms of openness and correspondence that will structure the work, when one rejects directedness, and follows the logic of the wander.

“I would be comforted if you would bequeath me your feet. Only your feet would continue to exist, detached from you, unexplainable like those of marble gods turned into the dust and the limestone of their own tomb.” 15

Writing recently on Cy Twombly, Dean remembers a lecture she gave on the artist at the Dia Center for the Arts in October 2003, in the immediate aftermath of her first making and showing Boots. In that lecture, she had shared another memory, an even older memory of travel, a visit to Delphi alone in the summer of 1987 on a college exchange, arriving there in the aftermath of a storm, perhaps in the calm before another. “I have wandered to the communal wasteland just below Delphi,” Dean relates. We are reading a journal entry: “I have arrived in Delphi just after a storm and I think now it will rain again. I think I see the clouds of a thunderstorm, hear thunder too, looming over the mountains. How frightened I suddenly become: in awe to the manic anger of the gods I know are there—­here.”16 With the nature sounds, the gathering storm, it is as if all of Dean’s later aesthetic is already present in nugatory form, found in retrospect in a “wander” recorded in a diary. Dean remembers: “The port of Itea is under blue sky and sun, and the sea a pool of light; that serene green grey and me in the middle, tucked under a cliff, the wind ferocious around me and a cock crowing beyond. Birds still singing too, just, but all creatures and me by our creatural empathy aware of the incipient storm. The cock’s cry almost one of panic, warning.”17 I too visited Delphi once, in a time of summer rains, not long after Dean’s visit. It was the summer of 1991, but I was not alone. Traveling with a blue-­eyed and blond friend with a Scandinavian air, I remember most his being ostentatiously cursed in the streets by an old Greek woman fearful of the evil eye of an evident foreigner; while my recurring experience that summer—­with my thick, dark hair and the name of George—­was to be asked repeatedly and everywhere if I were Greek, a Greek

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American, returning home. Terror and belonging: Dean’s memory of her wander at Delphi seeks out a similar connection, to Cy Twombly and his work, with its classical references; but also finds belonging in another and deeper sense, linking his work to her own. “As the wind blows its foul-­smelling breath in this direction,” Dean’s journal entry continues, “I feel the rain on my face but still I make no effort to move and walk on back. I am stuck here, attached, fundamentally bound to acorn bed, sewer and plain.”18 As we are already in mind of Dean’s later films, of their nature vistas and sounds and storms, we cannot help but recognize now the stillness of Dean’s aesthetic, the freeze-­frame of her camera, in the memory of her once-­upon-­a-­time petrifaction in the ancient landscape, her inability to move. Rather than a pure or formalist or modernist archaeology of film form, Dean’s congealed aesthetic here finds another motivation, through seeking common ground with another artist—­an older artist, a male artist, and a painter—­Cy Twombly. “I was gripped with something I can only name now: ‘panic fear.’” In her lecture, she admits to “taking a circuitous route,” a “first connection” forged in Delphi to Twombly through the perceived presence of the Greek god Pan, a name that appears inscribed in Twombly’s painted images, a god evoked by certain of his sculptures. But the circuitous route is also that of which the experience of Pan consists. He is, Dean tells us, “the horned and hairy half-­goat god of nature who embodies the spirit of the landscape and the excitement that it inspires in us,” perhaps “the feeling of alarm one gets alone in the forests or mountains,” a “mixed feeling of exuberance and awe.” All of this was thought to be “the attendance of Pan by your side: his manic, frenzied presence, that can inspire fear and to which he gave his name: ‘panic.’” And all of this exacerbates the journey of circuitousness itself, the endless drift and wander, as Dean traces her motionless panic back to Pan, “the roaming god,” a figure that is “all and everywhere, a natural personification.”19

You can read the Antigone one. . . . [chuckle] . . . Is that all you want? That’s it, isn’t it? What else? What are you actually looking for? Oedipus? 20

Dean has a text on a work unnamed, described as the Unmade Project, 2005. The work took root in a natural disaster, an earthquake that struck Kobe, Japan, in 1995,

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killing thousands and leaving a large portion of the local population homeless. A museum documented in photographs the devastation shared by the artworks in its collection, recording the aftermath, where we see “frames that had lost their paintings and hung empty from their rails, drawings covered in crushed glass and sculptures lying face down on the floor by their plinths, seemingly mortified and unable to right themselves.” At the moment of the museum’s later revival and its move to a new building, Dean proposed to make a “fake film” restaging the devastation in the now abandoned or empty galleries. But “for various reasons,” Dean admitted, the film did not happen, and “I have always felt great sadness about this.”21 In a book about the notion of place or site published a decade after the catastrophe, Dean simply reproduced the museum’s documentary photographs, the recurring scene one of a great ruination enacted upon the work of art: paintings dropped to the floor, or crooked everywhere on the walls; shattered glass all around, with ceiling tiles missing up above; portrait busts knocked from their pedestals, littering the ground below like decapitated heads, covered in inches of plaster dust. The Unmade Project recorded an event of the catastrophic unmaking of art itself, but Dean concluded her text by noting that “sometimes unrealized projects come back in a different form.”22 Before publishing this essay, at the moment of the making of Boots, Dean pointed to a very different unmade project. Excised from the written asides published on Boots, but included in the Artforum introduction to the film (in fact as the first words of this exposé), Dean wrote: I have an unmade film project: something I carry around with me for the future. I’m always surprised by how it transmutes into other works. The project has at its center a dialogue between Oedipus, which means “swollen foot,” and his daughter/sister Antigone. Antigone is my sister’s name and an old fascination. Twelve years ago, while still a student, I made a small drawing of three boots hanging from the top of the paper. Under the first boot was written oedipus; under the second, byron; and under the third, bootsy. So Boots was on my mind even then.23

The critic Mark Godfrey was one of the first to draw attention to this unmade film, though Dean had admitted to it in print even earlier, in the wake of bringing her idea to a residency at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, in Utah, in the late 1990s. “For a long time,” Godfrey relates, “Dean has let it be known that she has planned a film around the figures of Oedipus and Antigone, drawn to their story by a series of personal interests (her arthritis gives her sympathy with the ‘swollen-­footed’ king; her sister is called Antigone).”24 The screenwriting residency didn’t resolve the project. Instead, Dean used the visit to enact her failed quest for Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Godfrey wrote about the

Tacita Dean, Oedipus, Byron, Bootsy, 1991. Collage, line drawn through carbon paper, ink, oil pastel, and PVA on paper, 4 9⁄64 × 5 53⁄64 in. Coll. Fundação de Serralves— Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. Acquisition 2004. Photo: Filipe Braga.

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film under the rubric of the “unmade,” following the artist’s assertion to him that it is the “film I am never going to make.”25 Dean has mostly described her idea in interviews around other works, especially the film Boots. Speaking with Hans Ulrich Obrist, she calls it “the central unrealized project.” Earlier she had informed him: “I have a project that I don’t know if I will ever make, but it’s odd how it’s all developing.” It has “to do with my sister’s name, which is Antigone,” a name that Dean admits “was one of the first words I ever said.”26 Arriving at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab without an idea for a film, Dean had written instead a “half a page synopsis about the unscripted part between Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus, and this journey between father and daughter in order to resolve things . . . the blind, limping despot, led by his daughter.”27 It was “a dialogue between the father and daughter in some sort of desert situation, but in a contemporary setting.”28 In another interview, she presses further: I’ve had this project that I’ve long wanted to make but maybe never will because I’m making it in so many ways—­[the 2004 photogravure work] Blind Pan and Boots

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are all steps toward making it—­which is this unscripted journey between the end of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and the beginning of Oedipus at Colonus when Antigone guides her blind lame father into the wilderness until something is resolved in him so that he can die. You don’t know how many years they are in exile, so it is a very powerful thing between the father, the blind disempowered king and his daughter.29

A chain of displacements comes to be not just enacted, but now described—­it comes to be acknowledged—­leading forward from a sibling, and a name, Antigone, in an open series of projects. The laborious, hobbled limping of Boots, the old man blind in one eye and with his outsized shoe like a swollen foot, the patriarch repetitively followed by Dean’s frozen camera on a wander through an architecture of abandonment, the godfather who is also a time sibling and a “twin,” and imagines himself a “lover”: all of this comes to be colored by Dean’s unmade project. Writing over a decade ago, Godfrey wondered productively if the Antigone project was of interest in Dean’s work precisely “because it will not be concluded,” a generative structure where Dean “endlessly imagines what the perpetually unmade film might be.”30 But at this point we cannot ignore that after her self-­exile to Berlin, recently redoubled by a further and somewhat puzzling exile to Los Angeles, Dean has suddenly announced the making of what one imagines is perhaps just a first version of this long-­contemplated film. And if, at the time of this writing, Antigone, 2018, still amounts to a film most have not been able to see (I have personally not yet seen it), we know enough to ascertain that the “unmadeness” of the film has not entirely been abandoned.31 In the lead-­up to her arrival in Los Angeles, Dean had returned to her Spiral Jetty project, to make a new film titled JG, 2013, in part focused on Smithson’s sculpture, using a new form of filmmaking she had devised around 2011, for her major commission to exhibit in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Involving stencils that mask the aperture of her camera in various ways, blocking it and reblocking it so that the film needs to be run through the camera numerous times, exposing partial fragments of the frame shot by shot, Dean’s new technique allowed for the colliding of multiple images and separate shots within a single frame. And now she has returned to the Antigone project in the same mode, exacerbating the internal image collisions, producing, in fact, two such films to be projected simultaneously, side by side. And this singular presentation in turn exacerbates precisely—­the film seems somehow deeply involved in such intensification—­her habitual anamorphic and lateral formats, with the double film now split in two, or multiplied by two, and also positioned side by side like two symmetrical body parts, positioned especially, of course, like two eyes. But with the subtext of the story of Oedipus, and with the subtext of blindness, the two projections come to be given over to Dean’s blind form,

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the masking and remasking of her aperture; and the entire film builds toward the reflexive documentation of a solar eclipse—­another recurring trope in Dean’s past projects—­a blindness or blocking out of the light. As a literary figure, Antigone has always provoked new ideas on relationality and kinship, on connection and correspondence—­the accursed, impossible sister-­daughter who transgresses the law to bury a dead brother, in Sophocles’s tragedy. Inspired by the imagined and nonnarrativized exile of father-­brother and sister-­daughter, the wandering until death of Oedipus alongside Antigone, Dean’s project begins to call up all the various forms in which a revision of kinship had been repeatedly explored by the artist, the “sisterhood” of religious vocation (Presentation Sisters), the “brotherhood” intimated in The Friar’s Doodle, a kinship that leans on older or even ancient ideas of community to enact a contemporary transformation of the idea of the related. And yet with Oedipus, hobbled and blinded, we can also begin to follow and to sense the self-­occlusion by Dean of film itself, its radical acquiescence to a new form that rhymes with and displaces onward from the tragic figure’s automutilation, his self-­enucleation. It is a blinding where the “perpetually unmade film” finally erupts as a process of dissolution, the unmade project transformed into the project of unmaking.

“The world’s pendulum is Antigone’s heart.” 32

In Dean’s oeuvre, most often the work of art survives. This is the work of the author as receiver, as Dean trains her camera on prior artworks, opens her films to past mediums—­fresco, altarpiece, easel painting—­which thus take on new forms: the St. Francis paintings by Giotto in Buon Fresco, the unknown former Franciscan’s drawing in The Friar’s Doodle, the continuation or Nachleben of Giotto’s specific painting of St. Francis and his “sermon to the birds” in Dean’s curious film Pie, 2003, a record of the magpies perched in a tree outside her Berlin studio’s window.33 In one of Dean’s blackboard drawings, titled Wake, 2000, the artist seems to attempt a self-­reflexive image of artistic afterlife, found, as so often in her work, in a metaphor drawn from the sea. We gaze at a field of erasure, mounting toward a central, cloudlike form of glowing white, with the title pondering and instead pointing us toward the “wake” of a ship, the aftermath of a passage, and the fading of its trace, of the collision and the confusion of waves. But it is as if we were also staring at aftermath itself—­not just an image of water and wave, but a scene of almost pure dissolution and erasure, in the obsolete language of the inversion that belonged to the photographic or filmic negative, given over to the open flux of a kind of formless form.

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Tacita Dean, Blind Pan, 2004. Five photogravures on Hahnemühle Bütten 350 g paper, each 24 1⁄64 × 35 7⁄16 in., 25 63⁄64 × 187 1⁄64 in. (framed). Printed by Mette Ulstrup and published by Niels Borch Jensen Editions, Copenhagen.

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The title Wake points us, of course, not only toward aftermath but also toward death, the ritual of the waiting with and watching over the dead, the marking of a time between life and death.34 And in the wake of Wake, Dean produced a work extravagantly concerned with endings and unmaking, twenty found-­postcard photographs made into a series of photogravures titled The Russian Ending, 2001. Inspired by a practice in the early twentieth-­century Danish cinema of producing two separate endings for its films, a happy one for audiences in the United States and a tragic one for Russia, Dean’s appropriated photographs unveil a serial panorama of disaster. We see burned-­out vehicles, an exploding volcano, a collapsed bridge, sinking or capsized ships, the explosions of war, burning cities, a failing zeppelin, a beached whale, and repeated images of wakes and burials, the death of a series of so many old men.35 Dean covers the photographs in her almost illegible scrawl, as if the endless image of ruination could instead be a starting point, the desiccated ground from which to imagine and construct in each case a new story and a reinvented film. The repeated wreckage of the image echoes the other ruins and wrecks we encounter in Dean’s actual films: the shipwreck in Teignmouth Electron, the ruined architecture in Bubble House and Sound Mirrors, the ruination of her medium of film itself in Kodak, or the human wrecks like Boots, the living ruins of the human, of the masculine.36 And so, through what we can read of the inscriptions, the images cry out in the language of aftermath and ending, a repeated litany of catastrophe: “It’s over,” “all lost,” “dead place,” “whence they say that no man ever returns,” “all that’s left,” “not a soul,” “all hands lost . . . all crew lost . . . all lost . . . lost at sea,” “emptiness (not a sound),” “godforsaken,” “no life,” “we must weep for the past.” The end gets spelled out on almost every image and in a multitude of languages—­“La fin,” “ende,” “fine,” “end”—­and we repeatedly meet up with the last words of Boots, here some years before the film’s making: “bye bye,” “the sea’s got her now—­bye, bye,” “bye bye.” We hear in this litany not just the song of ruination—­of photography, of film, of architecture and the monuments of modernity, of the specific figure of the father,

through the burial of all the old men. We sense, indeed, a mocking of the same, a play with the inevitable catastrophe, the inevitability of catastrophe. There is an ecstasy of unmaking, a joy in the procedures of dissolution. In The Russian Ending, this is the language of lateness, the afterlife and survival of the photograph through the repeated enactment of an end, of its end. It is also a language of black humor, a work filled with laughter tinged with bile. “Poor Minke!” “slut.” “final scene.” “ende.” “Bye, bye . . .”

“You had your wish. In a strange land you died” (Poor) antigone goodbye darling I must leave you goodbye darling I must go . . . Everyone is blind bye bye swollen foot 37

“It goes back to Delphi, really,” Dean remembered, of her photogravure series Blind Pan, 2004.38 The work depicts a wasteland, a blasted heath, a simple horizon line of undulating black hill against mottled gray cloud. Detail has been suppressed, the image flattened and emptied out, and all appears dark, barren, the overcast sky soaked in melancholy. Or perhaps things are not simple at all: for the indistinct horizon toward which we stare could just as well be the inky mass of sea and wave, an empty desert transmuted into the boundless ocean—­a vision and a view, toward the distant ocean horizon, that Dean’s work gives us repeatedly to see, from the Disappearance at Sea films to The Green Ray, 2001. Another photogravure series built from a found photograph of a landscape, Dean’s image offers up a threshold, a kind of limit—­between earth and the heavens, between sky and sea.39 Or perhaps it maps the far reaches of the visible itself, the point beyond which one cannot see, another

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experience of limits and exhaustion to which (especially in pictures) we sometimes obstinately give the name of the “infinite.” But Dean’s vista has been shattered, broken down, the found photograph portioned out in five linked prints that submit the work to the condition of the photographic fragment, perhaps another ruin. The segmented horizon line also calls up the basic forms of film, like a string of individual film frames, in this case breaking down the original photograph from whence they were spawned. Rather than constructed on the foundation and bedrock of the still image, on the ground of the photograph, the filmic here ungrounds the photograph and the entire landscape—­perhaps we might even say the “world”—­that preceded it. And so to this excessively wide or lateral view, a vista stretched as if tortured on the rack, pulled from side to side beyond the individual frame, Dean offered a title that points to cinematography but also blindness. Blind Pan: a pan, of course, is the term for a lateral movement of the camera, usually a shot that maps or surveys the totality of a represented space. Blindness is normally not the function or modality of the pan, given over to the mastery of the visual field by the camera. But Dean’s camera often seems to pan automatically, or excessively, as in works like Fernsehturm, where the architecture depicted ceaselessly spins the lateral vista for us; or follows movements almost unconsciously, motion in the second degree, as in The Friar’s Doodle.40 And blindness everywhere inhabits Dean’s work. It is the recurring trope of her early projects, and we remember Donald Crowhurst lost at sea, absent even from the film that memorializes his disorientation; or the linked story that Dean would remember of another historical sailor, another tragic male figure, named Tristão da Cunha, physically afflicted with blindness while voyaging, adrift at sea, but nonetheless coming across an uninhabited island in the icy southern seas to which he would give his name.41 Blindness becomes an analogical structure for Dean, a point of comparison linking other artists, like Cy Twombly to the writer James Joyce, who—­Dean reminds us—­not only had in his manuscripts an almost indecipherable “system” of editing, cross-­outs, and deletion, but also “had very bad eyesight and was, in fact, almost blind.” She continues: “He would turn over his notebooks and unknowingly write over pages he had already written upon, often making them indecipherable. I learned from Roland Barthes that Twombly had been in the army and was used to drawing at night when he couldn’t see the page: drawing over drawing in the darkness.”42 Given that Blind Pan comes to be covered, like Dean’s other photogravure series, in her hasty scrawl—­white script in the darkness—­blindness analogizes this pantheon of artistic practice one step further, linking these figures to the artist’s own manner of creation. “I was working blind,” Dean confesses, in her searching statement on

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the genesis of the film Presentation Sisters; but this is a repeated confession, in many project statements, for the manner in which Dean allows chance discoveries or unplanned events to decide the course of her work.43 In its most self-­reflexive and explicit moment, blindness would be coupled with imagined wandering in Dean’s internal conception of her curatorial project An Aside, her exhibition in London in 2005, described as “a show created through a meandering, ill-­formed thought process.” Following a series of associative and at times personal connections between other artists and their artworks, Dean admits that “my route has not been linear,” but “I have at least been faithful to the blindness with which I set out.”44 The blind wander cannot help but call up at this point the mythic reference of Oedipus, and the unmade project that has haunted Dean before and after Boots, the attempt to imagine Antigone accompanying and leading her father-­brother into exile. This indeed was the motivation of Blind Pan, made the year after Boots, as the stretched and broken panorama comes to be covered in script that imagines a set of spoken lines, directions, and camera notations for a potential film. As Marina Warner describes the conceit: “Inspired by Oedipus’ time in the wilderness between his leaving Thebes and his exile in Colonus where he dies, the work tracks the blinded, self-­mutilated King of Thebes being lovingly led and cared for by his youngest daughter Antigone.”45 Blindness—­but more, this story of care for the blind Father—­comes to link and suture the work’s structure, its title, its thematic references. According to another critic, analogue photography, writing, and drawing “are brought into the closest possible proximity” in the work, the writing laid down over and obscuring again the shattered found photograph, another ground that is, then, more a burial ground, a site of eclipse or occlusion. The title Blind Pan rhymes the cinematic pan with the visual panorama, but one that is hindered, devastated, sliced through in multiple ways. As it does in the Oedipal story generally, castration surely casts a long shadow here, the panorama sliced into pieces, and the segmented horizon line itself reduced to a black linear slash through the visual field, a bladelike descendant of all the severed body parts that people Dean’s early work (The Story of Beard, the sliced feet and legs, the multiplying breasts of The Martyrdom of St. Agatha, the repeated reference to religious relics). The critic continues: “And there is a blind man here. The title Blind Pan is possibly a pseudonym for Oedipus: between the goat-­footed god Pan and the king named ‘swollen foot’ a certain analogy can be drawn—­when blindness is added to Pan, you have almost arrived at Oedipus. And it is not incorrect to associate Pan with blindness, since this deity is also responsible for states of excitation in which even those who have eyes are no longer able to see (‘blind panic’).”46

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We are, indeed, back at Delphi, and as Blind Pan attempts a loose imagining, a kind of structureless structuring, of an impossible project or future film, we gaze at the repurposed vista, and see it anew. It becomes now the desert of the meander or exile that Dean has always sought, but also the vision that the blind, mutilated king, the figure of Oedipus—­the accursed Father, but also the Father killer—­could never have on his own. Along with blindness, and perhaps as its consequence or twin, the redemption of the visual field might be seen as one of Dean’s innermost concerns—­the partial views in her films like Pie that reject all totality; the invitation and acceptance of multiplicity through the relentless fragmentation of the shot; the insistent closeness and intimacy of her camera, called “loving” and “caressing” by certain early critics. 47 And yet now that we gaze far—­as we look toward the impossibly distant—­we find ourselves looking at a cracked, shattered vista, and wander along with blind Oedipus into exile. But how, then, in terms of its narrative motivation, are we to understand this fading panorama, this almost hindered vision? Is this the vision given to Oedipus by Antigone, a vista that can only be imagined by the blind man, a visionary scene—­ but hazy, indistinct—­as the sister-­daughter leads the father-­brother into the desert of exile; leads him, that is, ever so gently from behind, it seems, into the future? Are we meant with Blind Pan to enter the internal vision given to the mutilated and blind Father—­an imagined vision, but also a literally reparative vision, the scene of a resounding gift? Or is this blasted scene at which we gaze instead something like our own inhabitation of the gaze of Antigone herself, the sister-­daughter leading the father-­brother into exile? Are we seeing what Antigone sees, the sister-­daughter who in the future will defy the state, leading the father-­brother who in the past has transgressed against and killed his own father? The question will be undecidable, a structure of literal ambiguity, a redoubled gaze that lies somewhere between earth and the heavens, between landscape and seascape, between earth and water and air, between solid and liquid and gas. It is a broken panorama that lies as well not only between all the states of matter, but between almost all the mediums, between writing and drawing and painting, between photography and film, between stillness and motion. And set by the narrative of Dean’s Antigone project as a scene that imagines the exile of the Father, it is a gaze between life and death, but also between father and daughter, between brother and sister. It is something like the uncanny gaze of analogy, a gaze for two, a vision shared.

“Boots. It’s your Father!” So anyway, it’s the first I heard about him. So I said, “Hello, Dad,” and he said, “Yeah, I’m here.”

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And I said, “Where are you?” “I’m under an oak tree and I’ll wait for you.” And there he was, in prisoner’s clothes. He said, “I’m going to be tried, for treason.” 48

Looking at photographs by Robert Frank of London in the early 1950s, Dean sees her father. There “is no sun” in Frank’s London, or it is “low, diffused, occluded, and replaced,” the light gone missing from each print. “The day is almost always dark,” Dean observes. But there is London, early 1950s London, “my father’s London,” Dean relates, when he was “demobbed and a barrister, no longer young. Any one of those dark-­suited figures walking down Whitehall or The Strand could be him, with heavy tread and weary outlook.”49 Studying a monumental drawing by the artist Roni Horn, sitting “alone with it, in the gallery storage, somewhat awkwardly,” Dean sees her father again. Or rather, she reads his name. For Horn’s drawings, like Dean’s own, are “covered in words,” a connection between them that the artist underlines. “Roni likes words,” Dean tells the reader, “particular words, but not all words. She likes her words to be direct and unambiguous, and full enough to encompass the physical realm in a single syllable.” For Dean, the drawings present perhaps “a graphic form of lexicography,” with the particular drawing she is examining “encrypted” with words that intimate a “universe of touch, sensation, nature walks and fishiness; Nordic myth, time travel, warmth and theological conceit.” And then she sees it: “fool fool Joe Joe.” Across a combinatory graphic field made by Horn seemingly out of linear incisions and the faceted collage fragments of a previous shattered drawing, Dean finds these redoubled words. “Double fool. Double Joe. Always doubling,” the artist muses. She then admits: “My father’s name was Joe, so I’m drawn in. Joe written twice across a central divide, split either by accident or by design: it’s hard to tell.” 50 In other works and words by Dean, especially in the film The Uncles, we learn more about her father’s name. For The Uncles is among the films by Dean that deal most explicitly with the paternal legacy; it is a film in part about Dean’s grandfather Basil Dean, her father’s father, and his importance to the history of British cinema, but only as described through the lateral relationship of one of her paternal uncles to his father—­a difficult relationship, it turns out, for this uncle (who became celebrated in his own right, though he hardly mentions his own achievements), was ultimately disowned. It amounts to a film where we experience how two of her uncles, her maternal uncle as well, “have learnt how to define the impact of their famous fathers on their lives,” honing their memories, as Dean describes this, to “make them less

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Roni Horn, Such 1 (detail), 2012. Powdered pigment, graphite, charcoal, colored pencil, and varnish on paper, 92 × 96⅜ in., 97⅛ × 101½ × 3½ in. (framed). © Roni Horn. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York. Collection proyectoamil and Juan Carlos Verme. Photo: Thomas Müller.

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powerful, or at least, less painful.”51 In one moment, Dean’s paternal uncle shares the story of how Basil Dean—­even though absent at his son’s birth—­gave the middle name “Jolyon” to Dean’s father, Joseph Dean, from an important character in his friend the writer John Galsworthy’s popular The Forsyte Saga. It is a story that throws into perspective Joseph Dean’s decision to give mythic or historical names to his own children—­Antigone, Tacita, Ptolemy—­names that in other texts by the artist we learn specifically “annoyed” her grandfather. But Jolyon was a fictional, invented name, the uncles explain, and in a later project Dean surmises that her father was perhaps the “first non-­fictional person” with the name, which became popular alongside the novels, and spread. While making the series Fatigues, exhibited in Kassel at documenta in 2013, Dean also embarked on a work titled c/o Jolyon. The project involved overpainting found historical postcards of Kassel with images of its contemporary appearance,

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to be mailed “c/o Jolyon” to Afghanistan, where they would be displayed, sent to a figure there in the arts named “Jolyon Leslie.” Another double had been found, another chance encounter with the paternal, but the double was already there at the origin, the father never encountered in the singular for Dean. “Double fool. Double Joe. Always doubling.” Joseph Jolyon Dean, Joe Joe—­as Dean’s uncles in her film insist the fictional character’s name should be correctly pronounced, as “Joe-­lyon,” not “Jolly-­on,” never “Julian.” Joseph Jolyon, Joe Joe, Double Joe: The Name of the Father, as a Lacanian would say, now comes even to reinflect Dean’s “first” double, her long-­ago connection in Girl Stowaway to the wayward personage of “Jean Jeinnie,” like “Joe Jolyon” a name given in the modality of the redoubled. The paternal-­as-­origin will seemingly only be encountered by Dean as a form—­as Dean described Horn’s drawing—­that is “always doubling,” or perhaps “splitting,” and whether “by accident or design: it’s hard to tell.” 52 Such terms and actions—­doubling and splitting—­rhyme with those of psychoanalysis, almost Kleinian in their usage and address. And if Joseph Dean does “appear” in Dean’s work around 2002—­but in the form of a sound piece, his voice recorded in an interview the artist conducted for Berlin Project and at times confusingly associated with a similar interview that we hear throughout with the figure of Boots—­he comes to be “encountered” in her films in the form of the double, a stand-­in or substitute, in the first of Dean’s filmed “portraits” made that same year. This is the portrait at the beginning of the series of films from which Boots will emerge, and then the subsequent string of male patriarchs, the series of filmed portraits of old men, which perhaps could all be seen as playing with the modality of the double, the stand-­in, the substitute, the effigy, a living chain of displacements of and from the father. Dean’s father comes to be “encountered” in 2002 in the project Mario Merz, as the artist looks at another artist, as with the artworks of Robert Frank or Roni Horn, and again sees her father: “The first time [I met Mario Merz] was in Bologna. I saw him, watched him, and eventually, after dinner, went up to him and told him he looked exactly like my father. He kissed my hand and walked off.”53 Dean repeated this claim in interview after interview, more emphatically or less: “He looked a bit like my father,” she hints to Hans Ulrich Obrist. Or later: “I was very fascinated by Mario, I just watched him. He reminded me of my father.”54 After first meeting him in Bologna, Dean “hounded the museum photographer for a photograph of him, which she said she would send me, but never did. I wanted to put images of the two men side by side to document the likeness as proof of my objectivity.”55 Here Dean describes—­as directly as she ever will—­the innermost tactics of her own work, her repeated search in her analogue medium for the more powerful

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experience of analogy, a “likeness” that can only emerge, it seems, through the performance of a kind of lateral positioning, the desire to see each face “side by side.” In Mario Merz, this literal but unrealized desire to place the two men next to each other comes to be displaced into the analogical and lateral working of her camera in the film. Watching the film, we seem everywhere deflected from the old and fierce Italian artist, who mostly sits, calmly facing Dean’s camera. But working to film Merz on her own, without a crew—­and on a day of turbulent weather, gathering storms, the clouds often overtaking the sun—­Dean has admitted to a series of technical “errors,” pushing the film frequently into both over-­and underexposure, the light at times too blinding, the shadows then too deep, to see Merz perfectly or clearly. Exacerbating this, her camera focuses—­as if it cannot help itself—­on physical details of Merz’s body and face and hair, pressing in tight on his hands, or becoming overly attached to his eyebrows or his glowing white mane. Later films by Dean will repeatedly echo this oblique approach to her portrait subjects, an opacification of the portrait that we sense in the repeated enactment of a series of shots that produce so many close-­up, fragmentary details. It is an opacification sensed as well as we gaze, for example, at an artist like Claes Oldenburg, seen by Dean’s camera mostly from behind, repeatedly filmed facing away from us or from the back, in Dean’s film Manhattan Mouse Museum, 2011. While in Mario Merz the blocked portrait subject mostly faces forward, the inversion here seems paradoxically to link the films rather than separate them. A similar experience had already arisen in the more monumental of Dean’s two filmed portraits of Merce Cunningham, in Craneway Event, 2009, as we follow shots that linger too close on the choreographer’s hands, making notes; or as we get distracted by the dancer’s notorious wild hair, electric tangles of white, standing on end; or as we see him emphatically from behind, over and over, from the back, the visual plenitude of the portrait denied us. In Manhattan Mouse Museum, Oldenburg spends most of the time of the film physically in contact with a collection of small objects, the salvaged miniature commodities that populate works like his Mouse Museum or Ray Gun Wing projects, caring for these physical things, observing them closely, touching and turning and dusting them, inducing frequent physical reactions in his own body, as we hear him repeatedly sniffling as he cleans. We are presented with a physical approach to Oldenburg as an artist, pressed close by Dean’s camera to his body from behind, as he cares physically for tiny things, and brings temporary order to the entropy of matter, even at one point handling for a long time a miniature male penis in his wild collection, carefully and earnestly dusting it off. It had been a similar activity that we witness in Craneway Event, as we press close to Cunningham, most often from behind, or in lateral asides that fragment his body, watching him as he

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Tacita Dean, Mario Merz, 2002. 16 mm color film with optical sound, 8 min., 30 sec.

watches his dancers, directing them, but also—­or so it inevitably seems—­caring for them, collaborating with them instead of ordering them about in the conventional directorial way. We see Oldenburg and Cunningham in old age, perhaps as displaced avatars of the figure of the Father as Dean comes to envision this. But these are patriarchs that allow the “Father” to be seized in the modality of the artist and art making, through the act of aesthetic creation and its infinitely various internal processes, a very different inflection of the paternal and the generative, and one hardly arriving at the singular progenitor or the patriarchal Father at all. Many years earlier, as Dean created her first filmic portrait of the aged male subject—­in the form of the aging male artist—­as she spontaneously arrived at the idea of filming Mario Merz, the physical had already become all. Usually described as authoritative and opinionated, Merz insisted that Dean film him without interviewing him, or without any speaking; as she had already begun to record the nature sounds of the garden where he sits, we can in the final film hear him a little bit, but the artist’s voice is muffled, like a person mumbling to themselves, distractedly, drowned out by the sounds of the world. “I think Mario gave himself to the film,” Dean relates in a subsequent interview. “Who knows what goes on in the heads of old men?”56 The soundtrack of the film refuses to answer the question, for the gift the artist gave was simply his body, his physical presence and appearance, something Dean has almost obsessively underlined. “I, like you,” Dean insists to Hans Ulrich Obrist, “think that older people are fantastic. For you it’s maybe more cerebral but for me it’s very physical. I love the way that time is inscribed in their bodies. That’s what I am really attracted to.” Pushing further, Dean admits that the attraction was based on sheer physicality in the Mario Merz project, precisely because of the resemblance of the artist to her father. And so she describes her film to Obrist: “He sat . . . and just became very

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physical, he became his body in a way, which was very unlike him, because he was famous for being very authoritative and talking a lot.”57 The analogy to the father emerges here through matter and the material, through the body, and Dean underlines this essential move: “It was just about his body in a way. It has that quality to it.”58 At times, while we witness Dean pressing her shots close to Merz throughout the film, the physical voyage of the film becomes something she imputes to its subject instead, to Merz himself, as if the form the film takes did not properly “belong” to her at all: “He was definitely aware of what was happening and wanted to present himself in his physicality more than he had ever done—­how he had performed in front of a camera before—­which had always been very forthright and dogmatic.” She then shares: “But for me, he really wanted to be just physical, his physical self, which was quite amazing. And then it happened again in Boots and in other works.”59 Seeing the Father, or rather searching for a “likeness” or analogy to her father, Dean instead produces a chiasmus: Merz insists on a film where he appears visually, with “no speaking,” while Dean’s father only emerges aurally in the work, without image, speaking to his daughter in the simultaneous Berlin Project. As an aside, Dean has admitted to regretting that she did not film her father before his passing, in 2010. But she did once almost film her father, or rather did so indirectly, as she made footage in 2008 of her parents’ home, in the wake of completing the film Amadeus (Swell Consopio), where she stages a return to Folkestone; footage in which her father appears, inside the home, in the manner of the external, porous shots of the then recently completed film Michael Hamburger.60 All of the films of aging men were “always like an attempt to do him strangely,” Dean herself avers, before admitting to an even more fraught project involving her father, now in the wake of his death.61 With ambition to return to writing after a career in the law, Dean’s father “left a lot of notebooks and he was desperate to write his autobiography, which he gave the title Prisoner on the Bench, because he was a judge.” Even the association of the Father function in psychoanalysis with the Law becomes fraught in Dean’s specific case, particularized around the chance details of biography. “I decided when he died, although I don’t know now, it’s become more dissipated and complicated, that I would try and write his autobiography, using his name as a pseudonym.”62 To write in the place of the father, to write as or for the father, to write in the name of the father, to write the father’s autobiography: a pairing beyond the bounds of what psychoanalysis calls “identification” is being imagined. Identification involves a kind of becoming, a desire to become, but here we hear of a collaboration beyond death, perhaps a reparation in the face of failure, incompletion, loss. Instead of this, Mario Merz and Dean’s subsequent film works enact a repeated chiasmus, a literal torsion or turning. With Merz appearing in the mode of sheer

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physicality, through the body; and her father aurally, as sound and voice, the inversion perhaps indicates a displacement that instead should be read as the sign of a transformation, a mutation, the doubling here more an operation of splitting, or the making-­different that is paradoxically the most passionate and central concern of the analogical. It is a doubling that should call up for us the idea of form and medium, indeed of the photographic double—­which, as we have already seen with Zoe Leonard, becomes now an operation opened onto difference, as opposed to former notions of copy, repetition, or seriality. As framed retrospectively, in her written aside on the Mario Merz film, the transformation of likeness, of the uncanny double, of the initial and almost hallucinatory encounter with the Father in another form and in another being, becomes the lesson for Dean of her first portrait film. Having approached Merz physically, through the body, Dean writes after completing her film: Something else happened. Suddenly, I could no longer see my father’s features in Mario’s face, nor in the movement of his hands, or the small steps he took when he walked. It seemed as if the genesis of my desire had burnt itself out, and the making of the film had purged me of my subjectivity. Mario Merz had at last become Mario Merz to me. It was as if their beguiling similarity had been but the means to beget myself a film of Mario in the garden that afternoon in San Gimignano. As for the striking, destabilizing likeness to my father, I can barely see it anymore.63

What is Dean describing here? What process does the film ultimately give witness to? Is this redemption? Reparation? It is literally a separation and splitting to which Dean confesses, a splitting off of a potential double from the burden of representing the father, a kin figure recognized but now cast in another mold. Perhaps this is the form that reparation must take. Years later, long after Mario Merz’s death soon after the making of her film, in the immediate aftermath of her own father’s passing, Dean would be tasked—­instead of ghostwriting her father’s autobiography—­with writing his obituary.64 Alongside her searching and singular text—­bucking almost all accepted niceties of the genre, and approaching her father through his own Oedipal conflict and its effects on his life—­ the artist published a portrait photograph of Joseph Dean (called “Joe” throughout), a frontal portrait that rhymes now retrospectively with the frontal images of Mario Merz. And so we can see the piercing, dark pupils the two men perhaps shared, the redoubled bald pate spreading upward from their eyes, the eyebrows for each white and overgrown like weeds, the thick but colorless muttonchops of Merz exaggerating in obstinate countercultural mode the still-­persistent sideburns of Dean’s more conservative father. But beyond these wayward details, the two men do indeed

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appear utterly unalike. It is as if the witnessing of the double was a desire, even a fantasy, to allow the physical to reassert itself. And it is in the body that the double will be split, a kin figure discovered, but only as he wanders away from the father. Or better, it is in the aged male body that the compulsion to find the Father in every (male) authority figure or precursor comes to falter and eventually fail, and instead the father-­double will fall away, splinter off, split in two, the analogy of Mario Merz establishing the manner in which we can imagine a father figure wandering away from the function of the paternal, from any association with “authority” and the Law.

What did they do in the Charité? I remember it all being Greek They had these awful anaesthetics in those days Because they would have had to cut it off right at the top here . . . So my father didn’t believe it, can you believe it? He said, “No.” And so I can thank my dear father for my leg. 65

In Paris in 2003, upon the occasion of the first exhibition of Boots, Dean reclaimed an early drawing, a collage really, until then more or less forgotten, displaying it outside the rooms where her three versions of the film were screened. Itself titled in tripartite form Oedipus, Byron, Bootsy, 1991, the work on paper seems to have been torn from a spiral notebook, the ripped left edge rhyming emphatically with the sprocket holes in a piece of film. Three collaged extremities descend from the top of the page, as if from the heavens, three sliced pieces of shin, ankle, and foot. These bottoms of the body arrive from on high in different colors, moving from white to tan and black, and all have different shapes, with none of the three identical body parts identical at all. One is lighter and one is darker, one is thicker and one is graceful and another is squat, and the toes of the lined-­up feet curve up and down, each articulated in their own individual way, working together to create a collective undulation, a pattern of movement or modulation—­the shape, we might say, of the analogue—­like waveforms. Labeled in script on the drawing with the reference to Oedipus, Lord Byron, and Boots, Dean’s image creates a chain, three feet detached from the body but then linked together, following each other like ducklings wandering off in a row, from the “swollen-­footed” king to the clubfooted, limping poet to Dean’s more recent beloved “twin.”

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In Dean’s early works on paper, long before Boots or even the Oedipal project announced in the late 1990s around the idea of Antigone wandering with her father-­ brother into exile, the image of the severed, swollen foot spreads everywhere. There is, already, Oedipus, 1991, a single profile of an unduly enlarged, misshapen foot, a visual translation from the Greek. The swollen foot appears like an absence, all shadow, a silhouette as empty as a black hole, inscribed with the ill-­fated name of Oedipus, and surrounded by a deformed square in delicate pencil line like an intimation of an admittedly irregular film frame—­a frame infected by the foot’s deformation. There is My Feminist Foot, 1991, the lone foot turned the other way with respect to the solitary limb of Oedipus, as if the two could form a pair, and encircled too with a square pencil frame like a shot in a film. The foot appears mottled and unlovely, the pure black giving way this time to color, as if the severed limb were bruised, or seized in the process of decomposition. Sliced from photographs of ancient statuary, as in the filmstrip progression of feet and legs presented in the collages titled Jeté, 1991/92; or with the feet repeatedly imaged as either cut-­out fragments or empty, open silhouettes—­delicate, wavering drawings as if traced from a prior model or source—­Dean’s early pictorial language calls up the precedent of an artist like Nancy Spero. Establishing an underrecognized feminist inheritance, Dean’s collages lean upon and redouble the example of Spero’s then still relatively unsung work, her visual language involving the repeated imprint of mythic figures, in so many parts and pieces. But with Dean’s obsessive focus on the foot, and with this body part’s inherent articulation of contrary vectors, opposed shapes, like the primordial condition of form itself—­a simple affair of the wavering horizontal set against the rigid vertical—­ the drawings also call up a specific contemporary of Spero’s feminist practice. Dean’s early drawings have mostly been seen in relation to her career-­long interest in Twombly, to the male artist’s particular fusion of regressive depiction and inchoate scrawl, of tenuous graphic deposit and the fading ancient word, but here Dean instead seems closer to Oldenburg. For the foot collages call up (and precisely invert) the Pop artist’s fixation on the similarly shaped “Ray Guns” of his imagination, again a base or basic articulation of form—­horizontal against the vertical—­encountered everywhere, in a burgeoning collection of detritus and found objects, allowing a confusing, anti-­categorical category to emerge where all forms can be collided and compared, with serial repetition slipping instead into the analogical, sameness eroded into the riot of infinite difference. Dean’s earliest works thus already announce the trajectory that will lead to Manhattan Mouse Museum by 2011. Some of Dean’s collages imagine the feet as the building blocks of form, or like the letters of a word, a visual “alphabet” to be arranged and rearranged in image

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Tacita Dean, Oedipus, 1991. Carbon paper and line drawn through carbon paper on paper, 4 9⁄64 × 5 53⁄64 in.

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after image (ABC, 1991/92). But with Oldenburg’s recurring phallic weapon ceding here to a soft, fleshy form prone to ungainliness and deformation, an undulating and wavelike body part that supports the entire body, here severed from its structural function, we wonder what this language of feet, this alphabet of severed ankles and wriggling toes could construct. The feet sprout hooks in some drawings, to be suspended like clothes or torture victims on high, in an endless permutation (Before the Fact, 1991/92; The Story of Skipiod, 1991/92). They come cloaked in the religious iconography of the past, traced from Renaissance paintings, but of catastrophe and the Fall, like the feet and legs of Masaccio’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, ca. 1424–­27, copied in Dean’s series Czech Footage Sequence, 1991/92.66 Or they reappear in her earliest blackboard drawings, with some of the collages having been pinned repeatedly to the various states of the Sixteen Blackboards, 1992, where the inspiration for including these accretions seems borrowed from examples of the same severed body parts in appropriated ex-­voto images, religious icons—­or, more accurately, healing icons, monuments of reparation—­which appear in the first

states of the blackboards, before the collages and drawings of feet take over. And yet despite the trappings of spirituality, Dean’s ungrounded, dislocated feet, hung on high or floating up into the air, to be endlessly shuffled—­an action, taken literally, that is precisely that of the hobbled, afflicted foot—­seem simultaneously unable to transcend their devotion to the low, an impossible alphabet of the body, a writing in and of sheer matter or physical form. Clearly, the chain of feet in these earliest of Dean’s works are already being analogized to film, a connection moving reflexively, but also eccentrically, from the (human) foot to (film) footage, from the individual body part, the physical base of the body—­the most “human” part of the human body, as Georges Bataille might say—­to the string of stills in a strip of film.67 This is the modality of the early collages, a lineup of feet, the movement of feet, a chain of feet, like the footage of film, and it is an analogy directly named in Dean’s triptych of walking feet titled the Czech Footage Sequence—­first feet, “original” feet, Adam’s and Eve’s feet, Masaccio’s feet, the afflicted, accursed feet of the Expulsion and the Fall. It is as if an ur-­form of

FIG U R E 3.10   Tacita Dean, My Feminist Foot, 1991. Collage, line drawn through carbon paper, oil pastel, and PVA on paper, 4 9⁄64 × 5 53⁄64 in.

Tacita Dean, ABC, 1991/92. Oil, graphite, varnish, and collage on paper, diptych, 4 9⁄64 × 5 53⁄64 in.

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“displacement,” as I have been using this Freudian word, had been isolated in the lineup of feet, the exodus and wander of the foot; and claimed, through this body part, for film. Thus, in these early works—­in the chain of works with their chain of feet that then comes to fruition in Dean’s later career—­the foot will also always be, first and foremost, an affair of the excessive “swollen foot,” an “Oedipus,” an afflicted foot, in exile or exodus. At the start, for Dean, “Oedipus” is already taken physically, and literally, as a word that erupts less as the principle of the Father and the Law, in the phantasmatic mode of castration and loss, and more as an excessive and unruly signifier that becomes flesh, a medium gone physical, a concept chased back to matter and the body. And in this regressive and stubbornly physical mode, the Oedipal can ramify with other objects and other forms, with film especially, the foot followed into footage—­as if Dean’s understanding of film as a medium was always already afflicted, in exile or exodus, in the mode of aftermath, in the wake of the Fall. Film was always already for Dean an instrument of displacement. A few years after making these collages, Dean included among her early projects a multimedia work titled Foley Artist, 1996—­seen by its initial critics as an analytic examination, perhaps a deconstruction, of film and the cinema itself. Looking to make explicit the sound effects that need to be postproduced to accompany the inherently silent footage of analogue film, Dean worked with two expert—­and, of course, aging—­Foley artists, “Beryl” and “Stan,” the woman improbably nicknamed “Beryl the Boot,” and the man sometimes referred to as “Stan, Stan, the Footsteps Man.” In other words, Dean set herself to examining the way sound comes to be constructed in film, not only in the retroactive guise of postproduction, but as a fiction, a construction, a supplement added like an excrescence to the film that has already been shot—­sound in film as an inherent modality of excess. And as Dean

worked with the “footsteps artists,” as “they are sometimes called,” she set Beryl the Boot and Stan the Footsteps Man a paradoxical task, difficult to reconcile with a conventional analytic impulse.68 For they worked blind in Dean’s project, in what we now recognize as the modality of Oedipus, making their walking sounds and other effects without any relation to the visual image, the already recorded film that would normally guide their actions.69 And so we face an “analysis” of film that hardly seems so far from Boots, the analogies spreading in multiple ways. Examining the production of filmic sound, Dean arrives again at the foot, at the blind, wandering Boot, and comes later in Boots to give this form, now in both sound and vision. As she once remarked, to Theodora Vischer: “The thing with Boots is, you notice the labour of walking. You notice the action of walking because it’s flawed. If he was an able walker the narrative wouldn’t be about this slow walk through the building, through time, through memory. It would be entirely different. The only reason you notice it, is because it’s a flawed action. It’s the same with so many things. You notice things when they have a flaw; when they touch failure.”70 Oedipus will be chased back to the body, to the low, to the afflicted, swollen foot. If this amounts to a recurring base impulse of Dean’s work, it can be sensed not only in the literal recurrence of feet and footsteps in her later projects but in all those works where an aesthetic structure gives way to an emphatic physical reading, where a medium devolves into something like a body, a living being. The common structure of Dean’s early films that prioritize the frozen frame, with film approximating against the grain the fixed and static image of photography, can be seen as resting upon a deeper analogy, an almost regressive insistence, that the still film is a kind of uncanny, “living” photograph—­and a more profoundly “open” photograph—­like a substitute subject or being.

Tacita Dean, Czech Footage Sequence, 1991/92. Three drawings: found labels, line drawn through carbon paper, ink, oil pastel, and PVA on paper, each 4 9⁄64 × 5 53⁄64 in.

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Dean radically enacted this principle in another later work, another of her filmed portraits of Merce Cunningham—­a film that also must be seen in a complex way as another displaced self-­portrait—­her film Merce Cunningham Performs stillness (in Three Movements) to John Cage’s Composition 4'33" with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007 (Six Performances; Six Films), 2007. The attempt by the aging dancer to hold a deeply photographic immobility becomes the task of the filmed performance at hand, the stasis rhymed with the silence, neither of them pure or complete. Merce Cunningham Performs stillness aligns the still film with a stilled body, and reflexively reveals through a filmic portrait the subjectivity that Dean’s cinematic form had always imagined. But in many of Dean’s films we encounter objects that appear like effigies of the human body, like the cracked, aging volumes of the pottery in the Morandi film Day for Night, evoking wrinkled skin, but also a set of distended human forms; or the similarly swollen shapes that Dean once filmed in Madagascar of the baobab trees, with the bloated mass of these immobile entities seeming so often to raise their inverted-­root branches like imploring “arms” to the sky. These latter works that evoke the human in effigy are precisely the films by Dean that most insistently

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Tacita Dean, Baobab (location photograph), 2001. 16 mm black-­and-­white film with optical sound, 10 min.

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approximate her medium to the still photograph, comparing film to photography. They seethe with the energies of analogy. As described in an essay by Julia Garimorth, Dean’s Baobab, 2002, plays as a film with the visual effect of “incessant contrasts,” the modality of dealing with “light and shade characteristic of photographs.” But the poetics of contrast also relay a more general concern with “transition” itself, and a shift that “usually goes unseen.”71 Film seeks out an analogy with photography, seeking to approximate its appearance, its immobility, its fixation, its inscription of light. It stands still in an expression of relationality or even solidarity, a kind of “kinship” between forms. This familial metaphor brings us back to Oedipus, but it is also the metaphor under which Dean herself explicitly placed her film, as she found herself attracted to recording these “strange, fantastical trees”—­now threatened with extinction—­ “that seem to take on human personality.” Baobab would be narrativized as a search for a lost, or forgotten, kinship: the baobabs “stand about, frozen in animated posture,” in Dean’s inherently photographic description, “hands on hips, arms to the sky, bending one closer to the other to hear its talk. And as we walked amongst them, we soon gave them names. . . . They appeared lost from their prehistoric kinfolk, turned to a breathing stillness like the standing stones in Cornwall.”72 And the “kinship” that Dean finds, as if regressively—­between tree and human being, or between photography and film—­comes to be located in another swollen form, a bodily form, but a body in excess, as if the relationality at stake can only be made apparent at the limits, the baobab trees evoking a body that has become somehow too intensely physical. But the metaphor must be taken to its limits as well. It is almost as if the lesson of a work like Baobab—­the lesson of so many of Dean’s initial frozen films—­is that film is a kind of “swollen” photography, a photograph filled to bursting, pushed beyond its conventional bounds. This again thrusts the work into the Oedipal orbit, but an Oedipus translated visually into a swollen foot, Oedipus or the Father figure become flesh and matter, and located in the real. In this guise, throwing out analogical connections as opposed to division and separation, the female artist herself can embody the Oedipus now being invoked—­perhaps she can embody it most of all—­something on which Dean has repeatedly insisted, reminding her audience of her own affliction, her own physical swelling and limping gait, as she has increasingly suffered from a crippling arthritis over the years since her work as a filmmaker began. And all of this would be returned to and underlined—­the physical motor of Dean’s analogue projects, the foot that girds the “swollen” footage at the basis of Dean’s films—­at the moment of 2010 or 2011, at the point of the turn in Dean’s work. In the films at this moment, suddenly the iconography of some of Dean’s earliest collages

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began to erupt, like the return of the repressed: for example, the incongruous red egg that floats mysteriously, like a celestial orb, around all the shuffling feet of Czech Footage Sequence, encountered as one of many globular images played with in Dean’s monumental commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, the work she titled simply film, 2011.73 And it was at this precise moment, too, that Dean published a singular, almost indescribable book with a frequent interlocutor, the writer and scholar Marina Warner, where the Oedipal metaphor or analogy would return, and be made explicit, unavoidable—­a slender, delicate tome titled simply Footage, in the resurgent language of her earliest collages.74 I cannot do justice here to Warner’s extraordinary text—­a deep, historical meditation on the afflicted foot in art and poetry, in myth and religion, and of course in Dean’s own work. The text is sui generis in its range and scope, and I have been following (weakly) in its footsteps here. But Dean’s contribution to the publication—­embodied in a photographic series focused on antiquity, like others she has published—­has gone more or less unremarked. Throughout Footage, the severed feet return, in the form of photographs of the bottom of so many ancient statues, mostly Egyptian. On the book’s cover, a first image presents a foot in stone, stepping forward in the Egyptian manner, as if the foot were not only the base of art, the literal support for a sculpture, but more, that the striding footstep—­usually an attribute, in Egyptian art, of men—­would in some essential way be definitional of the human form itself. But in Dean’s cover image, the foot has been cracked, right through the ankle, and precariously and insufficiently patched. The threat returns of a severed foot indeed, redoubled by the crop of the camera, and perhaps intimating, in the ancientness of the eroded artifact and the threat of its imminent dissolution, a more general concern with affliction. And so Dean begins to play with the photographs, all of feet, collaged together into strips, placing the feet into the primordial movement of the step, now evoking not the origin of art in general, but the building of the filmic image from its basis in the photographic still—­here always aligned with the motionless foot, hewn from immobile stone. As the book opens, a first string of photographs arrange themselves vertically, indeed like a filmstrip. They each seize upon the Egyptian sculptural trope of the primordial stride, with one foot thrust forward. Finding different sculptural examples of this ubiquitous trope and then stringing them together, Dean resists placing the feet in motion, like an attempt at simulating walking, film leading sculpture into the illusion of life, for her camera faces the feet head-­on, and the image type stutters and repeats. Instead, coming closer to the feet and then moving slightly away, or colliding feet from multiple sculptures of different overall shape, the feet themselves seem to increase and decrease in size from photograph to photograph, as if the effect were precisely one of a single foot going through the process of swelling, engorgement, or affliction.

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Images from Tacita Dean, Footage, from Seven Books Grey (Göttingen: Steidl, 2011).

A great permutation then unfolds, with later image collages—­really they are collisions, the photographs sliced and laid down next to each other, side by side, or layered like images in a pile—­the later photographs colliding different sculptures together, different feet, of different sizes, perhaps of different genders, sometimes mixing color images with black-­and-­white. A general contagion of sculptural fragments erupts, and the photographs of the sculptural feet are laid down almost always on the angle, abutting each other unevenly, as if askance or askew. Exacerbating the hybridity of the image constructions, there are some monsters, odd or ungainly feet that arrive on the page alone, sometimes enlarged and at other times shrunken by the photograph. One massive foot seems to have but four toes, and another—­though this is probably an illusion of the camera angle—­really seems to carry six, the foot divorced from the sculptural body it once carried, splayed flat against its elongated pedestal. Dean reproduces this specimen across the page from a close-­up photograph of Boots, the camera gazing down, toward the floor, where we are finally given to see, in great detail, his giant orthopedic shoe, his multiple canes. A few times in Footage, Dean combines a living foot with the sculptural effigies, the resulting collages positioned uncannily between the living and the dead; and in the wake of Boots’s giant, engorged shoe, the artist seems to complete the altered Oedipal trinity. Boots’s “swollen foot” lies at the very center of Footage, halfway through its course; but just a page or two later, Dean creates a photographic collision that stretches across the page, through its gutter, meeting in the book’s heart, the two photographs sutured in the binding. On the one side there are the feet, the sculptural feet, two massive appendages carrying a much smaller pair riding astride them, little feet standing on big feet. Attached to this, moving from black-­and-­white into color, there are more feet, but now of flesh, the soft, curving feet of a mother embracing

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those of a child, in the intimate space of a bed. The child wears pajamas on which one can read the word “football” over and over; one suspects that one is in the presence of a boy child, and, of course, one suspects that Dean has included here an image of herself with her own son. Inversions again erupt, as this image of maternal love reciprocally inflects the reading of the statuary on the opposite page, as we look back upon the big feet supporting the small. But as we transition from black-­and-­white to color, from the foot in stone or in art to the foot in flesh, the representation comes to be inverted, perhaps undone. For Dean’s Egyptian fragment here derives from a rather well-­known sculptural group at Karnak, of Ramses II standing with his adult daughter—­tiny, miniature, shrunken—­dwarfed by and perched upon his massive feet, as if conveying their respective positions and power. It is an image of king and princess, of father and daughter, transformed laterally into a new image (and imagining) instead of mother and son, their feet not nearly as hierarchical, sharing their curves and softness, echoing and folded into each other, the boy’s feet pushed ever so slightly forward by the mother’s, an image of the foot’s embrace. Instead of Oedipus, there are the curving feet, the swollen feet, endless and entangled. Instead of the feet arranged hierarchically, vertically, as basis and order and law, there is an alignment of feet, the side-­by-­side-­ness of feet, a confusion of feet, an inversion of the foot. Again, Footage was published—­the metaphor of footage returned—­just as Dean confronted the transformation of her film form, and we can sense its further messages. Film was now to become an “Oedipus” for Dean, which means something entirely other than a normative understanding of the artist’s project as the repetitive searching for the father, an obsession with the paternal, with tradition, with legacy and lineage. Film is an Oedipus, a swollen foot, which we can now understand as a kind of footage filled beyond itself, and to excess. And this is precisely the turn announced by the new forms—­afflicted and yet engorged—­of the work film by 2011. The project of film as the bodily project of swollen footage might carry along with it the old Oedipal metaphors: it implies disease, sickness, trauma, as if Dean recast the project of film in the wake of film’s affliction, like a foot wounded and hurt. But swelling can also be this: it can be the sign of growth, expansion, metamorphosis. The engorged film frame long ago traced in pencil around Dean’s collage work Oedipus already intimated as much, the deformation ever so gently distended, belly-­ like, and enclosing another swelling form. The enlargement or expansion of film thus need not only be understood—­in the more typical bodily metaphor—­as phallic or tumescent; for the swollen foot, the Oedipus, that Footage imagines involves the mother, the distended body linking the swollen-­footed Oedipus to pregnancy, reproduction, generation.

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We are faced with work that insists on tying the Oedipal physically and beyond all conception to the female body, generating a new form from within. It is almost an act of sympathy that must be imagined, a redemption of an afflicted, swollen masculinity. Film must be reimagined as an Oedipus, which means it must reimagine Oedipus, as a swollen footage, distended and deformed—­but also expanded, with film finding, in this analogy to the body and the physical, another path. With its swollen footage, film might simply be the Oedipus of Dean’s persistent attentions, as if it were film that must be led, like Oedipus, and as an Oedipus, limping, blinded, into the space of exile, the space of waiting, the space of the between. Film must become post-­Oedipal, shorn from the father function, adrift on the sea of the lateral, the analogue finding its difficult way toward the analogical.

Chère petite soeur. Dear little sister. 75

And so Dean has turned, in the face of the chance vagaries of her own biography, the obsession with a “first” word and a dear sister’s improbable name, to the labor and myth of Antigone. According to Sophocles’s Theban plays, the work of Antigone might be understood as the mourning and care for the Father-­Brother—­for the mutilated Oedipus led by the faithful Antigone into exile; or for her own generational brother (and nephew) Polyneices, in the play Antigone, mourned and buried against the decree of the king, in defiance of power and the law. To care for the Father-­ Brother in the face of death: it seems an achingly precise description of the deep logic of so many of Dean’s films. But the Antigone principle of course runs deeper even than this, into the heart of Dean’s long and late work with film. In one of the most important of the many recent considerations of Sophocles’s drama, philosopher Judith Butler has asked: “What would happen if psychoanalysis were to have taken Antigone rather than Oedipus as its point of departure?”76 For Antigone’s fate is “decidedly post­oedipal.” As we well know, her father is her brother, with a mother shared in Jocasta; and her brothers are also her nephews, sons of her Father-­Brother, Oedipus. “The terms of kinship,” Butler writes, here “become irreversibly equivocal.” 77 This is, of course, another way of saying that the Antigone principle—­ the Antigone “complex”?—­raises the question of kinship, of relation, but through a series of bonds that become increasingly enigmatic, almost incomprehensible, in their opening onto multiplicity itself, or what Butler will call symbolic “promiscuity”:

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Antigone is one for whom symbolic positions have become incoherent, confounding as she does brother and father, emerging as she does not as a mother but—­as one etymology [of her name] suggests—­“in the place of the mother.” Her name is also construed as “anti-­generation” (gone [generation]). . . . If the stability of the maternal place cannot be secured, and neither can the stability of the paternal, what happens to Oedipus and the interdiction for which he stands? What has Oedipus engendered? . . . What will the legacy of Oedipus be . . . [in] situations, where positions are hardly clear, where the place of the father is dispersed, where the place of the mother is multiply occupied or displaced, where the symbolic in its stasis no longer holds? 78

Antigone represents a reinvention of kinship itself, of relationality, but not in its “ideal form.” Instead Antigone follows the rules of kinship to the point of their “deformation and displacement.” Butler takes Antigone as a model for those who attempt to “confound kinship in the rearticulation of its terms.”79 And so it will surprise no one that the philosopher of performativity then reveals the manner in which Antigone’s post-­Oedipal “fate” comes to be exceeded and exacerbated by a set of acts, an operation, a reiterated logic. Antigone seems overly attached to the paternal function; she “lives out a strange loyalty to her father,” bound to him, however, through a curse. But the curse of the father, Lacan’s definition of the symbolic, does “not quite capture her.”80 The father’s words, Butler writes, “are surely upon Antigone; they are, as it were, the medium within which she acts and in whose voice she defends her act.” But Antigone transmits the words of the Father in an “aberrant form.”81 And this displacement is then followed excessively, a “promiscuous obedience,” as Butler describes it. On Antigone’s burial of her brother, a love for her (dead) kin that Oedipus had claimed only for himself, and only to the extent that he was himself dead—­this father who is also a brother—­Butler writes: “It is clear that she both honors and disobeys this curse as she displaces her love for her father onto her brother. Indeed she takes her brother to be her only one—­she would risk defying the official edict for no kin but Polyneices. Thus she betrays Oedipus even as she fulfills the terms of his curse. She will only love a man who is dead, and hence she will love no man. She obeys his demand, but promiscuously, for he is clearly not the only dead man she loves and, indeed, not the ultimate one.”82 Thus Antigone actively produces and expands the “equivocation at the site of kinship” into which she was at first merely born. This is the “postoedipal dilemma” she comes to represent, one “in which kin positions tend to slide into one another, in which Antigone is the brother, the brother is the father, and in which psychically, linguistically, this is true regardless of whether they are dead or alive.”83 Antigone reinvents kinship as a “slide of identifications.” And if kinship, Butler then concludes,

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is the “precondition of the human,” Antigone presents instead “a new field of the human  .  .  . when gender is displaced, and kinship founders on its own founding laws.”84 Which is another way of saying that kinship, with Antigone, expands beyond the rule and the law. Such is the operation of kinship that one might trace in Dean’s move to film other artists, older artists and mostly male artists, and usually at the end of their lives, in the confrontation with death. “The old men I film,” Dean has stated repeatedly, “seem to die just afterwards.”85 It is as if she were directly invoking the labor of Antigone, her leading of the Father-­Brother into exile, her leading of film itself into this work of relinquishment. As opposed to the oft-­repeated claim that these “portrait” films should be understood in the spirit of the homage, or as a kind of simple tracing of artistic influence, Dean’s films seem to be reaching for something much more complex. As this subset of films begins, with Mario Merz, with a father substitute approached instead laterally, the “deformation and displacement” involved engenders an ambivalent kinship, as was then immediately made clear in Boots. Rather than the patriarchal and patrilinear web of “influence,” Dean’s subsequent portrait films begin to map a kind of strange “imagined family,” a series of discovered relations, like a search by and for the wayward sibling.86 Indeed, when Dean came to gather a series of these recent works in 2012, in an exhibition titled Five Americans, her promiscuous twinning of her own concerns (her own “self ”) with filmic and photographic portraits of Cy Twombly, Merce Cunningham, Claes Oldenburg, or Leo Steinberg contained what seemed at first a willful “aberration”: a short, double-­screen portrait film of the artist Julie Mehretu (gdgda, 2011). In the midst of this larger series of films or photographs devoted to aged men—­to a painter, a sculptor, a dancer, an art historian—­here suddenly was a double film centered on a woman, a painter, an African American artist, and one of Dean’s own generation. Some critics decried the bland logic of “demographics” as motivating the sudden exception in Dean’s potentially incoherent grouping. But as Dean’s camera filmed Mehretu mostly from behind as she worked with assistants on a new monumental painting, a large-­scale commission; and as one watched the intricate labor involved in this work’s execution, which necessitated utilizing the digital and a computer, but came to be realized through an elaborate painterly procedure of taping off parts of the work, a process akin to stenciling—­one could not help but be struck by the parallels observed here with Dean’s own recent work, and the crucial shift in form that the moment of 2010 or 2011 represents. For this was the year that Dean, too, like Mehretu, accepted a large-­scale commission, in the work film for the Turbine Hall. And this was a film that involved Dean in “inventing”—­in part through digital means—­a series of aperture masks for her analogue camera, so many stencils that would partially

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block sections of the film to be exposed, with the film run repeatedly through the camera, with alternating masks, producing all manner of image collisions now internal to the filmic frame. Even the double-­screen format of gdgda seems prescient, as this is precisely the presentational strategy of Dean’s most recent inventions with the new “collage” films she has been producing with the aperture masks, for example the side-­by-­side double-­anamorphic stretch of the recent film Antigone, which amounts to a pair of anamorphic 35 mm films shown abutting one another. Making gdgda at the same moment as film in 2011, Dean finds a sibling dynamic, a paradoxical connection both in form and in format, underlining, however, the different modalities in which painting and film could each employ blockage, masking, and stenciling. Relation emerges from the procedures of unmaking, a kind of shared image occlusion, even an image shattering; the sibling or likeness will be recognized around the processes of blockage, a kinship of visual holes and absences. And as the two women artists labored simultaneously at monumentally scaled commissions—­usually deemed the province of the “masculine”—­Dean works to prioritize twinning, likeness, alliance, a new form of sisterhood, a kinship in art deeper than any notion of influence. This is precisely the logic that must then be extended to Dean’s films devoted to men, to Oldenburg or Twombly or Cunningham. gdgda allows us to see that in her films of aging male artists, Dean also seeks out forms of connection, of relation, and the kinship established is potentially that of the sibling. The likeness discovered is at times so intense that these portrait films of Dean’s have often been described as “self-­portraits.” Dean films Twombly, in the work Edwin Parker, 2011, as graphic gesture and erasure come to the fore with the increasing importance in her work of the long-­standing series of blackboard drawings, so often summoning the classical

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Tacita Dean, gdgda, 2011. Two 16 mm color films, silent, 4 min.

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past; as blockage and deletion come to occupy the redefined process of her most recent films. Or Dean films Cunningham as the choreography of bodies and a kind of “open” direction of the people appearing in Dean’s films enter explicitly into her work, to the point that Dean has now appeared in her own films conversing with actors as Cunningham was depicted collaborating with his dancers. This shift became clear with Dean in her project Event for a Stage, 2015, and this change, too, has persisted in the film Antigone. We face a kind of occupation, an inhabitation, or even a “continuation” of the male artists’ work. This is not “influence” (and these are not “father figures”): Craneway Event, 2009, explores at one point Cunningham’s dancers using tape like Mehretu to block out their choreography or like Dean with her aperture masks to black out parts of the film frame, a twinning around absence again, the multiple lives of the stencil, a contagion of opacities. “I realized I was in the unique position,” Dean has said of Cunningham, when he passed away at the moment she began to edit her 2009 film, “of still being able to work with him and to create something new, not only about him but also with him.”87 Ambivalent kinship comes to override the more tame or normative idea of influence, and in the recent portrait films, Dean could be described instead as impossibly searching to relate to a “brother,” to locate the relationality of the sibling, to remake kinship of and with figures normally associated with the paternal, with the father—­the impossible labor and the position of Antigone.

“She leads along the roads of exile this father who is at the same time her tragic older brother. He blesses the fortunate offense that led him to Jocasta, as if incest with the mother had been but the means to beget himself a sister.” 88

The echoes lead us, inexorably, to film, 2011, to Dean’s monumental projection and commission for the Turbine Hall. We follow paradoxical reverberations, like the almost silent dancing of Cunningham’s troupe in Craneway Event, accompanied only by their own percussive steps resounding in the cavernous space of the performance, recalled by the silent film with which Dean now filled—­or underlined the emptiness of—­the massive Turbine Hall. But these steps also recall Boots, of course, the dancers standing in beyond all logic and reason for the wizened old man and his outsized foot, his hobbled journey of memories and echoes in another architectural void. And the echoes multiply, as they are wont to do: Dean’s film was not only silent but focused on architecture, on the partitioned far wall and windows of the Turbine Hall, which it internalized as a recurring and foundational image. Like Sound Mirrors

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and other early works, the film rhymed with and redoubled its original site, its first place of projection. It is as if the echo had now become something like the vocation of film itself, a medium of reverberation more than a simple index or visual trace, a form of recurrence weaving an expanding network of connections, like so many ripples spreading across water. Indeed, we sense in this introjection by film of the Tate Modern space another echo of Dean’s earlier films, with their recurring dedication to architectural structures from the past: industrial structures, abandoned structures, utopian and failed structures. As such, these were filmed architectures that followed the logic of ruination, and were most often depicted by Dean as falling into so many disjunct pieces. This decimated condition was itself echoed—­it was itself introjected by Dean’s films—­with Dean’s projection internally partitioned, for example, by the myriad window frames of the glass-­enclosed hangar of Craneway Event; or with her overall shot visually smashed, or faceted like a jewel, as was caused by the mirrored glass of the gridded architectural exterior in Palast. And yet again, this taking apart of the unity of the filmic projection, almost like a fragmentation of the cinema screen itself, travels back to Boots. In one of the most consequential of the echoes evinced by film, Dean began to use the internal gridded architecture of the Turbine Hall not only as an introjected image in the film to be projected but also as a strangely broken ground, an ungrounding of the film’s own background, with the work’s aperture-­gate masks initially matched to the template provided by the architecture’s loose grid. Allowing different zones in this grid to be shot and run as film through the camera at different times, Dean’s masking process initiated a massive breakup of the unity of the still shot, an intensification of former fragmentations, with her film now made up internally of multiple shots occupying the same space of projection, like a mosaic of so many disparate pieces. But this shattering of the filmic shot finds its true precursor in Boots, a film otherwise hard to attach to the more abstract logic and nonnarrative structure of film. Toward the end of each of the three versions of Boots, a specific shot—­an external shot, crucially, one of Dean’s key forms—­looks back upon the villa at sunset, and from the outside. The glass doors of the villa, the specific shape of their panes and their vertical gridded format, rhyme intensely with the later subdivision of the screen in film, with the template taken from the far wall of the Turbine Hall. As befits the later work’s introjection, even introspection, film now converts the externality of the shot in Boots to an internal shot of the museum’s architecture and its windows from within. But with the camera in Boots outside the pink villa in Portugal, at the moment that day is done, the glass windowpanes mirror the light and the villa’s surrounds as opposed to permitting visual access to the interior spaces.

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Tacita Dean, film, 2011. 35 mm black-­and-­white and color film, silent, 10 min., 42 sec.

The panes fragment and collide a disjunctive series of mirrored nature images, of sky and cloud and sun, of trees and garden and shrub—­and this too will be reiterated by much of the footage of natural phenomena that now erupts in film. The Turbine Hall commission returns us uncannily to this crucial scene, to the villa’s echoing of the fading light around it, to its broken mirroring back of that light, with film exacerbating the prior scene’s visual format and its fragmentation, like a memory that only becomes more vivid as time passes. We have returned to lateness as unmaking, to late style as a recalcitrant tearing asunder at a moment of expected culmination, of synthesis or fruition. For Dean made film as a kind of protest, as the culture announced analogue film’s increasingly

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dire “obsolescence”—­its death certificate signed prematurely by the industries that once supported its photochemical processes, all turning toward the digital.89 It is at this moment that the artist created a new analogue-­film form founded paradoxically and passionately on a crumbling ground of image fragmentation. Of course, film always depended on collage, on montage, on the ability to exacerbate the break or interstice between film frames, building upon this void the collision of disparate shots, the montage of scenes. The artist underlined this ungrounding in all her statements on the piece. At first unsure how to proceed—­with a film commissioned for a public space unlike any other in which she had worked, and massive in scale—­Dean insisted she was “lost,” but then: “I found my way eventually through collage.”90 An initial and recurring series of images would be devoted to a mountain, Dean’s reflexive and allegorical imagining of “Mount Analogue,” a figure taken from the eponymous and unfinished postsurrealist novel by the French writer René Daumal.91 But this and many of the other images that unroll during the film’s course, a string of seemingly unmotivated and arbitrary visual incident—­like a filmed version of automatic or stream-­of-­consciousness writing—­emerged at first from actual collages. Dean looked to her found-­image collections, to her piles of flea-­market postcards, which she then began to mine and to slice up, mapping out the image sequences of film. In this moment of gestation, the film looks back, to old analogue photographs, to found images, but also to modernism, as if in memory of the avant-­garde, reaching back to collage. And yet this memory, this lateness—­looking back to the preeminent modernist tactic of fragmentation itself—­comes to be positioned as the engine of invention, the font of a new idea of film form. While themselves a throwback to early cinema techniques for producing special effects, Dean’s aperture-­gate masks are of a complexity hardly imagined in film’s history; and so here, looking back, collage resurfaces not only to associate film with its techniques of montage and the cut, with the transition between scenes, or even the interstice between frames. Rather, now, the frame itself divides and subdivides from within, a mesmerizing, infinite play of image partition, so many particles endlessly colliding with each other internal to the overall screen or scene. But from this dynamic of lateness, from this fragmentation, from this self-­ shattering of the filmic image itself, something like a new unity began to emerge—­ here too like the overall patterning of mosaic, or even the luminous cloisonné effect of stained glass. This is a metaphor that film indeed explores, a kind of afterlife or archaic survival, with church architecture, Gothic stained-­glass windows, erupting as images through the myriad holes bored by Dean’s shifting aperture masks, asserting themselves several times in the place of the Turbine Hall’s own window openings. What we might name the (almost psychic) “breakdown” of the film frame leads to a

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Tacita Dean, Mount Analogue, 2011. Collage of postcards, 5 5⁄32 × 2 29⁄32 in.

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profusion of disparate images, an eruption of shots and scenes, now able to be linked in their sequencing but also literally collided, internal to the cinema screen. The breakdown of the frame leads to a new resource or engine of comparison, new forms of side-­by-­side-­ness, of the analogue slipping into analogy. Film here is like stained glass, the projection in the Turbine Hall indeed like a wall in a cathedral. But likeness itself now begins to spread like wildfire, as promiscuous comparison—­promiscuous kinship—­becomes something like the work of film form. The shards and particles once again will constellate into a series of new forms. The first sign of this new unity comes from another echo, and it again concerns the format of film itself. Reverberating with the architecture of the Turbine Hall, film introjected as a backdrop image the far wall of the space near where it was projected. But the work also responded to the space more generally, to the Turbine

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Tacita Dean, film notebook pages, 2011.

Hall’s narrowness and vertical rise. One result of this response was Dean’s move to work with 35 mm film instead of the 16 mm format she normally espouses, a question of the scale of the image that she needed to produce. But Dean also would take her habitual anamorphic stretching of her films, and add to this a rotation of the lens by 90 degrees, upending the conventional “landscape,” or horizontal, format of the cinema screen in a rhyme with the building itself. And this new format, this rhyme of image and architecture, called up another echo internal to Dean’s own oeuvre, from the turning-­point works of 2010 or 2011 especially. If the partitioning of the screen in Dean’s film had been presaged by the gridded space represented in Craneway Event, or the work’s silence by the mute wandering of The Friar’s Doodle, or the aperture-­masking process twinned by the stenciling and taping off recorded in gdgda, Dean’s projection format for the Turbine Hall placed film in closest dialogue with her portrait of the art historian Leo Steinberg made that same year, with the singular vertical format of still photographs arranged like a monolith in the work The Line of Fate, 2011.

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A portrait made of so many close-­up photographs of Steinberg’s hands, The Line of Fate reads immediately like a translation of Dean’s long-­standing concern with other, lower appendages, her materialization of analogue film through the bodily metaphor of the foot (footage), the afflicted or swollen foot—­her allegorization of her practice through the mythic references to Oedipus especially.92 In this part image of Steinberg, writing by hand is being compared and linked, clearly, to other analogue mediums like drawing, and also to photography and painting and film itself. But here a portrait by Dean comes to be communicated in a rare vertical or “portrait” format—­no matter the lateral or sideways movement of Steinberg’s writing hand overall—­and this vertical effigy has been constructed out of a kind of image partitioning, a broken, cumulative scene of arranged photographs, like a filmstrip, or like the mosaic effect of Dean’s other found-­image gravures.93 In its verticality, in its formal rhyme with and thus necessary (but underrecognized) connection to Dean’s series of portraits of aging men, film arrives as a project ensconced within the portrait genre, though hardly any images of human beings exist any longer within its purview. “I did immediately have a formal idea . . . to try and make a portrait format film,” Dean has explained. “Cinematically portrait format is awkward. But of course the one thing that does have a portrait format is the human being. But that was the one thing I was utterly sure I shouldn’t include, was a human being.”94 Having decided that her film would mostly exclude the human form, but that it must be oriented in “portrait” format to echo and underline a portrait-­format space, Dean describes her initial dilemma and conception: I found my way eventually through collage. I sat at my desk and made Mount Analogue, using my flea market postcard collection: the Matterhorn and the oily sea around Helgoland. I sorted out the postcards that were portrait [format] in shape: stairs, towers, waterfalls, fountains. . . . I blew up pieces of film and then glued sprocket holes onto the Mount Analogue collage and saw that the anamorphic portrait format that I had established at the beginning was, in fact, a strip of film. I realized I was making an ideogram and, unbeknown to me, the portrait I’d been struggling to recognize for so long was a portrait of film itself.95

A substitution has been announced here, a strategic displacement, an unconscious “recognition,” as Dean moved from her long-­labored-­on series of portrait films to a new film form in the portrait format. film would be necessary to confront as a “portrait of film,” like a subject—­but of what kind? How could a medium now act as a kind of being? What model of subjectivity would the work construct? It may at first sound purely formal, Dean’s concerted transformation of the overwhelming belonging of film and the cinema to the landscape format—­her

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Tacita Dean, film, 2011. Installation view: Tate Modern. Photo: Marcus Leith and Andrew Dunkley.

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impulse to turn this widening structure appropriate to objects and spaces toward the artistic genre of the subject, toward the vertical format of the portrait. But the change is momentous. For in this collision of formats we can in fact sense the implicit drive to think the subject in relation to the world—­literally, as film’s landscape format now becomes unfixed, and constitutes instead a portrait-­format image, as a double-­stretched horizontal swings into a towering vertical.96 We face an image genre devoted to nature and the world instead now occupying the image field that constitutes a subject. It is a simple shift from the horizontal to the vertical, but one motivated as well by this film’s desire to “rhyme” with the world (and echo the space of its exhibition). It is as if the swinging of the landscape format into the portrait format of film announced precisely the project of the author as receiver, this “self ” constructed only by making space for the world, a radical opening. A late form again provokes an alternative modeling of subjectivity—­the subject is at stake, and perhaps is the central stake, in any understanding of the strategies of lateness, of what might seem the otherwise anti-­subjective and anti-­expressive abandonment that lateness entails. Clearly, the displacement from Dean’s earlier portrait films implies that in film we are to be confronted in a new way with the “subject” of Oedipal fatigue, a new descendant or fellow traveler of the old male subjects, the Oedipal dynamics that occupied the entire prior decade of Dean’s art. This is the “recognition” that film ultimately provokes. But one might also observe that film engages again with the project of a kind of self-­portraiture, an imagining of the transformed figure of the “author” in the confrontation with a new conception of one’s “medium.” In her essay for the project, Dean describes precisely this dual interweaving: “I found in 16mm film a medium with which I was immediately comfortable and I have grown with it.”97 For Dean, to make the portrait of film is, then, somehow to make her own portrait, too: film underlines this by emerging as a “silent” film, as few of Dean’s films before 2010 in fact are, with the evocation of her own first name that the word “silence” provokes. And one of the few human traces in the film arrives as a circular aperture appears at the top of the screen, filled with a close-­up of a single eye, in black-­and-­white—­a memory image again, redolent of the radical pedigree of the early avant-­garde cinema, of Soviet cinema, of Dziga Vertov and his “Kino-­Eye,” for example. But the eye is clearly Dean’s own, the Kino-­Eye now given over to a woman auteur. Or almost: for the circular aperture appears more than once, and the second time we see it, the all-­seeing cinema eye floating on high clearly no longer belongs to Dean at all. It is also no longer black-­and-­white, but in color. And now it seems a child’s eye at which we gaze, and Dean has clarified this. As in the contemporaneous collages of Footage, Dean’s Kino-­Eye in film offers up an alternation between a

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mother and a child. It was never meant to be a deep enigma, and a notebook sketch for this scene in the film has been annotated by Dean—­“need to make it easy to guess.”98 In an interview with me, when asked about this sequence, Dean answered without any hesitation: “It’s my eye and my son’s eye.” To which she then quickly added: “And there is Mathew’s toe.”99 Dean refers here to her partner, the artist Mathew Hale. Almost imperceptible in the panoply of images thrown at the viewer in film, a close-­up image of a toe had appeared just a minute or two before Dean’s Kino-­Eye, in a bottom quadrant

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Tacita Dean, film, 2011.

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Tacita Dean, film notebook pages, 2011.

of the work’s broken screen, its lowness set against the later eye at the apex of all, its deformed and squat bulbousness contrasted with the circle’s geometric perfection—­a memory of surrealism, of course, paired with the resurgent image forms of Russian constructivism. The toe glows ruby red, like an inhabitant of that foundation of the analogue image in film that is the darkroom, but also like an intimation of violence, its blood-­red blush heavy and thick and almost dark against the serenity of the otherwise celestial eye on high, in the cinema sky. With the exception of some stray footage of feet running up a staircase, these are the only human or bodily signs in the entirety of film. They seem to point to the work’s play with the Oedipal itself, as if the film must be related to a kind of shuffling of the classic Oedipal triangle, of mother, and father, and child. “But the possibility of a previously unseen red . . . ,” the artist Roni Horn mysteriously opined, at the start of her contribution to Dean’s catalogue for the project, a book whose otherwise unadorned cover—­no title or graphics at all—­displayed a single enlarged image of a piece of blank red film, and which collected and documented a series of short statements from some eighty-­

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one artists, critics, curators, directors, and actors on “Film and the Importance of Analogue in the Digital Age.” But by the chance coincidence of last names (there is nothing coincidental for Dean when it comes to names), Horn’s statement on the enigma of the color red sat directly across the page from Mathew Hale’s own contribution, in his case an image contribution, a continuous strip of photographic film, with most of the frames glowing blood red.100 Here too, clear Oedipal stakes seem announced, as we gaze at so many enflamed images of a trip to Venice: sunset on the water, the phallic bell tower of San Marco knifing at the sky, boats and docks, and then, repeatedly, Rufus—­Dean and Hale’s son—­playing or pointing contrariwise to the phallic tower; and then too, in an almost final image, Dean herself, photographed by Hale gazing through her own photographic camera at, perhaps, one assumes, her son. To play with the Oedipal triangle is to play with positions, and substitutions, enacted by the alternation of the “Kino-­Eye” between Dean and her son. But as the image of the male toe—­the Father’s Toe—­compares its reddened ovoid to the eye and circle to come, as these shapes enact a kind of promiscuous similarity as opposed to stable and ironclad separation, we sense other substitutions, key to Dean’s portrait of film in film, indeed key to her reimagining of film itself. The toe spends its short time on its small and lowly fragment of the screen moving en pointe, like a disgusting parody of the ascending movement of a ballerina, a shift in positions that echoes—­as parody does—­the movement of the image in film from the horizontal to the vertical. Modernism would have called such redoubling self-­reflexive, but again with this image it is film, Dean’s reinvention of her medium, that comes to be compared unbelievably to the foot, to an ungainly toe, to a father’s big toe.101 And beyond simply moving into the vertical position of the image overall, this bulbous blood-­ red toe sets off a chain of signifiers, leading us to the Father in an all-­too-­physical guise, to memories of Boots and his outsized shoe, to Oedipus as a Swollen Foot. It leads us to an afflicted film of swollen footage, spouting so many chains of images and signifiers relating to each other, connecting to each other, like this toe form—­this anti-­phallus, a Father-­in-­pieces—­at the bottom of film and all its later cognates and its kin, a transgression of stabile positions and boundaries truly worthy of Georges Bataille. The slippage of Oedipal positions reminds us of the format of film once again, and it allows us to redescribe its overall address as founded on the slippage of kinship itself, a revision of film and relationality both. It is not only “world” and “self,” the horizontal and the vertical image, that come to intertwine in Dean’s new form. If Dean’s earlier portrait films are best described not as representing so many paternal precursors, like an almost pathological series of repeated homages to the

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Father figure, but instead as explorations of a lateral or sibling relation, perhaps of connection itself—­the portrait of film that film entails places the medium now in the complex position of this Oedipal confusion. As opposed to the Oedipal curse and its negation, we confront the myth of Oedipus as the double (redoubled) relation—­ relationality in excess and beyond all bounds—­of Oedipus the Father-­Brother discovered and cared for by the Sister-­Daughter, by Antigone. We discover that impossible relationality in a literal way. For, once again, film confronts the viewer as a vertical (paternal) image that has been constructed literally from the side-­by-­ side or sibling dynamic of film. It is the product of Dean’s intense lateralization of her medium, an anamorphic film, but then “turned.” We remember Boots and Dean’s filmic father-­turning, the work of film as a kind of perversion, the labor of the père-­vert. film now makes this turning or veering literal. A landscape image comes to be rotated into the portrait format—­this is really a weak or far too timid and formalist way of stating the shift Dean’s work now entailed. Instead, the work would confront—­it would produce—­a profound ambivalence, like that embodied by the logic of Oedipus and Antigone, the Father-­Brother, the Sister-­Daughter. In film, the vertical and the lateral cohere together. A “vertical” cinema, an image in the mode of the portrait or subject, comes to be constructed from the space of the lateral, and from a displacement of the lateral’s drive to connect.102 This “coherence” implies incoherence, a new ambivalence of film form that asserts a transformed kind of relationality, an assertion of promiscuous kinship. Film (film) has become the site of that ambivalent kinship. It has become the Father-­Brother. Oedipus at last. At an earlier key moment in her work’s development, Dean had already defined the analogue mediums of film and photography to which she adheres as based on a thinking of what we could now call “kinship.” The analogue itself becomes a platform for Dean’s intervention into what psychoanalysis calls the “family drama.” At the moment of an earlier retrospective that Dean named Analogue—­as she now named her Turbine Hall commission film—­Dean felt compelled to define the photochemical forms that she would continue to defend. She felt compelled to define the analogue, but admitted again to being lost: “I realize,” she confessed, “that I do not know what analogue means.” But as she bore down on her task, Dean at first emphasized affect and subjective intimacy. She characterized the analogue as like a close relation: “Analogue, it seems, is a description—­a description, in fact, of all things I hold dear.” Relationality would be its ethos, and Dean continued: “It is a word which means proportion and likeness, and is, according to one explanation, a representation of an object that resembles the original.” An analogue is not “a transcription or a translation but an equivalent in a parallel form.” It is an equivalent that must however be “continuously variable, measurable and material.”

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Tacita Dean, film notebook pages, 2011.

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And so Dean insists as well on the physical as an inherent dimension of analogue forms, bringing us back to her unceasing reference to the body, to psychic or subjective dynamics transmuted always into material forms. “Everything we can quantify physically is analogue: length, width, voltage and pressure. Telephones are analogue; the hands of watches that turn with the rotation of the earth are analogue; writing is analogue; drawing is analogue.” The analogue involves “a continuous signal,” a “continuum,” contrasting it with the digital, constituted by “what is broken up, or rather, broken down, into millions of numbers.” For Dean, ultimately, the digital “neither breathes nor wobbles, but tidies up our society, correcting it[,] and then leaves no trace.”103 By inference, for Dean, the analogue instead does “breathe and wobble,” and we think of her films of limping subjects, like Boots, as stand-­ins, like the exiled and afflicted Oedipus, for her analogue medium itself. We think of her early work as a platform for the paradoxes of the “still film,” a kind of “living photograph,” a medium-­in-­excess taken not just as “alive,” but as a model of being.

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As the sign of this “life,” film’s inheritance, its present potential, seems to have become the ceaseless presentation of transgressive relationality. The work of the analogue is the work of “continuous variation,” and this can be followed into the unruly kinship discovered over and over in Dean’s filmic forms. Surely this can stand as one description of the operation of film. Beyond its foundational backdrop image of the Turbine Hall, or its obsessional hallucination of the icon of “Mount Analogue,” almost all the images in film could be described as self-­referential. The sprocket holes that line the sides of the vertical screen throughout initiate this internal self-­ reference—­a film that also constitutes a picture (a portrait) of film—­but most of the ways in which the work points to its medium are not so direct or literal. An escalator runs, its stairs resembling the movement of film frames; a river flows, its coursing like the unceasing stream of cinematic images; a phallic smokestack belches industrial clouds into the heavens, rhyming its monolithic form with the vertical monolith of Dean’s transformed and rotated screen.104 Formal self-­reference, Dean’s pointing to her analogue medium, emerges through a concerted play of almost alchemical mutation—­one thing becoming another and then another again, film finding itself in so many disparate signifiers, and finding itself only to the extent that it endlessly mutates, in continuous variation. The echoes and resonances initiate a new experience of the labile, as the self-­reflexive drive becomes paradoxically the motor of this riot of visual incident. As such, formal self-­reference in film also insists that it be taken literally, as a reference to the “self,” but now to a subjectivity that can encompass this insistent affiliation and variation. The image streams of film do seem deeply in the orbit of the prior films that Dean has made, to all of her prior themes and concerns. They refer not just to “film,” but to Dean’s films. We are confronted by images of stairs, as in Boots. But also we gaze at objects like soap bubbles moving up and moving down, floating and falling, like an allegory of the basely material and the celestial, of matter and of air. The constant transmutation of broken shots and images at first seems to emerge from the almost cosmic territory of earlier projects like Dean’s A Bag of Air, 1995, or the Berlin Project, as film catalogues all the states of matter, of solid and liquid and gas. There are random images of pigeons pecking away at the grass, like the birds in Pie. There are grids of skyscraper windows, as in Palast. We see strange, four-­petaled violet flowers, suggestive of Dean’s early obsession with four-­leafed clovers. Sun and dappled shadow, single towering trees, mountain landscapes and every possible imagining of water: each nature image in film reads simultaneously as a memory image, in the second degree, an image of the image of the natural world that Dean has been tracking in film after film, throughout the course of her artistic life.

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But the “self ” or subjectivity we encounter in film leans back not just on Dean’s own oeuvre, as if film were a simple retrospective in cinematic form. All the self-­references, in fact, self-­differ, and the memories begin to extend to other artists altogether, and to the various avant-­garde traditions, like constructivism and surrealism, from which film evidently emerges. Immediate (or rather, proximate) precursors erupt as Dean nods to prior Turbine Hall commissions, especially with one image sequence that seems to reinstantiate the glowing yellow orb of the Weather Project, 2003, by Olafur Eliasson.105 film provides the echo of past Turbine Hall projects and introjects them as well, like it has already done with the museum space, as if in imitation of the operations of memory, a time-­oriented notion of the author as receiver. But a painting analogy comes to dominate the reminiscences, as Dean uses her aperture masks and old cinematic techniques of hand painting and bright filters and gels to colorize the represented grid of the Turbine Hall. Memories of modernism erupt again: Some of Dean’s aperture masks are even named “Mondrian,” and so slice quadrants of the vertical screen that come to scintillate in various arrangements of the de Stijl artist’s pure red and blue and yellow. And then this “purity” of abstract form comes itself to be split asunder, as Dean evokes the stripes and squares and bladelike wedges of constructivist figures like El Lissitzky (Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1919), seeming to break the already broken film into further pieces, like shattered glass. Or colors stray from the primaries, toward orange and sky blue and saturated candy hues that recall the postwar “impure” abstractions of Ellsworth Kelly. The entire conceit of using the Turbine Hall’s far wall and its grid as a backdrop remembers Kelly, of course, calling up his crucial early work Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1949—­with Kelly’s monochromes stenciled off the architecture of the museum like a template, an abstraction that insists on its connection to the physical world.106 Kelly’s Window produced an abstraction from doubling or duplication, a copy erupting into something singular and different. It was an abstraction as an enigma, abstraction as linkage, a “nonrepresentational” form based on a hidden relation, an indexical connection.107 And so too now in film, Dean’s memory images produce not some convention-­laden fidelity to modernism or the past as such, but instead put the memories to work as an engine of transformation. They erupt through the fragmented screen in “continuous variation,” entering into infinite alliance with one another, a ceaseless permutation of linked forms. Producing affiliation through variance, through difference, film reads not as a simple repetition of Dean’s prior films, but rather as a “continuation” and alteration of them. And film produces not a simple approximation of abstract or modernist painting, a pastiche of modernism;

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instead, it uses cinema to transform both mediums in concert or in dual articulation, altering them by linking them together.108 This is the work of ambivalent or unruly kinship at large in film, and it is this impulse that the self-­reflexive gestures of the film must actually reveal. So many of the individual images that erupt through the aperture templates in Dean’s film produce this sense of affiliation and difference—­a relationality in excess. It is as if we were witness to an unceasing migration of linked forms: circular shapes dominate the film’s images throughout, as if in emulation of the infinite spinning of a reel of film, another form of self-­reference. We see the aperture masks that mark out circular holes, like the Kino-­Eye, migrating all across the screen, but there is also the soap bubble seeming to float gargantuan in the museum space, a transparent globe in front of the windows of the Turbine Hall. From the round of the bubble we move eventually to floating and falling balloons. We see a (hand-­painted?) river-­rubbed stone, an almost perfect sphere, and then an egg (and then some more, the egg abounds). The curves migrate into an image of a light bulb, but there had also been

Ellsworth Kelly with Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1950 © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery. F I GURE 3. 23 

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Tacita Dean, film, 2011. Installation view: Tate Modern. Photo: Marcus Leith and Andrew Dunkley.

the shimmering globe of the sun, reflected imperfectly on moving water, a circle now internally placed into continuous variation, a geometry that will not stand still. We see the round of a clock face, the spiraling shell of a snail clinging to a leaf, an orange or other spherical ripe fruits in oversaturated tones, as if in defiance of the work’s evident embrace of late style, of anachronistic lateness itself. This “continuous variation” of the circle reminds us of the bulbous toe and its declension and comparison to the eye, as father and mother relate to child—­indeed, Dean here seems really to engage surrealism and Georges Bataille, and that transgressive sense of the eroticism in the surrealist’s writing that Roland Barthes called a kind of “round phallicism” in his reading of Bataille’s novel Story of the Eye.109 But the contagion is multiform, the alliance and kinship that the shots discover between themselves almost infinite, an exercise that film never ceases over its full course. Lightning strikes spread across the screen; they redouble the light leaks or flares that erupt as Dean colorizes the screen’s grid, running her film through the camera

F I GURE 3. 25   El Lissitzky, Klinom krasnym bei belykh (Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge), 1920. Poster, color lithograph, printed in red and black on off-­white wove paper, 20 1⁄16 × 24 7⁄16 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Azita Bina and Elmar W. Seibel in memory of Charlotte Vershbow.

repeatedly, a flash erupting through overexposure each time the camera starts and stops during the production of the color changes. The lightning strikes also rhyme with other natural forms, like the rivulets of water cascading around stones in a creek. Clouds find themselves echoed by smoke billowing from industrial chimneys, echoed again by the man-­made waft of fog machines. The triangle vies with the circle as the prime motor of affiliation or relation. It is the shape of the film’s central image: the pyramid of Mount Analogue, which finds itself echoed in the triangular caps of mushrooms on a forest floor, a linkage persistent in the face of a change in state, from hard to soft, and in scale, from the monumental to the miniature. The triangle even gets repeated and transformed by Dean’s play with the circular apertures that appear like round “dots” but group themselves in a triangular formation, like a constellation of stars, or excised black holes, in the illuminated cinematic sky. They transform again as Dean plays with the abstract triangular “wedge” aperture and its memories of Lissitzky, slicing through the screen like a blade,

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Tacita Dean, film, 2011. Installation view: Tate Modern. Photo: Marcus Leith and Andrew Dunkley.

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and provoking the most radical breakup of the screen that film imagines. With this inevitable evocation of slicing and thus castration, the triangle returns us, of course, to Oedipus, to the Oedipal triangle, its play of positions now destabilized and altered. It is as if the rule, the law, the cut of Oedipus and of castration had mutated into a different kind of breakdown, into the unruly affiliation of shape and form we have instead been tracing. And if the triangle in film whispers “Oedipus,” Dean will not let the ramifications of this alone. For we witness the triangle or pyramid of Mount Analogue itself suddenly erupt in triplicate on the screen, the now blood-­red mountain against an almost liquid blue having become a figure given in threes, like a visual hallucination, the triangle and the Oedipal in excess. Throughout film, Mount Analogue appears over and over, and each time differently, its very image devoted to the analogue as a mode of “continuous variation.” We see it endlessly colorized, in red and blue and green. We see it in black-­and-­white like a drawing. In fact in many of its appearances the mountain clearly is drawn, excised from one of Dean’s blackboard drawings (a drawing like the landscapes of the series Fatigues, which were in fact inspired by this initial mountain image from film). And so both drawings and photographs of the mountain come to sit at the heart of Dean’s work with analogue film. But we also see the mountain mirrored, splitting the screen in two, in a repeated scene of reflection, as if doubled in a body of water. Echoed by so many shapes and aperture formats in the work’s course, and redoubled now by its literal analogue, by its mirrored reflection below, Mount Analogue creates a new overall shape, a new form through this reflection, like a floating monolith within the vertical oblong monolith of the screen, so many echoes of the screen from within. We are gazing at a reflection of a reflection, the analogue itself now en abyme. But as the analogues line up, they endlessly mutate—­from drawing into film, from solid into liquid, the thing and its analogue or reflection implying always difference, change, continuous variation. And so Mount Analogue amounts not just to a reflexive image in and of film; it describes and enacts the work’s process. The work of the analogue becomes promiscuous linkage, an overpowering affiliation in the face of the shards and particles of film, its broken cinematic scene or screen. The work of the analogue becomes something like the task of Antigone, a movement with and beyond Oedipus and his curse, and in the face of his mutilation, the infinite cut of castration, the endless loss of his blinding. With film, unruly kinship spreads a different, wandering path across the visual world. There is another image that seems crucial in film, standing out, literally, beyond all the others. After the sun in one shot disperses its circular form upon the surface of the water, after a light bulb in the darkness takes its place, after a lightning strike splits the screen asunder, an ostrich egg suddenly appears, like magic. A kind of

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Tacita Dean, film, 2011.

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visual wonder, the egg towers high, taking up almost three-­quarters of the vertical screen. It is enormous. And if its ovoid shape connects to the circular forms that have preceded it, the egg compares itself even more directly to the deformed ellipse of the male toe, an imperfect, vertically stretched circle. In this film produced by masks, riven by blindness, sliced into so many disparate pieces, we confront Oedipus here in another guise. We stare, for a few seconds at least, at a truly gargantuan swollen form, but also implicitly a kind of swollen footage, as the egg “escapes” the sprocket holes that line the screen of film throughout. The image enacts a form of literal excess. And as has occurred before in Dean’s work, a swollen form redirects “Oedipus” beyond the bounds of gender, beyond the masculine, and toward a signifier of reproduction, a form of new life. The egg, of course, reads as an image of gestation, pointing differently to the afterlife of analogue film. As it escapes the sprocket holes that frame all of the work’s other images, the monumental swollen egg seems literally pushed out into real space, to become that illusion of life and the real that the cinema always promised. The egg becomes a signifier of transgression, a swollen form moving beyond the film frame, a swollen footage materialized through an image of new life. The metaphor of the “subjectivity” of this portrait of film comes to fruition here, underlining the almost “living” quality of film, its address to the audience as a kind of being, a form given life. The egg swells beyond the geometrical prison of the film frame, exceeding the sprocket holes that turn the entire work into a picture or portrait of a filmstrip. The frozen stillness of the sprocket holes on either side of Dean’s screen often find themselves matched by almost photographic stills within, the persistence, even here, of Dean’s early adherence to the “still film.” But when the internal image collages track movement, the dialectic set up with the unmoving sprocket holes makes it seem inescapably and uncannily as if a strip of film had come suddenly to life. This is the “portrait” that the work continually provides, in the face of the declaration of the death or obsolescence of analogue film at large: The image in film confronts us repeatedly with the sense that we are staring at a film that is suddenly “alive.” It is as if the oldest of cinematic fantasies, the animation of the inanimate, returned in a new guise, and as an animation of the cinema or the medium itself. The individual film frame becomes a living, breathing thing, a subject in effigy. But the being that has been imagined is like Said’s description of lateness in his essay on Visconti and Lampedusa, as lateness creates “a platform for alternative and unregimented modes of subjectivity, at the same time that . . . [we confront] a lifetime of technical effort and preparation.”110 And so the swollen form steps beyond the frame, beyond the screen, like the swollen footage (Oedipus) must be led into exile, blind and afflicted. To lead film

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beyond itself, beyond the rule and the law, into a moment of promiscuous, “unregimented” kinship, linkage, and relation: such is the passion of this film suspended between the allegorical figures of Oedipus and Antigone, between their labors and their mutual destinies. Which is another way of saying that in film, a new form comes into being through this impossible, paradoxical dialectic of fragmentation and connection. A new form will be born of the torn scenario of affliction and affiliation themselves.

It’s a nice and beautiful word, “Antigone.” A beautiful name. It’s a beautiful sound.111

It has been unnerving to write this text, to complete it, at the moment Dean has made the film Antigone. For I began writing these chapters long ago, years before one imagined Dean ever completing this film, when the idea of Antigone—­and when it was just an idea—­allowed a different and deeper reading of the film Boots, and then perhaps of the common and already worn-­out tropes applied to Dean’s oeuvre, to her static films especially. But I have accepted the position that this dilemma has put me in as a writer here, namely that my words might be immediately obsolete, even before their public appearance, and that a film might now exist that would completely reinflect these readings I have imagined and proposed, these words. I think—­I am rationalizing to myself—­that the best thing I could do is to submit to this position, which is not unlike the blindness Dean has often praised and sought out in her work, and increasingly so. To write the text without seeing Antigone: only in the final moments of composing this chapter have I even been able to see the catalogue, to access the artist’s words and the latest imagining of her recurring (and I think unending) project. The documents gathered in this publication reveal enough, I would say; they reveal much that a reading of Antigone would need to explore. The origins of the project come now to be probed, with Dean admitting to the “riddle” that lies at the genesis of the work, a riddle of biography and her older sister’s name. It is a riddle that across all the work Dean has now devoted to this name, Antigone, links her project even more strongly to a sibling dynamic and a paternal enigma, and to an impulse now named, however strangely, as “feminist.” Wondering how her father could have given a daughter such a fraught and burdensome name, Dean admits to challenging him on this directly. “I remember we were walking in the fields behind the house. He replied that it was because Antigone was the first feminist.” It was, Dean admits, “an answer that I didn’t expect, especially as it came from the mouth of a man who had penned me a letter while I was at art school calling feminism the ‘anorexia nervosa of the West.’”112

We can see and sense how Antigone continues and exacerbates the logic of the lateral, the sibling dynamic of Dean’s former films, as we confront an intensified side-­by-­side-­ness. For Antigone involves two anamorphic 35 mm films projected side by side, with the individual films constructed using the artist’s gate-­masking process. Internal montages thus break apart the individual image, which then calls up the work of relationality, of lateral connection, but now one that exceeds the individual cinema screen alone. Antigone constructs a cinema beyond itself, a cinema of side-­by-­side-­ness, a new mode of moving film outside the individual frame, into a form of exile and a kind of beyond. The film also exacerbates the Oedipal thematic of self-­mutilation and blindness with which Dean has long tarried. It brings this affliction of film into a state of excess: “So Antigone was instructed by blindness: my own creative blindness, the blindness of Oedipus

FIG U R E 3. 28   Tacita Dean, Antigone, 2018. Two synchronized 35 mm anamorphic color films with optical sound, 56 min.

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and the cosmic blindness found in nature in the form of the total eclipse of the sun,” Dean explains (the solar eclipse of 2017 makes up part of the work’s key footage). “But most especially Antigone has taken form as a result of the inherent blindness of film.” Speaking now of her continued development of the techniques of aperture-­gate masking, Dean goes on: the “film was composed without the possibility of seeing what was already exposed in the frame.” Only when later printed “did the film reveal itself to me.” And like Antigone leading blind Oedipus, now Dean asserts: “A medium guides an artist.” She continues the metaphor, in a new form: “I maimed and blinded the camera to make Antigone. Heavy with studio lenses and with its vision impaired by masks, I surrendered agility and spontaneity and instead let the camera see with its inner eye.”113 But it is the echo, the connection and relation, a deep and unruly linkage, that guides this blindness. “I found synthesis,” Dean explains, “with the eclipse’s perfect cosmic binary and turned Antigone into a diptych.” It is “sun and moon, dark and light, Antigone and Oedipus, father/daughter, brother/sister and two blind eyes.” 114 Such has been the critical gesture of Dean’s work since film, made literal in Antigone, it would seem. But it has become the generalized promise of her invention of a new kind of late form. “Blind old age at last,” Oedipus rages, in Oedipus at Colonus, a line from Sophocles that Dean will cite in her film. Writing on other films she has recently made that continue the aperture-­masking process, Dean describes the lateness of her form, its limits and new potentials: “I have found a way to combine disparate places, people and events together in one frame, uniting them photochemically as they never have been united in life.”115 It is impossible to read this passage now without thinking of Oedipus and Antigone, as Dean’s process fragments and breaks up film only to invent new modalities of relation, portrait films that might “combine” and “unite,” for example, disparate actors who did not exist in the same place and time in reality. “The photochemical film frame,” Dean writes, “is therefore a magical place of pictorial intimacy where one is bound together by chemistry.” All the possibilities of relationality are raised here, of ambivalent and promiscuous connection, new forms of kinship, imagined groupings and families, ties and bonds produced by a form of “blind co-­habitation in the film frame.” This is the paradoxical progeny of Dean’s embrace of film’s lateness, her abandonment of authorial planning or control: “No gesture or expression can be directed within this method of masking, nor can it be choreographed in time; everything is left to chance,” she avers. “The medium requires blind faith. Only the negative, deep within the darkness of the camera body, carries the secret to what has already been exposed on it. The camera is a room. And what happens within it now is beyond all control.”116

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Such wildness amounts to Dean’s protest against the regime of the digital, a triumph of planning and absolute power over the future image to be made, the great mantra of “postproduction.”117 Instead we are given a new litany of lateness—­a work that can only proceed through unworking, fragmentation, and a labor of relinquishment, a literal letting go. This is the task that we can now describe: for film to be film, Dean seems to assert, one must let go of film. For analogy to radiate from the analogue, one must release the analogue, “beyond all control.” One must abandon it, but in a new way. Of course, we have been tracking the labor of relinquishment differently with Dean, and these abandonments have come to be allegorized by an even more momentous one, subjectively speaking, which is Dean’s long wander with and away from the paternal, from the Father. All of these relinquishments are to be connected. And all are to be led to a kind of beyond, an exile like that of Oedipus that takes film and the analogue beyond themselves. What an extraordinary new description of the Oedipal struggle and drama all of this seems—­the desire to lead the Father toward the work of relinquishment, the opening of Oedipal fatigue, the abandonment of the paternal function in oneself. If only we could describe it, we could follow its full ramifications: the Antigone “complex” casts the Oedipal conflict differently. But this is a lesson for film in Dean’s projects, and the allegory reaches both ways. As Dean redefines film within the structures of Oedipal fatigue, so a new form of film redefines the Oedipal, its subjective operation, even its “potential.” We are not used to speaking of the Oedipal dynamic as one of potential. For the Oedipus myth is a grand story, one of the most monolithic of narratives that we retain, the very form of the intractable. But Dean’s work with film has been, among other things, a long battle with the intractability of narrative itself. The closest Dean comes to describing the true tone of her project arrives, not insignificantly, through a memory. It comes, by now typically, through the words of another, an older male artist, a writer—­the screenwriter Stewart Stern, most famous for being the author of the (Oedipal) film Rebel without a Cause. Dean returns to a memory of workshopping with the screenwriter her idea for dramatizing the “gap” between Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus, and the leading by the Sister-­Daughter of the Father-­Brother into exile. She returns to the origins of the Antigone project and to a dialogue with Stern that took place more than twenty years ago. As restated by Stern as he comes to grips with Dean’s idea, we learn that Oedipal fatigue involves a great forgetting: “And the metaphor of Oedipus and Antigone,” Stern relates, “wandering around and around and around forgetting backstory, forgetting everything in that lost time that no one has ever dramatized between Thebes and Colonus. That’s a wonderful dark hole to fill.”118 We learn

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that this forgetting is something like a redemption, perhaps a forgiveness, a leave-­ taking that allows a new departure. Stern continues: And if that becomes a metaphor for the arrest of two people who are as intricately involved and tied as this father and this daughter who have to get to a place which represents relief, communication, softness, permeability, spontaneity, mutual celebration, mutual respect and that that will be physicalized through some act, some work that was whatever it is, and [she will] tell him whatever she has to say and get out of there without him. To be able to say you go your way and I’ll go mine. Tremendous.119

These are the words with which Antigone leaves us. They are spoken, acted out and dramatized by a substitute in Dean’s new film—­as Stern, too, has now departed us, recently passed away at a venerable age. This, I think, is what the exhaustion of symbolic authority sounds like, or could sound like, as a line of flight follows the exile of Father and Daughter, of Brother and Sister, to a place that represents “relief, communication, softness, permeability, spontaneity, mutual celebration, mutual respect”—­for the Father, and for film. “Bye, bye,” we remember Boots proclaiming. “Ciao, ciao.” It is the story of a farewell, in the truest meaning of that term. It is then so much more than a simple leave-­taking, a final goodbye. Abandonment as a form of love.

Let’s sing another song boys, this one has grown old and bitter, old and bitter, old and bitter. . . . 120

4 THE PH OTO GRA PH I C EC H O

Philosophy is really a homesickness; it is an urge to be at home everywhere. ­Novalis I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

When Tacita Dean made film, and opened up the space of the catalogue for this project to a vast panorama of statements from many other figures still invested in analogue over digital production, one of the most compelling came from fellow artist Sharon Lockhart. As much as they differ as artists, there has always been a real dialogue between Dean and Lockhart, and a commonality that could be traced through their various works, just as Zoe Leonard and Moyra Davey, too, have shown at the same galleries during their careers, and collaborated together on editorial and curatorial projects.1 “In film and photography,” Lockhart wrote in Dean’s book, “we are seeing the end of analogue processes.”2 The proclamation is unsurprising, even flat-­footed, but Lockhart’s concern was immediately to show that this end of the artistic use of analogue photography or film has always been linked up to the fate of larger industrial regimes of production. Linkage is key, and in fact, Lockhart underlines the lineaments of the social “life” that analogue work once entailed. “The digital can be individualized,” she observes, but the analogue “is a system tied to large bodies of people doing the same thing. There is a social aspect to it.” The work and labor

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involved in analogue production is on Lockhart’s mind, but this labor itself becomes a platform for connection, as opposed to the alienation that labor usually connotes. “In the analogue world, large numbers of people had to work together. They had to maintain equipment together. They had to work at the same time of day. They had a schedule to keep. They had to live with more or less the same options in food and entertainment.” Alienation, as usually understood, comes now to be inverted: “And in all these limitations they shared, they had a connection.”3 At the moment of her writing for Dean’s catalogue, Lockhart had just finished exhibiting a major project entitled Lunch Break, 2008, that took form mostly through an interwoven series of works in both film and photography. Focused on a shipyard, the Bath Iron Works in Maine, Lunch Break was driven by the artist’s reflection on the passing of certain forms of industrial labor. Lockhart also marked the disappearance of significant spaces of resistance within these older social structures, signaled most of all by the title of her project, the imperiled break from work that punctuated the rhythm of daily life in a factory, a space suspended uneasily between labor and leisure. Other forms of commonality fed off the platform of the lunch break, and so Lockhart found herself spending considerable time reflecting on the passing not just of many kinds of factory work but of analogue print media like the newspaper. “As you can see in the film and photographs,” Lockhart remarked to artist James Benning, “a lot of the workers read the newspaper. Newspapers were strewn around almost every work area. . . . All this reading got me thinking about how this workplace is tied to analogue technology, which is shared in a different way than digital technology. A newspaper gets passed around; it’s social, portable, and exists in the world.”4 If the fate of the industrial factory and the analogue newspaper were linked, so too were the forms of life to which they gave rise. Lockhart again imagines an inversion: “Institutions and conditions once decried as monotonous, repetitive, and oppressive now appear—­on the eve of their disappearance—­not only reliable but tangible, dense with physical substance and the increments of time. They are the repositories of days, accumulating as lifetimes, of many individual people.” 5 In her text for Dean’s film, after remembering the social life that surrounded the industrial production of analogue images, Lockhart then relates a memory, of the laborious process of color-­grading her own films. Again, the continuous or connective drive of analogue film comes to spawn other connections, as she explains; since “each part of an analogue print is connected to all the rest,” the changes that one can make in processing were limited and the object needed to be reconsidered “as a whole.” This involved Lockhart sitting in a theater with the color timer, a man named Walt Rose, and for each set of changes they would watch the entire film again together. After suggestions and criticisms, further changes would entail waiting a week for a new print to be made, and then the two

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would sit and watch the film again. “Sitting there in that dark theater,” Lockhart recalls, “concentrating on the image in front of us, but free to converse, we shared stories from our lives and became good friends.” This was the repeated ritual of the making of Lockhart’s filmic work, “for fifteen years.”6 The digital, Lockhart concludes, no matter the “untethered” quality of the image that might allow an audience to be gathered across the world, produces thereby a “discontinuous world,” and one that is “Balkanizing.” To abandon fully the analogue involves increasingly the elimination of “the time and space of commonality.” A world of shared work, a space of collective gathering, the communal structures of everyday life, all seem to be displaced by the “individualized and looser social connections characteristic of  .  .  . social networking sites.” The analogue, for Lockhart, remains a powerful reminder that we are experiencing a “shift away from the commons and the strong social bonds it engenders.”7 Lockhart’s story is a tale of memory, again, but also of connection, linkage, and social ties. It is a recollection of a form’s internal dedication to continuity and connection, one that must be linked immediately to a deep social embeddedness, a structure whose innermost principle seems to be to preserve and spawn relationality.

This chapter will examine closely a project by Sharon Lockhart entitled Pine Flat, 2005, consisting primarily of a series of nineteen large-­scale color portrait photographs and a film, made up of twelve individual episodes, also portrait-­like, that when shown theatrically lasts some two hours (it is Lockhart’s longest film to date). The project, I will want to claim, amounts to another turning point, a culmination and a major transformation of an artistic language. But no artist in this account has placed their work more emphatically between film and photography, from the earliest moments of their career. In other words, that Pine Flat amounts in the main to a film and a series of photographs—­this has become something like Lockhart’s signature format, with almost all of her major projects suspended precisely between the two great analogue image mediums. Lockhart’s earliest works belonged largely to photography alone, although the artist produced photographs that most always seemed to open onto cinematic conventions (of lighting, costuming, acting, setting). The cinematic dimension of Lockhart’s earliest photographs led organically to her involvement in making films, and yet her first film works, like Khalil, Shaun, A Woman under the Influence, 1994, were filled with shots that borrowed the conventions of functional photographs, such as medical documents. By the end of her work’s first decade, Lockhart’s subsequent films Goshogaoka, 1997, Teatro Amazonas, 1999, and nō, 2003, had developed an even more radical photographic address, moving toward long, durational shots with

Sharon Lockhart: Pine Flat at Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2006. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York / Brussels.

F I GURE 4.1 

Sharon Lockhart, Shaun, 1993. Five framed chromogenic prints, 14 × 10⅞ in. each. Unless otherwise noted, all works by Lockhart are courtesy the artist; Gladstone Gallery, New York / Brussels; and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. FI GUR E 4.2 

an unmoving or static camera that would draw comparison to the “still films” of the same moment by Dean. And so we faced the hybrid situation where Lockhart’s photography was attached by critics to early postmodernism and its “critique of representation,” to images that appropriated the conventions of advertising, fashion photography, and especially the cinema, as in the Untitled Film Stills, 1977–­80, by Cindy Sherman. And yet Lockhart’s films began to draw the attention of an even earlier generation of avant-­garde filmmakers and critics, especially those associated with structural film, like the artist James Benning—­precisely because of the static, photographic nature of these films’ address.8 “I come from photography,” Lockhart has explained, when pressed on the static camera she deploys in her deeply “still” films. “When I started making films,” she averred, “my photographs . . . were very cinematic.” The films emerged from an activity of relating and engaging formal “opposites with the mediums,” suspending them between film and photography but also entwining these forms tightly together.9 This emphasizing of the programmatic relationship of one medium to another has become the central tactic of Lockhart’s work with these two until-­recently-­analogue forms. In some sense, Lockhart’s project might at first be described as being about that relation itself, about the dialogue between film and photography, the deep and passionate relationship between forms or mediums. And yet this is a description only worth claiming to the extent that we might begin to see this relation between forms as opening up the larger question of relationality itself. For Lockhart’s work has moved from this paradoxical formal dynamic toward an insistent ethical and political project of being between, and of finding resonance, or connection—­a value that relates back to the analogue, but of course moves far beyond it.10

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Some years ago now, I published an essay entitled “Photography’s Expanded Field.” Lockhart became a central figure for me at this point, and the essay attempted to think deeply about the paradoxical opening up of photographic form that the fading of the analogue regime of photography was witnessing. This was an opening that seemed intensely focused on the opposition between photography and cinema, between the still and the moving image. Forgive the solipsism of what I am about to do: I want to continue by remembering a few passages and claims from the beginning of this now old essay, an attempt to diagnose what had happened to photography in advanced artistic practices since the onset of postmodernism in the 1970s and 1980s, what had happened to photography in the wake of its technological outmoding by the digital, what had happened to photography in the face of the proclamation by many of its “death” as a coherent medium, if indeed it ever was one. For these passages—­and the central idea in my prior work of the photograph’s “expansion”—­set the stage for comprehending the current possibilities of photography that Lockhart’s work both provokes and provides.

Everywhere one looks today in the world of contemporary art, the photograph seems to be an object in crisis, or at least in severe transformation. Surely it has been a long time now since reformulating the history and theory of photography has seemed a vital intellectual necessity, an art-­historical project that was born rather of the new importance of the photograph in the art practice of the 1970s and 1980s. As theorized then, postmodernism could almost be described as a photographic event, as a series of artistic practices were reorganized around the parameters of photography taken as what Rosalind Krauss has recently called a “theoretical object”: the submission of artistic objects to photography’s logic of the copy, its recalcitrance to normative conceptions of authorship and style, its embeddedness within mass-­cultural formations, its stubborn referentiality and consequent puncturing of aesthetic autonomy.11 With hindsight, however, we might now say that the extraordinary efflorescence of both photographic theory and practice at the moment of the initiation of postmodernism was something like the last gasp of the medium, like the crepuscular glow before nightfall. For the photographic object theorized then has fully succumbed in the last ten years to its digital recoding, and the world of contemporary art seems rather to have moved on, quite literally, to a turn that we would now have to call cinematic rather than photographic, as we faced the increasing dominance by the 1990s of the projected image in all manner of contemporary artistic practice.12 We exist in a quite different moment than that described by Krauss some decades ago in her essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”: the elastic and “infinitely malleable” medium categories decried by the critic then seem in fact

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today not to be our plight.13 Critical consensus would have it that the problem today is not that just about anything image-­based can now be considered photographic, but rather that photography itself has been foreclosed, cashiered, abandoned—­ outmoded technologically and displaced aesthetically. The artist stars of the present photographic firmament are precisely those figures, such as Jeff Wall, who reconcile photography with an older medium like history painting, in a strange reversal of photography’s former revenge on traditional artistic media; or those, such as Andreas Gursky, who have most fully embraced the new scale and technology of photography’s digital recoding. (This is hardly an opposition of possibilities: Wall has also embraced the digital, and Gursky is surely also a pictorialist.) And even the most traditional or medium-­aware of contemporary photographers cannot now resist the impulse to deal the concerns of other mediums into their practice, less utilizing photography to recode other practices than allowing the photograph to be recoded now in turn, as when Philip-­Lorca diCorcia lights his street photography with the stage lights of theater or cinema; or Thomas Demand accompanies his constructed photographic simulacra with equally simulated projections placing his constructions into motion; or Rineke Dijkstra feels compelled to place video recordings of her portrait subjects alongside their photographic depictions. Even among those artists, then, who continue in some form the practice of photography, today the medium seems a “lamentable expedient,” as André Breton and the surrealists long ago called painting—­an insufficient bridge to other, more compelling forms.14 And yet I am pulled back from the finality of this judgment, from this closure of the photographic, by a strange vacillation in much of the photographic work with which I am presently concerned. In “Photography’s Expanded Field,” I was interested at first in the work of artist Nancy Davenport, specifically a piece called Weekend Campus, 2004, where the artist took inspiration from a specific and notorious cinematic shot in Jean-­Luc Godard’s film Weekend, 1967. Davenport concatenated into motion a series of digitally scanned photographic stills, with the frontality of the frozen photographic gaze in a series of portraits meeting the lateral and unceasing pan characteristic of the cinema. One could also think, however, of Lockhart’s dual project of working within the modes of what could be called “cinematic photographs” and “still films” simultaneously. How to describe such work’s hesitation between motion and stasis, its stubborn petrifaction in the face of progression, or its concatenation into movement of that which stands still—­ the dual dedication of such work seemingly to both cinema and photography? It is this hiccup of indecision, whether fusion or disruption, that I want to explore further. For it seems that while the medium of photography has been thoroughly transformed today, and while the object forms of traditional photography are no longer in evidence in much advanced artistic practice, something like a

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“photographic effect” still remains—­survives, perhaps, in a new and altered form. The “photographic” remains. And if we could resist the object-­bound forms of critical judgment and description, as well as the apocalyptic announcement of a medium’s sheer technological demise, we might be able to imagine critically how the photographic object has been “reconstructed” in contemporary artistic practice—­an act of critical imagination made necessary by the forms of contemporary art, and one that will answer neither to technological exegesis nor to traditional formalist criteria.15

Survival, expansion, alteration, the “photographic effect”: these are the terms that interest me most in relation to the fate of photography now. In “Photography’s Expanded Field,” I went on to map a kind of logical expansion of photography torn between stillness and motion, between what I called narrative and stasis, between, it would seem, the two equally troubled domains of the mediums of photography and film, the concerns of the photographic and the cinematic. In what follows, I want to do at least two things that my essay “Photography’s Expanded Field” did not do. First, I will present an extremely close reading of a specific artist’s practice as it is opened up and indeed formed by the precise interpenetration of photography and cinema that I explored in my earlier essay. Treating in detail Lockhart’s Pine Flat means that I am turning to a work that came to fruition in 2005, the year of that essay’s first publication—­and where it was thus not at all treated.16 Second, and more importantly, I want to offer this close reading as an amplification of the structural mapping of photography’s expansion that my earlier essay hoped to broach. By amplification, I mean radicalization, in a way; what I hope to do here is deal not just with the forms and possibilities opened up by the expansion of the medium of photography but with the meaning, and perhaps too the motivations, for the insistence with which many artists today who continue to think and to use photography emplace their practice between mediums, or engage in the cinematic opening of the still photograph that has been my concern. Another way of stating this radicalization would be to say that my concern here is less with the “objective” or structural mapping performed in my earlier essay. Thinking historiographically, we should remember that the postmodernist model of the “expanded field” elaborated by critics like Krauss can be seen as the dialectical response to some very different projects, and other expansions, being proposed at this same historical moment. Like two “torn halves” that “will not add up”—­to paraphrase Adorno already speaking in the language of late style—­these were expansions imagined more in the field of the subject, and of consciousness.17 I am thinking of the countercultural concerns of an earlier text like Gene Youngblood’s Expanded

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Cinema, of 1970, with which—­if not seen as a direct response—­Krauss’s project should at least be compared.18 The interpenetration of forms and the expansion of mediums like the photograph have, too, a “subjective” logic, and it is to the desiring politics of the expansion of photography that I hope now to turn.

In the first “episode” of Lockhart’s film Pine Flat, we see a pine forest on a steep hillside, blanketed by falling snow. Lockhart’s camera gazes fixedly at the scene, unmoving except for a slight wobble in the apparatus from time to time, and the storm comes in steadily, its clouds settling down like fog in the distance on the highest reaches of the trees. We then hear but do not see a young girl, whose plaintive call echoes through the winter landscape: “Ethan!” she cries. Resounding on the hillside, the girl’s summons rings out, more strained and then worried; more steady, a bit singsong; and then suddenly clipped, high-­pitched and nervous: “Ethan . . . ! Where are you, Ethan . . . ?” She pleads again: “Please, Ethan! Come back . . . !” It is as if we were listening to a game of hide-­and-­seek that has very much gone awry. Some minutes into the scene, the girl’s voice diminishes in volume, becoming harder to hear, as if she were getting farther away, fading into the distance as the snow continues to fall, a spreading gray. “Eeeeee-­thaaaaaan!” By the end of the episode a dog begins to howl, adding its cry to the girl’s plaintive searching—­adding, that is, to the desolation of the inscrutable scene, and to its almost mythic overtones, rhyming with the famous childhood tale of a certain red-­clad young girl, a forest, a wolf. The snowstorm has by now enveloped the entire landscape, the clouds obscuring more of the most distant trees. Eventually we cannot even see that there is a hill still before us, and only the lowest groupings of the trees remain in view. But the cries never end, echoing out across the wintery, mountain landscape: “Ethan! Come back here!!” And the snow never stops falling, all absorbed into an increasingly monochrome gray. The scene grows as thick as its fallen snow.19 Lockhart’s Pine Flat thus opens with an immobile but developing image where the viewer experiences a process of intense visual opacification. That from the scene’s beginning we are in fact listening to something we cannot see is significant for Lockhart’s work, and this is a dynamic to which I will return. (Sound had played this role before for Lockhart; of her prior film Goshogaoka, filled ultimately with the chanting and staccato footsteps of teenage girl basketball players enacting some seemingly avant-­garde drills, Lockhart relates: “With this project, I heard the sounds of the girls [practicing] before I saw them. I followed the sounds inside the building and met the girls. Sound is always a huge part of what I do.”20) But the cry of loss with which Pine Flat begins, this seemingly endless fort/da game to which the opening of the film invites us—­Where are you? Please come back!—­becomes immediately and

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deeply significant in other ways.21 It becomes a gesture of reflexivity, given the origin of Pine Flat in the old artistic strategies of what the surrealists called “objective chance” and the “found object”—­no matter Lockhart’s ongoing concern as an artist with what seems the opposite of such procedures, her clearly staged photographs and artificial cinematic constructions. Of course, the fraught resuscitation of the dubious, if not discarded, avant-­garde tactics of the found object and objective chance has been shared by all the different artists and photographic or filmic work I have been considering. But the origin of Pine Flat points to a quite specific and meaningful encounter. Looking in the year 2000 to get away from her home and work in Los Angeles, looking indeed for solitude, Lockhart drove some four hours north, into the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. There, not far from the Kern River, she came across a rural community by chance—­this, at least, is the story that is told about the work—­and she decided to stay, because the place struck her as deeply “familiar.”22 To the critic and curator Catherine Wood, Lockhart described the

F I GURE 4. 3 

Sharon Lockhart, Pine Flat, 2005. 16 mm film, color, sound, 138 min.

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retreat as born of “a meandering drive,” one where she chose to proceed “without a map,” ultimately stopping “at random in a small town, where she met some local people who, in the course of conversation, offered her a place for rent.”23 She would eventually set up a photographic studio in the town, working there for the next four or five years on the project that became the Pine Flat photographs and film. In the work’s first installation, in late 2005 and 2006, Lockhart emblazoned a wall divider with an enlarged copy of a hand-­drawn map indicating, like an old pirate’s treasure chart, a route to the town, inscribed as “population 310,” involving a voyage across “foothills” and past labeled streams and farms and enticing springs, with Lockhart’s “portrait studio” marked in the map’s terrain vague, along with other singular landmarks such as a “Dump,” “Church,” “Bar,” and “Store.” Less workaday, the map also located a “Lookout Tower” and a somewhat more distant but equally vague “Mountain.”24 It bears remarking that it is unclear whether Pine Flat, California, is the actual name of the place to which Lockhart retreated; in other statements, she has intimated that she wants to keep the site’s true identity a secret. “Whether or not ‘Pine Flat’ actually exists on any map,” critic Michael Ned Holte wrote at the moment of the project’s completion, “is somehow less significant than the notion of place constructed by the film.” Significantly, there “are no adults in the film,” Holte notes, with each episode focusing on the town’s children and their activities. He concludes: “While we cannot assume the world presented by the film is free of grown-­ups—­like a less quarrelsome, more meditative Lord of the Flies (1963)—­this world is vast but indeed isolated, an island of sorts reflecting the collective imaginary of its subjects.”25 But the project also pointed immediately to the psyche of its maker, something on which the origin stories told about the work insist. Catherine Wood intimates this as she tries to unpack the specific character of the chance aspect of Lockhart’s encounter with this place and its community. “The random way in which Lockhart came across this location, leading to the development of a new work,” Wood argues, might be seen as connected to earlier projects by the artist, like Goshogaoka, where she appropriated the aleatory ordering principles embraced by avant-­garde artists and dancers of the 1960s. The actions staged and recorded by the teenage basketball players in this earlier film make specific reference to Yvonne Rainer and others from the Judson Dance Theater, with such tactics themselves “reaching back” to origins in the chance procedures of “the compositional practices of John Cage . . . or of Marcel Duchamp.” However, Wood sees the connection to the surrealist notion of “objective chance” in Pine Flat as primary, as “the intensity of the work suggests that Lockhart’s ‘chance method’ grew from a deeper need, perhaps an unconscious emotional desire. It might be said to have more in common with surrealism’s loaded notion of ‘objective chance,’ in that she found something that seemed almost to be already familiar.”26

F I GURE 4.4 

James Benning, hand-­drawn map of the Pine Flat area, 2005.

While based currently in Los Angeles, Lockhart had been raised in New England. Nevertheless, all of the artist’s statements on the project hail the discovery of the Sierra Nevada town as revelatory: “For this project,” Lockhart explained, “I wanted to look at something that felt very familiar to me. I immediately felt connected to the landscape and the people of Pine Flat. It is very similar to the places I grew up.”27 Her work in the immediately prior years had begun to question deeply all the weighted concerns of documentary photography and film, eventually leading the artist into direct dialogue with issues confronted more by ethnography and anthropology, the “science” of the cultural other. Lockhart’s previous work had thus become known for an engagement with ethnographic representation that led to a series of far-­flung projects in places like Japan, Mexico, and Brazil.28 But now, in Pine Flat, Lockhart’s attention was held by a locale that reminded her of a different sort of distance, which we could call a temporal one, as she claimed the community she found was similar to the place where she herself was from. The dissonance of imagining how this could be the case for a rural Sierra Nevada mountain community and a New England–­born artist echoes other distances the project immediately foregrounded. “When I made Pine Flat,” Lockhart averred, “I felt like I never left home, it was just four hours away.”29 And yet, leaving the megalopolis, Lockhart began to “engage and identify with an American community” that, as Wood describes it, while relatively “close at hand,” involved “a different order of

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socio-­cultural distance,” immediately apparent in the town’s “isolation, its lack of employment, schooling, or shops.”30 Lockhart’s filmic and photographic cameras focused here, as in prior works, on children. But as the critic Mark Godfrey came to realize, it was not just children who occupied Lockhart’s attention in the project, of course; it was a community of working-­class children and adolescents.31 In Pine Flat, in the face of all the artist’s claims of confronting the “familiar,” a discovery that was in fact a kind of rediscovery—­of a place that reminded one of origins, and of home—­ there is in fact an encounter with a deeply specific form of the unrepresentable, a class experience and belonging that in contemporary art today seem almost always to drop out of representation altogether. Like the young girl we hear but never see who initiates Lockhart’s film, the project that became Pine Flat leads us immediately into a structure of multiple opacities. This is what must be pondered in the face of Lockhart’s finding of a place where she would come to work over long duration, and a place that reminded her of her own past. As the artist visited and revisited the town over the course of the next four years, she ultimately set up a portrait studio where she created photographic images of the local children, and collaborated with them as well over the years and through the seasons on the many different episodes of the film, where they are all portrayed outside, in the pristine surrounding natural landscape. During this process, the town would become a home away from home.

Unlike the work of many artists today who prioritize obsolescent analogue techniques—­for example, Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean—­the large-­format photographs in Lockhart’s portrait series, entitled Pine Flat Portrait Studio, are hardly outmoded in terms of their literal form or medium. Lockhart’s photographs are all chromogenic prints, scaled in the current photographic Esperanto to the format of the tableau, like easel paintings, three feet by four. These are not photographs, in other words, like Leonard’s, produced with an old Rolleiflex camera. They are not images, like Dean’s, made on discontinued rolls of celluloid film. Instead it is now the photographs’ conventions—­and perhaps their subject, rural youth, as well—­that bespeak the past, as Lockhart engages the history and address of a specific kind of vanished, nonart photographic portraiture, especially as produced by commercial photographers in rural locales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lockhart’s photographs unwind in series, a repetitive chain of portraits all sharing the same general system or photographic parameters, and so one thinks of the work of August Sander in Germany, of his massive archival project Citizens of the Twentieth Century, and his turning of the portrait genre in photography toward

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typological ends.32 With each subject in her images depicted alone, facing forward, and with each approached in the same conditions of precision focus and natural light, Lockhart’s portraits emit the perfume of Sander’s Sachlichkeit, the camera aesthetic of the New Objectivity. They seem to align themselves, indeed, with the considerable photographic legacy that Sander has left behind in contemporary art, and to the continued return to Neue Sachlichkeit aesthetics in the photography of the so-­called Düsseldorf School, to the portraits of artists like Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff. Repeatedly, Lockhart has nodded to this legacy, going so far as to restage a specific photograph by Sander—­also of children—­in her larger body of work.33 And yet in Citizens of the Twentieth Century, Sander carefully photographed his own portrait subjects always in the context of their home or work environments, as if they were rooted organically into their surrounds. Lockhart will engage this more in the Pine Flat film, where each episode captures the local children engaged in play or other activities in the surrounding mountain landscape. The photographs by contrast are stark—­they are a lesson, in fact, in contrast. The children appear always on the same cracked, light-­gray concrete floor, against the same blank and jet-­black studio backdrop. While these spare accoutrements might seem to belong generally to commercial and studio portrait photography, their blunt emplacement in Lockhart’s series reads as utterly precise, and again as a strategic appropriation. Pine Flat Portrait Studio calls up the peculiar intensity of these conventions of studio portraiture as enacted by another specific figure in the history of photography, pointing to the still underknown work of the American portrait photographer Mike Disfarmer. Active in rural Heber Springs, Arkansas, in the decades leading up to World War II and just after, Disfarmer could be considered a key figure of what is now deemed “vernacular” photography. Like many such figures, Disfarmer was wedded

F I GURE 4. 5  Sharon Lockhart, Pine Flat Portrait Studio: Jessie, Breanna, Kassie, Chance, 2005. Four framed chromogenic prints, 45½ × 36¾ in. each.

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Left, Mike Disfarmer, Untitled, ca. 1940–­45. Gelatin silver print, 5⅛ × 3 1⁄16 in. (image), 5 9⁄16 × 3 7⁄16 in. (sheet), 11 1⁄16 × 8½ in. (mount). © J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Right, Mike Disfarmer, Untitled, ca. 1940. Gelatin silver print, 5 × 3 1⁄16 in. © Museum of Modern Art. Acquired through the generosity of Thomas and Susan Dunn and gift of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg.

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to the normative social conventions of photography in the similarly extreme or intensive—­almost compulsive—­manner that produced other now canonical early twentieth-­century photographers such as Eugène Atget and Sander. Recording the local rural population in this area of the American South, Disfarmer isolated his subjects in an extremely spartan studio setting, with all posed on a bare concrete floor against the same dark, blank backdrop. It was as if Disfarmer’s subjects existed in a mournful void, the industrial setting and technique of the photograph emerging as the most extreme opposition to the rural Arkansas population—­to their faces and features, thrown by the blankness into vivid relief; or to their particular clothing and the “attributes” and belongings many brought with them to be recorded. It has been observed that this opposition of commercial photography and rural portrait subject is particular, too, to Disfarmer’s name, which was not his given one. Adopted as a child, he was originally named Michael Meyer, raised in a family of recent German immigrants, with “Meyer” in German deriving from the word for a kind of agrarian landholder or peasant—­a name, in other words, meaning “farmer.”34 Mike Dis-­ Farmer: it is as if the formal tactics of the work and the constructed figure of the photographer and his chosen patronymic both express an extreme disidentification with the rural Arkansas community from which he emerged.

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We may wonder if Lockhart was attracted to Disfarmer’s work as she labored on Pine Flat precisely because of this disidentification staged around the opposition between his rural subjects and industrial photography—­we may wonder, in other words, if Lockhart was attracted to this opposition precisely because of a need to overcome it (as now, today, both share the same condition of being increasingly outmoded or superseded). Reclaimed and repositioned as “art” photography at the later moment of the 1970s, Disfarmer’s portraits immediately inspired at least one major artistic response before Lockhart: Richard Avedon’s In the American West, 1979–­84. As Avedon took inspiration from Disfarmer’s images to turn his Warholian aesthetic of capital and celebrity toward the rural, the anonymous, and the working class, In the American West became one of the most galling examples of the fetishization and objectification of working-­class subjects that the history of photography has ever seen.35 In photography history, of course, this is saying something. We sense an intensifying lineage of oppositions, then, in Lockhart’s appropriation of Disfarmer’s position and photographic style. Disidentification and objectification become the immediate ground of Lockhart’s photographic operations, her borrowed photographic language. This is the photographic history to which her project passionately submits. The question seems to be whether the extremity of the language will allow other effects, other readings, other politics to emerge.

This initially might be hard to imagine, as Lockhart replicates in Pine Flat Portrait Studio the conventions of Disfarmer’s portraits more or less exactly. She also follows Disfarmer’s antiquated reliance on natural light only and thus longer exposure times, allowing the subjects perhaps to “grow” into their image, almost to “bloom.” Provoking an observing attentiveness with an extreme focus on detail, we would seem to be in the presence yet again of another embrace of that leave-­taking before the world—­an involuntary, almost passive, but deeply “open” documentary impulse—­characteristic of Kaja Silverman’s model of the author as receiver. Lockhart’s absorption of Disfarmer’s photographic conventions provides another mode of “authorial divestiture.”36 By now, we know that Silverman’s model of the voiding of the authorial ego is not a straightforward cancellation of the author function, but rather a project that calls for the redefinition of the self more generally. As we witness Lockhart’s revival of Disfarmer’s portraiture in a new form, and as we witness the opening up of this old photographic language to a new set of subjects, a new group of children in another place and time—­we recognize that authorship as receiving entails an intense project of memory, a self given over to the grips of a kind of mémoire involontaire. To receive, for Silverman, is to remember; it is to be open to a new object in the world as

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it aligns itself with the lost objects to which we have been attached in the past—­or, conversely, it is an opening where we align our own desire, our past, our memories, with a new object that solicits us in the world. Memory and a kind of transformative repetition produce this idea of reception. In a major text published at the moment of the emergence of her idea of the author as receiver, Silverman pointed to the way that sight and vision themselves might only be made truly possible through acts of repetition and reclamation. In her book World Spectators, Silverman begins with a chapter entitled, in redoubled form, “Seeing for the Sake of Seeing.” Here she undoes many entrenched understandings of vision and visuality, employing a psychoanalytic model to arrive at the inherently “recursive” nature of sight itself. For the theorist, each act of vision is a form of “seeing again.” This is so, for Silverman’s model of vision internalizes the Freudian notion of desire, the finding of an object as the refinding of a lost object: “Every act of visual affirmation . . . occurs not only via the incarnation of a formless and unspecifiable nonobject of desire, but also via the visual reincarnation of previous incarnations.”37 And further: “The world spectator is consequently not just someone to whom the past returns, but someone who holds himself open to the new form it will take—­who anticipates and affirms the transformative manifestation of what was in what is.”38 For such a model of vision, photography indeed represents a momentous event in the history of human culture. The photograph, in this light, becomes not just a technique of sheer duplication, mechanical reproduction, but the purveyor of the ability to see again what has been seen before, to see a scene—­to experience a gaze—­always already visually redoubled. Perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to position the invention of photography as the necessary achievement of this more complex understanding of human vision—­its potentially inherent recursive structure, its need to open itself to the structure of “seeing again.” Photography can model the complex desiring nature of the visual itself, making explicit a structure usually repressed. The idea of the author as receiver finds support here in what we could call the recursive structure of the photograph. Every photograph is an image redoubled, a vision shared and repeated, a scene that entails a kind of optical echo and reverberation.39 Now, if this model of photography as reception, of the author or photographer as receiver, can be applied to Lockhart’s images in Pine Flat, it must be admitted that the photographs do present problems for us, in ways beyond the fact that their conventions are—­to use the old, postmodern term—­“appropriated” (for Leonard’s, and even Dean’s, were as well). In each photograph, the children adopt a pose; they do not present themselves “objectively” or analytically, all in the same position (hardly any are exactly centered within the image, and their

stances are as particular as their still-­growing bodies). In fact, “individuation,” perhaps even “subjectivation,” seems really key to the series, to Lockhart’s supposed continuation of an “objectivist” approach to photography—­in the lineage of either Neue Sachlichkeit or vernacular portraiture. Each photograph specifies its subject by their first name alone. And the poses multiply: hands are placed on hips (Jessie, Meleah, Travis, Sarah), or stuffed into pockets (Damien); thumbs are hooked through belt loops (Becky); heads face mostly full forward, but then some tilt in introversion (Damien); arms are crossed defensively (Sarah again, Chance, Mikey, Ryan), or hold an attribute—­like a drawing pad (Dakota), or a hunter’s rifle (Mikey), or a lollipop (Breanna). The criticism of Pine Flat has emphasized that in making these portraits, Lockhart entered into a form of collaboration with her subjects that is now characteristic of almost all her works—­which for the most part revise problematic conventions of human portraiture. As critic Timothy Martin has described Lockhart’s overall project, the aim has consistently been “to make portraits that are not portraits.”40 And yet, if collaborative between Lockhart and child, a product of the children’s

FIG U R E 4.7   Sharon Lockhart, Pine Flat Portrait Studio: Meleah, Travis, 2005. Two framed chromogenic prints, 45½ × 36¾ in. each.

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Sharon Lockhart, Pine Flat Portrait Studio: Dakota, 2005. Framed chromogenic print, 45½ × 36¾ in.

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desires as to how they would like to be recorded and presented—­what they might like to wear, what they might bring with them to the portrait session—­some of the images read as intensely uncomfortable, beyond all notion of childhood awkwardness.41 Witness the image of one of the younger children in the series, Chance, outfitted in a T-­shirt on which we can read the word “Independent,” but also clad in too large jeans, with his arms crossed tentatively and his presence before the camera entirely uncertain, legs curled in reticence—­at least so it appears to me, though the images seem designed to provoke different responses in different viewers. And the viewer’s

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Sharon Lockhart, Pine Flat Portrait Studio: Sierra, 2005. Framed chromogenic print, 45½ × 36¾ in.

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confrontation with the photographs of Pine Flat Portrait Studio becomes structural, too, here—­it must immediately be noted that when one sees the photographs in person (as opposed to in reproduction), they are presented under glass, a glass that is deeply reflective, even excessively so. Any encounter with the photographs thus involves seeing one’s own mirror image in the same space of representation as the children. And so, if this is collaboration, we cannot be sure of the origins of each pose, in photograph after photograph, whether it comes from the artist or subject; the attributes also may have been the children’s idea, or they may have been provided

Sharon Lockhart, Pine Flat Portrait Studio: Becky, Damien, Katie, 2005. Three framed chromogenic prints, 45½ × 36¾ in. each.

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by the author. If the photographs are the product of collaboration, the attributes also seem to be the direct progeny of Disfarmer’s portrait conventions, which would be a different understanding of “collaboration” altogether. We face a similar undecidability with regard to costume in these photographs, with the children’s clothing ranging here from everyday jeans and T-­shirts to elaborate biker outfits and combinations even more outlandish than the general tendency of children to mix and match clashing pieces of clothing would involve. And so the viewer discovers Sierra, the portrait of a young girl dressed for the rodeo, it seems, and almost buried beneath her accoutrements, which include a catcher’s mask, cowboy boots, fringed turquoise riding chaps, a hunter’s vest, and an outsize plaid flannel shirt marked with the word “Wrangler,” a cowboy nostalgia brand popular with American children especially in the 1970s. But then there are the children who present themselves dressed instead in a manner impeccably well matched: the subject of Breanna seems proud of how her sky-­blue top gets picked up in the same blue on her leopard-­print wrap skirt (betrayed, however, by the stained and dirtied blue of her thick tube socks stuffed into incongruous purple sandals). Shoelaces are tied and untied simultaneously, as in the portrait Jessie—­in a manner that seems too studied to be an accident. T-­shirts spout countercultural messages (“Freedom” and a peace sign in Becky), or more contemporary alt-­or emo slogans (“Tough Guys Wear Pink” in Damien), or simply echo the rote spread of commodity

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brands marketed to youth (“Hurley” in Katie). There are Vans sneakers and Converse high-­tops, and the children seem to emulate similar styles, such as leaving sneakers thickly laced, but untied, like slippers. There are also a lot of sandals and bare feet. A trio of three portraits hung alongside each other when Pine Flat is installed, featuring the three children just mentioned—­Becky, Damien, and Katie—­seem to be near each other, perhaps, due to the similarity of their sneakers alone, all of them black with pink laces or other, fuchsia highlights. Costume, props, and pose: my description of the children and their representation in the portraits nods to the photographs’ potential theatricality, their constructedness. It is entirely unclear, in other words, whether the photographs presented as the series Pine Flat Portrait Studio are to be understood as fictions or as documents, whether they engage the children in performative acting or testify to an unselfconscious “being,” whether they approximate Disfarmer’s long-­lost models from the past or locate an untouched pocket of authentic rural existence in the present.

And Lockhart’s film presents us with a similar set of problems. “I didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t know how I was doing it,” Lockhart has admitted about the Pine Flat project, but the film was begun before the photographic portraits, in this instance.42 In fact, before settling on the Pine Flat project’s form, Lockhart had actually proposed making a new film about a historical film camera, a move akin to Zoe Leonard’s photographic return to the Rolleiflex. Lockhart initially began work toward a filmic portrait of Jean-­Pierre Beauviala, designer of the Aaton 16 mm film camera, a portable apparatus with a new capability for sync sound used widely during the events of May ’68, and a favorite tool of documentary and New Wave filmmakers key to Lockhart, like Jean Rouch, Louis Malle, and, especially, Jean-­Luc Godard.43 The Beauviala portrait was instead transposed into the Pine Flat project, where Lockhart filmed for the first time in an isolated location without a substantial crew, on her own, precisely enabled by her use of an old Aaton camera. Working in 16 mm, Lockhart’s medium in this instance is deeply obsolescent, then; however, here too we confront a paradox. Contrary to Leonard’s and Dean’s projects, Pine Flat connects its outmoded analogue form paradoxically to the subjects of youth and (mostly) pristine nature—­however potentially threatened in our postindustrial present. The form is almost classical: Lockhart films twelve episodes that are all ten minutes in length, six of individual children in the rural landscape and then six more episodes of the children gathered into groups. The ten-­minute expanse corresponds, more or less, to the full length of a single reel of 16 mm film. During

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Sharon Lockhart, Pine Flat, 2005.

the time in which the film is allowed to roll to its depletion without interruption or cuts, Lockhart’s camera remains, like Dean’s, absolutely still. It is also, like Leonard’s, insistently frontal or “objective.” In this, the camera’s fixed and passive gaze registers the nonheroic, nonnarrative activities of the individual children, as they play or perform simple tasks. The film’s episodes are given basic descriptive names, and can be shown theatrically as a two-­hour film with an intermission, or looped when combined with the photographs in exhibition, with only one episode from each half of the film shown each day. In the first half of the theatrical version of the film, the episodes of single children record “actions” like a girl reading a book in a field (Reader), a boy attempting to play music while sitting in a running stream (Harmonica), another sleeping deeply near some mountain rocks (Sleeper), a slightly older boy listening to the forest sounds while hunting (Hunter), or a young child waiting before a crisp autumn valley for a slowly approaching school bus, which we eventually hear arrive but cannot see (Bus)—­throughout the full ten-­minute duration

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Sharon Lockhart, Pine Flat, 2005.

of the scene. All of the “open,” passive attributes of the author as receiver seem once more to be in effect. And yet, while Lockhart supposedly “scouted” her pristine locations with the children, and perhaps discussed with them what activities they might enjoy based on their own proclivities, we again are not faced with a film of “found,” documentary footage, even though this is its address. Calling the work a “space of encounter,” a “two-­sided liminality in which both artist and [her] subjects are engaged,” Catherine Wood has clarified that in Pine Flat: [Lockhart’s] manipulation of what we see in the film in particular is hard to unpick: sometimes it is a suggestion to the kids about what to wear, but sometimes also she would buy clothes that the child aspired to wearing, enabling them to appear as they wanted to be seen. Sometimes she directed their actions, and sometimes they improvised or responded to an unplanned occurrence, such as the boy playing his harmonica who looks up at an aeroplane flying overhead.44

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The actions become slightly more complex in the film’s second half, as the children filmed in these scenes are mostly older, and gather into pairs or groups. We see episodes where the adolescents cross a winter field, in some kind of collective game (Snowy Hill), or swim together looking down into the depths of a summer stream, treading water (Creek), or chase one another, wrestling and smoking cigarettes in the rain (Guns in Rain), and then play together on a swing hung from a monumental oak tree (Swing), or lie as a pair of couples newly embracing and making out in a golden summer field (Kissing). The 16 mm film reads as documentary, and indeed, as somehow “once upon a time,” like older, historical footage suddenly unearthed. And yet all of the episodes were staged for the artist’s now antiquated and historical camera. It is as if Lockhart does not recognize the opposition between fiction and documentary at all.

Such has been the ambivalence of Lockhart’s photographs and films from the very beginnings of her career. The vast majority of her earlier portrait projects were focused on children or young adults. Pine Flat arrives as a culmination, a link in a chain of ongoing and related works. In her Auditions series from 1994—­a breakthrough work—­Lockhart photographed children locked in a simultaneously awkward but deeply touching embrace, as if she were trying to capture the nonreplicable moment of one’s first kiss—­the onset of love and a first connection for many to a world outside the family. The episode Kissing in the Pine Flat film seems an internal memory of this prior work. However, with the Auditions series, Lockhart produced five of these images, each with different children but in the same locale. The children are on a staircase, with sunlight dappling a tile floor in the distance below, but never in the same way twice—­the light and shadow index the noncoincidence of the scenes (the photographs may be sequenced by this luminosity, which becomes gradually darker in each successive image). All the boys are on the right, and attempt to hold the upper part of the girls’ bodies—­but again never in exactly the same way, placing hands on shoulders, or upper arms, or even, most awkwardly, on necks. The girls drop their arms completely, or tentatively place them on the boys’ lower torsos. Some girls are taller than the boys, but not all, and the similarities and differences in the five images continue to amass. The repetition disrupts the reading of each photograph as an inimitable experience or memory, and things become even more problematic when one realizes that in the five photographs, one of the boy children shows up twice, engaged very differently in two scenes of kissing, a boy named “Max”—­lucky Max, we might call him, although he is met with a blank stare by the girl he attempts to kiss in one photograph, and a head turned demurely away in another.

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Impossible, then, to read as documentary or photojournalism, the Auditions series announces its divergence from what Henri Cartier-­Bresson called the “decisive moment” in photography, though this seems precisely what the photographs seek to imitate and stage. Lockhart’s images instead deployed the Hollywood or theatrical conventions of the performance audition, pointed to by the series’ title. Indeed, each photograph was the result of the children’s attempt to replicate a prior image, another scene, which immediately, then, in this early project, comes to appear a reflexive activity for Lockhart. No photograph for the artist will be considered unmediated; each arrives as the attempt to reinstantiate a prior image, another visual scene. This must be read as more specific than “appropriation,” as postmodern criticism understood this term. The initiation and basis of Lockhart’s work in photography immediately seems reminiscent of what I have just described as the very logic of the author as receiver—­with the task of the photographic image being to bring back to life a memory image, to connect the scene of the visual with an image from the past, to have each and every visual image replicate or bring itself into alignment with another image, to enter into the condition of the recursive. In this case, the dialogue for Lockhart between photography and cinema provides the vehicle for this alignment, as the image crucial to the Auditions series comes from a concrete cinematic source: the climactic “first kiss” scene from one of François Truffaut’s films about children, L’argent de poche (Small Change), 1976. This climactic scene has been celebrated as one of the crucial moments of autobiography in Truffaut’s oeuvre, a cinema already working through the webs of memory, navigating document and fiction. Small Change presents many scenarios focused on French children in a provincial town in the Auvergne, in the immediate months leading up to a nostalgic 1970s summertime vacation from school. Crucially for Lockhart—­given more recent works focusing on children who are orphans—­ one of the main characters has lost his mother, and another suffers from parental abuse at home, from which he is eventually removed. With the world of adults minimized—­as Lockhart will model more emphatically in Pine Flat—­other worlds of affection, care, and play open up for the children, climaxing with the final scene of two of the children’s first kiss. In Small Change, this “first kiss” scene is always already a memory image, in ways now also beyond its potential autobiographical resonance for Truffaut. We are told the story of “Martine” and “Patrick” (the motherless child) at their summer camp. But the story of this first kiss is told in voice-­over by Martine, as she relates to a cousin in writing the memory of what occurred. In fact, as the scene begins, Martine writes to her cousin at night, in the silence of her camp dormitory, using a special pen equipped with a light for writing in the dark, like the projection form of the cinema, or also literally like a kind of “light-­writing,” the etymological meaning of the word

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“photo-­graph.” It is as if this telling of a first amorous memory embodied the cinema and photography in another form, and by other means.45 But Martine is light-­writing in the dark to her cousin, from her summer camp, and we hear her words: “It finally happened,” she begins. We travel through her memories of the summer, her encounters with Patrick, as the young boy and girl smile at each other, make “eyes” at each other—­provide beauty for each other’s eyes in various scenes, so many memory images, told by the young girl in indirect discourse, in the past tense and in the second degree. Martine and Patrick go with the other children to see a bicycle race, but again they “only have eyes for each other.” And then a lunch scene commences, back at camp, in the dining hall. Like the bicycle race, the activity seems deeply French—­as does Martine’s gingham dress, in the tricolor’s red, white, and blue—­as the cafeteria fills with dining French children, very serious, very busy with their elaborate meal, all the girls on one side, all the boys on the other. Martine departs the cafeteria to use the restroom, leaving behind an apple, like a biblical Eve. The other children seize their chance, and the girls especially taunt Patrick that Martine is waiting for him outside, to be kissed by him. Patrick rises to the occasion. He leaves the dining hall and goes up a flight of stairs, narrowly missing Martine as she returns to her friends. They play the same trick on her, but this time it is the boys who taunt her, and she goes out to find Patrick. The two children encounter each other on the stairs, and—­after awkwardly maneuvering toward each other’s faces—­they kiss innocently and embrace. When they return to the cafeteria together, the other children go wild with laughter and mischievous joy, hooting in unison (“Quel chahut!” Martine writes to her cousin) like a living embodiment of Brueghel’s visions of a world upside-­down, a world given over completely to children in a painting like his Children’s Games, 1560. Small Change ends with their excited cries, and the credits run over an even more Brueghel-­like image of a milling crowd of children’s faces seen from above—­another intertex-

tual or memory image for Truffaut, of a famous scene from his earlier film The 400 Blows, where the director had filmed a marionette show for French children from the point of view of the puppeteer, from the angle of the stage looking out at the wonder on the faces of the child audience. Having recognized the way Lockhart’s Auditions series returns to Truffaut’s scene (and its own returns, memories, and inherent recursive structure), we can now sense how the photographs were constructed, through a deeply cinematic mode that involved location scouting, casting, and repeated performance before the camera, “directed” more than simply operated by the artist. Lockhart finds a staircase filled with natural light, like the scene from Small Change, and even the detail of the tile floor has its basis in Truffaut’s film. And yet as the repetitions unwind, the evident differences signal transformation: the children of Lockhart’s Auditions assert themselves as emphatically un-­French, of course, in a manner contrary to the nostalgia in the mode of Truffaut, their multiple ethnicities and diverse cultural identities apparent and reshuffled in each photograph. And the artist’s camera refuses to look down at the kissing children on the stairs, as Truffaut’s did, instead positioning itself precisely at the children’s level. To the extent this alteration signifies, the implication seems to be one of refusing the distanced, elevated adult viewpoint, embracing instead a relation of egalitarianism, the camera as equal—­harmonized with that which it surveys.46 The children in the Auditions series thus become more central to the image, and loom large, beyond all conception of their years. And the Auditions series performs one more striking alteration on the “memory” of Truffaut’s memory scene, immediately apparent. Lockhart’s images diametrically reverse the perspective of the angle of the shot constructed by Truffaut. A series of new images unwind in mirror reversal, their replication also a kind of photographic inversion, like a chiasmus, as we move in alteration from cinema to photography, from the nostalgic glow of memory to its rehearsal and redoubling.

FIG U R E 4.13   Sharon Lockhart, Auditions, 1994. Left to right: Audition One: Simone and Max, Audition Two: Darija and Daniel, Audition Three: Amalia and Kirk, Audition Four: Kathleen and Max, Audition Five: Sirushi and Victor. Five framed chromogenic prints, 49 × 61 in. each.

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François Truffaut, dir., Small Change, 1976.

In this replication or reenactment, the photographs in Lockhart’s Auditions series present a set of “memories” as “falsifying” as Tacita Dean’s film Boots. We might even characterize them beyond falsifying as “exteriorizing,” memories that do not belong to a subject, strictly speaking, but at least in part belong to the world. The solipsistic space of memory had long been a target of contemporary artistic practice, at least since minimalism—­moving from the private dimensions of subjective expression to a more public motivation for artistic forms.47 And yet Lockhart’s engagement with what seems on the surface to be the traditional trappings of memory—­even the photographic devotion to the memory image—­seems also to cancel the interior or solipsistic basis of this older structure. We face a stuttering series of memories in exile, reminiscences that have moved beyond the subject. Lockhart’s images for the later project Goshogaoka, 1997, followed a similar logic. Again the work included both a long-­form film and a series of staged photographs, presented in dialogue. In the film, we witness ten-­minute-­long episodes (the precursor to the 16 mm approach of Pine Flat), where the camera stands motionless before a Japanese girls’ basketball team drilling in a school gymnasium replete with a curtained theater stage in the background. The drills are accompanied by the girls’ otherworldly chants, and the motions of the players seem to derive more

FIG U R E 4.15   Sharon Lockhart, Goshogaoka, 1997. 16 mm film, color, sound, 63 min.

FI GUR E 4.16  Sharon Lockhart, Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team: Kumi Nanjo and Marie Komuro; Rie Ouchi; Atsuko Shinkai, Eri Kobayashi, and Naomi Hasegawa, 1997. Three framed chromogenic prints, 32 5⁄16 × 27⅜ in. each.

from experimental-­dance history than from the familiar imperatives of sport. In the photographs, we see a series of individual or group portraits of the Japanese girls, now seemingly captured while the high school basketball team was playing or practicing. And yet something here, too, is amiss, as the photographs present the girls intensely spotlit, with backgrounds almost blank or black. We foresee, again, the future that will lead to the oppositional formal language of the portraits in Pine Flat Portrait Studio. The high-­contrast lighting of Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team cancels the documentary address of the action images, leading the viewer to sense their artificiality, their perhaps frozen poses that only simulate motion, snapshots converted into staged constructions. And indeed, Lockhart’s images were arrived at after the girls chose favorite sports photographs of female basketball stars upon which to model their actions and their poses. Each photograph comes to be inspired by a prior one, now in the mode of a collaborative process that entailed deep emulation, a kind of image aspiration, with the photograph the trace of a concrete desire to “become.” In one of the examples of a “source” image for the girl basketball players’ poses from the Japanese press that Lockhart has allowed to be published, we can see again that strangely—­or, by now, characteristically—­Lockhart has diametrically reversed the angle of the original shot, like a mirror inversion. Lockhart’s photographs relate

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F I GURE 4.1 7  Left, Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team: Yuka Koishihara and Eri Kobayashi; Yuka Ishigami; Chinatsu Narui and Hitomi Shibazaki; Kumiko Shirai (detail: Kumiko Shirai), 1997. Four framed chromogenic prints, 32 5⁄16 × 27⅜ in. each. Right, research material for Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team, 1997.

to other images, with which, however, they will not be allowed to rigorously coincide. While the source image Lockhart has revealed accompanies one of the only portraits in her series where a basketball player seems to face forward, conforming to the genre of the portrait by confronting the viewer directly, most of the images attest in other ways to the fragmentary nature of their scenes. Timothy Martin has asserted that even the film Goshogaoka can be read as “quite portrait-­like,” by which he means that Lockhart “invites us to perceive the girls honorifically, as artists, as dancers.”48 But in the photos, and unlike in traditional portraits, the girls mostly look awry, gazing off-­scene, beyond the frame, or up into the air—­in many images seeming to stare into the harsh light source of the image itself, descending upon the scene in an almost apocalyptic mode. This is reflexivity not as unity, completeness, or wholeness, but reflexivity as the specificity of fragmentation, perhaps even catastrophe.49 The photographs attest to their partiality, their insufficiency, their belonging to a larger continuum beyond their frame, with the girls each gazing at something the viewer will never see. And so here, if in Goshogaoka, the photographs speak to emulation, even identification, as a process for the making of the photographic image, this chain of image aspiration—­this duplicative performance that births the photograph for Lockhart—­speaks to another process of becoming. Martin again: “Here [in the Goshogaoka photographs] is the obverse of the will to physical and social activity”

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evinced by the project’s film. We witness instead “a fantasy of becoming static, iconic, literally, becoming photographic.”50 In Goshogaoka, modeling each image on another image becomes the vehicle of this “becoming photographic” of the image and the subject. The staged snapshot becomes a form of the genre we recognize as the portrait, in a process where the subject herself becomes photographic, gravitates toward the conditions of the photograph. To make a photographic portrait, in the Goshogaoka project, is to identify with another, to become other. And so it is for the photograph in Lockhart’s hands, a scene of alteration combining formats, genres, and even mediums, as the cinematic tropes the photograph now deploys continue to alter the photograph’s own identity. It is as if we are witness in Goshogaoka not just to the teenage girls’ identifications with media and celebrity, but to the photograph’s own identification with that which has always been beyond it.

Lockhart’s photographs thus dismantle many of the assumptions of both art portraiture and documentary, pictorialism and reportage, the “constructed” and the “objective” image. They dismantle, in fact, the imperatives of ethnographic documentation, the discursive formation to which Lockhart’s work in its early moments seemed oriented, and to which critics most often connected it—­given her direct embrace of projects in remote locations in Asia and Latin America.51 In her early work, Lockhart consistently made portraits that would not shy away from—­that would indeed gravitate toward—­extreme situations of cultural alterity. In these projects, modeling pose and costume upon prior images was not her only strategy. As in Pine Flat, the settings, the far-­flung places in which the act of portraiture occurs—­the photograph’s “world,” in other words—­became an overriding concern. This was enacted most poignantly in her linked “Brazil projects” that led up to the key film Teatro Amazonas in 1999, the work to follow from Goshogaoka. Here, Lockhart actually accompanied two anthropologists on research trips in the Amazon River basin, only to produce a series of photographic images that moved laterally away from direct portraits of the ethnographic “subjects” of this field research. Admittedly, Lockhart did produce a series of serial group portraits, family portraits, where anthropological subject families were invited to arrange and rearrange themselves for the camera after each image was taken and shown to them, producing—­over the course of the making of the series—­a collective and collaborative portrait closer to their own desires and self-­understandings. But the other projects around Teatro Amazonas took entirely other approaches to portraiture and to the subject.

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In her series Interview Locations, Lockhart photographed the homes in which the Brazilian families had been interviewed by the ethnographers, but absent of their inhabitants. Simultaneously, she requested treasured snapshots from the same families, which she then rephotographed for a series entitled Family Photographs. The result was a first series that gathered to itself so many images of seemingly abandoned homes, emptied-­out domestic spaces; and another series, the rephotographed snapshots, that spoke of time past in an anonymous voice, like rootless or discarded memories again bereft of their individual owners. The photographs seem quite literally haunting: in the Interview Locations, we see the bare furniture, the forsaken wooden floorboards, the deserted rooms, contrasted with sacks and bags and receptacles filled with small possessions and hung on hooks, or analogue media like newspaper covering a wall in the place of decoration, with more analogue equipment, like rickety cassette players, aligned nearby. But the domestic abandonment overrides all. The deep sense of loss or absence pervading these photographs, portraiture conveyed through the strategy of the missing, would lead art historian Norman Bryson to see the Interview Locations and Family Photographs series as key examples of what he has called “counterpresence” in contemporary photography. Associated with the conceptual turn in photography since the 1960s, counterpresence for Bryson involves “the systematic negation of photography’s classical imperative to reproduce the things of the world.” Instead of serving as a “reservoir of information” for the eye, the photograph of counterpresence would “interrupt” such visual “absorption.” Bryson describes this: For as long as counterpresence held sway over reception, the eye could no longer simply receive and process the flow of data; a hiatus cut the flow, stopped the gaze in its tracks. Now attention had to work on a quite different basis: not passively receiving a flow, but actively working with juxtapositions and fragments, sequences and implications. Photography suddenly incorporated within itself structures of interruption and montage formerly reserved for the cinematic.52

No longer in a sense turned “toward the spectator,” a photography of counterpresence according to Bryson would be “inadvertent,” deploying strategies of “deflection and withdrawal” that confer upon such photographs “a mysterious afterlife.”53 Looking at these photographs does not deplete them, for their significance lies outside their surface form. While pointing to a history of photography that begins with the Düsseldorf School, specifically with the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher and of their imme-

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Sharon Lockhart, Interview Location: Survey of the Aripuanã River Region. São Miguel Community, Boca do Juma River, Brazil. Interview Subject: Francisco Colares. Anthropologist: Ligia Simonian, 1999. Framed gelatin silver print, 32 × 27 in.

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diate followers—­and thus to photographic projects that abandon the single image for serial formats, archival arrangements, and narrative groupings or sequences—­Bryson elaborated his idea of counterpresence in direct relation to Lockhart’s Interview Locations and Family Photographs series. If the photograph of counterpresence holds its interest outside itself, now the art historian confronts a work he describes as invoking “the whole tortuous history of the West’s attempt

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to understand the world outside itself.”54 The photographs literally enact the “afterlife” of counterpresence, as Lockhart depicts the rooms of intercultural encounter “afterwards,” when both anthropologist and “informants” have exited the scene. “From one point of view,” Bryson writes of these photographs, “every detail we see harbors potential knowledge of the interviewed families and their culture.” And yet, he continues in the proper key, “the absence of human subjects gives all of this an eerie atmosphere.” The photograph now takes on the aspect of ruination: “All we have are spaces whose intelligibility depends on familiarity and use by individuals who have now vanished, leaving behind only these mysterious, Pompeian clues, in a visual field collaged from fragments and scraps that may or may not accurately reflect the personality and inner life of the now departed families.”55 Or almost. For even this ruination and abandonment is not total with Lockhart. Oppositions again will not hold. In one of the most poignant of the Interview Location photographs, Lockhart’s camera has descended low, crouching down toward the floorboards, seeming to gaze at the domestic space from a very particular and specific vantage point. It is as if Lockhart’s camera not only descends toward the image’s “ground,” like a photographic fundament, but wanted to identify physically with the gaze of a child, a viewpoint the photograph models against “objectivity” and documentary approaches. For, rather than “neutral,” Lockhart’s perspective implies a concrete subjectivity, and one here beginning below the level of the empty room’s single abandoned chair. This is documentary from a toddler’s point of view, an interior as experienced from the vantage of the earliest moments of life, or the beginnings of subjectivity itself. This is the fundament the photograph in fact seeks. And then we notice that in this photograph at least, a child does appear, a sliver of his face and body peeking through a doorframe in the far distance of the interior. The space is not quite empty and void of human presence. There are photographs, reproductions on the wooden walls—­high up, above the chair, the space and the image of the adult. But there in the distance a child gazes back at the low-­lying camera, face and body blurred like a memory of a Helen Levitt image of children at play, as this boy seems himself to initiate a game of hide-­and-­seek with the photographer and her camera. And Lockhart’s capture of a child hidden within or just beyond the emptied-­out and eviscerated image finds other echoes in the paired series. In the Family Photographs, a rephotographed old snapshot shows another image clinging to the ground, descending into the phenomenological space and visual experience (and not just the representation) of the child. In this rephotographed photograph—­grainy, slightly out of focus, and faded—­a child lies

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F I GURE 4.1 9  Sharon Lockhart, Photo from the Collection of João Damasceno; Interview Location: Survey of the Aripuanã River Region. Natal Community, Aripuanã River, Brazil; Interview Subject: João Damasceno; Interview Subjects: Alexandre de Oliveira Bento, José Luiz Cardoso, Maria de Jesus Araújo Ferreira; Anthropologist: Ligia Simonian; Photos from the Collection of Alexandre de Oliveira Bento, 1999. Three framed chromogenic prints and three framed gelatin silver prints; left to right, 16 1/2 × 13 1/2 in., 27 × 32 in., 27 × 32 in., 13 1/2 × 16 1/2 in., 13 1/2 × 16 1/2 in., 16 1/2 × 13 1/2 in.

F I GURE 4. 20  Sharon Lockhart, Photo from the Collection of João Damasceno; Interview Location: Survey of the Aripuanã River Region. Natal Community, Aripuanã River, Brazil; Interview Subject: João Damasceno; Interview Subjects: Alexandre de Oliveira Bento, José Luiz Cardoso, Maria de Jesus Araújo Ferreira; Anthropologist: Ligia Simonian; Photos from the Collection of Alexandre de Oliveira Bento (detail: fig. 4.19, fourth from left), 1999.

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now upon the ground outside, fingering the grass, perhaps on the verge of sleep or in its aftermath, an epic but exposed nap upon the bare earth. And the camera of the once-­upon-­a-­time family member who originally took this image does not look down upon the recumbent child. The viewpoint again lowers itself to the child’s level, even as that level involves a collapse in fatigue upon the grass. There is a future, of course, for such an image. And for such a viewpoint, here ghosted and redoubled—­made recursive—­by Lockhart’s camera. Inevitably, we think forward to the film Pine Flat, to its children, to its camera angles, but also to a specific episode from its early half like Sleeper, where Lockhart positions another child on the grass of a forest floor, filming him recumbent while he sleeps, while he dreams. As in the Auditions, we gaze at an image that we have seen before, and that was already “seen before” and redoubled prior to our first encounter with it.

F I GURE 4. 21 

Sharon Lockhart, Pine Flat, 2005.

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Nostalgia whispered through both of these photographic projects, the Interview Locations and Family Photographs, in its classic forms—­the home space, the time of childhood and origins. Nostalgia perhaps also colored the series’ photographic and historical evocations—­as many of Lockhart’s abandoned domestic interiors appeared like direct homages to the photographs that Walker Evans had once produced for his collaborative project with writer James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941, matching their black-­and-­white tonality, their attention to the home space as a ground for portraiture, embracing thereby a return of Evans’s displaced portrait strategies, so many subjects reflected in the impoverished but richly used objects of their surround. The rephotographed family snapshots also attached themselves directly to older imaging technologies, outmoded cameras, and bygone times.

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Sharon Lockhart, Untitled, 1996. Framed chromogenic print, 32 × 43 in.

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Sharon Lockhart, Untitled, 1996. Framed chromogenic print, 43 × 32 in.

But nostalgia attached itself even more deeply to those early works by Lockhart where her focus on youth portraits and on domestic interiors actually came together, fused in the same image. Again we are leaning on the etymology of nostalgia here, the “ache” to “return home.” All without titles, these single-­image works were filled with a general sense of languor and of suspension: a photograph of a young girl napping (more sleep!) on or near a glass table, enveloped by its

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mirror embrace (Untitled, 1996); a young woman in an old, fading home turned away from the camera, in profil perdu (Untitled, 1996). Rather than snapshots or documents, whose content they seemed to imitate, these images were delicately staged, with locations scouted, costumes chosen, and lighting arranged, again, along a cinematic model. They were, in other words, “directed” photographs, like we speak of the direction of a film, relatively large-­scale photographic images paradoxically and collectively produced. Their paradoxical address continued into the strange intensity of their formal reflexivity. For if these single-­image works approached the scale of painting, they also emulated typical painterly subject matter—­dreamlike images of sleep, or female subjects in domestic interiors caught in moments of inwardness and introspection. As photographs, they were riddled with references to specific painterly structures: a play with the motifs of window transparency and mirror reflection in the photograph of the sleeping girl, two of the primordial metaphors for the surface of the medium of painting itself; or a marked contrast of framed painting and tabletop, two instantiations of the tableau, in the photograph of the young woman in the outmoded interior. And yet, simultaneously, so many of the aspects of these scenes seemed to speak passionately of photographic reflexivity, and at times with the same shared signifiers that pointed to painting. This is their paradox: the prominent glass tables used by Lockhart in each scene pointed not just to the tableau but to the camera lens. Interior scenes darkened by distant curtains, barely parted, rhymed not just with the canvas ground of most paintings but with the camera shutter, provoking comparison of the dim interior with the photographic structure of the camera obscura. A whole lived experience of photographic self-­reflection seemed on offer, entering into a dynamic compared to an image of the past or of memory—­but staged for the camera, and twisted into a broadly cinematic construction. Painting, photography, film, we remember with Moholy-­Nagy: reflexivity in Lockhart’s photographs suddenly drops the prefix “self ” we habitually append to such medium-­specific dynamics. Reflexivity usually turns inward, like memory. Here it expands and resonates across its traditional boundaries. Similar images of children were made simultaneously in outdoor settings, like the uncanny diptych Julia Thomas, 1994, looking forward in this way to Pine Flat. As with Zoe Leonard’s, many of Lockhart’s photographic works arrive as image pairs; the coupled photographs in Julia Thomas both abandon the dream-­filled interior for a literally dreamlike overgrown path or garden at night, the human subject outlined again in stark contrast against the darkness. A girl in one photograph looms large, in fancy dress, surrounded by newborn, vivid grass; a boy in the other shrinks contrariwise, wearing neither shirt nor shoes to guard against the crumbling autumn leaves strewn everywhere upon the ground. But the pecu-

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Sharon Lockhart, Julia Thomas, 1993. Two framed chromogenic prints, 61 × 49 in. each.

liarity of almost all of these exterior or outdoor portrait photographs, echoed by other Untitled images from 1996—­and perhaps attributing to their enigma and suspended sense of time—­was how in each image the subject did not look forward but turned away, or turned back, to look along with the viewer into the black or inscrutable distance of the photograph. The inadvertency, to use Bryson’s term, was repeated and emphatic. It has slowly become apparent that these early portraits take an opposite but linked approach to that evinced in a series like Auditions. For if the latter photographs approximated documentary snapshots but had been modeled upon a cinematic “source,” here Lockhart’s cinematic portraits held a kind of mysterious dialogue with prior documents, in this case family snapshots. Beginning in 1994, Lockhart had already adopted the strategy enacted later in Brazil for the Family Photographs series, engaging in a kind of “self-­ethnography” as she began to rephotograph her own personal archive of family photo albums. The series con-

Left to right, Sharon Lockhart, Untitled Study (Rephotographed Snapshot #1), 1994; Sharon Lockhart, Untitled Study (Rephotographed Snapshot #2), 1995; Sharon Lockhart, Untitled Study (Rephotographed Snapshot #3), 1995. Framed chromogenic prints, each 15½ × 13½ in.

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tinues to the present day; Lockhart calls each of these images an Untitled Study (Rephotographed Snapshot). In many of these “studies,” we see a typical family unit, a mother, a father, a blond child or perhaps different young children, in photographs most often taken in the natural landscape. Family members stand out against rolling hills, a forest, a lake; or they are in the fields, by a picnic table; or on the sand dunes, near the ocean. In the first image in the series, we can assume, we are gazing at Lockhart as a child in the arms of her father; in the second, at her holding hands with her mother—­but we will never be sure, as in each of the early Untitled Studies the family members depicted almost always turn away from the camera. It is as if Lockhart seemed at first to pick just those family snapshots that were something like the “failed” photographs from a roll or a collection, the ones that did not give you the information a family photograph is supposed to give, images where someone’s back is to the camera, or where the photograph falls out of focus or uses the wrong exposure—­the photographs that would usually never have made it into the normative family album, and that digitalization has now consigned to an eternal oblivion. Hardly any critical accounts have noticed or remarked upon these images, these photographs gone wrong. The artist, until recently, has not spoken of them, but

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has allowed them from time to time to be reproduced enigmatically and without much further comment in the supporting documentation of various exhibition catalogues. One might assume that the Untitled Studies series amounts merely to a kind of analytic “study,” reflecting Lockhart’s early quasi-­anthropological interests, a conceptual project based on the appropriation of amateur photographs that happen to be personal, and that reveal the manner in which historical photographic conventions and social habits structure even one’s own memories and subjectivity. But that Lockhart here was “appropriating” photographs taken mostly by her own mother, and in some cases by her father—­this speaks to something deeper and more pressing than a critical analysis of photographic convention, or a sociological study of photographic habits in the spirit of the work of Pierre Bourdieu.56 That the photographs chosen were also for the most part “off,” somehow opaque and elusive to understanding, to their supposed function, to normative photographic conventions: this also complicates the rationale of the series. Instead, a formal process comes into view here—­for Lockhart’s work as a whole, and, perhaps, for photography itself in the current moment. One exception to the critical silence on the Untitled Studies series was the important early essay on Lockhart by Timothy Martin, who comments on their emphatic relation to the Untitled cinematic photographs of 1994–­96. Initiated simultaneously, the two bodies of work should be seen in tight relation to each other. It is through this photographic “kinship” that we come to understand, perhaps, the reason for the rephotographed snapshots being called by the artist “studies.” Describing Lockhart’s work in the wake of the Auditions series, Martin writes: Lockhart’s pictorial language was now beginning to take the role of characterization upon itself, employing a cinematic sense of mise-­en-­scène as its chief device—­though making no further overt reference to specific films. Nearly all of the untitled large-­ scale color photographs of 1995–­1996 pursue this pictorial language to greater and greater degrees of scenic involution and mystery. And in nearly all of them the human subject is obliquely posed, many with back to camera: a figure of vacancy, stillness, and deferral within a picture of tense visual expectation. Curiously, a few of these poses echo those seen in the artist’s rephotographed family snapshots, which she has produced from 1996 [sic] to the present day. In these nostalgic images, she, her sister, mother, and father appear as solitary or paired figures, typically with backs to camera, before natural vistas or more domestic placid scenery. The sense of longing and deferral in these images offers a powerful, though muted, personal counterpoint to the cinematic grandness of the large-­scale photographs, which appear to derive from them in ways that remain essentially indeterminate and private.57

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Left, Sharon Lockhart, Untitled Study (Rephotographed Snapshot #7), 1998. Framed chromogenic print, 15½ × 13½ in. Right, Sharon Lockhart, Pine Flat, 2005.

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The Untitled Studies series thus does not exactly amount, again, to a set of image “sources.” Instead, they are held in lesser or greater dialogue with Lockhart’s cinematic portraits—­a strangely distanced relation to images of one’s personal history coming into contact with a distanced, staged image of intimacy in the present. And this “dialogue,” I would say, continues onward throughout Lockhart’s subsequent work, as the natural scenery and the poses of the rephotographed family snapshots find a startling series of echoes in the more recent images from Pine Flat. Indeed, at the moment of the making of the Pine Flat project, Lockhart rephotographed commercial portraits of herself and her sister produced in the 1960s and 1970s as Untitled Study images, documenting some kind of historical survival of the studio-­portrait practice engaged in by Disfarmer into her own personal history, into her childhood, which she extended as well to the children

in Pine Flat. And many of Pine Flat’s filmed scenarios seem to follow closely from Lockhart’s enigmatic family photographs, with pairs and trios of children playing in both, or with the long-­ago snapshots of herself or her family members with back to camera now taken up in episodes of Pine Flat like Bus or Snowy Hill. The echoes produced between the two works take a multitude of forms. Sometimes, it seems that Lockhart allows compositions to spread, to be shared, as we see the glowing field and tree positioned left of center in Untitled Study (Rephotographed Snapshot #7), 1998, reemerge—­swollen with age as if marking the passage of the years—­in the late episode of Pine Flat where children play on a rope swing hung from a hoary tree. Sometimes, Lockhart takes up the “activity” of the rephotographed snapshot alone, which is the case with Untitled Study (Rephotographed Snapshot #11), 2000, an overexposed image of a young child asleep on the sand dunes. Along with the Brazilian Family Photograph we have

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Sharon Lockhart, Untitled Study (Rephotographed Snapshot #11), 2000. Framed chromogenic print, 15½ × 13½ in.

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F I GURE 4. 28   Left, Sharon Lockhart, Untitled Study (Rephotographed Snapshot #10), 1999. Framed chromogenic print, 15½ × 13½ in. Right, Sharon Lockhart, Pine Flat, 2005.

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already discussed, this image returns in the Sleeper episode of the Pine Flat film, the girl child now a boy, the framing much more tight, but the bodily positions of the children shared across the years (at least for a time—­in the film, the boy twitches and moves around, in the chance activities of sleep itself ). Objects and accoutrements sometimes travel through space and time, from photography to their cinematic reemergence: for example, we follow the dark plaid shirt worn by a blond boy (or is it Lockhart herself, with a boyish haircut?) near a fairground carousel in Untitled Study (Rephotographed Snapshot #10), 1999, reappearing as the outfit of the young Latino boy waiting for a school bus in the episode Bus that concludes the first half of the Pine Flat film. In the film still that is most often reproduced to stand for this episode, the plaid-­clad boy turns away from the camera to the right, as the blond child turned away years before to the left, their positions reverberating in mirror reversal, once more presenting us with a relation of chiasmus and inversion.

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The act of turning away from the camera thus returns most of all. It is as if an initial analogy first occurred to Lockhart around the issue of pose—­the fact that these enigmatic (failed?) snapshots of family members seen from behind created a correspondence with the situation of the viewer’s orientation toward the image, with both viewer and photographed subject gazing toward a distant horizon, like the unfathomable vista of the enigma of the past itself. Both viewer and viewed were positioned similarly in relation to that unknown scene, and to a kind of thus infinitely deferred desire.58 And then it is as if this initial analogy inspired the artist to seek out another series of affinities, “attuning” her early cinematic photographs or the more recent images from the Pine Flat film project to these auratic images—­these redoubled photographs—­from her own past.59

Attunement, I want to claim, has become one of Lockhart’s overriding artistic concerns—­a way of understanding her work’s position between photography and film, and of comprehending her transformation of photography more generally. The stakes of such a tactic are larger than photography alone, though they perhaps find their beginnings and foundation there. “Attunement”: the word may strike the reader as strange for an aesthetic discussion, given its use (mostly) in new-­ age discourses or non-­Western healing practices. And yet here I want to register the word’s potential musical connotations, thinking of sound and harmony and tuning, something of great interest in the face of an artist who began her work with a photographic series titled Auditions. This was a title taken by critics for its theatrical or performance meaning mostly, but that meaning itself has its origin in an etymology that points more primordially to the domain of the aural or of sound. “Audition” and “audience” share this etymology, with “audition” meaning the attending or listening to someone, giving them one’s attention. Nothing could be further from the ethos of Lockhart’s Auditions series than the Warholian model of the Screen Tests, 1964– ­66, a title she could have, but pointedly did not use for her early photographic images and project.60 This closeness to Warhol, but also—­in such intimacy—­this inversion of his work’s power hierarchies or subjective dynamics, runs through much of Lockhart’s work in film. The Sleeper episode of Pine Flat calls upon Warhol directly, pointing of course to the Pop artist’s “anti-­film” Sleep, 1964, “starring” the poet John Giorno. Lockhart’s shift from recording a lover to recording a child, moving from a gaze of potential desire to one linked to the figure of a mother or sibling or friend—­a gaze of care perhaps most of all—­establishes a different mode of attention and watchfulness. With this, the activity of listening—­of “auditioning”—­ becomes key in Lockhart’s work, along with a parallel receptivity and openness to

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the other, to the child. Warholian voyeurism and subjective “testing” seem very far away. In Lockhart’s subsequent work, literal images of musical instruments and scenes of musical performance recur, coupled with attentiveness to the deep silence of the photograph as an object, or the constructed, additive nature of sound in analogue film. Sound and silence have thus seemed key to Lockhart, by now for quite a long time.61 As a medium, photography had been defined by its processes of physical inscription, understood as an image that preserves a record or trace of the world, a visual scene produced through an indexical or causal attachment to the real. For photography to become newly relational as a form, however, would be to build upon (and not negate) its procedures of physical inscription, its creation of an image that comes into being like an attached visual shadow. Proximity, closeness, the pressing of form upon form, what we might even call the “intimacy” of forms—­all of these now become perceivable as photographic effects, photographic afterlives, like a step beyond or even an intensification of photographic indexicality. “Attunement” names this approach of one form toward another. And it is a device we can add to Bryson’s notion of photographic counterpresence, the turn of contemporary photography away from its classical imperative to reproduce the things of the world. Bryson’s notion complicates productively the long-­vaunted shift of the photograph from an analogue or indexical mode to the digital or electronic image. Photographic counterpresence embodies a different kind of depletion of the photograph, a giving up that instead opens up new possibilities. For like the dynamics of lateness and longing more broadly, photography turns away from the world only by turning toward objects and forms in a new way, becoming manifest as a kind of reaching “beyond” the photographic image or frame. The turning away of counterpresence makes possible the turn toward the beyond of photographic form. Modernist strategies and understandings of photography—­always fraught—­had wanted to understand the possible autonomization of the inherently composite nature and activity of photography, its turning inward upon itself, a modernist separation from other forms. Attunement instead aspires toward a kind of radical sharing of forms. As a metaphor, or better, a device, attunement in Lockhart’s work functions similarly to the strategies of “receiving” we have analyzed in the artists of this account whose work seems quite close to her own. Beyond the visual, the enveloping or encompassing experience of sound has played its role in most of these tactics and strategies. In Leonard’s archive Analogue, the photograph comes to be considered everywhere in relation to the analogue receiver, and functions as a literal kind of open receptacle, a container waiting to be filled. In Dean’s still films, we face the recursive formal play of the similarly aural structure of the “echo,” as Dean rhymes objects and mediums, and also ultimately beings and architectures or even

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“worlds”—­the great achievement initiated in Boots, though the tactic was preceded in Dean’s work and made explicit and reflexive in earlier films such as Sound Mirrors. And as we will see with Moyra Davey, we face a similar, and in fact programmatic, understanding of the photograph as both receiver and receptacle—­with so many of Davey’s photographs literally focusing on stereo receivers, or record players, the photograph gravitating toward all manner of analogue sound production. But Davey will also produce photographs of receptacle or container structures in her domestic spaces alongside such analogue equipment—­storage structures—­like the family refrigerator, in the work Glad, 1999, functioning as a site of additive layers and endless inscription, the refrigerator holding messages and images and other household containers everywhere layered or piled not just within it (we cannot see what is stored there), but upon it, and moving beyond it. The refrigerator photograph models the “mess” or extreme domestic clutter we often see documented in Davey’s photography, but it also can be read here as clarifying the structure of a photography now expanding, moving in an additive way out into space in many directions.62 Like these expansions of photography beyond the “merely” visual, Lockhart’s strategies of attunement exceed the literal obsolescence of the analogue to instantiate what we might call—­in Kaja Silverman’s sense—­a conceptual strategy of analogy.63 To attune something requires two forms; it can never be a solitary endeavor. Attunement differs from procedures of doubling, the precision duplication of the photograph as copy. “Attunement” instead names the attempt to bring forms close, to have them “rhyme,” like two similar sounds—­even if the “words” that create them may otherwise look or appear very different. It is a concept we could use to understand Lockhart’s insistent linkage of terms we normally perceive as oppositions, rhyming in her work document and fiction, past and present, viewer and viewed, subject and object, self and other—­until the opposition will no longer hold. Attunement is a desiring and emotive mode; it is the form of Lockhart’s disorienting version of “receiving,” the way in which even while intensely manipulating her images, she makes space for the world outside, for the photographic attachment to the real. It is an action modeled on the workings of memory itself, the affinities through which desire can be displaced from past to present and vice versa. It is a device through which we might finally begin to understand that commonplace of the criticism of Lockhart’s work that sees it as an uncanny combination of both distance and affect, of objective photography or structural film, and the intense subjectivity of the emotions—­a combination that, moreover, Lockhart seems to signal precisely in the connotations of her project’s title Pine Flat. Of course, “pine” means to emote, to waste away nostalgically, even excessively, for the past; “flat” seems to be the opposite of that. Attunement brings them together.64

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To “pine” or to long in the language of the “flat,” the objective, or the distanced: long before the Pine Flat project, Lockhart explored how attunement can come from strangely ready-­made conventions and unlikely, even alienating places. For Lockhart, it can (or perhaps must) come from these places most of all. Attunement might emerge from established practices of mass culture, from Hollywood, for example: witness her portrait of actor Ben Gazzara (Ben Gazzara, Los Angeles, California, March 21, 1998). In the line of work that descends from her early film Khalil, Shaun, A Woman under the Influence, the Gazzara portrait testifies to Lockhart’s long-­standing interest in the films of John Cassavetes and the actors who worked with him—­perhaps due to the way Cassavetian melodrama already pushed beyond normative Hollywood conventions, not through cancellation but through adherence and excess. The photograph of Gazzara presents him in close-­up, gazing almost longingly into the camera, head resting on his hands and on a pillow while he lies in bed. Evidently the photograph of the aging actor was taken on or in relation to the practices of a film set, for Lockhart has paired it with a second image of a young woman in almost exactly the same pose. This is Gazzara’s “stand-­in” during shooting, Lockhart’s title informs us: Emilie Halpern, Stand-­In for Ben Gazzara, Los Angeles, California, March 21, 1998. We have encountered Halpern before in Lockhart’s art—­she is herself a well-­ known artist and ceramicist—­as the young woman turned away from the camera in the slightly earlier Untitled photograph of the outmoded, darkened interior. Here, she performs the opposite pictorial function, turned full forward to meet our gaze, and one wonders if her photograph as “stand-­in” came prior to the Gazzara image, setting its parameters like composition and lighting; or if it was meant to replicate the image, “holding” the position of the iconic actor for further shots—­allowing the photographic image to persist, to be continued, as a cinematic “stand-­in” normally does. The two images align, but not exactly: Gazzara gazes up from somewhat below Lockhart’s camera, and so we are looking ever so slightly down at him; while Halpern meets the camera gaze head-­on, equalized within and by the frame. Other microdifferences erupt, as Gazzara lays his head directly on his hands, while Halpern thrusts hers under the soft, white pillow; and their beds are obviously not the same, nor seemingly in the same room or domestic space, with one darker and one pure white. But both hold the same pose: lying down, and lateral to (in nonalignment with) the upright camera, facing but producing thus a dissonance, too, with the pose of the viewer. This dissonance seems key, by which I mean it seems deeply significant, for it opposes the alignment of viewer and viewed in Lockhart’s many images of subjects with their back to the

Top, Sharon Lockhart, Ben Gazzara, Los Angeles, California, March 21, 1998, 1998. Framed silver gelatin print, 191⁄5 × 22¾ in.; Bottom, Sharon Lockhart, Stand-­in for Ben Gazzara, Los Angeles, California, March 21, 1998 (Emilie Halpern), 1998. Framed silver gelatin print, 15¾ × 18 in.

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camera, including her previous photograph of Halpern herself. Opposition takes command, as Lockhart presents another photograph that emulates the personal or domestic/family snapshot, but arrives as an intricately staged image of an actor. And yet the two images themselves now rhyme with each other. The result is immensely confusing, but also intensely auratic: it is as if the commonplace cinematic practice of using a stand-­in during filming has produced a photographic document of two individuals deeply aligned, exchanging places with each other, “attuned” from one to the other. Possible imaginative scenarios proceed from this uncanny attunement, narratives having nothing to do with the story that we might assume was being filmed: perhaps we face an amorous situation, a document of a couple in the intimate space of their bed. Or perhaps we face a memory, like those where we recognize an intensely personal attachment to a parent, but cannot remember if we are thinking of an image of our “father” or our “mother,” interchanging them within our minds. Or it is as if we see a scene of deep but loving identification, where a “daughter” takes the place and position of her “father.” Obviously these are projections. But all of these scenarios seem legitimated by the images; none of them are definitive. And we hardly need to stop there. For the situation only becomes more expansive when we realize that these two photographs are themselves attuned to earlier images within Lockhart’s oeuvre, by pose though not by gaze with the Untitled portrait from 1996 of the sleeping girl near the glass table, for example; or by gaze though not by pose with Lockhart’s diptych of two teenagers standing before the sea, staring into the camera as if they were reaching toward each other as much as toward the viewer, across the gap of both space and time—­in the works Lily (approximately 8 a.m., Pacific Ocean) and Jochen (approximately 8 p.m., North Sea), both 1994. Critics immediately narrativized the attunement of this latter image pair—­as if the form itself translated into a symbolics of love—­reading the otherwise spare and stark diptych as the product of “a transatlantic romance, with an implied gaze of longing crossing thousands of miles.”65 The viewer of these photographs has been caught in the amorous crossfire. But photographic form modeled attunement in Lily and Jochen in ways beyond simple narrative meaning, as we note, again, a difference in camera angle in two closely related images, Lockhart taking a greater distance and looking down slightly upon the male figure, as she would do with Gazzara as well. This difference holds the young man’s features in the same relation to the frame as the marginally smaller (younger?) face of his distant image companion. Horizon lines, the place where the ocean meets the sky, thus align with precision from one image to the other, though the color of the water (the light and sunshine of the Pacific versus the steely gloom of the North Sea) surely does not. Scale seems to come unmoored through the rhyming and equalization of attunement.66 And since

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all of these images may (or may not) be photographs aligned with Lockhart’s own memory images—­with prior photographs or phantasmatic scenes that we are not here given to see—­the attunement involved in the artist’s image pairs or couples becomes more disorienting still.

In addition to alienating ready-­made or mass-­cultural conventions, attunement can also emerge from dissonance itself. Lockhart’s tactics seem dependent on seeking out or staging such opposition, and on the redemption implicit in overcoming it. Such was the task of Lockhart’s film Teatro Amazonas, 1999, where she used a stationary camera to film from the point of view of the stage an audience in Brazil gathered to listen to an experimental choral composition by Lockhart’s frequent collaborator Becky Allen—­another collaborator, I want to underline, this time a musician and composer. Later, Allen would go on to record much of the sound for Lockhart’s film Pine Flat.67 And so here, we might imagine, is another form of attunement: the intense collaboration between two artists and two women, one working in the realm of the visual, the other in the realm of sound. Attunement, in other words, is a way in which we can begin to understand Lockhart’s constant impulse toward collaboration in all of her projects. Teatro Amazonas seethed with cinematic resonance, throwing out linkages typical of Lockhart’s early work. Filmed in the neoclassical opera house of the Brazilian city of Manaus, the project remembered Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, 1982, which mythologized the Teatro Amazonas and used it as a location. And Lockhart’s filming of an audience from the vantage of the stage evoked once again Truffaut and his 400 Blows, and the scenes of the children’s puppet theater. Truffaut’s child audience had appeared in fragments and close-­up, the camera shifting in narrative vignettes across the faces of the rambunctious crowd, moving in a diegetic arc from reactions of boredom and puzzlement to fear and wonder. Emerging from her work alongside anthropologists in the region, Lockhart’s film instead took distance from the audience, taking it in more or less as a whole, like a massive group portrait. This photographic rigidification of the filmic scene into a thirty-­minute-­long shot (and on the larger format of 35 mm film) allowed an equalized attention to the entire audience, a group of more than three hundred residents of Manaus individually “cast” by Lockhart, chosen through a complex engagement with sociological method to represent all of the neighborhoods and classes of the city. And so with Teatro Amazonas, an audience gathers to watch and listen to an audience watching a camera and listening, to a chorus we cannot in fact see, to a nonmelodic music both dissonant and difficult. The sixty voices of the Brazilian

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Sharon Lockhart, Teatro Amazonas, 1999. 35 mm film, color, sound, 38 min.

chorus each held individual tones, Portuguese vowel sounds, until their time to sing that tone was over, with the chorus diminishing slowly over the course of the film, as voice after voice eventually and regularly drops out. The initial high-­volume eruption of Allen’s music as the film begins evoked the cinematic again, calling up Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968. It recalls especially the eerie soundscape that accompanied that film’s scenes of confrontation with the mysterious (and yet screenlike or cinematic) “monolith,” with reflexivity twisted into a sci-­fi evocation of an alien or inexplicable encounter. The resonance underlines the many ways in which Teatro Amazonas seems to produce an aesthetic confrontation with otherness itself. But this dissonance immediately begins to unravel. Teatro Amazonas was preceded in this by Goshogaoka, where the earlier film really only comes to fruition when shown in a theater, given the proscenium stage and glowing-­red curtain that stood as backdrop to the dancing or drilling Japanese basketball players, echoing any theater in which the film comes to be projected. In Teatro Amazonas, the theatrical space and members of the cinema audience will now be redoubled, as Lockhart explained: “The film is really completed only when it is viewed by another audience.” Chance occurrences in the film—­the Brazilian audience members were not directed and could react to the musical performance as they

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pleased—­find their echo in the present or the real, in the audience assembled each time the film is shown. Moments of alignment become key: “Strange things happen,” Lockhart continues. “I really liked it when someone in the film was walking out and someone in the cinema, from the same side, did the same thing. Things like this make it complete.”68 Lockhart here describes a kind of echoing or doubling, an attunement of the image and the real, a fortuitous approach of one toward the other that the structure of Teatro Amazonas provokes. The attunement of Allen’s avant-­garde score to the formal parameters of Lockhart’s film followed similar pathways. Lockhart had requested of the composer a slow fade-­out of music to correspond to her stationary filmic long shot, with the diminishing chorus allowing the sounds of the assembled audience eventually to take over, becoming increasingly apparent as the music drops off. By the last five or six minutes of the film, the initially cacophonous music has completely wasted away to silence. With this, the project aligned the avant-­garde composition with the community portrayed before us—­a choral work for many voices but without melody or traditional sonic hierarchies, attuned to a group of many faces gathered by Lockhart according to similarly inorganic procedures derived from sociology and statistics. As the burst of vocal music began over the course of the film to diminish, the inexorable dying or fading of the music allowed the ambient sound of the community before the camera to emerge, to be “born.” Diminishment produces renewal, the dying of a form opening up form itself. “She knew she wanted a long slow fade of music,” Allen explained of her collaboration with Lockhart, “that was gradually overtaken by the sounds of the audience.” Developing this initial conceit, Allen first decided on a formal correspondence, a “non-­melodic music” that “mirrors the non-­narrative content of the film.” But the correspondences only multiplied. To embody a slow sonic fade, Allen “chose a shape that represented that idea, a three-­dimensional cone,” constructing her musical composition and score in alignment with visual form, the conical fade embodying a sense of “sound as shape.” An echo or alignment then erupted between the two forms, not just between the choral music and the audience or ambient sounds. The “shape of the piece,” Allen explained, “the cone, does reflect the view of the camera, the sight lines of the camera could be considered to be cone-­like; the focal point of the camera to the back wall of the theater is a cone shape.” While insisting on their dissonance and their difference, the film and the music align, they become parallel with each other, an attunement that Teatro Amazonas models for this audience confrontation with cultural otherness itself, allowing another relationality to emerge for the image of alterity at the work’s heart. “The music does not work with melody or have harmonic development, in the traditional sense,” Allen further explained. “There

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is no musical punctuation that might synchronize with the image or gesture. This creates an experience for the viewer in which their expectations are reversed. He or she is paralleling the experience of the audience on the screen. The sound creates a context for this experience.”69 So Teatro Amazonas represents a kind of emblematic work for Lockhart. It could be called the artist’s manifesto piece, if the term were not too strident for the film’s capacious address. For Teatro Amazonas embodies a cinematic form literally about receiving, documenting in film an audience listening to music, and receiving an aesthetic form. But because its reflexivity is other-­directed, beyond a single medium or form, the work produces a kind of inescapable attunement between these mediums, between music and film and photography (given the static film and frozen camera), no matter the individuation and differentiation that emerge. The work reflexively manifests an audience on film that is being stared at by an audience in the world, in real space, and so it produces another scenario potentially involving the coming together of two things that are or become alike, but are manifestly not the same. Multiple dissonances come into alignment here, climaxing in what we might consider a foundational series for the artist: the attunement of the viewer and the viewed, of self and other, and of history and the present, as an audience in the past faces and models an audience gazing at the film at each moment of its present or future screening. Attunement in Teatro Amazonas produces a structure of the echo, of increasing reverberation. And an echo is not a mirror. Attunement cannot be described as the making of a copy, nor an exact double. Identity and sameness are not its stake. As the mythology reminds us, Echo “follows” but is not Narcissus. Rather, the two figures exist as a pair, and a tragic one where they will neither really meet nor coincide. An echo multiplies that which it follows. And while involved in a fading of sound, of volume and intensity, it can also represent a kind of amplification. The echo transforms one form into another, changing it through fragmentation and multiplication, like a translation. And so Teatro Amazonas and its scene of an audience presenting itself before another audience, of sound forms following and attuned to film form: the almost photographic scene cannot function as a mirror. It enacts a becoming-­other.

Remember the mythology for a moment. Remember the nymph Echo, cursed for her repetitious and distracting chatter to only and forever talk in a way that “repeats the last words spoken, and gives back the sounds she has heard.” Echo can only receive. Encountering the youth Narcissus with his great beauty, she “follows” him, but cannot immediately communicate with him. “How often she wished to make

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flattering overtures to him, to approach him with tender pleas! But her handicap prevented this, and would not allow her to speak first; she was ready to do what it would allow, to wait for sounds which she might re-­echo with her own voice.” And so in the mythological tale, we listen to the way of Echo. Sundered from his companions and lost, Narcissus calls out: “Is there anybody here?” Echo seizes her chance, and answers in the only way she can: “Here!” But Narcissus does not understand that he listens to another’s words, and not his own, and that their meaning has been changed. “As he called, she called in reply. . . . But all he heard were his own words echoed back.” Eventually, following closely, pressing in, Echo goes to throw her arms around the beautiful boy. And we are told: “But he fled from her, crying as he did so, ‘Away with these embraces! I would die before I would have you touch me!’ Her only answer was: ‘I would have you touch me!’” The echo, here, changes all. An echo is diminishment, fading, repetition. It regurgitates the recycled fragments. But in doing so, Echo communicates otherwise. The echo transforms that which it repeats, the forms that it follows and allows to grow, and that alteration here rings out as affirmation. Narcissus again: “I would die before I would have you touch me!” Echo repeats: “I would have you touch me!”70

During the making of the Pine Flat project, Lockhart also made one of her most “musical” single-­image photographs, a staged or directed image entitled simply Untitled (Herrod), 2005. As opposed to Pine Flat and its images of childhood reverie or play, this photograph presents a scene of labor, a skilled craftsman restoring a cello in a music-­instrument repair shop. It seems to relate directly to Lockhart’s prior images of repair work in a Mexican museum (Enrique Nava Enedina: Oaxacan Exhibit Hall, National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City, 1999, 1999), or of other labor that happens adjacent to the aesthetic sphere—­a series of photographs following the conservation of Morris Louis’s abstract paintings (The Testing of Assumptions: Glenn Gates, Straus Center for Conservation, Harvard University, 2005), or the installation by a team of art handlers of Duane Hanson’s superrealist sculptures of workers (Lunch Break Installation, “Duane Hanson: Sculptures of Life,” 14 December 2002–­23 February 2003, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2003), to which I will return. Indeed, the photograph inverts “play” for labor in a direct, physical sense as well, for we see the craftsman holding the cello being repaired upside down, the photograph of the scene and any potential sound the musical instrument could produce interacting in a dance of chiasmus and inversion we have experienced so often in Lockhart’s art. One immediately notes, too, the high-­contrast light and dark of the photographic scene; we have seen this stark opposition in Lockhart’s images now many times, and it underlines the inversions the photograph creates. Lockhart simply described

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the impulses of Untitled (Herrod), perhaps her most Tacita Dean–­like photograph or project outside the purview of her analogue 16 mm films, her “still” films: With Herrod (that is the cello repair guy’s name) I wanted to do a work about conservation to go along with the [Duane] Hanson and Morris [Louis] photographs. I had heard about a Stradivarius cello that had been left on a front porch in Los Angeles and was stolen. It turned up four days later in a dumpster and was sent to a local conservationist, Robert Cauer, for repair. We visited his studio to approach him about photographing a cello being restored. The Strad had been finished for months but he showed us around and we saw the entire process. His studio was surprisingly small and was located in a converted bungalow in Hollywood. He had a shipping container in the driveway packed with choice pieces of the appropriate woods. Several apprentices worked on instruments as we were shown around. The process was fascinating and the stories of the workers were equally so. None of them were musicians or carpenters by trade. They all had happened into the job and trained in the specific craft of instrument repair. According to Mr. Cauer, it requires just the right combination of ear and carpentry skills. Finding musicians to train as carpenters or carpenters to train as musicians never worked out. They were like a family, all working there for years. Herrod had come from the Bahamas and worked from the shop for 18 years. Herrod worked on a cello, repairing the neck for the photo. I liked the way the instrument was held upside down as he filed the neck, going against the typical playing position. I also liked the very personal and domestic setting, in opposition to the institutional setting of the Hanson photographs. The afternoon light, coming through the door of the studio[,] reminded me of a 17th century Dutch painting and it seemed appropriate considering that the basic craft techniques haven’t changed since that time. No one has improved on Stradivarius’ design. 71

Lockhart’s description can stand for the moment, with the photograph pointing to further analogies between music and photography, between restoration and photography, between history and the present, between detritus and repair and care.72 For these metaphors also get worked out in Pine Flat. Music was included in the Pine Flat film quite directly, internal to certain episodes like Harmonica, where we gaze at and listen to a boy as he attempts for ten very long minutes to play his instrument, repeating the same sounds or noises over and over again while surrounded by the comparatively blissful gurgle of a mountain stream. He is just one of several Narcissus-­like figures that Lockhart’s film proffers (in the second half of the film, in the episode Creek, two children tread water in another country stream, gazing down in the posture of Narcissus—­and yet they look beyond their watery reflections, beneath the surface of the creek itself, through a

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Sharon Lockhart, Untitled (Herrod), 2005. Framed chromogenic print, 48 × 38½ in. F I GURE 4. 31  

boundary to what lies on its other side and that we as viewers cannot see). Beyond these scenes, the film featured a musical intermission linking its two halves, where Lockhart displaced the fullness of the cinematic image, filling the break in the film now instead with the sound of a young boy singing and playing guitar. Lockhart has identified this teenager, Balam Garcia, given her larger collaboration with him; she would produce a single-­image Untitled photographic portrait of him alongside Pine Flat in 2005, showing the boy playing his instrument against a monochrome studio background, with sound-­recording equipment at the ready. But the microphones also provoke comparison to Lockhart’s camera; and indeed she would help him to press a full vinyl record featuring many of the cover songs that he could perform.

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The album, entitled Stuff I Like, was installed as an element in early exhibitions of the Pine Flat project. In the intermission to Lockhart’s film, we hear but do not see Garcia as he sings along to a prior “model,” creating his own, rather tentative version of the angst-­ridden pop-­punk anthem “Stay Together for the Kids,” by the California band Blink-­182. The cover song becomes another instantiation of attunement, now within the grasp of the child—­a musical version of the photographic attunement, the recursive, echoing images, that Lockhart has long espoused. We listen to the boy as he diverges from the original song, and even changes key, his still-­developing voice breaking from time to time. “As the child sings a mainstream pop song, his voice is full of fragile aspiration,” Catherine Wood writes of the Pine Flat intermission. “The song creates a contradictory image, simultaneously implying that her subject’s interior subjectivity ‘speaks’ and flattening the possibility of this insight with our knowledge that the soulful quality in these lyrics, or this tune, have been found in American pop culture, exported and marketed globally on the basis of just these emotive tricks.”73 Attunement emerges from a structure of deep opposition yet again. For Wood, ultimately, the musical intermission for Pine Flat can only be read as a key moment of “reflexivity” for the film, no matter that it involves an opposition of sound and vision, music and cinema. For in the boy’s tender and awkward attempt to express himself through a mass-­cultural echo, Lockhart signals the processes of attunement that in fact run throughout the whole of the Pine Flat project. As the boy sings his version of the pop song, we listen to a kind of living inhabitation of a prior model. In all of its moments, visual or aural—­cinematic, photographic, or musical—­this is the recursive structure that Pine Flat tries repeatedly to imagine. The intermission enacts from its in-­between site the project’s larger inhabitation of former images and scenes, the strategy that we used to call appropriation. No matter the artificiality of the “original” source, in the pop tune that the boy sings, we seem to experience a kind of redoubling of the structure of memory itself, figured here in the boy’s awkward, halting, and gentle singing of a mass-­cultural product. For in Pine Flat, paradoxically, the staged or manipulated image will now be the one that registers the model of the author as receiver—­producing an uncanny rhyming of past and present, a melancholic looking back (to a time of origins, or of the lost object) that paradoxically locates or models a new beauty in the world today, a new value in the present moment.

The photograph as copy and appropriation, the manipulated and constructed image: these postmodern and largely digital developments for photography have been heralded as part of the medium’s downfall, so many harbingers of photography’s

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inability now to imagine direct political engagement or to sustain a documentary address, its relinquishment of an indexical tie to the physical world, the erasure of its privileged connection as a visual medium to the “real.” These are the repeated cries of loss that have accompanied the transition through which photography has now passed, describing something like the stakes of the shift from the analogue to the digital image. But Pine Flat does not follow this trajectory, nor participate in its logic. This is not the future of photography or of film that it envisions. The constructed image or photograph can drive a deeper connection to the “real,” as Lockhart reconceives this. Aside from considerations of artificial costume and pose, or potential models in image banks from other places, people, and times, the photographs in the series Pine Flat Portrait Studio manifest one manipulation more directly than any other: each of the photographs is physically “attuned” to all the rest. Not only presented in a repetitive series, each photograph echoes the image parameters of all the others that Lockhart has made, creating a repetition of another, much more confusing and all-­encompassing sort. And this repetition depends on difference, on change, not on the systematic replication of all photographic parameters. By precisely altering the distance of her camera to the children based on their relative sizes, Lockhart was able to photograph each child at the very same scale within the frame. The oldest and tallest of the children—­like the subject of Ryan, clearly a teen—­occupy the same space within the image as the youngest and smallest—­like the subject of Kassie, or of Jessie, who seems too young even to have started grade school. The children thus all appear literally to “rhyme,” as they are brought into a strange, physical correspondence with each other, their photographs echoing each to each. The tactic seems egalitarian, but it is also deeply deindividuating, potentially alienating, confusing the series’ reliance on photographic objectivity and the portrait genre’s role in the construction of identity. “Since the one rule I made for myself was to scale all of [the children] to the same height,” Lockhart has offered, “the final images have a strange discontinuity in regards to identity. It is very hard to see if some of them are represented twice or if there is just more than one sibling or family member. If you can read someone as the same person, it still is very hard to tell how much time has passed.”74 The adjustment of how the camera captures its subject or object, in both photography and film—­this was something Lockhart had played with before and repeatedly, utilizing it as a strategy, for example, in her immediately prior film work nō, 2003. Here, in ritualistic movements, Japanese farmers rake haystacks at different distances from the camera, building them at different sizes so that they all appear to be the same scale in the final film, equalized within the utopian space of the image, if not in reality. The stacks do not recede into the distance, but establish

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FIG U R E 4. 32   Sharon Lockhart, Pine Flat Portrait Studio: Ryan, 2005. Framed chromogenic print, 45½ × 36¾ in.

a radically equalized and impossible grid. nō attunes the space of the world and its objects to the distortions of the camera apparatus, to the formal conditions of a visual medium. Lockhart’s early photographic diptychs, with their tight photographic structure of comparison and alignment, had been perhaps the origin point of the tactic in the artist’s work. We have witnessed a more subtle scale adjustment already with Lily and Jochen, the slight alteration of the camera angle and of its distance from the face of the two subjects equalizing their potential difference in age, and uncannily so, given the amorous subtext that has been attributed to the photographic format and form. Lockhart could work the attunement in a different direction, too, of course, moving

Sharon Lockhart, Pine Flat Portrait Studio: Matthew, Matthew, 2005. Two framed chromogenic prints, 45½ × 36¾ in. each.

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this photographic strategy into oppositional possibility. In Julia Thomas, made the same year, we are much closer to the “girl” in one photograph than the shirtless and shoeless “boy” in the other. Pushing the male subject into the distance, shrinking his body in scale, seems here to disguise that Lockhart’s model for “Thomas” may not be a young boy at all, his regression to childhood a matter of formal and photographic effect, a bit in the spirit of Alice in Wonderland. Disorienting and egalitarian simultaneously, the attunement of physical scale in Pine Flat contributes to “an uncanny uncertainty about how [the children] relate,” in one critic’s words.75 We feel pushed closer here to the youngest children, who grow outsize in our proximity; we stand further away from the older children and teens, as if their maturation shunted us away from them, pressing the teens into the distance of the image. Nostalgia, the longing for origin, becomes spatial, with closeness not to be confused with identity. The photographs’ attuned or egalitarian format does not result in photographic equivalence, but instead proposes a quite precarious

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two-­step of intimacy and withdrawal.76 The uncanniness of this attunement thus works against the photographic parameters of the portrait series itself—­its ordering principles, its archival or documentary basis. Pine Flat Portrait Studio had been arranged in a set diegetic line, organized when displayed in exhibition from younger to older children (the line seems to waver back and forth, with younger children repeatedly interspersed, but such is its overall trajectory). This is precisely what the photographic attunement of all the images in the series works against, the order and foundation of chronological sequencing, the diegetic march of time. For we seem to perceive the slowing of the linear advancement of the years, of the collective growth and maturation of the children, as if time could be halted in its tracks altogether. Photographs of sisters perhaps taken at the same point seem like potential images of the same girl taken at two different ages; photographs of the same child taken at two different moments during the project’s life become impossible to reconcile, as if aging (and photography) bifurcated the child into two different subjects, or conversely, was held in abeyance, its physical signs such as growth all but canceled out.77 In the series of only nineteen photographs, this redoubling and return occurs with Sarah, and Mikey, and Sierra, and Matthew, all of whose portraits recur at least twice (Mikey will “star” in one episode of the Pine Flat film as well). In this, the portrait series finds itself beset by wayward analogies, unruly photographic correspondences and affinities, and begins to produce forms of what we might imagine as the kind of “falsifying movements” within time more characteristic of the medium of avant-­garde cinema.78 In certain respects, the opposition between the Pine Flat photographs and the film had been stark: as portraits, almost all of the photographs depict the children staring directly into the camera, meeting the viewer’s gaze, while the filmic episodes never do; the stark black backdrop of the studio photographs also directly inverts the film’s avoidance of any real contrast between the children and their surrounds, between the youth and the natural landscape, between figure and ground. And yet, with the disruption of the diegetic line, with these other, more subtle devices, the photographs attune themselves to the medium possibilities of film.

Conversely, the Pine Flat film attunes itself to photography. This is direct and easy to perceive; we have already dwelled upon Lockhart’s adoption of the long take and a stationary camera; it became the characteristic form of Lockhart’s filmmaking in the 1990s. Each image within Pine Flat remains largely static; cinematic movement lies suspended; the film seems to slow, to become, like a photograph, almost “still.” In this, the photographic attunement of film appears like a turning back of Lockhart’s medium upon itself, a return of cinema to its photographic

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Sharon Lockhart, Pine Flat, 2005.

prehistory and foundation. This stands as a long-­established tactic of filmic specificity, a characteristic displayed long before by many structural films. In Pine Flat, however, Lockhart established a further analogy or echo between forms, and in this turn backward the “photographic” film begins to attune itself to its subject: to the look back at the rural and at youth, to the activities and temporality of childhood itself. A slowed image, positioned by attunement squarely between photography and film, opens itself to the in-­between, suspended activities of the child: reading a book with rapt attention; napping quietly; waiting distractedly, listening to the forest sounds; playing on swings, moving languorously back and forth; or treading water slowly in a country stream. Almost every “activity” in Pine Flat amounts to a moment not of “suspense” but of suspension, often in the most literal sense. Critics have remarked that all of these activities—­and the subjects of many of Lockhart’s Untitled photographs that led up to the Pine Flat film—­point back to the

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Sharon Lockhart, Pine Flat, 2005.

unselfconscious attentiveness often evoked in premodernist painting, where a depicted figure seems to block out the surrounding world, and that the art historian Michael Fried has called “absorption.” In Pine Flat, Lockhart seems to define the experience of childhood as the very model of absorption itself (though in each filmic episode something almost always disrupts the reverie: the rumble of a passing airplane above the forest canopy, gunshots from hunters in the distance, the sound of car traffic not so far away). Adding to these deeply absorptive activities would be the peculiarity of Lockhart’s mise-­en-­scène in the film, which seems to drain each episode of any sense of a contrast between figure and ground—­using color matching, for example, in an episode like that of the young girl reading to void the expected depth of field in the image, flattening and suturing the filmic scene as if to the entire screen. And so, the point has been made that Lockhart wishes her photographic and filmic images to engage not only with the history of painting but specifically with the dynamics of modernist painting that earlier “absorptive” subjects presaged.

Sharon Lockhart, The Testing of Assumptions: Glenn Gates, Straus Center for Conservation, Harvard University, 2005. Five framed chromogenic prints, 47 × 61 in. each.

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For modernism inherited and furthered the mission of absorptive themes to negate narrative meaning, by similarly canceling the formal conditions that sustained such meaning, like the visual opposition of figure and ground. Pine Flat would thus embody a belated modernist impulse, aligned with modernism’s medium-­specific, self-­reflexive, and ultimately solipsistic project.79 But of course, this can hardly be the case. The flattening of the filmic scene in the episode Reader emulates the conditions of modernist painting in another medium and through entirely other means, through a cinematic language itself approaching the image conditions of photography. And no matter the bucolic and absorptive activities of the Pine Flat episodes, stark oppositions structure each and every scene. In Harmonica, for example, the regular, segmented form of the chosen musical instrument echoes the serial structure of the frames of a strip of film, but the device stands against the unbroken flow of the surrounding waterfall and country stream. In Reader, the young girl slowly turns the regular and, again, serial structure of the printed page, as all around her the wind kicks up a gentle breeze, producing an endless, rolling quiver in the fields and grass. In Hunter, a rifle held by the young boy stands as the ultimate “punctual” signifier, echoing the camera and its shots—­at one supposedly unrehearsed moment the boy points the weapon directly at the camera and thus the viewer, breaking the absorptive logic—­in a surround otherwise again given over to unbroken flow, to the movement of the wind and fallen leaves, and to the distant echo of forest sounds. It is crucial that these structural oppositions provoke the reflexivity the film supports, given its embrace of difference and multiplicity, so many attunements across all formal divides.80 If Pine Flat points, like many of Lockhart’s photographs, to absorptive themes in the

history of painting and thus the tableau form that now dominates contemporary art, this pointing happens within a structure of opposition that seems allegorical of the transformed condition of Lockhart’s cinematic photographs and photographic films, of the divides and attunements her tactics of formal metamorphosis require. The reflexivity here stands far removed from the single-­minded medium specificity of modernist form—­and rather than splitting the film, fragmenting its formal language, the oppositions themselves call now for an aesthetic of connection and new linkages, a language of the echo and attunement. In her work before and after Pine Flat, Lockhart was and has been relentless in her pursuit of the absorptive subject and the tableau form. If one positions the Pine Flat project against the claims now made for such thematics in contemporary photography, what does one do with this evident and self-­conscious interest on the part of the artist? In the very year that Lockhart produced Pine Flat, she also created a photographic series of five images focused on the work of the color-­field painter Morris Louis, as noted above: The Testing of Assumptions: Glenn Gates, Straus Center for Conservation, Harvard University, 2005. Here indeed is photography contemplating modernist painting, and doing so explicitly and directly. More: Lockhart focuses on one of Michael Fried’s exemplars of modernist painting, as Louis was one of the key figures for Fried’s theorization of modernism more generally, and one of the central artists that he supported. Indeed, the Louis photographs by Lockhart are crucial: they become something other than simple staged or directed photographs, participating in her larger series of works that depict “absorbed” subjects involved in their labor. The photographs in The Testing of Assumptions have been staged for the camera, as if we are watching

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a performance more than the document of someone’s work and craft—­or better, it is as if performance and work, the aesthetic and labor, should be seen as parallel or aligned. But the photographs Lockhart has made of this modernist shibboleth are now literally about staging, reflexively. For what Lockhart documents is the re-­creation of a supposedly imitable Louis work, the remaking of its vaunted “presentness” with a double by an art conservator in the process of studying how the modernist work was likely originally to have been made. We are looking, in fact, at something like an attunement or an echo, the conservator engaged in repeating—­with distance and inevitable difference—­Louis’s process of creation, pouring rivulets of acrylic paint, embracing gravity and chance, with the painting’s unstretched canvas folded and unfolded before our eyes. The echo this produces reflexively with Lockhart’s own processes of photographic creation and reenactment becomes striking. It seems key as well that the color-­field painting at the series’ heart bifurcates internally into two sides, that each cluster of color pours also attempts to echo the other, with more differences erupting through the repetition, like two double rainbows that reflect each other but will never coincide. Lockhart has photographed the young conservator at Harvard University, Glenn Gates, as he attempts to figure out how Louis might have painted the works for which he must care.81 The staging and replication have been made in the pursuit of knowledge, and the echo here—­like photography—­hopes to extend the life of Louis’s work, to conserve and preserve the work of art through its repetition. Lockhart’s series of photographs thus cannot be “absorptive” per Fried’s formulations, even as Louis becomes a subject, “faked” and set up theatrically as the photographs are for the camera and the observer. They are not singular, examples of “presentness,” but are doubles of another double, photographic images that repeat the replicated painting now itself changing, growing, in an insistence on its process of laborious making.82 Restaging the genesis of a modernist painting, The Testing of Assumptions explores how knowledge itself might emerge as a product of theatricality, an enactment for the eye, for the camera, and for the observer. Absorption becomes theatricality; in the face of a found attunement in the world, this opposition, too, now comes undone.83

For critic and curator Mark Godfrey, who first reacted to the explicit acknowledgment in Pine Flat of Fried’s ideas on painting, photography, and modernism, Lockhart has repeatedly sought in related works to dissolve the logic of absorption. The figure turning inward announces the turn of art itself away from the world, and the cancellation of the concrete relation to the viewer or beholder in that world. “While still making photographs of people utterly absorbed in activities,” Godfrey explains, Lockhart simultaneously “finds ways to make the viewer completely conscious of his

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or her own physical position . . . creating situations that Fried would call theatrical.” And he concludes: “The literal space outside the photograph occupied by the viewer begins to count as importantly as the space depicted within it. At the same time, the composition and subject of the photograph no longer allows the viewer to forget his or her presence when looking at the photograph.”84 Formal devices have been key to this paradoxical duality of spectatorship. In the episodes of Pine Flat, we confront not only suppressed horizon lines in almost every landscape Lockhart films and a consequent flattening of cinematic space, an indistinction between figure and ground. Each scene most frequently has also been organized around a striking compositional oblique. It is there in Reader, as the green of grass or leaves stretches unbroken up the entire screen, collapsing foreground and background, but the hillside upon which the activity takes place crosses the screen on the sloping diagonal. It is there in other episodes, like Bus, as the distant road cuts the spreading landscape along the oblique; or in Kissing, where the embracing children have been arranged on a diagonal trajectory through the otherwise monochrome and undifferentiated golden field. Many of Lockhart’s photographs that we have been pondering share this compositional dynamic, like Untitled (Herrod), where the gaze travels from the darkness into the light along a long, oblique passageway into the room where the craftsman works.85 In all of these images, Lockhart insists upon the oblique as the compositional form that emphatically connects pictorial space to the viewer’s space, and to a specific subjective vantage point. The oblique insists upon the connection of the image to the viewer. It amounts to the historical and compositional form of the anti-­classical—­the off-­centered, the unbalanced, the asymmetrical and open. In the history of art, the oblique has always asserted itself as the compositional form of transformation and becoming. As the oblique transgresses the boundaries of pictorial space, pushing the image’s connection to the viewer and world outside the frame, we confront the repeated experience in each episode of the Pine Flat film that something always lies beyond what we are given to see. No matter the nostalgic image of childhood pleasure, fulfillment, or absorption, the filmic episodes come to be structured around this beyond. We gaze at the reading of a book whose contents we as viewers will never know, at a child sleeping and dreaming images that we will never access. Something is always beyond what is given to be seen, like the prey in the scene Hunter, or the underwater world in Creek, or the school transport that approaches through the entirety of Bus only to arrive off-­screen, just beyond the frame. But this is also how Pine Flat began, and we remember the opening episode of the film, where the children themselves are not seen, but only heard, a girl’s cries echoing through the image all around. Dreaming, reading, waiting, searching, listening: something will arrive; something lies beyond each scene we are given to see.86

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This structuring absence cannot be understood as a product of “absorption.” It instead amounts to a beyond, and it takes the experience of the work outside the image’s confines, like we are simultaneously asked to move in these portrait projects beyond the “self.” It is another sign of the recursive echo that the Pine Flat film creates in relation to photography, now gathering its traditional cinematic tools of the off-­frame to redouble and underline what Bryson has called photographic counterpresence. Pointing always away from the image seen, moving beyond the frame: this is another way of expressing the first condition of the expansion of photography and film, which will meet and confront each other in this interspace where they are not. But it is also the mark of the work’s incompleteness, its internal fragmentation, and so erupts as another sign of what we could see as the project’s lateness as a form. Internally riven, between photography and film, Lockhart’s work comes to be divided into what is framed and what is testified to now by the image, but remains beyond it, and also exceeds it. In Pine Flat, we are not only in retreat, to the mountains, to the forest, to the extremity of rural life. We are on the edge of the image, and pulled toward its beyond.

To consider Pine Flat as related to a self-­reflexive or solipsistic modernism: this, then, hardly seems the case at all. What appears to embody a belated modernism—­a return to the past, another nostalgia—­again amounts to a project steeped in new analogies, new connections, new correspondences. We face the stuttering curse and promise of Echo, not the stagnant self-­absorption of Narcissus. For Fried, “absorption” signaled a mode in which painting was able to throw off its narrative functions, and begin an ultimately monomaniacal focus on the self-­reflexive logic of vision, paradoxically by negating the convention that a painting was meant to be beheld. Absorptive subjects were thus solipsistic; they canceled out the presence of the spectator, turning inward upon themselves. Such would be the subjective modality that the modernist artwork inherits. Later modernist conventions of suspending oppositions between figure and ground, foreground and background, achieved this eradication of painting’s narrative or communicative basis in an even more radical way, severing the painting from the task of depicting the world, securing its utter separation, its lonely autonomy. In what has become a notorious and deeply influential account, Fried now sees this logic returning today with a vengeance—­and not in painting but much more perversely in contemporary photography.87 For this critic, photography becomes the more rich, the more powerful, as it begins to sever its formerly inherent and indexical connection to the world, or to deny its automatic and mechanical production of the visual image through works that come to assert the artist’s

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“total intentionality,” a more pure aestheticism. It is as if we heard the call of ressentiment, a settling of old accounts, a criticism of revenge: the task of the photograph, in Fried’s account, becomes to deny photography, to negate the photographic, to suspend it with an image that inverts its “ontology,” thus securing its status as “art.” The argument very much repeats Fried’s earlier account of painting and absorption, and the medium’s necessary but paradoxical denial that a painting is meant to be beheld. But it also amounts to a kind of pictorialism redux—­ remembering the earlier movement where photography sacrificed its innermost procedures to emulate the medium of painting. This anti-­ontology of photography might thus be read as a revenge by contemporary photography on photography itself, an almost painful and masochistic self-­negation and cancellation of the possibilities of photography as the necessary cost of its becoming “art.” But instead the echo expands as it dissipates. It extends as it repeats. We have been following a different logic for photography: not its melancholic self-­abnegation but its movement beyond its older forms through extending itself, through expansion. The “photographic” intensifies as it loosens itself from, but also echoes, the medium of photography—­transforming its former object conditions, its modes of operation, its conventions and history. The photographic comes to transform the photograph itself. It calls for a reading across forms, for such becomes its innermost principle. We have thus been considering the transformation of photography by largely meditating on a film.

And so if Lockhart’s Pine Flat “rhymes” with the history of another medium—­ recalling the prehistory of modernist painting, or evoking modernism’s sublation of the opposition of figure and ground—­it is in the spirit of canceling oppositions in a much different manner, oppositions that modernism needed to uphold. It is in the spirit, perhaps, of canceling modernism’s melancholic withdrawal from the world altogether. Lockhart’s film is anything but “autonomous,” solipsistic, self-­ absorbed. It presents a document of cohabitation and collaboration. Pine Flat is not “absorptive” but “attuned,” linking its form to photography and to painting both—­not one, or the other, hardly medium specific in the old, limited sense. In Pine Flat, Lockhart surely does cancel all sense of figure-­ground distinctions in her filmic images: grass spreads directly up the screen and merges through color matching with the trunks and leaves of trees; horizon lines are rigorously suppressed, for example in the opening scene of hide-­and-­seek being played in a forest covered by falling snow; indeed, snow and fog join figures with their hazy fields, an image dynamic that comes full circle and returns as the work’s last episode, to close out the film itself (entitled Fog, a scene of barely visible group play in a landscape completely

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“socked in,” as one says of the thickest fog days in California). With the missing horizon lines, we are often too close to a scene to allow distinctions to emerge. And this closeness spreads to the children, who fuse with these figureless fields inasmuch as we could say they become “attuned” to their environment. We remember again what Walter Benjamin once said about ruins. Indeed, like an untimely sibling of old age and Oedipal fatigue, this vision of youth portrays its subjects as “merging” into their surrounds. Lockhart achieves this in part through details of pose and costume: the position of the child’s body in the episode Sleeper has been curled up into the same shape as the crook between two rocks, curved into the same form as the land. Remarkably, in the episode Bus, the blue jeans, tan backpack, and plaid shirt worn by the child rhyme precisely with the blue-­green, straw, and purple foliage of the surrounding valley. In the episodes of pairs or groups, the children—­even when bickering—­ seem to ally themselves with each other. And as the children throw out so many ropes to their environs or their playmates, attuning and attaching themselves to their surrounds, we as viewers of Lockhart’s film hardly find ourselves “detached” from the children before us, negated or separated by a scene of self-­absorption. Instead, we find ourselves—­over the ten-­minute expanse of this temporal image—­ “attuned” to the children’s absorption by Lockhart’s filmic form; we are attuned to their attunement. As the two children in Creek, for example, tread water in unison and look down, away from the camera, into the water’s fluid depths—­one of the most beautiful episodes in Lockhart’s film—­we too look down at them, positioned by the camera in such a way as to attune our gazing with theirs. And as the children wait, or listen, or play with no regard for the passing of time, we too find ourselves as viewers waiting. We find ourselves attuned to their attentiveness, joined in their temporal suspension. Wait along with the boy again in Bus. He is quietly leaving, fleeing the image, and the last minutes of the episode that concludes the film’s first half record only his absence, after the school bus finally arrives and takes him away, beyond the image’s edge. But he was already fading, one of the few children of color documented in the project and this community, and we have noted his plaid shirt echoing the colors of the mountain vista beyond, an alignment almost like camouflage. We remember that the plaid shirt takes the child beyond himself, and beyond the image, in other ways as well. It is a key signifier in the Pine Flat project, and we could turn to the photographic portraits, and find the young blond child of Sierra, in her rodeo clothes, in her Wrangler shirt, also plaid. The waiting child in Bus had echoed the many Untitled Study (Rephotographed Snapshot) works where Lockhart and her family pose with their back to the camera. But the plaid shirt created an attunement specifically with Untitled Study (Rephotographed Snapshot #10), where a blond child

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wears a deep-­purple, blue, and red-­plaid shirt jacket, while facing away from the viewer. The exact same plaid shirt erupts again, in a very different and more recent rephotographed image, Untitled Study (Rephotographed Snapshot #22), 2015, where the blond child—­it does seem to be Lockhart herself—­now faces forward, held protectively in the arms of an adult man, the artist’s father, one presumes, who also wears a different and clashing kind of plaid. We may wonder why the repeated detail of plaid seems so key to Lockhart’s projects, whether it is due to it being a kind of working-­class signifier; or whether it is because of the qualities of the textile itself, with its weave of color and lines, its over-­and-­under patterning, the way it makes visual incident out of repetition, a kind of flickering play of recursive geometric echoes and linear reverberation.88

Sharon Lockhart, Untitled Study (Rephotographed Snapshot #22), 2015. Framed chromogenic print, 15½ × 13½ in.

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F I GURE 4. 38  Sharon Lockhart, Lunch Break Installation, “Duane Hanson: Sculptures of Life,” 14 December 2002–­23 February 2003, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 2003. Four framed chromogenic prints, 72 × 121 in. each.

And the detail spreads, creating an image chain, a cascade of attunements—­from Lockhart’s rephotographed personal documents to her performed static films to her staged and directed photographs. For it is there as well, the plaid, in the four-­ photograph series Lunch Break Installation, “Duane Hanson: Sculptures of Life,” 14 December 2002–­23 February 2003, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, a purple plaid shirt even more precisely similar to the one that will be worn slightly later by the waiting child in the Pine Flat episode Bus. Like an inversion of the series presenting the abstract Morris Louis replication, the Duane Hanson photographs focus on two art handlers working to install a three-­figure sculpture of construction workers on their lunch break, made by the superrealist, by the photorealist—­as Hanson is sometimes categorized, the creator of indexical and photographically inflected sculptures. The subject seems both explicitly political and implicitly absorptive, and

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yet it becomes extremely difficult to tell which figures are the living human beings, absorbed in their activity, and which are the lifeless sculptural replications, which precisely cannot be so absorbed.89 Photographing the art workers and sculptural construction workers together creates an echo so tight as to disorient the viewer altogether. And then we note the plaid shirt. It is there in the first photograph on a dolly, with other sculptural “props” to be set up around the grouping, like a water cooler or a soda can or a pizza box. In the second photograph, now the plaid shirt is being carried by a figure to the far right of the image, who seems transformed by photo­ graphy into a rigidity more sculptural than the standing sculptures, with the art handler preparing to place the shirt within the scene. By the third photograph, the plaid shirt hangs on the scaffolding surrounding the workers, as Lockhart’s camera seems to circumnavigate the sculptural group as it comes into formation, turning around it like an orbiting moon. And the shirt will then be occluded, as if in eclipse, disappearing behind the sculpture of the standing worker in the final photograph due to the angle of the shot. But this only seems to mean that the detail is ready for its “rising,” like the sun, its reemergence in Pine Flat and the other works to come. Like the borderless boundaries of a plaid garment and its overrun grids, like the reverberation of the pattern itself, the echo outruns the individual image, propelling a chain of connections, each one repeating the last, but each one a transformation of the one that came before. Artist, worker, artwork, viewer, child: each will be attuned to each.

Our attunement to the children in Lockhart’s film provokes a sense less of detachment than of care. In an essay on Pine Flat written by a friend of Lockhart’s, the artist Frances Stark, it has thus been suggested that Lockhart’s close attention to children, her camera’s open, capacious, and steady (photographic) gaze in the Pine Flat project, should be conceived in some analogy to that of the gaze of a mother toward a child.90 More essentialist metaphors, perhaps. But they have been earned, quite literally, as the photographic attunement by Lockhart of the filmic scene in Pine Flat depends on another intimate approach, on the episodes that seem so often to echo the poses, compositions, and salient details of the actual rephotographed snapshots made by Lockhart’s family decades before. Many of the photographs, one imagines, had to have been made by the artist’s mother, and it is as if this is one photographic legacy Lockhart clearly wants to work through, an artistic transubstantiation of her mother’s amateur photographs from the past. It is as if Pine Flat entered into the maternal gaze, to occupy it, to redouble it, and perhaps in echoing it to have it, too, be transformed.

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Redoubled and echoed, the maternal gaze can only be encountered here as a form of excess (even fairy tales and myth can hardly imagine a figure who could care for the unending chain of children Lockhart’s work calls upon the viewer to engage). In the Pine Flat film’s conversion of a camera eye that initially seems totalizing, perhaps oriented toward surveillance or visual domination, into one of passive attentiveness and care, we do sense the opening up of a maternal and protective logic within the project. More than simple biographical memories that return in dislocated reenactment, Lockhart’s episodes in Pine Flat recapture the mother’s gaze as the affective modality originally involved in the making of the remembered photographs, extending that gaze to the making of further images, to the making of this film. But attunement, ultimately, amounts to a quiet and yet unruly form of desire; the normative familial metaphors, even the redemptive forms of maternal care, do not regulate all of its paths. Attunement, for example, is not the same thing as what psychoanalysis calls “identification”; not based on “misrecognition,” nor the rapacious drive to possess—­to be or to have, as the psychoanalytic narrative would put it—­attunement places two forms into the same “key.”91 It allows them to echo each other, to repeat but also to become different and to diverge in this resounding. It precisely does not equate them. Instead, this mutual rhyming preserves a crucial distance, evinced in the distanced tactics of Lockhart’s oeuvre. In Pine Flat, no matter the contrary devices of proximity and intimacy, it is as if we gazed into the distance—­not just of so many gorgeous natural vistas but also into the intense mystery of the past. Ultimately, this is why the obsolete analogue format of Lockhart’s film seems so appropriate. It not only signals an analogy with the threatened reality of rural youth in our present culture, like a pocket of historically surpassed experience subsisting against all odds; it points to the attunement that the film’s images open up with Lockhart’s own memories and memory images, and perhaps also with our own as viewers. The film episodes embody a fundamental paradox: frozen like a photograph but extended temporally in the way of the cinema, each embodies a flat “live” or real-­time duration that also inevitably rhymes with the pastness of memory. It is as if we confronted a series of “living” memories, or recollections existing impossibly in the present. The project embodies a literal nostalgia, a seeming resurrection or retrieval of youth, of childhood, of a time long past. It seems to fixate there, and the static camera that Lockhart utilizes amounts to just one sign of this. But we face a strange form of nostalgic “pining.” Pining denotes a melancholic wasting away from longing—­for home and for the past. In Pine Flat, however, this pining becomes a way to turn the wasting away into a gesture of generosity. We have seen this logic before: now it is the pining for the past

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in Pine Flat that displaces the hegemony of the author; it is a “wasting away” that makes space for the other. Echo—­the echo—­can only receive, following the other with her resounding. And we must finally note that it is of course crucial that the tale of Echo and Narcissus comes to be gendered as it is, no matter the discursive attribution in modernity of what is called narcissism so often to the female sex. Narcissus is a young boy, and Echo wants to break into and open up his deadly self-­ absorption—­by giving him his own words back, in a different, fragmented form. A giving up and giving over, the longing evinced in Pine Flat hollows out the image of the past, we might say, exteriorizing it and depersonalizing it. We hardly know to whom these memories in exile belong (it is why we may hardly recognize them as memories). Thus exteriorized, they can be claimed by others in the present. Simultaneously, this pining interiorizes; the wasting away from longing opens up a hole within the self, the emptiness and loss of melancholia, into which the other—­the past of the other, the memories of another—­can be inserted, and where they can also be preserved. And so here, to pine away for the past becomes the first condition of an opening up to the world. It follows the ramifications of attunement, the impossible correspondence, the distanced rhyming (the rhyming of distance)—­where now the other can be installed within the self, and the self shared vertiginously with the other. This, then, is the very heart, the very point, of my reading of Lockhart’s work: Pine Flat—­like Dean’s film Boots, and perhaps like Leonard’s archive Analogue, too—­amounts to a displaced self-­portrait.92 But it is also an “other-­portrait,” an imaging of the shared space between the self and the other. This will become a driving force in Lockhart’s subsequent work, whether we contemplate the more literal return home of her Lunch Break project, filmed in relation to factory work in Maine, where she grew up and where her own past comes to be directly engaged; or the subsequent Maine project about a female worker that is the film Double Tide, 2009; or her more recent collaboration with Polish orphans in the Milena, Milena and Rudzienko projects (initiated 2013 and 2016, respectively), with the attached works so often given doubled names, as if they were portraits that belonged to more than a single subject, portraits split in two, like the film (another return to Truffaut) entitled Antoine/Milena, 2015. The work Double Tide, especially, made the dynamic of the displaced self-­portrait explicit. The film focused on the slow, almost excruciating labor of a female clam digger who also happens to be an artist, and who, as she comes to be visually doubled by the analogue film and the watery environment she bends over like another Narcissus—­Caravaggio’s achingly beautiful painting of the myth ghosts this film—­comes again to perform as a surrogate for the artist, for Lockhart, a displaced self-­portrait or an “other-­portrait” in extended form.93

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And so, in the viewer’s attunement to the children of Pine Flat, one is called upon to desire a kind of self-­exile. Following the work’s disorienting logic, it becomes possible to see the film’s episodes as memories, perhaps like one’s own, but in the irretrievable past; and this becomes a motor for attachment in the present, the viewer’s alignment with and sharing of the slow and suspended activities and play in every scene, reenacting that suspension with the represented children. These two vertiginously similar experiences may appear equivalent. They are instead attunements, attempts to bring close two things that will never be the same—­like the very forms that embody this vision by working in concert in all of Lockhart’s projects, the photographic and the filmic themselves. Faced with the bucolic vision in Pine Flat of nature and of childhood, we may long to return, but instead, in our lateness, we find something else entirely. The episodes of Pine Flat emerge as what might be called documents of memory, and also staged fictions of reality. At the same time they also rhyme with the opposite of such experience (as, in Lockhart’s work, oppositions always seem to come undone). For Pine Flat also embodies a collection of fictionalized memories and “realized” documents, performed and reenacted for the camera. It testifies to an attempt to literally give shape to the past—­to reshape the past—­as well as to allow its now redeemed light to shine quietly upon the present. It is an attunement of the one to the other. This attunement of past and present joins all the other oppositions that structure Lockhart’s work, the collaboration within her oeuvre of photography and film, document and fiction, memory and imagination, photographer and subject, self and other, viewer and viewed. These oppositions are pairs, Lockhart shows us; and rather than hold themselves apart, they call out to each other. They can be coupled. But they call to each other like Echo, and through the photographic echo. They repeat the other’s words, making them different as they resound. Film repeats and speaks to photography through the latter’s own “words,” making the photographic echo other than it once was. Photography recursively enacts the cinematic, transforming film in the process. Surveying the ruins of the photographic image, suturing the splinters, attunement becomes in Pine Flat the very modality of longing: it is the voyage home that will never reach its destination, the intimate approach that will never end.

A postscript, then, in the spirit of not ending, and because what I am trying to point to in my reading of Lockhart’s work amounts to a deep paradox: in the Pine Flat project, what becomes visible seems at first to amount to a documentary project about a concrete place, a given community, and a specific group of children. We are intensely familiar with such photographic endeavors, and the documentary setup

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here seems so banal as to court parody: the photographer travels to a distant locale, spends time with an unknown community, and documents the “other.” But the document and the photograph as late forms instead take the radical subjective turn that my larger project has been tracing. And so Pine Flat becomes at least allegorically a self-­portrait, too. But if Pine Flat can be read as a kind of self-­portrait, then it is not about the singular self anymore. Surely, it cannot be taken as a project “about” Lockhart, a self-­portrait of the artist. This raises the crucial questions: How are we to understand the form of displaced self-­portraiture that Pine Flat invents? How can we describe and place this formation of the self-­in-­exile, echoing and made possible by an image and a medium similarly beyond itself? If not a traditional self-­portrait, what liminal experience allows us to understand the “other-­portrait” that takes its place, this attunement of self and other that works here reciprocally to open up the photographic and filmic image? Isn’t the “other-­portrait” the same thing as the simple fall back into what we long called “documentary photography,” in what I just invoked as its most banal forms? Do we regress to the kinds of ethnographic representation that Lockhart long responded to in her work, that she appropriated and opened up to new questions? Isn’t this the “other-­portrait” in its pure form? This reading has been trying to suggest something much different than these concerns and possibilities. I have been trying to follow and describe the invention of a portrait—­that is, a picturing of the self—­that acknowledges the self is not identical with itself, that the self is somehow always to be opened to the other. I have been trying to follow and describe a project that acknowledges that a form must be invented to accommodate and approach this truth. Ultimately, I think that this is what Lockhart’s project tries to imagine, in a formal way. This is what the project tries to make concrete and palpable. It tries to create a form where that impossible imagination becomes possible. The further lesson of this imagining amounts to a photographic one. The moment—­culturally, aesthetically, and historically—­when photography becomes in some deep, structural way an echo of itself, when the photograph is no longer itself, no longer able to cohere in the way it had over more than a century—­when, to use a term of Rosalind Krauss’s, photography begins to “self-­differ”—­this, of course, is the moment when this impossible task of the imagination perhaps becomes possible. The photographic echo simultaneously continues and transforms photography—­ “beyond recognition,” as the postmodern critics once said. For the form that results cannot be understood as a traditional photograph anymore. And so it is for the portraiture and the subjectivity at stake in Pine Flat as well.

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5 THE ABSENT PH OTO GRA PH

Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-­absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them. ­Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama

Dust. Moyra Davey’s photographs seem to portray a spiraling series of obsolescent technologies and outmoded objects, a catalogue of detritus and decay. Early photographs began in the streets: typologies of decrepit pennies found on the sidewalk, lumpen newsstands with their lingering print media, improbable stores on City Island in the Bronx selling replacement buttons labeled “facockta” or “simcha.”1 But then the artist appeared to turn away from the outside world, to become a prowler of her own domestic interior, shut off from the urban spaces that so long nurtured the hopes of the photographic document. In more recent photographs, we see yellowing books on overstuffed shelves, outsize dictionaries, and paper-­strewn tables and desks. There are photographs of empty liquor bottles and VHS tapes; naked light bulbs in their sockets and vinyl records grouped in series and stacks; household appliances like refrigerators, microwaves, or clocks alongside outdated analogue receivers, portable radios, and old-­school stereo speakers. There are photographs of fluorescent-­light tubes and the widest variety of domestic products, piled up at random on kitchen counters. There are forgotten objects: an old toy behind the furniture, a two-­year-­old copy of a daily newspaper under the bed. There are destroyed ones: an ironically soft-­focus photograph of the ragged shards of a plaster ceiling that has collapsed onto the floor. Disrepair, if not disaster, seems the subtext of such an image, and dust spreads all around. It is there in almost every one of Davey’s works, clinging to a dog’s paw or a

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Moyra Davey, Facockta Buttons, 1996. Chromogenic print, 20 × 24 in. Unless otherwise noted, all works by Davey courtesy the artist; greengrassi, London; and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin / Cologne / New York.

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turntable’s needle glinting in the sun. In other photographs, we see the dust running rampant along a floorboard, or lurking on the backside of a shelf, or covering a pile of books, or hiding out beneath the bed. With the broken shards and gathering dust, Davey signals an indirect, subterranean connection in her work to that of Marcel Duchamp, considering the fractured state of the artist’s magnum opus, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–­23, and his notorious use of household dust in its making. Perhaps one might take this whispered evocation as a sign of Davey’s emulation of Duchamp’s particular brand of anti-­productivity, an artistic model of laziness and extended languishing—­one that started with the proclamation of the death of a medium, painting, and ended in the artist’s disingenuous claim to have abandoned art altogether. For death and abandonment seem the central point of Davey’s images: here are photographs, we might say, that emerge as “last” photographs, pictures that turn inward, in melancholic self-­absorption, away from the urban spaces of street photography; documents that relinquish all purchase on the social field in which photography once thrived. Like Davey’s fallen ceiling, photography seems to have collapsed in on itself, to have become a late thing of jagged, knifing fragments, and this shattering involves the photograph’s confinement to the space of the home, the landscape of nostalgia. We thus face lingering images of obsolescent things that echo the increasingly attenuated existence of analogue photography.

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Moyra Davey, Ceiling, 2003. Chromogenic print, 24 × 20 in.

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Moyra Davey, Floor, 2003. Chromogenic print, 24 × 20 in.

In other words: the dust that has fallen on Davey’s domestic spaces seems to have fallen on the traditional photographic image, too. But with this reading, the artist would not agree. She has described her photographs’ confinement to the home as an intensification and redoubling of their photographic qualities: “My south-­facing apartment on the eleventh floor is both a sundial and a camera. Like the bus, it moves, albeit with planetary slowness, absorbing a sequence of solar rays that light up each room in turn. This is the season, late fall/early winter, when I wait and watch the light, trap it, and later observe its subtle shifts as the days begin to lengthen.”2 And Davey has a different explanation for her melancholic images. When asked about the motivations behind this body of work, the artist simply replied: “I’d say that these pictures are about the life of objects.” As if to underscore this understated point, Davey clarifies in the same interview that the spreading dust in her domestic scenes is also “alive” for her: “Dust is made up of dead matter, but it’s also totally alive in its entropic, inescapable fashion.”3 And so my initial argument can be reversed: the life that has fallen on Davey’s domestic objects and spaces seems to have fallen on the traditional photographic image, too. Lateness implies the stubborn ongoingness of survival; it raises the issue of the photograph’s afterlife.

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Moyra Davey, Shure, 2003. Chromogenic print, 24 × 20 in.

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Moyra Davey, Paw, 2003. Chromogenic print, 24 × 20 in.

My white-­haired dog is blowing her winter coat. As I write, piles of dog hair lie in clumps around my desk, rivaling the worst you see in any of Davey’s photographs. The hair is strewn under the dining table, where it mixes with assorted crumbs; attached to the fabric of ottoman and couch; and at its worst in the kitchen, which I haven’t cleaned in a week. My dog prefers the house this way, I think, and shares her coat willingly with my socks and slacks, a gift from which they will never be free. This morning I quarrel with my wife over who will walk the dog, saying that I have to write. But as soon as they leave, I become convinced that I can no longer concentrate, and take a break from my work to vacuum the entire house, knowing that I will need to do it again in a day.

Copperheads. At the tail end of the 1980s, Davey began to photograph money. Produced during the crisis moment of a widespread economic recession, Davey’s low-­tech color images would each be titled Copperhead, 1990.4 The images focus on the profile of Abraham Lincoln engraved on the United States penny, the cheapest, most devalued piece of American currency—­still in circulation, but hardly used by

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most anymore. “I’d just moved to NY,” Davey wrote in retrospect, “had no money and was thinking a lot about the psychology of money; Freudian ideas that equate money with excrement; the Potlatch custom of shaming a rival with extravagant gifts and squandering of goods . . . and misers.”5 At the moment of the series’ emergence, the Copperheads would have been safely ensconced within readings of postmodernism that stressed its “allegorical” procedures.6 The series announces its filiation, for example, to one of the earliest projects by artist Sherrie Levine, her Presidents series from the late 1970s, which also deployed the profiles of political patriarchs—­Lincoln, Washington, Kennedy—­fusing them with domestic scenes of motherhood, or images of female models culled from the fashion and advertising world. In each collage-­like work by Levine, the male president’s silhouette framed the interior scene as if embodying the family romance in its public as opposed to private form, a feminist allegorization of the linked but gendered spaces of consumption and political power. Similarly, a longer historical and political dimension emerges within Davey’s work: the title Copperhead, we might observe, not only serves as a literal description of the profiles and the money before us but was a term used during the American Civil War, the historical event to which Lincoln’s image directs us. “Copperhead” was the name given to the so-­called Peace Democrats who opposed the North’s use of war to reunite the sundered nation. While the Peace

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Democrats came to embrace the name, and began to wear copper coins as a proud

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badge of their anti-­war position, the label “Copperhead” originally made explicit reference to the poisonous snake, and was thus an epithet of treason and betrayal. Many Copperheads were forced into Canadian exile, as would occur to those Americans opposed to fighting in the Vietnam War a century later. This allegorical dimension of Davey’s work opens, however, onto another reading that was not immediately present in the artist’s early reception. This is what we might call the formal logic of the series, a medium logic, a rethinking of the photograph itself. Or, in other words, a first instance in which Davey found what she now often calls a new “way to work,” and that I will understand here as a consistent drive to reconceive the practice and given models of photography. The series’ flirtation with a notion of “betrayal” makes perfect sense on this level, for not only would Davey’s work assert a transformation of the patriarchal image— ­a literal opening up of a representation of the (symbolic) father to experiences that Oedipal law should not allow (an association with excrement, for example, or worthlessness, or utter and ceaseless fungibility)—­it would twin this opening with another transgression, an expansion of the photograph itself.7 In the initial language of the project, Davey describes her actions as comparable, through photography, to the idea of the counterfeit. “I shot the pennies on a copy-­stand with a raking light,” Davey recounted, making her camera into a kind of microMoyra Davey, Copperhead Nos. 57, 27, 28, 18, and 77, 1990. Chromogenic prints, each 24 × 18 in. (image), 24 × 20 in. (sheet).

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Moyra Davey, Copperheads, 1990–­. Digital chromogenic prints on Fujicolor Crystal Archive, tape, postage, ink, 18 × 12 in. each, overall dimensions variable. Installation view from Hell Notes, Portikus, Frankfurt, 2017.

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scope, a device of enlargement. “I would take the film to a lab in Chinatown that made small, white-­bordered prints.” She continues: “Though I was not making much revenue from them, I thought of the Copperheads in some way as my own counterfeit, a deeply satisfying reverie of self-­sufficiency, a bit like the shit-­to-­gold fantasy whereupon the dirtier and grimier the penny, the greater its potential for transformation and surprise.”8 The series invites us to align photography with the pennies that Davey describes—­ dirty and grimy, aged and beset by erosion, but the more open to transformation for that. Indeed, the medium logic of the series is simple to see: it is basic, almost primordial, for the Copperheads comprise an archive of silhouettes, a typology of portraits, pointing back to several origins of the photographic impulse itself, and to a specific ur-­form of the medium. To return to the silhouette, to prioritize the portrait, to alight upon the typology: we face elemental modes of the technical prehistory of the photograph, as well as of its later social usage. And yet, in the end, the kind of recursiveness that Davey seeks hardly seems self-­reflexive or medium specific; instead, betrayal or treason becomes her formal logic, like the counterfeit, for she locates photographic qualities in an analogue outside the photograph itself.

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Basically worthless, the pennies that Davey depicts are “like” photographs in many different ways. They are objects of circulation and objects of use; they are objects kept close to the body, in wallets and pockets, and fingered by hands; they are tokens stamped with their time and date. They are small objects, miniatures, enlarged by the photograph’s innate habit of holding on tight to its object world, progeny of the close-­up and the zoom. They are obsolete, throwaway vestiges, but also keepsakes, collector’s items, useless avatars of blind luck or cunning thrift simultaneously. The one hundred pennies that Davey photographed were found at random on city streets (though some, the artist admitted, were discovered in the manner of the surrealists at the flea market).9 The fallen coins were encountered like so much discarded garbage, and indeed, each Copperhead seems a memorial to analogue photography’s contemporary eradication, or—­amounting to the same thing—­its ceaseless dedication to that which is on the verge of disappearance. For ultimately, the works capture in the greatest detail the immeasurable variety of the decay of each cast profile on the penny’s surface, embodying meditations on loss, erosion, and the slipping of a thing into the status of detritus. “The Copperheads look like poisonous landscapes,” Helen Molesworth attests in her reading of the work, “aerial views of strip mines, the surface of the moon.”10 And yet, in fixating on this image loss, the Copperheads depict the penny (and the patriarch) as a receptor surface, a skin infinitely susceptible to wounds, gouges, and scratches—­in other words, as a site of contact, an object, like the photograph, endlessly open to receiving the marks of the world. The images also depict the penny as a reactive surface, the site of myriad eruptions and chemical “blooms.” In recording this, Davey’s Copperheads mirror photography in yet another way: they are images of serial objects, replicas, each given over to the condition of absolute chance and singularity. And if each photograph seems an image of disappearance, a cast or imprint fading away before our eyes—­like the indexical properties of photography itself—­the images’ condition as “last” photographs can also be reversed. For it is as if we gazed upon photograph after photograph of “latent” images, an irreducibly unique but incomplete form at the point of its emergence, like a landmass surfacing from the ocean’s depths, or an unknown object blanketed by deep but melting snow. The Copperheads are photographs of destruction and resurrection, loss and rebirth at once. Their latency implies an opening, a potential becoming. Almost twenty years after first producing the series, Davey published a book devoted to the one hundred images in her miniature archive. Previously displayed in a grid upon the wall, or in blown-­up images arranged in smaller sequences in a row, the Copperheads would now appear in a seemingly never-­ending series, one image to each and every page. Arranged in this way, the photographs are easy to set in motion with the flick of a finger. In effect, Davey has transformed the

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gridded typology into a kind of flip-­book, a protocinematic device—­to accompany the protophotographic engraved imprints and silhouettes—­that carries the photograph and the image into other domains. Davey’s book Copperheads might even be described as a flip-­book in excess, for the pennies are reproduced not just to one side of the book, but on all facing pages, an amplification of the flip-­book’s dynamics—­and a redoubled image that rhymes again with early photography, with something like the coupled, two-­step visual address of the stereoscope. The photographic image in Davey’s book literally and no longer metaphorically began to “move,” to bloom—­not along any narrative or directional axis, but with the anarchic force of infinite difference, an endless riot of texture and color, the full entropic beauty of the living processes of decay.11 Emerging on the back of what I have here been calling “Oedipal fatigue,” Davey’s Copperheads project opened up the image of the patriarch from rigidity to flux, the photograph from immobility to motion.12 With photography placed in relation to cinema, the work contemplates a sharing of form that converts the expanded photograph into a vehicle with—­to cite the artist’s words again—­an intense “potential for transformation and surprise.”13

Sometimes I simply open my apartment’s front door and let the wind from the far windows blow the dog hair like tumbleweed out into the hall.

Coats and Chairs. Two more images of nineteenth-­century patriarchs need to be placed in dialogue with Davey’s photographs of Abraham Lincoln. They can be found in Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay “Little History of Photography.” This essay wishes to explain the “charm of old photographs”; written during the initial moments of the Great Depression, it argues for a return to the earliest potentials of the photographic medium, glorifying the obsolescent achievements of the pictures made in the first decade of photography’s history, before the onset of the medium’s ruinous industrialization. In this, the essay shares much with Davey’s regressive but optimistic vision for the photograph. Although the images have rarely been noted or discussed, Benjamin offers descriptions of two photographs of philosophers—­Arthur Schopenhauer and F. W. J. Schelling—­during the extended flash of brilliance that is his text. Both images concern the philosophers’ relationship to their daily environment, and in this the images provoke connections to Davey’s obsessive reflection on photographs of domesticity and everyday objects. On a deeper level, however, these images allow Benjamin to open up a philosophical point of the greatest significance: the photograph’s mediation of the split between subject and object,

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or rather, photography’s role in crafting a potential new relationship of the one to the other. Late in his text, Benjamin describes the photograph of Schopenhauer. He has just finished introducing the reader to the images of Eugène Atget, noting that they are empty of people, which he compares to a crisis in the idea of domesticity or to an abandonment of the home itself: “The city in these pictures looks cleared out, like a lodging that has not yet found a new tenant.” This photographic experience of a “salutary estrangement between man and his surroundings” emerges as the opposite of the qualities that Benjamin locates in the image of the philosopher. “To do without people is for photography the most impossible of renunciations,” Benjamin observes. Another relation to one’s environs can be imagined: “The generation that was not obsessed with going down to posterity in photographs,” Benjamin writes, “rather shyly drawing back into their private space in the face of such proceedings—­the way Schopenhauer withdrew into the depths of his chair in the Frankfurt picture, taken about 1850—­for this very reason allowed that space, the space in which they lived, to get onto the plate with them.”14 Before the full onset of the self-­alienation that the photographic image came to represent, the “depths” of the philosopher’s chair entered the photograph because the philosopher was attached to his objects, inseparable from them, immersed in them. Benjamin presses further in an earlier passage on the photograph of Schelling. The passage is crucial, for in it Benjamin sets up the terms in which he will define the experience of “aura” that his text otherwise delineates. One of the most complex ideas in Benjamin’s lexicon, aura seems to refer to the experiences of singularity that photography and its reproductive vocation come to betray, as well as to a temporal duration in experience that the photographic image also eventually disallows (Benjamin: “To trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the hour become part of their appearance—­this is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains, that branch”).15 But Benjamin often reverts to fabric metaphors when attempting to define aura, calling it a “strange weave of space and time,” and praising an old photograph for capturing an “aura that had seeped into the very folds of the man’s frock coat or floppy cravat.”16 This is photography, it seems, prior to its own alienation from its innermost potential, as Benjamin describes this experience as one of “congruence” between the camera and the bourgeois subjects it initially represented (“subject and technique were as exactly congruent as they become incongruent in the period of decline that immediately followed”).17 But such congruence of photography and its subject emerges from a deeper congruence, a more intense escape from alienation: the photograph’s ability to imagine a form of connection between the realms of the subject and the object.

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This is where Benjamin’s description of the photograph of Schelling becomes transformative. “Everything about these early pictures was built to last,” Benjamin asserts. “The very creases in people’s clothes have an air of permanence. Just consider Schelling’s coat: It will surely pass into immortality along with him: the shape it has borrowed from its wearer is not unworthy of the creases in his face.”18 The passage is breathtaking, for Benjamin here seems not only to describe an individual photograph, but to describe within Schelling’s image objects and qualities that are themselves “photographic.” Wrinkles, aging, the passage of time: these are photographic attributes, and for Benjamin the “creases” in the philosopher’s coat are not unlike these, a second “skin.” But, even more, the philosopher’s coat itself is “like” a photograph, which Benjamin thus seems to define in the most extraordinary way: a photograph is a “shape” that is “borrowed” from its subject. Or to state this another way: as philosopher and coat, the old man and his wrinkled skin, or subject and object “borrow” form from each other, so too the photograph participates in this intimate connection of subjective life and objective form, like a coat filled out by the body of its wearer. At its origins, and at the height of its potential, the photograph emerged as a model that allowed one to “think” the communion of subject and object, a concrete example of the analogy between being and appearance. It is with such a luminous passage in mind that we need to look again at Davey’s photographs of inert domestic objects, devoid for the most part of people, perhaps photographed like Atget’s city streets, which for Benjamin were images that address us like the “scene of a crime.”19 For if Davey’s images are instead about the “life of objects,” or perhaps their afterlife, then we have to imagine the force of this animation, perhaps even the absent subject from which quotidian object and indexical photograph—­analogues all—­have borrowed their form.

I do not exactly know what Benjamin meant by the “Frankfurt picture” of Schopenhauer. The image of Schelling in his coat is reproduced in the English version of Benjamin’s text. But the Schopenhauer photograph is not there. My text is by now late, severely overdue, and yet I spend hours googling Schopenhauer anyway. I don’t find any images of him in a chair, but I do become interested in his book Studies in Pessimism. And I locate the following description of his daily routine: “From the age of 45 until his death 27 years later Schopenhauer lived in Frankfurt-­am-­Main. He lived alone, in ‘rooms,’ and every day for 27 years he followed an identical routine. He rose every morning at seven and had a bath but no breakfast: he drank a cup of strong coffee before sitting down at his desk and writing until noon. At noon he ceased work for the day and spent half-­an-­hour practicing the flute, on which he became quite a skilled performer. Then he went out for

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lunch at the Englischer Hof. After lunch he returned home and read until four, when he left for his daily walk: he walked for two hours no matter what the weather. At six o’clock he visited the reading room of the library and read The Times. In the evening he attended the theater or a concert, after which he had dinner at a hotel or restaurant. He got back home between nine and ten and went early to bed. He was willing to deviate from this routine in order to receive visitors” (R. J. Hollingdale, introduction to Essays and Aphorisms, by Arthur Schopenhauer).

Reader. A critic in the New York Times once described Davey’s domestic photographs as presenting “disheveled living spaces,” most likely belonging to a “depressed and possibly dangerously alienated person.”20 In these spaces, books seem to be everywhere—­on every surface, table, or shelf. In the image Untitled (Dictionaries), 1996, we see two immense and browning tomes, positioned like bookends, or like mouths gaping at a pile of smaller books that mounts between them. “Sometimes,” Davey has written of books and reading, “it feels like a literal ingestion, a bulimic gobbling up of words as though they were fast food.”21 In the dictionary photograph, no spines can be seen, and the books display only their anonymous accumulation of pages, like so many sedimentary layers in an archaeological dig. These layers culminate in a small clock that sits atop one of the dictionaries: a modern-­day vanitas image, it seems, the books indexing in an almost geological sense the passing of time, the lost moments spent with each volume and every page. All of this echoes the similarly infinite spread of vinyl records on a shelf below, a crooked series of sheaths that collect like wayward leaves, or like the pages of the books—­or, perhaps, like an endless stream of photographs. Indeed, Davey’s many images of books claim a singular model for the expansion of photography, and the comparison or analogy she constructs here aims to be anything but “depressed” or “alienated” in her conception. About this, she has again been explicit: in an interview, Davey admits to being motivated by a “wish or fantasy that writing and photography might be the same thing.” And then she asserts: “I do think words and pictures together form a kind of ultimate happiness.”22 What Davey means by this has very little to do with conventional models of the interrelationship of text and photograph, which—­from Benjamin to Barthes—­ seemed to call for the importance of the photograph’s caption in directing meaning, culminating in postmodernism’s ethos of the “constructed” image, a montage aesthetic of words and photographs interwoven (Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Mary Kelly). Davey’s fantasy, by contrast, asserts that writing and photography might be the “same” thing; they might, in fact, be configured as analogues for each other, extensions of the same activity. We, as viewers, sense this in the manner in

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F IGUR E 5.8 

Moyra Davey, Dictionaries, 1996. Chromogenic print, 20 × 24 in.

which Davey photographs books, her library, or her desk, the very sites of reading and writing. Most often, in Davey’s images, we see a group of books from behind, as if we were gazing at the back of the bookshelf. This position is all the better to wallow in the voluminous dust and grime, and the sometimes lost or forgotten objects that gather there. But, viewed in this way, the books appear without the identifying tags that run along their spines, and thus as open accumulations of unmoored pages. This “open” orientation compares the books to photography, for when seen in reverse they call up the notion of the camera’s reversal, or the inversion of the photographic negative. Moreover, the images of books “do” with the tomes what photographs are themselves meant to do: they play in an almost abstract manner with extreme contrasts of light and dark, with shadow and illumination. (Davey is always peering with her camera into dark spaces, a search for the camera obscura in the everyday: the gloomiest recesses at the back of her library, the enigmatic frontier of the no-­man’s-­land beneath the furniture.) The illuminated books become literal

Top, Moyra Davey, Film 1, 1999. Chromogenic print, 20 × 24 in. Bottom, Moyra Davey, Pile, 1999. Chromogenic print, 20 × 24 in.

F I GURE 5.9 

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examples of photography as “light-­writing,” the root meaning of the composite word “photograph.” Davey’s books also become receptive surfaces as, piled one atop the other, they support and capture a chalky skin of dust, a marker of passing time and long durations. This is what we witness emerging out of the darkness in Davey’s image Pile, 1999, books attached to and leading on to other books in an endless chain; books covered in dust, like forgotten ruins. And the analogy of books and photographs becomes inescapable in Film I, 1999, a picture of a desiccated strip of old film curled up like a dog in the bed of dust at the back of a shelf, nestled against the shadowy tomes. Books and photographs travel together for Davey, and with this recording of the passing of time through dust and the intense refraction of light, the artist’s photographs of books recapture two of the most primordial potentials of photography.23 If, for Davey, her collections of books are imaged in a way that allows them to behave “like” photographs, she has been at pains to outline how her beloved activity of reading books is itself like photography. I have moved from writing to books to reading, but Davey—­as befits her malleable vision for the photograph—­doesn’t herself seem to make distinctions between these domains. In fact, she has written a book on what she calls The Problem of Reading, 2003, which includes a collection of photographs, and endlessly aligns the three domains. Here, Davey treats reading as a form of “creative work,” one “tied to productivity, to making something,” which is part of a “generative creative cycle of taking in and putting out, with all the rewards . . . this process entails.”24 And it is the “passivity” of reading that Davey thus transforms, as she begins to emphasize the role that “randomness and chance” play in the reading process, most importantly in the choice of what from the infinite sprawl of possibilities one decides to read.25 Again and again, Davey states variations on a theme: “I feel it was not so much a question of myself making choices as books choosing me.” Or again: “It is not just a question of which book will absorb her, for there are plenty that will do that, but rather, which book, in a nearly cosmic sense, will choose her, redeem her.”26 Emphasizing, along with Proust, the “total absorption” of the reading associated with childhood, Davey looks as well to Virginia Woolf, for whom what the writer calls “youthful reading” involved “moments in which the ego is completely eliminated.”27 And yet in such moments of self-­loss, the self, we could say, is “found.” Davey thus reveals why books and reading are so crucial to her: “Just as a bookcase full of read and unread books conjures up a portrait of the owner over time . . . so the books that arrest us in the present constitute a reflection”—­and here Davey cites a critic—­“of ‘what we are, or what we are becoming or desire.’” The book “chooses” the reader, Davey concludes, uncovering “a want or a need,” and developing into a “sort of uncanny mirror held up to the reader, one that concretizes a desire in the process of becoming.”28

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And so it is with Davey’s images of books without owners, and more generally, of objects devoid of subjects. They are expanded photographs, durational “portraits,” in a sense, of an absent subject “over time,” or a subject that emerges everywhere in displaced forms. Indeed, Davey’s photographs of books are the objects in her image repertoire that make the portraiture aspect of her project most evident. The analogy of photography with reading provides the support for this turn, a transformation of the photograph more specific than the general turn long ago announced as the “death of the author,” the shift from production to reception. For, as Davey photographs her library and her domestic spaces, reading infiltrates the photograph, and becomes one with it. Light seems to fall from a window onto a portion of Davey’s bookcase in Eisenstein, 1996, and the camera obscura effect—­light piercing the darkness—­allies itself with Davey’s vision of books “choosing” their reader, as even in this image of books mostly turned with their backs to the camera, some volumes emerge with piercing clarity out of the crepuscular vista of shelves.29 The title of Davey’s photograph, however, marks an even more specific eruption within the image, or, to use Barthes’s term, a punctum, the acute detail that arises within the image due to its particular importance to the viewer.30 Named in her titles, these piercing details in Davey’s case are words, and her work catalogues a series of objects and photographs erupting into language, like speaking in tongues, the messages of deadpan oracles. “But shouldn’t a photographer who cannot read his own pictures be no less accounted an illiterate?” This, of course, is the voice of Benjamin again, and the crucial and Brechtian question that Benjamin once asked: “Won’t inscription become the most important part of the photograph?”31 Davey’s inscriptions, however, are not captions. They arise from within the substance of the photograph itself, from out of its innermost warp and weave. The piercing detail that Barthes called the punctum was never a word; language for the theorist was the domain of what he called instead the studium, the cultural or historical knowledge the photograph encoded. But in Davey’s domestic photographs, the word erupts in all respects like the punctum, a tiny detail that seizes the viewer in the larger image. The words emerge from depictions of individual books or visible fragments of album titles: in Greed, 1994, we face another standing wall of bookshelves, the volumes angled in all directions, our attention initially distracted by the blank white glare of what must be an impressive collection of October magazines, holding almost the entirety of the middle shelf. Toward the bookcase’s upper reaches, on a shelf populated mostly by volumes about the cinema, we “find” the detail, the spine of a slanted beige tome labeled Greed. With the cinema books all around it, the title likely has to do with Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 film of the same name, since we also know that a key early work that Davey made in collaboration with

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F IGUR E 5.10 

Moyra Davey, Eisenstein, 1996. Chromogenic print, 24 × 20 in.

F I GURE 5.1 1 

Moyra Davey, Greed, 1994. Chromogenic print, 24 × 20 in.

F IGUR E 5.12 

Moyra Davey, Bird Songs, 1999. Chromogenic print, 20 × 24 in.

her partner Jason Simon returned to this silent film—­like a postscript, a video “afterlife” of the film—­for a work they entitled Need, 1991.32 But the title word names something much more than Stroheim’s film, given the hoard of books the photograph faces down. We are usually closer to Davey’s photographs of vinyl records, and in Nyro, 2003, we recognize the singer’s face in the moody blue light, on the cover of a recumbent album, no matter that it has been veiled like a death shroud by the plastic record slip. More frequently, we are gazing at the parade of album spines, and the words erupt from the many others that could have been chosen: Bird Songs, or Greatest Hits, or Glass, all 1999. The “Greatest Hits” are from Sly and the Family Stone, and the

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“Glass” is not a thing but Philip, the minimalist composer, allegorizing the displacement from object to subject, from still life to portrait, that all of Davey’s photographs entail. The words leap from the photographs like a flash of subjective desire, a detail that finds the viewer, or conversely must be found. Yma, 1999, places us again before a room of bookcases and makeshift shelves. And all the domestic collections amass together: books, records, videos, tape cassettes, and many different vintages of stereo equipment. Given the arresting title, we are searching the image for the outmoded wonder of those albums usually categorized as “Exotica,” specifically for the Peruvian singer Yma Sumac with her birdlike, multioctave voice, but the words and the details abound. And she is “hiding”: it feels like a triumph to finally locate the blushing-­red album cover, leaning on a shelf just below the photograph’s dead center, a pileup of other records concealing almost everything but the singer’s beautiful name. And then there are the brand names, the language of domestic objects, asserting themselves in the interior—­and in the photograph—­in a manner so different than the deadpan of Pop art: the cleaning product on the now emptied bookshelves in Pledge, 2000, the Cuban coffee in Pilon, 1999, the maker of a turntable cartridge in Shure, 2003, or the barely visible inscription on a florescent light tube in Long Life Cool White, 1999. All of the word details seem to bring us close to the subjective desire expressed in Greed. Emblematic here would be Davey’s images of her kitchen refrigerator, a surface repository for myriad postings, notes, and other pictures, but also a support like a table or a shelf, upon which the artist’s family has piled their household wares. There are at least two photographs of refrigerators in the domestic series. The later photograph has been entitled simply Fridge, 2003; we stare at a ziggurat of appliances mounted atop the refrigerator, surrounded by a tangled web of electrical wires; and the appliance is covered in words, in handwritten lists, printed notices, and clipped pages, and especially the magnetic letters that allow one to endlessly use the white appliance as a site of writing, like the blank page. Davey recently underlined the talismanic place of the image for her work: I had a funny revelation recently . . . that my Fridge picture is very similar to Edward Weston’s toilet. In his diaries and notebooks, which I read in my early 20’s, and loved, he talks about photographing his toilet over and over, each time refining the composition until he attained a formalist perfection. And he writes about his exaltation at finally getting it right. Perhaps it’s odd to be identifying with Weston at this point in my life, but I have to admit that my process with the fridge was strangely similar. It involved a slow, methodical deliberation, a stalking of light, of waiting for the precise moment of solar illumination in an otherwise dim room.33

339

Top to bottom, Moyra Davey, Otis, 1996; Moyra Davey, Pledge, 2000; Moyra Davey, Yma, 1999. Chromogenic prints, 20 × 24 in. each.

FIG U RE 5.1 3 

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Weston’s toilet served the artist as an example of pure, disinterested form, a surface reflecting light, but it came with bodily resonance, of course, just a step away from the subjective desire and erotic images that otherwise seethed throughout his formalist, modernist project. Davey’s Fridge seeks no such repression, and the object’s opening onto subjectivity and desire seems the image’s “point.” In the earlier photograph Glad, 1999, we see a yellowing precursor, an older model of refrigerator photographed in more extreme close-­up. Davey’s image takes its name from the commonplace brand of garbage bags peeking out from behind the sugar, baking soda, cereal, and colon cleanser perched atop the large appliance. Along with some children’s drawings, everything mounted like a prosthetic extension to the appliance seems to be about digestion and waste: a garbage-­pickup schedule, tips for safe foods to eat, the address of a plumber. Thus, Glad must also be seen as related—­and even more directly—­to Weston and Excusado, 1925, his toilet photograph, a testament to Davey’s larger photographic archaeology. But all of these extensions attached to Davey’s refrigerator take the form of words, or of boxes and packaging and storage containers functioning like the box of the refrigerator itself, all emblazoned with more words, an endless echo. And so, from the realm of the quotidian, from the stuff of garbage, a specific word erupts, the detail of Glad—­and for the reader, the inscription names an emotion as well, a subjective feeling, a psychic state. An “ultimate happiness” indeed: reading and photography for Davey may not in the end be exactly the same, but their analogy or fusion expands the image, and in at least two ways. As reading, for Davey, “redeems” the subject, making available the recognition of a desire through the manner in which a book “chooses” its reader, so too the subject comes to enliven the photographic image, erupting within it—­a redemption of the inert quotidian object and the potentially lifeless photograph both. “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us,” Davey quotes Franz Kafka as saying, and so it is for the summons of her photographs as well.34

I feel a deep envy for Schopenhauer’s daily routine. The deadening repetition of it at first terrifies, but then I realize there is life in this rigor, a rhythm in which reading and writing have their balanced place. My work has no such balance. My manuscript is now increasingly late; if I wrote for just four hours in the morning, and then went about my life, this book would never get done. I do nothing now but sit at my desk, or with my laptop on my couch, or in a chair, my back aching so much that I can barely sleep at night. I am surrounded by books, my only companions, and I’ve given up on personal hygiene, daily upkeep, my dog or my wife. My writing is about immobilization: I can do nothing else. I have to stop living, it seems, to loosen the flow of words. My only respite comes from moments of procrastination, a writer’s potlatch, and recently I have been

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F IGUR E 5.14  

Moyra Davey, Fridge, 2003. Chromogenic print, 24 × 20 in.

Edward Weston, Excusado, 1925. Gelatin silver print, 9½ × 7 9⁄16 in. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Edward Weston Archive. © Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents.

FIG U R E 5.15  

F I GURE 5.1 6 

Moyra Davey, Glad, 1999. Chromogenic print, 20 × 24 in. (paper), 14 × 18 in. (image).

C hapter 5 344

Johann Valentin Albert, Portrait of Arthur Schopenhauer, 1852. Daguerreotype, 2 51⁄64 × 2 9⁄16 in.

F I GURE 5.17  

wasting time by googling writers and their libraries. I find a black-­and-­white image of Samuel Beckett’s bookshelves, which seem much sturdier than my own, and also more orderly. I feel some envy toward bookshelves filled with novels of similar size and shape, arranged in logical patterns, as opposed to the vain individualism of the supersized art catalogues and monographs that my shelves can barely contain. I vow to buy more novels from now on and fewer art books, and, when I next have some free time, to replace some of my sagging shelves. And then, more procrastination: I search again for early photographs of Schopenhauer. This time, a darkening portrait does come up of the philosopher in a chair. Taken in Frankfurt around 1850, it must be the daguerreotype that Benjamin had in mind. As opposed to in most portraits of Schopenhauer that I can recall, here his piercing eyes have

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been cast in shadow, and he does seem to fade or “withdraw” into the tight embrace of the sturdy seat, upholstered in a patterned tapestry fabric that yields to the sitter’s elbows. I am captured by other details that Benjamin ignored: the piercing bright reflection of a magnifying lens that hangs from the philosopher’s waistcoat, or the fact that his fingers have almost all gone missing, along with our ability to see his eyes. He holds one hand against his temple, a weary gesture, right up against his eyes and thus sharing their shadow. But the other hand has been thrust into a piece of fabric, perhaps a scarf, on the philosopher’s lap, the fingers disappearing into its pattern and folds. The gesture strikes me as an echo of what Benjamin characterized as the “shy” retreat of the great thinker away from the camera itself, his withdrawal into and fluid merger with his surrounds. Despite the philosopher’s rock-­hard, chiseled face, the fingers vanish into the soft flowing fabric and its “strange weave of space and time.” I cannot help but follow the trajectory of the detail, as the flaccid textile drops down like a cascade into Schopenhauer’s crotch. This seems less a gesture of modesty than an exacerbation of this photograph’s sheer passion for softness, folds, and crevices—­from Schopenhauer’s crotch to his belly to his elbows to his neck and shirt collar. Redoubling the communion between subject and object, the philosopher’s body parts merge with this fabric at the bottom and the center of the entire image. And I cannot, further, help the thought: the connection seems both erotic and specifically gendered, a fingering of an unavoidable anti-­phallus.

Mother. At one point in Davey’s book The Problem of Reading, we are shown four photographs of brittle, yellowed pages, each fragmented and close-­up, the text in French. The detail photographs extend from Davey’s earlier use of copy stands and macro lenses—­a repeated project of pure photographic proximity, a visual intimacy that shatters the wholeness of the photographic scene. And they arrive in small format, all four inches by six, rhyming with the look and size of index cards. It is one of the few times in The Problem of Reading that the photographs let us inside the book as an object, suspending us within its open covers.35 An attentive reader has highlighted specific passages—­the full extent of which we cannot see—­and underlined certain words, penciling in the margins their English equivalents: “bestow,” “barter,” “sloth,” “caddishness.” The images appear again in Davey’s video Fifty Minutes, 2006, in the plastic sleeves of an album that seems to contain the artist’s working prints of her myriad photographs, where they are paired with close-­up images of the teats and belly of the artist’s female dog. Otherwise anomalous, the title of the group of images appears at the end of Davey’s book: My Mother’s Copy of Swann’s Way, 1999. Paired with the notion of reading, the maternal has also been one of the forces through which Davey has reconceived the photograph. Again, she has published

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FI GUR E 5.18 

Moyra Davey, My Mother’s Copy of Swann’s Way, 1999. Chromogenic prints, 4 × 6 in. each.

a book on the subject, a collection she edited and titled Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood, which Davey describes as a series of “examinations of the creative life.”36 If this statement explicitly links the creation that is writing with the creation involved in motherhood, we also find the signs of maternal care throughout her photographic images: toys scattered around a bookshelf, disposable bottles in the kitchen, a model train running along the studio floor, a child’s doodles proudly displayed on the refrigerator. Beyond this familiar iconography, Davey’s images allegorize the maternal in other, stranger or more unusual ways, most often through an attraction to objects of a specific function and shape. Like stand-­ins for the mother, a burgeoning series of receptacles can be seen in Davey’s work: containers, protective sheaths, womb-­like enclosures. As with Leonard, Dean, and Lockhart, the metaphor continues to be essentialist, surely, but the photographs literalize this analogy everywhere, as if this

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“maternal holding” were something the photograph also, in its essence, shares: a series of empty liquor bottles, depicted as containers irradiated by and capturing light; the myriad boxes and packages that hold domestic goods; the refrigerators storing and preserving the family’s sustenance; the towering shelves hugging their books like cradles; even the early series Davey made of city newsstands, envisioned as encasements for the reading materials and the salespeople often depicted sitting within them, mostly elderly immigrants. Like a precursor and inspiration for Leonard’s later series Analogue, and for the photographer’s manner of treating New York City and its shopwindows, Davey’s Newsstand series embraces these contingent, freestanding businesses, boxes of every different shape framing words, newspapers, and magazines, and teeming with objects for sale. In the majority of these photographs, unlike in Leonard’s Analogue, a person comes to be held and encased in this array, uncannily literalizing the receptacle or maternal metaphor, as, captured from a distance, their body seems miniaturized by the scene, as if returned to the scale of childhood. The exceptions only serve to prove the rule: in the first image from this series, Newsstand No. 1, 1994, Davey photographs a kiosk that has been closed up, perhaps abandoned, its opening sealed shut by a hallucinatory quantity of packing tape, holding the whole precarious structure impossibly together. The newsstand seems stuffed to bursting. Sealed up in this way, the first newsstand appears more decrepit and ruinous than those that follow, but it also bears an even more unmistakable resemblance to the human body, evoking indeed the shape of a distended or pregnant belly. The Newsstand series provides a literal example of Davey’s later photographic move to divine the subject in a range of objects, displaced everywhere within the image. And the typology of doomed, quotidian urban structures preserved in Newsstand creates a founding model for the open, womb-­like receptacle Davey seems to understand both the photograph and the maternal to be. The metaphor of receptacle or container, of photographic or maternal holding, conjures the utopian, like a gesture of love or an embrace. But the decrepit, belly-­like newsstand split at the seams provokes other thoughts, underlining in this connection of photography and motherhood the ruinous aspects of each, the dynamics of violence and loss. We sense this kind of linkage of photography and the maternal in Davey’s video Fifty Minutes, which in a way closed out the domestic series of photographs for the artist by literally repeating them, recording them on and in video, with extended spoken monologues now inflecting the meaning of the photographic scenes.37 As by now should seem appropriate, Davey began Fifty Minutes with—­of all of the topoi from her homebound photographs—­a section on her refrigerator. Another reflection on the appliance ends the video, another repetition of a repetition, thus allowing the video to come full circle. And so, after Fifty Minutes opens with Davey flipping

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FI GUR E 5.19 

Moyra Davey, Newsstand, 1994. Chromogenic prints, 20 × 20 in. each.

in silence through working prints of her domestic photographs bound in an album of plastic sleeves—­we see images of dust and newspapers and a writing desk with the artist’s face and video camera dimly reflected in the weak, distorting mirror of the plastic—­we confront Davey herself, sitting in her bedroom and speaking to the viewer about her refrigerator. “I think of a fridge as something that needs to be managed,” the artist confesses. “A well-­stocked fridge always triggers a certain atavistic, metabolic anxiety, like that of the Neanderthal after the kill, faced with the task of needing to either ingest or preserve a massive abundance of food before spoilage sets in.”38 During the scene, Davey’s family unit seems insistently present, with her partner giving direction off camera, or the artist’s son playing just behind her head or, in another take, sitting impassively in the background shadows. And

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Davey continues on, confessing to a need to see the refrigerator emptied out: “I get an unmistakable pleasure out of seeing . . . the contents of the fridge diminish, out of seeing the spaces between the food items get larger and better defined. This emptying out reminds me of the carcasses being eaten away by maggots in Peter Greenaway’s film A Zed and Two Noughts.”39 We think back to Davey’s Glad, and clearly this fantasy of emptying out the refrigerator echoes the voiding of the body upon which the image also insists, the products, arrayed around the appliance, that all seem to intimate issues with digestion, constipation, and excretion. These have become metaphors for maternity now too, a dynamic Davey develops in later photographic-­image juxtapositions. In a recent interview, the artist describes showing her long-­ago gallerist an early photograph she made of a group of her other photographs—­a format increasingly prevalent in Davey’s work, something like a “meta-­photograph” or echo of other photographs, a “recursive” photograph, like the video Fifty Minutes itself. In this case the photograph entailed an array of images of her dog taking a shit, surrounding an image of her then pregnant nude body. The gallerist, of course, was Colin de Land, and Davey remembers his being “horrified” by the work, a striking reaction for a figure who also exhibited and spent much time with filmmaker John Waters. “I took a lot of pictures of my dog shitting and, in 1996, just before my son . . . was born,” Davey relates, “I photographed myself in bed with my pregnant belly and my dog looking like she’s sucking on my tit. Then I surrounded it with little photographs of her arching and taking a shit. The arch of her back perfectly mirrors the arch of my belly.”40 Davey’s confession to an obsession with emptying out the storage device that is her refrigerator now echoes other kinds of voiding of the body, aligning this with excretion, and all of this with the maternal, with giving birth. “The original inspiration for my shitting-­dog-­pregnant-­belly piece was Mary Kelly’s Post-­Partum Document,” Davey admits, “in which she catalogs everything that goes in and comes out—­the famous, stained nappies. When I was pregnant, I was thinking—­as a kind of joke—­that I was going to make an ante-­partum document about shitting, of feeling enormous and stuffed, and wanting to vacate my insides.”41 The maternal, too, can become a cry of lateness, and with all of these analogies Davey signals that the emptying out of the refrigerator, or of the maternal body, is an echo carried by the work’s similar concern with the emptying out of the photograph itself. The photograph in Davey’s hands must become a late form, a medium hollowed out, made “barren,” as we say of the failure, too, of biological reproduction. We return to the opening of Fifty Minutes: Davey continues to explain her joy in seeing her refrigerator slowly and inexorably become vacant, and how it reminds her of the deathly rot imagined in Peter Greenaway’s film, in which photography had a role to play. “He uses time-­lapse photography to show an animal carcass wither away

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F IGUR E 5.20 

Moyra Davey, Dr. Y., Dr. Y., 2014. Fifteen digital chromogenic prints, tape, labels, postage, ink, 60 × 54 in.

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before our eyes until all that’s left is clean white bone. That is my aim with the fridge: to be able to open it and see as much of its clean, white, empty walls as possible.”42 As with Davey’s photographs of the refrigerators more generally, we are listening now to a fantasy of and about photography itself. But this hollowing-­out of the insides of the photograph leads to new photographic possibilities, to forms that reach beyond the photographic medium. Emptying becomes the twin of opening, and both befall the photograph now. This is the work of lateness: “I want to make some photographs,” Davey recently wrote in her essay “Notes on Photography and Accident,” “but I want them to take seed in words.”43 Here the actions of reading and mothering fuse; Davey often refers to the notion of “life” or “germination,” or of images that “take seed”—­in words or other images—­in her statements on photography. This may seem far from the dynamics of lateness; but in this, she again seems preceded by Duchamp, who gave the deathly title Dust Breeding to his 1920 photograph, made collaboratively with Man Ray, of dust accumulating on the dormant or seemingly abandoned Large Glass. When the artist ceases work, Duchamp and Man Ray’s image implies, when the work of art suffers abandonment, another kind of creation occurs, one associated with “breeding” or giving birth. When first published in a Dada journal, the photograph was in fact subtitled The Domain of Rrose Selavy; the two names for the image bring the issues of the domestic and of germination together. Davey often treats her domestic photographs as organic things, growing in accumulations like wayward maps or diagrams—­a living spread of images. In Calendar of Flowers, Gin Bottles, Steak Bones, 2008, Davey mounts an accumulation of photographic prints on the walls; all different shapes and sizes, the prints are not arranged in a grid but abut and touch each other, pressing close to allow an image chain of loose associations to emerge.44 Configured in this way, the photograph appears literally “expanded,” placed into contact and dialogue with a host of other images in an expansive spatial structure, each individual photograph’s boundaries exceeded by proximity and contact or touching. If this is also how Davey has described the maternal sphere—­“much of life with small children,” she has written, “revolves around loss of control and disintegration of physical boundaries”—­the artist takes up this maternal valence in her individual titles for the three subgroupings of her piece: Blow, Bloom, and Bone.45 The work obviously allegorizes the passing of time, with its images of wilting flowers alongside empty bottles, stacks of bills, and years of personal diaries, but the three subtitles also name a kind of life cycle. Blow, bloom, and bone: we move from germination or “taking seed,” to growth and efflorescence, and then to death, a life—­and a life of the photograph—­figured not just through its marking of passing time but also through its dispersal like dust.

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That is to say, the photographs’ strange forward motion is shaped not through cinematic progression, but now through mechanisms of association and comparison, linkage and analogy spreading the images out along the walls. Davey has often talked about her attraction to Virginia Woolf ’s metaphor of a “net of words” descending on the writer, and here she explores a net of photographs, an image chain of figural connections. That such expansion of the photograph might have maternal valence as well Davey seems to signal in a passage describing her writing process. But it also describes her work on groups of photographic images like these: “Recently, on a frigid winter day,” Davey writes of herself, “she found herself in her studio surrounded by layers of books and papers. From this mass of paper strewn all over the sunlit floor, she began to conjure up an image of it all coming together, the parts knitting themselves into a web or net capable of holding her in a sort of blissful suspension.” While Davey has moved characteristically from a description of reading and writing to an “image,” she then goes deeper: “This fantasy obviously points to metaphors of maternal holding.”46

Moyra Davey, Blow, 2007. Four 12 × 17 in. chromogenic prints, twenty 8 × 10 in. chromogenic prints, one 10 × 8 in. gelatin silver print (layout approximately 50 × 81 in.).

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It is, in fact, the case that the most notorious association of photography and the mother enacts a similar dispersal along an image chain, as if the connection between such expansion and the maternal were much more intimate than it might at first appear. I refer to Barthes’s book Camera Lucida, which focuses its entire meditation on the photographic medium around an image of the author’s recently deceased mother that the writer calls the “Winter Garden Photograph,” and which depicts his mother as a five-­year-­old child. Discovered among a pile of old photographs after her death, the “Winter Garden Photograph” reveals to Barthes the “truth” of his mother that he could capture in no other image, and so he vows to take the maternal photograph as a measure of the medium more generally. But this is an image Barthes never shows us; it appears nowhere in his book. “I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph,” Barthes proclaims. “It exists only for me.”47 Instead, the image of Barthes’s mother occupies a place that links together the larger range of photographs that the writer chooses to speak about and to show; it grounds a series of associations and subterranean connections between images. “All the world’s photographs formed a Labyrinth,” Barthes concludes. “I know that at the center of this Labyrinth I would find nothing but this sole picture. . . . The Winter Garden Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography.”48 This “thread” signals not just the linkage of the mother and photography. Barthes’s image of his mother seems to operate like Freud’s notion of the lost object, which thrives on an attempt to reclaim or retrieve the first love that the relation to the mother represents, driving one on to ever new objects and desires. Or in Barthes’s case, to new photographs: for in Barthes’s hands, the “Winter Garden Photograph” becomes a prototype of what Davey in her recent writing has herself called an “absent photograph,” an image that exists only in the mind or in memory, in a text or in descriptive language, a photograph in writing. Such is the life of Barthes’s image of his mother—­a textual life, a written photograph—­ that it has led some critics to conclude that the “Winter Garden Photograph,” in a physical sense, simply did not exist.49 Indeed, the image seems cobbled together from the details of other photographs that we know or that Barthes does show us, a strange amalgamation of the image of Kafka in a winter garden as a child that Walter Benjamin describes (and again does not show) in his essay “Little History of Photography”; or the face and gesture of the young Barthes himself in an image from his childhood, reproduced in his earlier text Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 1975; or a gesture and stance taken by his mother in a different photograph in Camera Lucida that Barthes calls “The Stock.” All of which is very similar to some of the most important descriptions that Barthes gives of his notion of the punctum, the singular, supposedly irreducible

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detail that he finds himself seized by in this or that other photograph within his book. These details, however, often do not exist, or appear in different photographs than the ones Barthes describes, as he traces an expanding set of linkages or affective associations between images. Most notoriously, this occurs with a James Van Der Zee photograph of an African American family, in which Barthes locates the punctum in one woman’s black-­strapped pumps, but then some pages later changes his mind, deciding that the punctum for him must be the woman’s necklace, a braided ribbon of gold. “Ultimately—­or at its limit—­in order to see a photo­ graph well,” Barthes avers, “it is best to look away or close your eyes.”50 Having allowed the punctum to mount into his “affective consciousness,” in memory or desire, Barthes’s description of the previously viewed Van Der Zee image now substitutes gold chains for the pearl necklaces the women in the image actually wear. The gold chain, the photograph’s punctum, is nowhere to be found. But, as critics have observed, this gold chain does exist; it appears in a specific photograph of Barthes’s spinster aunt, again reproduced in another book, in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. The absent photograph, the displaced punctum: what we witness, in such passages in Camera Lucida, is hardly a set of innocent mistakes, nor even “lies” on the author’s part. No matter this aesthetic of the emergent detail, Barthes asserts that the photograph can only be approached as a “latency”; it can never handle “scrutiny.”51 The photograph should be considered as potential, as becoming, as germination, not as a document, evidence, or index. Indeed, Barthes’s displacements, the chain of images his descriptions associate and link, constitute a model of desire; this is, in fact, what the maternal “means” for photography. Along this maternal model—­which is that of the lost object and its incessant displacement of desire—­the photograph truly becomes a growing, changing, expanding thing. No longer “merely” indexical, the photograph can become a composite image, a fusion of images, or a latent image, an “absent” image finding itself again and again in other images, gathering to itself its progeny, its “children,” extending itself into other photographs and other domains. This is what the absent photograph, the “Winter Garden Photograph,” the maternal model of the photograph, does. It is another mode, for photography, of the medium’s expansion (into writing, into memory, into other images). It is, indeed, another mode of the photograph’s redemption.

I realize that I haven’t had a haircut in months. I have needed one for at least the last three weeks, but I know that I won’t be able to get one until I finish writing this text. I also need to shave. I resolve to stop going out until my writing is done, except to walk the dog,

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but that is impractical, and I begin to wear a winter hat to cover my unruly hair, even at the dinner table at a friend’s house. In Los Angeles, this is somehow acceptable. By now, the writing has become painful, and I really just want some free moments and a haircut. I escape my writing desk in frustration, and walk to a neighborhood park. There, something extraordinary occurs: I spot three fledging owls perched in a nest at the top of a palm tree. I have never seen such a thing before, and return the next day and the next, delaying my writing even more. But I have discovered the baby owls just at the moment when they are preparing to leave the nest, and on the third day I encounter one on the ground, trying to learn how to fly. I feel renewed, and for a moment like I have escaped the difficulty of my work, but then it occurs to me that there might be some underground associations. I remember Benjamin’s comment, in his “Little History,” on the photographer being the “descendant of the augurs and the haruspices.” The augurs read the flight of birds; the haruspices deciphered the entrails of sacrificed animals, sometimes birds and often sheep. I have been thinking too long about mobility and immobility, about life and death in photography, to fail to see the connection. I begin to think differently about the sparrow that flies into the screen of my study’s window, and remains there for upwards of an hour, staring at me at my writing desk; or the hummingbirds that visit the aloe plants along my terrace, and that my wife greets each time with exclamations of wonder and joy, calling them a good omen. The photograph as divination, as a vision of the future and not only the past: it is the kind of revelation one must sometimes leave the writing desk to encounter.

Receiver. Along with the images of dust and domesticity, of books and desks, Davey’s photographs include a beautiful series of images of analogue equipment: old receivers and stereo speakers, radios and vinyl LPs, VHS tapes and record players. A gender dynamic emerges surreptitiously in the images, as there is not only a kind of guy who typically revels in such outmoded stuff today (and here I include myself, for sure), but many of these objects presumably belong to Davey’s partner, the artist Jason Simon.52 And yet this gender dynamic can also be transformed: Speaker, 2003, positions on a table the disassembled object of its title—­really just an eviscerated “woofer”—­utterly saturated with raking light. There, in the glare of the late-­day or late-­season illumination, the round equipment evokes other things: the speaker as eye, as orifice, as camera lens. And, in the far distance of the photograph, the speaker links up to a series of objects sitting behind it on the table: a glass half-­filled with water, the ripped-­open package of a box of photographic film, a bottle of prescription pills, and, behind it all, a copy of Davey’s book Mother Reader. Hooked up visually to both photography and the mother, to liquids and chemicals, to containers and books, Davey’s Speaker proclaims that the analogue equipment she carefully records also provides a conceptual model for her photography: the

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Moyra Davey, Speaker, 2003. Chromogenic print, 24 × 20 in.

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Moyra Davey, Receiver, 2003. Chromogenic print, 24 × 20 in.

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analogue provokes a thinking of analogy, with the sound equipment and recording devices all compared to another analogue, the photographic image.53 But to include the mother in this domain reaches further. It is another model of the photograph’s expansion; now photographs like Davey’s Receiver or Receivers (both 2003) become key. For Davey transforms what might at first seem the essentialist metaphors of an image like Speaker—­the analogue equipment depicted as a hollow, an enclosure, an inviting cavity—­into a conceptual operation; the artist’s images of analogue devices show them all to be “receivers,” objects into which the world is invited, and on which the world can be inscribed, like so much accumulated dust. It seems that Davey has positioned her artistic practice quite close again to the model of “authorial divestiture” that Kaja Silverman has named the “author as receiver.”54 To be a “receiver,” an image or a photograph—­an object or an author—­needs to be configured as “open” to the world, seeking less to produce than to gather and bring the world “inside,” like Davey’s retreat into the home itself. The manner in which this can be achieved remains a desiring one, and, as Silverman has described this in her essay on the late work of Jean-­Luc Godard, the operation of the “receiver” is one that seeks to find “rhymes” between the self and the world, analogues in which a recognition of similarity and shared substance can be enfolded. The maternal logic of the “lost object” emerges as one of the prototypical examples of such acts of receiving; according to the psychoanalytic story, the subject is determined by a lost (maternal) object of desire, seeking impossibly to refind it in the world, but recognizes analogues for this love along the way, which can produce a constant renewal and transformation of the object of desire. With this idea in hand, we have a new way to understand the affect proclaimed in a signal image of Davey’s such as Glad. As we have seen, her photograph of the domestic refrigerator proclaims her aesthetic: we face an object that is both a container (that can be emptied, that can be opened), and a machine for storage, aspects that attracted Davey’s camera to this image, for photography is such a thing as well. But, as depicted here, Davey’s refrigerator acts also as a literal base for the support of other objects—­themselves so many containers, canisters, and plastic sacs—­and, even more, it functions as a site of collection, a surface of inscription for the notes and images and even photographs that cling to it like flypaper, or like so many affirmations of love. Davey’s photograph depicts the refrigerator as a site of maternal and domestic care, but it is also another model of the photograph finding itself in a new form in the world, or in a new domain. The photograph recognizes itself in Davey’s image of the refrigerator as a “receiver,” the machine’s creamy whiteness glimmering quietly with all the promise of a blank page—­a place, finally, where the world might be inscribed.55 In this moment of recognition, we sense that the author as receiver doesn’t “choose,” but rather is chosen by her subjects. Such is how Davey has described the

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problem of reading, which she has compared to her photography. But it is also how she understands the task of writing, again comparing this to the act of photography. In “Notes on Photography and Accident,” Davey describes waiting for “what wells up when we make space” for accident as more than just a chance occurrence: for example, “when we lie on the bed in morning sunlight and bring laptop to lap. I’ve often heard it said, most recently by novelist Monica Ali, that as writers ‘we’re not at liberty to choose the material, the material chooses us.’” And then Davey compares this openness to photography: “Geoff Dyer has noted parallel statements by photographers: ‘It is the photo that takes you’ (Henri Cartier-­Bresson), ‘I don’t press the shutter, the image does’ (Arbus), and one from Paul Strand on choosing his subjects: ‘I don’t. [ . . . ] They choose me.’” Davey concludes: “I’ve always intuited this about pictures.”56 This description makes explicit Davey’s understanding of her activity as a model of receiving, and, more specifically, that photography should only be approached now in this way. Her attempt to figure this photographic model on the level of artistic authorship is the task of her major work, the video Fifty Minutes. Davey has been explicit about this as well, the one artist in this account who points knowingly and self-­consciously to the author-­as-­receiver model. Titling her first European museum exhibition Speaker Receiver, the artist explained her expanded understandings of these terms: “Speaker and Receiver are the titles of two of my photographs [both from 2003], but, in fact, they are reversed in terms of the literal meanings of these words.” Describing Speaker, the light-­raked woofer photograph, Davey admits: “The speaker is mute—­it’s just the disconnected woofer sitting on a tabletop in sunlight—­and the receiver is alive and glowing from a dark corner: a machine with a soul.” With this inversion of values, the artist clarifies that when she took these two photographs as a “model” for the exhibition, she was thinking directly of Roland Barthes, of Barthes’s idea of a “reader who is actively producing or ‘writing’ something in the act of reading.” And “speaker/receiver is the dominant theme of my video Fifty Minutes.”57 Described by the artist as a work of “autofiction,” Fifty Minutes could be understood as Davey’s most radical “expanded” photograph, a literally extended work presented in the form of video, a durational image encompassing the full fifty minutes that the work’s title names.58 During the video, Davey shows the viewer her working process, as we see her filming her domestic spaces, and speaking directly to the camera, sometimes confessing private thoughts and experiences, but often reading in the second degree from novels and critical texts dealing with the issue of homesickness and nostalgia. She films individual prints of her domestic photographs, holding the still images for long moments on the screen; conversely, since making the piece, she has printed moving images captured from her video as photographic prints. But what comes together in Fifty Minutes is not just photography and video, the still and the moving image; the work’s claims for expansion are much

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more radical than that. The work plays upon the connotations of its seemingly flat, descriptive title, which functions literally—­pointing simply to the actual length of the piece—­and figuratively, referring to the fifty-­minute “hour” of a conventional psychoanalytic session. Davey’s confessional video imbricates in every way her “self ” and her photographic images, now presented in analogy to a psychoanalysis—­ about which Davey often speaks during the video’s course, describing her analyst, her complicated bus rides and walk to the doctor’s office, her distaste for his Freud-­ inspired couch draped with Mexican blankets, and her ultimate termination of the analysis itself. Fifty Minutes thus proclaims subjectivity to be its central stake. Mixing photographs and reading, images and words, but also domestic objects and the authorial subject, the video presents us with another version of Schelling and his frock coat, or Schopenhauer and his chair.59 Throughout Fifty Minutes, the imbrication of subject and object finds itself presented in the mode of receiving. Davey’s camera, for example, repeatedly displays her photographs grouped into an album or book—­not so much images seized as images received—­which move past our eyes as the artist flips the pages, a stream of what we could call “photographs for reading.” We watch Davey as filmmaker browsing with her family in a secondhand shop, or listening to the television. We see her gathering her notes and critical texts, or commenting on a film seen or a novel read. We witness her gazing at her husband reading on a couch, or watching her dog watching the luminous scene outside a bedroom window. Most often, we follow Davey’s camera as she films herself reading aloud, often about the subject of nostalgia—­the camera switching from the lines on the printed page to the artist’s face, or to her mouth, caught in the midst of recitation. Reading, writing, photography; domesticity, everyday objects, the maternal sphere: the author as receiver finds her place in all of this. But the place the receiver finds does not correspond to the one provided by the comforting and normative fantasy of nostalgic return that the homebound video seems initially to court. To the extent that nostalgia becomes one of Davey’s explicit subjects in Fifty Minutes—­as she surveys the limits of her domestic space, working ensconced in her New York City home—­the artist instead sketches the lineaments of a devastated nostalgia, a late mode of a kind of impossible blockage in the old relation to the past, to memory, or to home space itself. In various fragments in the video, Davey reads from passages that sketch a constellation of figures: the critic Vivian Gornick, the writer Natalia Ginzburg, the filmmaker Hollis Frampton. In the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York, the critic Gornick writes about writers like Ginzburg working in the wake of World War II, finding in their work “a severe absence of sentiment—­and even of inner motion.” The writing begins to sound almost photographic: “A remarkable stillness suffuses the prose in each; a stillness beyond pain, fear or agitation.”60 She describes the writer feeling as if “standing at the end of history—­eyes dry,

sentences cold and pure—­staring hard, without longing or fantasy or regret, into the is-­ness of what is.” Davey surmises that in the post-­9/11 New York of her video, 61

“daydreaming about the city stretching backwards in time is a cause for anxiety, a reminder that historical continuity and the promise of a future are no longer things we can take for granted.”62 Reading the writing of Ginzburg, Davey recognizes the critic’s positing of a negation of “sentimentality,” an “absence of nostalgia” in the work, affirming that in the novel Voices in the Evening, “there’s no psychologizing. We have to infer the complexity of a life from a handful of very selective and superficial details.”63 It becomes increasingly clear that in these passages, Davey describes her own artistic form, her own voice and its particular deadpan, her own lack of expression as she reads and cites and receives in front of her video camera, as she works as a woman artist in the confines of her home. And as she shows us more videos of her ruinous domestic photographs, we hear more of Davey’s thoughts on Ginzburg. She is especially struck by a passage where Ginzburg describes “the true face of the house,” which is “the horrible face of the

FIG U R E 5. 24  Moyra Davey, Fifty Minutes Grid, 2006. Twelve chromogenic prints, tape, labels, postage, ink, 12 1⁄64 × 17 33⁄64 in. each.

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crumbled house,” the reality of wartime destruction persisting even in the fantasy of reconstructed domesticity that returned when the war was over. “The image of a shattered house, a home reduced to rubble by bombs,” Davey explains, “becomes the central metaphor for a loss of wholeness, for the ability to ever trust again in the stability of material things, in the continuity of lives.”64 As the scene continues, Davey shows the viewer an image of a tower of books and papers in her studio office, at first panning it in close-­up, and then taking in the construction as a whole, an improbable pile so tall that it seems to model Davey’s own high-­rise apartment building in the form of books for reading and writing (there are many notebooks, journals, perhaps diaries). The image arrives in exceedingly low resolution, a throwback ruin of a recording, and the books—­like Davey’s photograph Speaker, or the earlier Copperheads—­reflect an intense, raking light, with more than half of them thus glowering in the shadows. But the tower of books models a precarious architecture on the verge of collapse. These are the images that Davey mines from a considered transformation of nostalgia—­lateness, catastrophe, fragmentation. It is as if Fifty Minutes and Davey’s photographs wanted to embody the afterlife of nostalgia, as the images invert the access to origin, wholeness, and deep emotion that nostalgia usually implies, turning to emptied-­out conventions—­dry, cold, and pure, as her critic puts it—­giving voice

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Moyra Davey, Diaries, 2006. Chromogenic print, 12 × 18 in.

F I GURE 5. 26  Hollis Frampton, nostalgia (Hapax Legomena I), 1971. 16 mm film, black-­and-­white, sound, 36 min. © Estate of Hollis Frampton.

to an expression “beyond pain, fear or agitation.” It is this postcatastrophic language that Davey then extends to photography, with her thoughts on Hollis Frampton, who enters her constellation because of his 1971 film entitled (nostalgia). The work imagines “a sort of leave-­taking of photography,” Davey asserts. It enacts an extreme violence upon the photographic image, as notoriously, in the film, Frampton “burns his photographs on a hot plate, and always out of sync with the disintegrating image on the screen is a voice-­over describing the circumstances of the making of each picture.”65 We again hear rhymes with the work of the author as receiver, rhymes with Davey’s own manner of treating and speaking of her photographs in the video we are now watching. Informed by “regret,” “failure,” and “loss,” however, the Frampton film “ends on a strange note of terror,” Davey relates, “with its narrator saying: ‘I think I shall never dare to make another photograph again.’”66 But Davey proceeds in Fifty Minutes to move from what Frampton called the “wounds of returning,” in his (nostalgia), to the making of some photographs. If it is too late for traditional nostalgia, then it is too late for the traditional photograph as well, and so now the deadpan receiver moves to thinking in words of “an idea for a picture,” as Davey the narrator describes to us the attempt to photograph a collection of Jason Simon’s 45s in dim light, or another image of dust on a turntable needle that sounds like the photograph Shure. “It can still happen,” Davey admits, “that I’ll get that sense of heightened absorption and suspended time that comes with the first idea and the notion of a latent image.”67 The photograph comes to take on other forms, to arrive in words, and through the subjectivity and desire of its author, a latency that announces the author as receiver. And at the center of Fifty Minutes, the artist locates what I have called—­after Davey’s own words—­an absent photograph, a memory image that, like Barthes, she

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otherwise refuses to show, but that exists in the form of words, in recited text, as an evocation. Not coincidently, this recitation describes a maternal scene: “As I write and think about . . . nostalgia,” Davey the narrator asserts, “a particular landscape always presents itself. It involves a summer day, a park in Montreal, ’60s-­era architecture, my mother, and a scene from an Antonioni film. But I can’t say more than that. To do so would be to kill off the memory and all the generative power it holds in my imagination. I keep it perpetually in reserve, with the fantasy that someday I may land there, in what is by now a fictional mirage of time and place.”68 Described in this way, Davey’s image takes its place alongside other absent photographs that well up in her various writings—­her description, for example, of an Annie Leibovitz image of Susan Sontag (“I don’t have the photo before me—­it’s another absent picture—­but perhaps I can conjure it from memory: Susan in jeans, white shirt, and dirty white sneakers, reclining on the left, her hair thick and wiry, black with white stripe; and, spread out over more than half the bed, a complex patchwork of ruled pads with half their bulk folded over, typescript pages crossed out and annotated, and oddly shaped scraps of paper with handwritten notes”).69 Or, even more striking, a whole series of Zoe Leonard photographs that exist only in Davey’s mind: “Zoe gives a lecture on Agnes Martin, but doesn’t show any paintings. With her characteristic flair for storytelling, she describes photographing the paintings over and over, and the difficulty of it all: all she can see is the dust in her viewfinder.” And then Davey concludes: “No paintings, no photographs . . . Yet I leave the lecture with an incredibly vivid image of the absent, unseen photographs.” They are “classic, vintage, black-­and-­white Leonard, signature black frame lines enclosing Martin’s pale, gray, pencil-­lined grids.” The meeting of mediums, the expansion of forms, seems to strike Davey: “Photographs of pencil marks . . . But wait, did Agnes Martin even use pencil? I realize, rereading this, that I don’t actually know, and may have invented these pencil lines, fantasizing photographs to suit my own desire.” 70 It is this “fantasizing” of photographs to suit one’s “own desire” that the absent photograph envisions, the receiving that it enables. It is hardly a coincidence that each of Davey’s absent images connects to a mother or mother figure, whether the role model of the famous woman intellectual or the heroic woman artist. And in line with these maternal lost objects, each “absent photograph” that Davey describes reconfigures the temporality of the photograph. From the past tense—­an image, as Barthes described it, of the “that has been”—­the photograph in Davey’s hands becomes a latent image, a proleptic force, a mode of divination: the photograph as what once was and may be again, or, most powerfully, the photograph as a “that will be,” even if only in fantasy or desire. In all of these ways, the author as receiver has transformed the photographic image. No longer dedicated to an object “out there,” or in the past, the photograph emerges from within, and travels toward the

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Moyra Davey, Receivers, 2003. Chromogenic print, 24 × 20 in.

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future. A photograph to suit one’s own desire would be a photograph of (and from) the subject, as much as the object; a photograph in which we read the lineaments of the subject who imagines it, who calls it into being, from the “reserve” of memory and desire. And this is the “photograph” that the varied acts of receiving in Fifty Minutes envision. As Helen Molesworth has asserted: “In Fifty Minutes reading is nothing less than the search for, and performance of, the self. The video shows us that we are all acts of ‘autofiction’ and that we come to know and invent ourselves through and in the pages of books, and through and in our recitation of them for others.”71 Such is the message of Davey’s video. We are receivers, Fifty Minutes seems to assert. And if this is also what a photograph is, or can be thought to be, then another analogy, the most foundational one for Davey, comes into play. In terms of being and subjectivity, we are receivers, and thus we are “like” photography. Which is a formula, of course, that can be reversed: photographs are like us, they can become models of subjectivity and desire, and, because of this—­and with a revelation that remains profound—­we can recognize ourselves in them. This, for me, is the lesson of Moyra Davey’s photographs.

The immobilization, the waiting, sitting at my desk until it hurts: all of this fades the moment a revelation arrives. I still don’t understand how it happens, and I know that I never will, but writing art criticism for me is in large part a setting up of the conditions in which this revelation can occur, a preparation for some kind of communion between my thoughts and the art before me. Euphoria then most often sets in; anything seems possible. It is all “worth” it: the pain, the silence, the loneliness, the life I’ve given up. I’ve just had the revelation of the “absent photograph” and the connections between Davey and Barthes on this. An hour or so later, I flip open my copy of Davey’s book Long Life Cool White at random. Now chance becomes my friend, and, at these moments, everything seems to connect. I have landed on a passage in Davey’s essay “Notes on Photography and Accident,” a section that she calls “Lost,” and just before it, a diary-­like entry dated October 13: “For Sontag and Malcolm, accident is the vitality of the snapshot, to which they oppose the turgidity and pretentiousness of art. For Barthes accident is wholly subjective; it is what interpolates him into any given photograph. It’s becoming clear to me that my own relation to accident is also extremely subjective, that accident is to be located outside the frame somehow, in the way we apprehend images. I shun the formal encounter via the institutions of galleries and museums, and gravitate to books and journals.”72 Where, one assumes, the absent photograph lives, and indeed lives on. But of course this is the “mode” of the absent photograph—­living on, survival, reanimation. It is not a question today of the loss or “death” of photography, not even of the persistence

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of the analogue image or the resurrection of obsolescent technologies. What lives on in the absent photograph is the way in which images determine us. The paradox is heartrending, and also beautiful: the absent photograph is not there, and yet it is all we ever seek. It is the image we will only “see” if we allow its latency to develop elsewhere in the world, outside the self, in other images, experiences, and forms. It is the photographic image we will only see if we allow the photograph to become other, and to be transformed. Photography, in this conception, is always already lost. And we will not relinquish it, for the absent photograph remains the image that, for all of us, quite simply means the most.

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AFTERWO R D LATE CRITICIS M

This is written in the night. In war the dark is on nobody’s side, in love the dark confirms that we are together. John Berger, Hold Everything Dear

Some final thoughts. Some last fragments. For some, it may seem immensely ludicrous—­it may seem deeply nostalgic—­to present an apologia for melancholia or nostalgia today, and to tie the fate of photography to such notions. Too often, surely, ideas of melancholia and nostalgia have been the source of the most banal clichés that writing on photography has produced. But there are critical energies operating within both that, I would argue, are precisely necessary to reactivate in our current historical conjuncture. This project was initiated at a moment—­in the wake of 9/11 and the second Iraq war—­when it had become clear that the geopolitical condition entailed a new state of permanent war, and so it bears remembering that nostalgia was originally a disease of soldiers. The nostalgic was so afflicted by the love of their homeland and of their past that they literally could not fight for them. In the face of the mobilization of modern armies, the nostalgic was immobilized. Early cures for the disease thus called for the infliction of “pain and terror.” A Russian general, invading Germany in the eighteenth century, infamously brought to an end an increasing outbreak of nostalgia among his troops by burying the afflicted soldiers alive.1 So there is a foundational anti-­militarism to nostalgia. This alone should make it important to consider again today. But what of its aftereffects, the regressive and fundamentalist nostalgias that plague us all around, the obsession with “homeland security” that today—­at least in the United States—­drives the machine of war itself? For this project now comes to its completion at a moment when most

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of the population of the globe has been confined to home (when one is available), under quarantine in a pandemic. In the United States, during this moment of stay-­ at-­home orders or the prescription to remain “safer at home,” the descendants of “homeland security” have been let loose upon the homeland, in a series of brutal internal assaults on American cities and citizens. The idea of home has never been more fraught. Nostalgia has become a battle-­ax. Perhaps this, too, now is part of nostalgia’s promise: we must engage with the weapons of the enemy and move their energies in another direction.2 In this sense, I have not been writing an apologia for nostalgia at all. I have instead tried to tell a story of nostalgia’s metamorphosis, a working with and working through nostalgia. Within contemporary art, we have witnessed in recent years a quiet but epochal shift from the retro aesthetics of postmodernism to a feminist opening up of history and the past. We have witnessed an aesthetic borrowing of the enemy’s weapons. Nostalgia, here, is less a style, and surely not a conservative refusal of change. It has become instead a feminist polemic, a way of holding open the past and desire—­a holding of both open to the future, and a way of insisting that things change.3 This is the task—­and this is the landscape—­in which photography and film have become central in new ways. This has been one of the pathways of their paradoxical transformation and expansion. I have intimated that we can search within nostalgia itself—­the turn back, the atavistic refusal to let go, the insistent and unconsummated intimacy and affection—­ for the conceptual tools that have allowed melancholic pain and withdrawal to be transformed, to be “attuned” with their opposites, we might now say. In the feminist redemption of the nostalgic mode, in the turn to longing in the face of lateness and loss, all the afflictions of the melancholic are transposed. Now, as we have seen, deadened passivity becomes openness; the indolence and sloth of the melancholic become attentiveness; a narcissistic wound becomes a form of care. Black bile can be transmuted into love; incorporation into exteriorization; inconsolable loss into the form of an infinite gift. We are reminded, endlessly, of what we missed, what we miss, and what we will miss. Such today is the resistance and the promise of nostalgia. Such today is the labor of the melancholics of time. And it has become the work of photography and film as well, a form of their contemporary afterlife.

This book began with a parable of photography. It also began in the darkness and silence of a camera obscura, and it has come to its end with the deadpan chatter of an artist on a psychoanalyst’s couch. We follow a trajectory, from the womb to neurosis, from enclosure to breakdown—­from origin to aftermath. This, too, should be understood as a potential parable of photography now.

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As this book comes full circle, I want to return to its origins. As I stated at the start, the impetus to think photography in terms of lateness began with a dialogue with the artist Paul Chan, on the forms and ideas embraced in his (then) recent work. As the global pandemic of 2020 erupted, Chan responded with an extraordinary short text, in which—­due to the conditions of the crisis—­the ideas of home and nostalgia had to be newly confronted.4 “Not being able to go home and being stuck at home are two of the less tragic reasons why these are the worst of times,” Chan admitted, speaking to his own being confined to a place outside his home in New York as the pandemic raged. “There are many different ways of thinking about what it means to be home,” the artist continued. “Experiences that make the concept of home meaningful are as fluid and varied as our sexual identities.” This comparison of the idea of home to the fluidity of subjective identity seems necessary now to Chan, due to the concerted mobilization of the most reactionary political forces around the experience of home as a concept, and as a weapon. “These thoughts are on my mind because a dehumanizing notion of home is being promoted by the most barbaric voices in American life. ‘We must go back to the way things were as soon as possible,’ these voices declare. ‘The economy must reopen immediately. Businesses must business again. Workers must work again.’ Get sick if you have to. Drink bleach to cope. The meaning of home here speaks to the demand that we must return to how they were most at home with us—­as the help, so to speak—­for the house they think they rightfully own.” And so, for Chan, a series of questions erupt: “Is it worth returning to the way things were? Is there a direction home that doesn’t point backward?” Thinking at first, as he so often does, of the ancient Greeks, Chan embraces a different and aesthetic reversion as he points back to Homer and the meandering return voyage of the Odyssey. For the Greeks, Chan claims, “going home” was a form of self-­expression. More, “going home was an artistic medium,” he insists, “like sculpture or painting.” And then Chan flips from the ancient to the modern, from the epic poem to modernism, from Homer to the Austrian writer Karl Kraus. Chan has cited Kraus often in his thinking and in his art; given the concerted battle cry of nostalgia in the contemporary moment, he fixates on a specific and gnomic line from the modernist: “The origin is the goal.” Chan immediately admits: “It’s not hard to recognize how conservative the phrase sounds.” It clearly is the battle cry of nostalgia that we now hear, a “motto” for the proper goal of any cultural endeavor for the Viennese writer: “to return to a glorious bygone past.” 5 But then Chan senses modernist irony—­he recognizes a duplicity, a splitting of the flat statement from its denotation, its surface meaning. “The origin is the goal”:

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notice, Chan advises the reader, “how it’s possible to read the word ‘origin’ as more than what is at root or source.” For an “origin” can “also refer to something beginning—­in other words, something that is new.” Chan exults: “Understood this way, the entire phrase is radically transformed, without a single word changing. The goal is now not to go back to a past. The goal is to find or discover what is new. Better yet, to find what is worth beginning anew.” To return to the past, in nostalgic regression; or to establish a new foundation, to start over (again): Chan’s reading brings out the lateness of Kraus as a modernist figure, the paradox of the backward-­looking modernist writing with an understanding of modernity that sees it, in one critic’s apt turn of phrase, as the “age of the aged.”6 This, too, has been a trajectory of this book: lateness as a precursor of a kind of modernist difficulty and reinvention, lateness as the precondition of a renewal of mediums and forms, lateness as a turn back that signals a radical opening.

As this book comes full circle, I want to return to its origins. This will involve a departure, a leave-­taking, as one origin of this project had nothing to do with photography. It involved a self-­critical examination of the kind of writing this project embodies, a reflection on the task of art criticism itself. With this self-­critical turn I mean to echo the subjective turn that this reading of photography and film has proposed. Clearly, throughout this book, the writing has enacted a fraught identification with the forms upon which it has focused (nowhere more explicitly than in the last chapter, on Moyra Davey, but I hope this has been palpable throughout). At the moment I initiated this thought experiment on lateness and photography, however, the possibility of thinking about a late criticism came first, and it became a starting point of the larger project. The impetus was deeply particular and specific: an invitation to think about the state of art criticism today by returning to a text from some generations ago, mostly left fallow by contemporary art historians, a late move par excellence. The Frankfurt-­based Institut für Kunstkritik, under the aegis then of Daniel Birnbaum and Isabelle Graw, convened a symposium on contemporary criticism around the text by Harrison and Cynthia White from the 1960s, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World. 7 In a largely sociological and functional analysis, the authors famously posit the rise of a “dealer-­critic” system at the moment of the late nineteenth century, coincident with the rise of modernism in French painting. And so I return to my thoughts from this event, as the project at hand began with them as well. But in doing so, I take leave of photography myself—­ here, at the end of things.

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My reaction to the bygone text was both simple and direct: a polemic against the major claim of the book, an assertion that its thesis—­as regards art criticism—­must be held as historically false. There never was any such thing as a “dealer-­critic” system. No such beast arose in the mid-­to late-­nineteenth century only to be dismantled in our own time, an epoch quite clearly of a “dealer-­artist” system in contemporary art. I will admit that the “dealer-­critic” system is an interesting and somewhat seductive label. Of course, there were “dealers” in the history of modern art who were also sometimes “critics.” The most important historical example here would be the figure of Daniel-­Henry Kahnweiler. And yet, the fact that Kahnweiler’s writings on cubism did not serve merely to legitimate the artists he represented, that in fact it might be interesting to discuss the ways in which this writing delegitimated such artists in Kahnweiler’s own historical moment and context, is a paradox to which the Whites’ sociological method remains entirely blind. But art criticism, I want to begin to claim, can be tricky like that. For the assumption of a “dealer-­critic” system makes two major missteps that I want to highlight as a starting point for further reflection. First, it associates the origins of modern art criticism with the rise of the modern market for art itself. This is manifestly untrue—­or at the very least, a strategic mistake. Art criticism arose, instead, in relation to the rise of the bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth century. While both art criticism and this public sphere would be indelibly altered by the forces of the bourgeois marketplace, the relative autonomy of both criticism and the public sphere from the market should not be forgotten. If we substitute the market as the origin of criticism in the place of a notion of a public sphere, we have destroyed the possibility for criticism before it has even had a chance to begin. In claiming this, I am stressing a methodological disagreement that for me has as much to do with the continued possibility of criticism (now) as it does with a narrative of its origins (then). The approach of Canvases and Careers made no allowance for criticism’s autonomy at all. Critics and criticism are discussed only in a relationship of complete instrumentalization to the art and artists they are said to serve. But this is not just a result of the Whites’ structural, institutional, or functional method: this is an eternal if not foundational problem for art criticism. For so many, criticism is the bastard child of the art world, the indentured servant, or perhaps more lyrically, the handmaiden of art and artists. Criticism is rarely approached on its own terms; usually, it is considered in light of how it performs, how it functions in relation to other actors and agents in the field of art. I am suggesting that a functional analysis of art criticism is not revelatory of the structural nature of the operation of

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the field; I want to suggest instead that it masks the fact that the functionalization (the instrumentalization) of art criticism amounts to the historical problem that art criticism has been struggling with for decades and has been attempting to overcome. So I don’t want to write here of art criticism as a bastard child, an illegitimate sibling of art. I want instead to think of art criticism as an orphan. Which is to say: I want instead to think about art criticism’s autonomy.

Now, autonomy has been a bad object in this book, a counterideal for the expansion of photography traced throughout its course. On this issue there exists a strange parallelism—­an analogy—­between criticism and photography themselves. As with photography, nothing could be more paradoxical than the attempt to speak about the “autonomy” of art criticism. For criticism, by its very nature, does not speak about itself.8 Art criticism is not self-­referential; it entails a practice of pure contingency. Nothing is more embarrassing; nothing, for me, is more depressing; nothing is more difficult for the art critic than to speak about themself, for art criticism than to speak about criticism. Two points, however: first, contingency and autonomy are not necessarily opposed. The contingency of art criticism, its dedication to speaking of other activities, other forms, may in fact demonstrate that true contingency may be a form of autonomy, a mode of relation to the other that is some truer way of reflecting on the self. This is a lesson both criticism and photography can elucidate for each other. I have been exploring this dynamic within art practice at some length here, to the point that it has become an underlying project of this book. And second: perhaps because of the inability or unwillingness to speak of an autonomous realm of criticism, we as of yet do not have any such thing in the field of art such as a “history of art criticism.”9 No established accounts, no historical narratives really pertain. The story remains up for grabs. I have mentioned the shared perception that modern art criticism arose in relation to the birth of the bourgeois public sphere. And the original occasion of these thoughts was the invitation to discuss the displacement of art criticism in the moment, perhaps, of what some see as the full eclipse of that public sphere, and the concomitant supplanting of art criticism in the face of the rise of the new functions claimed by curator, biennial, and collector. Without an accepted narrative of the history and transformations of art criticism at our disposal, one of my proposals for describing this contemporary shift will of necessity remain pure speculation, but it is a gambit that I want to explore: that what seems to signal the displacement of critic and criticism in the present moment is in

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fact the sign of a historical process of what we could instead call, more positively, or at least dialectically, “autonomization.” Only in the present, shorn of its functional tasks of legitimation, of confirming value in the marketplace, of identifying paradigmatic shifts in the field of contemporary art history, only in this apparent moment of crisis does art criticism “come into its own,” only in this moment does it achieve a new modality of practical autonomy.

Art criticism is obsolete, in other words, and this obsolescence is a mixed blessing. (The analogy of criticism and photography persists here as well.) Do not misunderstand me and the gambit I wish to explore: I fully realize that art criticism has, in a sense, been violently displaced. It has been murdered. There has been a structural necessity to do away with its former functions, its role as arbiter of cultural value, as preserve of competency and historical depth. But this situation must be seen dialectically. The structural displacement of art criticism’s former functions might be what art criticism was struggling to achieve. It might be not just a decimation but also an autonomization. And at any rate, all processes of autonomization entail, in some way, submission to forms of violence in order to be achieved. Several paradoxical moments in recent art history would be important to register and to reconsider if we were to entertain the notion of a becoming-­autonomous of art criticism. First would be the emergence of the artist-­critic in the moment of the rise of minimalism, and the displacement of the critic altogether in the moment of the rise of the discourse produced directly by the majority of conceptual artists (the artist Daniel Buren is paradigmatic here). This assault on the separate function of the critic at the moment of the rise of minimalism and conceptual art, however, is a development that I suggest we contemplate in the manner that artist Andrea Fraser has repeatedly suggested that we consider conceptual art’s larger relation to the issue of autonomy itself. Namely, that what seems in conceptual art to be the complete functionalization of the work of art, its total instrumentalization at the moment of institutional critique, for example, was in fact a testing of the possibility of art’s continued autonomy, a desperate attempt to ward off, homeopathically, the instrumentalization of art in the wider cultural sphere.10 This was a gambit Fraser herself would put to the test closer to our own historical moment, in her experiments with instrumentalization and autonomy around the projects she performed in the 1990s that she entitled Services, especially her project for the Generali Foundation in Vienna. But I think her suggestion is useful to explore in relation to the practice of criticism at the moment of conceptual art itself. To wit (and as astonishing as it might be to make this claim): conceptual art’s voiding of the function of the art critic

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was the first sign of a paradigmatic shift, the emergence of an art criticism without functions, an autonomization of art criticism itself.11 In the wake of being colonized by the artist, the function of the critic could be set free. This raises the necessity to retell the story of a second moment in recent art history in relation to the contemporary fortunes of art criticism. One of the most important art critics of the moment of the rise of postmodernism in the 1970s and 1980s, for me, has always been Craig Owens. Indeed, it was after reading his work toward the end of the 1980s or around 1990 that I decided that art criticism was something to which I would also want to devote myself. This book can be read as one response to that call. Like the work of all of the artists at this book’s heart, it is one long reply to the ramifications of postmodernism itself, and of postmodern criticism specifically—­a return and not a rejection, a reconnection as opposed to a forgetting. And of Owens’s many brilliant statements, I was always struck by his call, in writing about a critical postmodern culture, for a kind of neo-­Marxist critique of the “division of labor” in the cultural domain, the false separation of tasks between artist, critic, curator, historian. In the face of artistic practices such as those of Sherrie Levine, or Louise Lawler, or Hans Haacke, Owens not only fully embraced the “artist-­critic” model I just associated with the rise of minimalism and conceptual art. He also proposed an exacerbation of this hybridization of functions, a hybridization of tasks and roles within the field of art. For a long time, we associated a call such as this with the wider intertwining of what was called “interdisciplinarity” and postmodernism. However, from the vantage point of today, it would seem to be the first precondition of our contemporary situation of the collapse of the former position of the critic, with hybrid functions displacing the former role of the art critic, as we witness now the rise of the curator-­critic, the artist-­curator, the artist-­dealer, etcetera. But, here again, there is a dialectical fillip to this trajectory from interdisciplinarity to colonization. For today, criticism’s autonomy can be felt—­paradoxically—­in its infection of a vast range of other domains. Art criticism’s former service function within the field of art—­serving artists, serving dealers, serving the market, serving historical legitimation and the museum—­instead now comes to infiltrate these other positions, producing critical artists, critical curators, critical historians, critical museums (I admit that I’m not at all sure what that last category could in fact entail today, but I will imagine it anyway—­the cries to imagine precisely this entity now in fact increasingly abound). Ironically, criticism is again at its most autonomous at the moment of its displacement, which is also to say it is at its most autonomous at the moment in which it begins to reorganize the mode of functioning of other functions within the artistic field, and to be reorganized in kind.12 This book and its critical project comes in

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the wake of all of this—­art criticism after art criticism, one might now say; the persistence of criticism after the great sea change.

And so, I want to step away from these abstract speculations and say a few concrete words about the current form of the art criticism that I recognize as such, and the art criticism that I continue to work on and write. “Autonomization” might seem an inappropriate word to choose to describe such criticism, for surely the criticism that I continue to write has not so much been “set free” or separated off, but rather “hunted back,” to the one place that today seems to support longer critical essays and reflections by art critics: the exhibition or museum catalogue and the academic journal or book. Can these instrumentalized homes be claimed as a space of autonomy for art criticism? One thing that I have noticed about my own art criticism in spaces such as museum catalogues is that it might be autonomous only in the paradoxical modality in which I have been describing this above. For art criticism in the space of the exhibition catalogue is no longer criticism as traditionally conceived; it is the utter opposite of such criticism. It is usually monographic, following and remaining close to a singular body of work. It gives up, then, the critical task of identifying larger shifts in a generation of artists, larger paradigmatic changes in the field of art itself. While there are always exceptions, one is also invited to publish in such spaces as a supporter of an artist and their work; one enters into these spaces with the goal of critical elucidation, not condemnation or judgment/critique; perhaps, at its most radical, such essays may enter into a “collaboration” of sorts with the artist and the institution, potentially changing or challenging, through elucidation, the modes of operation of all three agents. But this is not criticism as it existed in the past; criticism in the space of the art catalogue is no longer criticism, in the sense of “critique.” What has it become? I have been pondering this question recently, and again my dialogue with the artist (and writer) Paul Chan has clarified the shifts and changes. At the moment this book project began, I had then recently interviewed Chan, and in the context of our published conversation he delineated three models for the work of art that parallel the way in which I have been thinking of this transformation in my own work as a critic (i.e., the movement from a journalistic criticism of judgment and value to an academic criticism of collaboration and elucidation). Chan first mentioned the model of art-­as-­critique. Not surprisingly, he distanced himself from such a tradition. Then he mentioned, with a nod to the work of Adorno and Benjamin, the much older tradition of art-­as-­cultic-­object. He maintained that art still functions

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very much in this manner, for a new religion that he named capital, but of course he didn’t want to associate his work with this either. It was his third model with and for which I felt the most solidarity and the most interest: what Chan called “art-­as-­affirmation.” Paraphrasing Chan, he said, “Now, I don’t know what [art-­as-­ affirmation] means. But that sounds right to me. . . . There are no formulas for this. But I think I can see it. And I want to make that kind of work.”13 In essence I am proposing that one life for the kind of art criticism that I continue to produce, however precarious, however useless, is the endless working through of a form of “criticism-­as-­affirmation.” In the traditional or even everyday sense of the word, affirmation is in fact the utter opposite of criticism; it voids the space of judgment, of critique; criticism-­as-­affirmation participates perhaps in the modality of art that an artist like Chan is now producing, but it does so only to void criticism’s own former functions. Instead of judgment (good versus bad), critical affirmation brings something—­thought and art—­to visibility. It is somewhat like what Boris Groys has recently called a form of “phenomenological” art criticism, a simple making-­visible-­ and-­perceivable of art, as opposed to its historicization, judgment, or immanent critique.14 But affirmation is not just a making-­visible but also a making-­possible: criticism-­as-­affirmation links critical discourse to the art object in the modality of creating a new space of being for the work of art (and for criticism), new possibilities and new potentialities. For a long period of time, I kept a quote from Gilles Deleuze above my writing desk. I thought of it as the starting point of all my projects. I wanted to live the way this quote read; but more relevant to my topic here, I wanted to write the kind of criticism that Deleuze seems in this passage to describe. I realize only in retrospect that I was already seeking a form of criticism-­as-­affirmation. The passage comes from Deleuze’s Cinema books, the most important of the philosopher’s writings for me: It is not a matter of judging life in the name of a higher authority which would be the good, the true; it is a matter, on the contrary, of evaluating every being, every action and passion, even every value, in relation to the life which they involve. Affect as immanent evaluation, instead of judgment as transcendent value: “I love or I hate” instead of “I judge” . . . The good is outpouring, ascending life, the kind which knows how to transform itself, to metamorphose itself according to the forces it encounters, and which forms a constantly larger force with them, always increasing the power to live, always opening new “possibilities” . . . There is only becoming, and becoming is the power of the false of life.15

I will admit that I no longer keep this Deleuze quote above my writing desk. Focused as it is on life and possibility, the passage has long been replaced with

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a set of different quotes, focused not coincidentally—­perhaps dialectically—­on death and dissolution. There is T. S. Eliot, this time with lines from “The Hollow Men,” 1925, not the lines about the way the world ends, the famous lines, not those, but these: This is the dead land This is cactus land Here the stone images Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead man’s hand Under the twinkle of a fading star.

There is Yohji Yamamoto—­they are heteroclite, these quotes—­in Wim Wenders’s film about the designer: “For me, what is coming is the end. I don’t feel that something will begin in the future.”16 And—­this, again, is the fault of Paul Chan—­for years there have been the splintered, seemingly abandoned quotes from Adorno detailing his understanding of the phenomenon of “late style,” and printed fragments from Edward Said’s last book, his unfinished book, on the same. These are the same gnomic proclamations on lateness we have been parsing here, to think photographic lateness, like Adorno’s incandescent first words on late style in his essay of the 1930s. I take the liberty of citing the words again, here at this project’s end, as repetition is their domain and my own preferred modality of their reading: “The maturity of the late works of significant artists does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation. They lack all the harmony that the classicist aesthetic is in the habit of demanding from works of art, and they show more traces of history than of growth.”17 Alongside Adorno’s words, I hung all the crucial contributions of Said, his understanding of late style in an exile’s terms, but now in relation to time and history themselves—­lateness as an abiding “sense of apartness and exile and anachronism,” a sensibility provoked by the individual confrontation with death and mortality, but more by the collective confrontation with an epochal historical transformation or shift.18 Given the displacement of art criticism that I have been discussing, this description has long made me wonder if a criticism-­of-­affirmation must be accompanied, dialectically, with a criticism-­of-­lateness, if art criticism itself today has become “late.” I have been wondering since the initiation of this project about the possibilities not of late style as such, but of the modalities of what we might call “late criticism”—­furrowed, ravaged, anachronistic, and showing “more traces of history than of growth.”

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Now, here again, we confront an impossibility or an embarrassment. Nothing could be more unpromising than to consider late criticism in the manner in which historians of culture have contemplated late style. Nothing could be more unpromising, that is, than the late work of most art critics, the art critic’s “old age” style: Clement Greenberg in the 1970s and 1980s, for example. Furrowed and ravaged, indeed. This speaks to the general tendency in art criticism for the critic to fail to surpass the limits of generational belonging, and the difficulty with which art criticism faces the process of its own aging: the art critic immobilized in relation to a moment of art practice that they once supported but that does not remain contemporary.19 I have surely myself embodied this dynamic in this book, with its intense return to a critical confrontation with bodies of work that emerged simultaneously with my own art criticism in the 1990s, some twenty-­five years ago. As Adorno wrote of late style, “In the history of art, the late works are the catastrophes.”20 Late criticism is usually a catastrophe, in the conventional sense of the word. However, I would maintain that this catastrophe, this falling out of sync of criticism and the times, is interesting to contemplate today inasmuch as it echoes a potential falling out of sync, not of any individual art critic from an aging generation, but of art criticism itself in relationship to the contemporary forms of the field of art. Late criticism’s irrelevance and late criticism’s pathetic refusal to step in time with the times has become criticism’s irrelevance today, too, and perhaps its own pathetic refusal. But I wonder if, in this more general and contemporary experience of the irrelevance of art criticism and the art critic, there resides a splinter of redemption. For falling out of sync with a field of art overtaken by market functions and the mechanics of legitimation has meant that, in the terms I have been exploring here, art criticism has been severed from its own older and most compromised functions, and can begin to invent new criteria and modes of operation.

I want to speculate that, ironically, lateness itself gives birth to these new criteria and new modes. For as the literary critic Stathis Gourgouris has pointed out, “all criticism,” even—­perhaps especially—­late criticism, “is postulated and performed on the assumption that it is to have a future.” Late criticism may be more dedicated to the future than we would otherwise realize, as Gourgouris continues, for “late style is precisely the form that defies the infirmities of the present, as well as the palliatives of the past, in order to seek out this future, to posit it and perform it even if in words and images, gestures and representations, that now seem puzzling, untimely, or impossible.”21

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What would some of the criteria arising from lateness entail? How can we imagine such a thing as late criticism? Explicating Adorno on lateness and positioning Adorno as the quintessential late critic himself, Said described lateness as focused obsessively on forms of “anachronism and anomaly.”22 Late criticism, consequently, would be a criticism of willfully anachronistic criteria—­like medium specificity in the late work of Rosalind Krauss, to give one example, decades after the closure of modernist discourse; or even older ideals, such as the academic precepts around history painting that Thomas Crow resuscitated in the face of his description of conceptual art and the work of artist Christopher Williams.23 Late criticism is, then, moreover, a criticism of anomalies. It is no longer a participant in that vision of criticism as the periscope or telescope of the artistic field, criticism partaking of the vision of the seer, predicting and delineating the future course of art, or even a criticism outlining the more general artistic conditions of the present. Instead, late criticism, as a criticism of anomalies, seeks out exceptions. It locates artists and art that work “against the grain” of the time. The task of the late critic is to locate artists and art that fall outside the times. And criticism itself in such a mode falls outside the times. This temporal dislocation is described by Said as a “form of exile.”24 Late criticism is an exile’s criticism; it must stand on the side of the losers of history. It cannot speak any longer for the more general “logic” of history or of historical development (of art, of form); it speaks only against that logic as the logic of the victors. Late criticism has always already lost. But Said points out that lateness as a form of exile also amounts to a form of survival, perhaps a technique for “surviving beyond what it acceptable and normal.”25 Survival is stubborn, a remnant, and so too is late criticism. As an exile and loser in the game of history, late criticism can produce a different vision of the field of art than criticism when it stood on the side of the victors. It must speak endlessly of the forces of its own decimation, the causes of its own exile, its own having become an anachronism or an anomaly. Late criticism narrates the forces of historical destruction, understands change and transition in a negative mode, fully aware of and never forgetting—­or allowing others to forget—­the violence that historical transition always implies. This is how, ultimately, I understand Said’s claim that “lateness includes the idea that one cannot really go beyond lateness at all, cannot transcend or lift oneself out of lateness, but can only deepen the lateness.”26 Late criticism as exacerbation does not want to catch up with the times. For this has been criticism’s curse all along, its functionalization in terms of cultural recuperation and legitimation. Late criticism resists this critical function, inhabiting the rips and tears of the historical process itself.

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But this begins to sound like nostalgia. Late criticism, however, is not nostalgic, at least not in the normative or traditional ways. This is its great paradox, and its great promise. Late criticism may abandon the present, may view the contemporary only in a cross-­grained way that seeks out the anachronistic and the anomalous. But late criticism in no way fixates on the past. It involves its own understanding of change and transformation, an untimely transformation, a mulish or pigheaded futurity. Lateness, for Said, also thus involved “abandonment”—­the vision of the late artist, Beethoven in Adorno’s account, renouncing the fulfillment of a life’s work, abandoning his own most crucial inventions.27 The past is “dredged up,” but it is now a past that announces a kind of personal dispossession; the historical forms return, but simultaneously the artist abandons them, absents himself from them, severing all connection to the comforts of the past. “The death of the author does not necessarily mean mourning and melancholia,” Kobena Mercer once wrote, “but the mobilizing of a commitment to countermemory.”28 In like fashion, late criticism remains unreconciled with its time, but it also abandons the achievements of art criticism of the past. It will have nothing to do anymore with a criticism that clings to narratives of historical development, the story of an art form that triumphs in an ecstatic mode wherein criticism of old found its narcissistic mirror, its own most essential sense of growth and development. Late criticism no longer tells the story of the development of an art, and no longer develops itself. As Adorno put it, “Late work still remains process, but not as development; rather as a catching fire between extremes, which no longer allow for any secure middle ground or harmony.”29 Late criticism instead involves the search for the “unmaking” of art, and it accepts as a parallel its own “unmaking.” Thus Said can conclude with this owlish description, that “lateness is being at the end, fully conscious, full of memory, and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the present.”30 We have come full circle to return to the thought that late criticism must be understood in some relation to passing and transition as a form of mortality, of death. Late criticism, like late style, is a form that necessitates a confrontation with death, with dissolution. In this, lateness again appears different—­although clearly related—­to the cultural situation of “aftermath” that Hal Foster posited as a general condition for art and criticism in the wake of postmodernism and its vicissitudes. In his text “This Funeral Is for the Wrong Corpse,” Foster associates the diagnosis of a contemporary condition of “aftermath” with, in fact, a famous dictum of Adorno. In this case, it is the opening sentence of Negative Dialectics: “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.”31 Like aftermath, lateness is entirely concerned with “living on,” with survival, remnants, and traces of the past. But aftermath differs temporally from lateness. Lateness

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attempts to imagine a suspension of temporal progression altogether, a refusal and not just a failure of development as a principle. Aftermath may “come after” the failure of a historical process, but lateness produces the failure; it prevails on the eve of the catastrophe, not the morning after; it proposes a specific modality of facing death and the end as (paradoxically) new forms of change. For late criticism, the death of criticism—­criticism’s impossibility or its end—­ becomes the modality through which one can begin to think the impossible task of an autonomous art criticism. Dissolution becomes a form of autonomy. In late criticism, death or the end of criticism is transformed into a process affecting art and criticism both. The point, however, is to consider criticism not as dead, but as confronting its death, and to make of this confrontation a project. It cannot go on forever. However, we are surrounded today by a misunderstanding of this critical task, one of the most important, in my opinion, of the present moment. The analogy between art criticism and photography asserts itself here again, as the flat and simplistic proclamation of photography’s “death” has been one of the most persistent critical tropes against which this entire book has been posed. In the contemporary rush to proclaim the death of art criticism, I have found it useful to diagnose such misunderstandings psychoanalytically, as a confusion of the fundamental dynamics of identification and desire in the relation of criticism to its demise. On the one hand, we are confronted today by art critics (young and old) who wish to outdo each other in the pessimism of their pronouncements, who perform in their judgments the closure of critical possibilities and mourn the passing of an avant-­garde culture, whose preservation is not self-­evidently one of the tasks of art criticism. Here, the art critic identifies with the causes of art criticism’s demise; they internalize and want to be the lost object of criticism. It is a form of critical masochism, not unlike Freud’s account of mourning and melancholia, in which criticism is voided only to be internalized in the art critic’s discourse as a lost object, as an internal void. I want to stress instead that late criticism is not a form of critical closure. It does not identify with the death imposed upon it, masochistically. But it does not desire this death, sadistically, either. We are positively surrounded today by “art critics” who do not so much want to be but to have, who do not identify with but desire, the forces that have produced contemporary art criticism’s demise. The love of cynicism, the tone of the blasé, the world-­weary, the wholesale submission of the voice of criticism to the tone and criteria of fashion and the dandy—­the Warholian tone, in other words—­these are the signs of the sadists of art criticism today. Such art writers love the death of the critic; they desire it and perform this desire sadistically in most everything they write. They align their criticism on the side of the forces of criticism’s destruction. This alignment can be deadpan, in true

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Warholian style. But it is most often euphoric. There is an energy in such a position, in other words (as with most massacres), a liveliness. But it is the life of the zombie that we experience here, a form of the living dead. To live in the confrontation with death, to imagine a late criticism that confronts its own demise—­that speaks endlessly about the forces of the victors, the conditions of exile, that makes palpable the historical conditions of art criticism’s lateness—­this is another matter entirely. As opposed to the pathological forms of late criticism I have just detailed, late criticism cannot identify with nor desire its demise; it cannot be nor have its death. In late criticism death operates instead as a force of dispossession. (Late criticism tells the story of criticism’s dispossession.) Death produces the separation of late criticism from itself that I have been describing today as criticism’s autonomy. I want to return to and repeat Adorno’s thoughts on late style one last time. As opposed to the biographism of humanist ideas of “old age” style, Adorno’s understanding of the role of death in Beethoven’s last works was allegorical. Adorno resisted the psychological interpretation that always sees the aging artist tearing apart his work in the face of his own imminent demise—­Michelangelo chiseling away at the Rondanini Pietà, 1552–­64, eating away its physical substance, returning it to an as-­if-­unfinished state, propelling sculpture toward the spiritual, toward the afterlife. However, we remember how death does operate upon the artwork in Adorno’s account. It is through leave-­taking, through the farewell that any experience of death also entails. The late artist “abandons” the task of expression through form; artistic conventions present themselves now as objective historical things, unenlivened by the breath of the author. And in this abandonment of his own work, the author paradoxically sets the late work “free.” The association with a form of autonomy produced by death is the crucial point. Abandonment produces freedom, and lateness comes to be the time of this leave-­taking. We have confronted the crucial passage where Adorno articulates this dynamic process. It too hung above the writing desk. And it too bears repeating here, at the end, as it amounts to a passage that calls for an endless unpacking. Adorno writes: The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. Of the works themselves it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself. Touched by death, the hand of the master sets free the masses of material that he used to form; its tears and fissures, witnesses to the finite powerlessness of the I confronted with Being, are its final work . . . The conventions . . . are no longer penetrated and mastered by subjectivity,

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but simply left to stand. With the breaking free of subjectivity, they splinter off . . . splinters, fallen away and abandoned.32

Subject and object “break free” from each other in this description of the artwork’s internal shattering. Lateness, again, can only be understood as a process of fragmentation, “unmaking,” but it is this unmaking itself wherein the fragments of the work of art are “set free.” “In the very late Beethoven,” Adorno concludes, “the conventions find expression as the naked representation of themselves . . . [His style] seeks not so much to free the musical language from mere phrases, as, rather, to free the mere phrase from the appearance of its subjective mastery. The mere phrase, unleashed and set free from the dynamics of the piece, speaks for itself.”33 Now, the analogy may not be easy or precise, but such a process amounts to the one we must imagine for art criticism. Late criticism would entail the unmaking of criticism, too. We are used to thinking of autonomy as self-­sufficiency, unity, self-­reflection. Lateness attests instead to the fact that autonomy is best described as the revelation of insufficiency, internal fragmentation, an utter lack of self-­determination. The late work, as Adorno ultimately describes this, “turns its emptiness outward.”34 We have followed here the many ways in which photography in recent years has adopted precisely this exteriorization as its form of continuation, it exacerbation—­its way of finding the goal of a new “origin.” But the question remains: Can art criticism? If it were successful in doing so, late criticism would work with and articulate the decimation of art criticism, turning this historical process to task, making of it a critical project. For Adorno, lateness was inherently productive; we sense this in the jarring anachronism through which Adorno sees the late Beethoven works as predicting, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, the musical modernism of the early twentieth century, a modernism before its time holding hands across the chasm of the years with a modernism to come. For Adorno, all late works “dredge up the past in the anguish of the present as sacrifices to the future.”35 This beautiful and harrowing thought could have served as the motto or slogan of this entire book—­it remains the best description I can imagine of the overarching project of this text. The line comes from Adorno’s only real close analysis of a late Beethoven piece, from his extraordinary essay on the Missa Solemnis, 1819–­23. Here we sense the autonomy or freedom that comes from dispossession, and we sense that the impoverished position of criticism today can become a force of the dispossessed, which is the very logic of redemption: the weak shall inherit the earth. Adorno one last time: “[Lateness] is the impotence . . . of an historical position of the intellect which, of whatever it dares write here, can speak no longer or not yet.”36 “No longer or not yet”: this is the time of art criticism today. As a counterpoint to the nostalgia we have been tracking in contemporary manifestations of photography,

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this epochal homelessness is the sign that criticism today has become—­literally—­ untimely. Now, for some, given what I just said about criticism and redemption, that criticism has become untimely would seem to mean that I am predicting that criticism’s time will come again. But in fact I am rather more optimistic (and less religious) than that. Afterlife—­another central term of this account—­is not about return; it does not entail the wait for a Second Coming. I guess that what I have been trying to think through is that only in becoming untimely has criticism entered into the impossible state of a provisional autonomy. Criticism, in this view—­true criticism—­can only be untimely; it is a form of untimeliness itself. 37 And so I am not of the opinion that criticism’s time will “come again.” For when criticism has become untimely, its time has finally come.

NOTES

I N T RODUCT I ON

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 . G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998), pp. W 78–­79. Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” in On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 15. See, for example, the “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary,’” organized by Hal Foster, in October, no. 130 (Fall 2009), pp. 3–­124. On Byrne’s work more generally, see my Gerard Byrne: Books, Magazines, and Newspapers (New York: Lukas and Sternberg Press, 2003). For one attempt to map this turn, see the questionnaire that I edited for the special issue of October magazine on “Obsolescence,” “Artist Questionnaire: 21 Responses,” October, no. 100 (Spring 2002), pp. 6–­97. I am leaning here on some of the statements describing his own work by one of the artists already mentioned, Anri Sala. See Gerald Matt, “An Interview with Anri Sala,” Anri Sala (Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 2003), pp. 50–­5 2, 57, 78, 80. Ben Hutchinson, Lateness and Modern European Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 269. Hal Foster, “This Funeral Is for the Wrong Corpse,” in Design and Crime and Other Diatribes (London: Verso, 2002), p. 125. Foster, p. 129. See Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001); and Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999). The widespread recent return to Warburg’s ideas in art history has found its echoes in contemporary art; since initiating this project, for example, I would point to the exhibition held at the Goethe-­Institut’s Wyoming Building in New York in May 2010 and its accompanying catalogue; see Fionn Meade and Lucy Raven, Nachleben (New York: Goethe-­ Institut, 2010). Again, I am in dialogue with Hal Foster here: In a short text on photography, Foster critiques the recent dominance in photography discourse of both Roland Barthes’s book Camera Lucida, with its (analogue) model of sheer indexicality, and Michael Fried’s tome Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, with its embrace of a pictorialist and painterly practice of digital photography. Usefully, Foster suggests instead a “hetero-­chronic” condition for photography today, and in the following terms: “Perhaps we can only grasp a condition like the analogue at the moment of its outmoding, but this is not reason enough to fixate on it melancholically. On the other hand, a euphoric embrace of the digital is even more problematic: amnesia is no response to melancholy. To see the analogue and the digital in essential terms is to miss not only how they

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define one another diacritically but also how they mix with one another practically. That is, it is to miss how what counts as ‘photography’ today is often a constellation of techniques, surfaces, and effects that produce a multi-­spatial and hetero-­chronic image, one more complicated than the this-­has-­been document of Barthes or the instantaneous tableau of Fried.” See Hal Foster, “Double Impasse,” in Mutations: Perspectives on Photography, ed. Chantal Pontbriand (Göttingen: Steidl, 2011), p. 152. Matt, “An Interview with Anri Sala,” p. 52. My interest in late style was directly prompted by a dialogue with the artist Paul Chan, who offered the concept as important to his thinking-­through of his project The 7 Lights. I instead elaborate on Foster’s concept of aftermath in my essay on Chan, the text that initiated this dialogue; see “Paul Chan: The Image from Outside,” Paul Chan: The 7 Lights (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2007; New York: New Museum, 2008). I more directly confront lateness as a lens for understanding Chan’s work in an unpublished lecture, “On the Necessity of Destruction,” delivered at the exhibition Paul Chan: Selected Works, Schaulager, Basel, September 2014. Since initiating this conversation on lateness with Chan in 2007, an entire literature on late style has evolved in relation to the intervention, mostly, of Edward Said’s book. For the most consequential account of the fate of the concept of an artistic medium today, see Rosalind Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (Winter 1999), pp. 289–­305, and her book “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-­Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000). Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven” (1937), in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 564. See also Adorno’s essays “Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis” (1959) and “The Aging of the New Music” (1955), from the same collection. Edward Said, “Timeliness and Lateness,” in On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (New York: Vintage, 2006), p. 17. See Said’s comments on the music of Richard Strauss, in “Return to the Eighteenth Century,” in On Late Style, pp. 45–­46. Said, “Timeliness and Lateness,” p. 8. Said, p. 13. Said, p. 13. Said, p. 11. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” p. 566. Adorno, p. 566. Adorno, p. 567. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), in The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 310–­26. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, pp. 4 and 44. For the archaeology of the invention of nostalgia and its transformation within modernity, see Jean Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes 54 (1966), pp. 81–­103. Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” p. 94. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, p. xv. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 23. Charles Maier, “The End of Longing?,” unpublished paper cited in Boym, Future of Nostalgia, p. xiv. Mike Kelley, “Black Nostalgia: An Interview with Mike Kelley by Daniel Kothenschulte,” in Sublevel: Dim Recollection Illuminated by Multicolored Swamp Gas (Cologne: Verlag Walther König, 1999), p. 52. Moyra Davey, “Fifty Minutes (video transcript),” in Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays by Moyra Davey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 128. It is important for my project to note that I first came across this passage in the essay of appropriated text fragments published by Zoe Leonard to accompany her project Analogue; see “A Continuous Signal: An Essay of Excerpts and Quotations,” in Zoe Leonard: Analogue (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), p. 178. Stewart, On Longing, p. 23. I want the logic of my book to follow a dual project similar to that explored more than three decades ago by Douglas Crimp in his text “Mourning and Militancy,” October, no. 51 (Winter

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1989), pp. 3–­18. More important, however, is the foundational effect this essay had on subsequent artistic practice; one could claim that the work I trace here had one genealogical origin in the paths opened up by Crimp’s essay (for instance, and especially, the early work of Zoe Leonard). Boym, Future of Nostalgia, p. 30. Boym puts this slightly differently at a later point in her text, pp. 49–­50: “Longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection.” See, for example, Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). Boym opposes reflective nostalgia to what she calls restorative nostalgia and defines them as follows: “Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming—­wistfully, ironically, desperately. Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt. . . . Reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones; it loves details, not symbols. At best, reflective nostalgia can present an ethical and creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias.” See Boym, Future of Nostalgia, p. xviii. Boym, p. 50. László Moholy-­Nagy, Malerie Fotographie Film, quoted in Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” (1931), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–­1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 523. Yve-­Alain Bois takes apart such claims in his now classic text, “Painting: The Task of Mourning,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). Trevor Paglen, “Is Photography Over?,” Still Searching: An Online Discourse on Photography, March 3, 2014, https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/2014/03/03/is-­photography-­over/. I am thinking about not just analogue but also digital photography here, as the digital image is already old, and many of its most celebrated uses by artists in recent years have been oriented toward historical conventions of picture-­making rather than any fargoing and future-­oriented rethinking of artistic forms. In addition to the conference discussions, participants posted short position papers; see “Is Photography Over?,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, April 2010, https://www.sfmoma. org/watch/photography-­over/. My response was extended in relation to Moyra Davey’s work in another short text, “Some Things Moyra Taught Me,” Frieze, no. 130 (April 2010), pp. 19–­20. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). Walker Evans, “The Reappearance of Photography,” Hound & Horn 5, no. 1 (October–­December 1931), pp. 125–­28. I elaborate a dialectic for photography of abstraction and atavism, of photographic futurism and primitivism, the new and the old, in George Baker, “Photography and Abstraction,” Words without Pictures, ed. Alex Klein (New York: Aperture, 2010). In this connection, one remembers the complaint of Benedetto Croce about photography: “And if photography be not quite an art, that is precisely because the element of nature in it remains more or less unconquered and ineradicable.” See Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic: As Science of Expression and General Linguistic, quoted in Allan Sekula, “The Invention of Photographic Meaning,” in Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–­1983 (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), p. 16. Hollis Frampton, “The Invention without a Future,” October, no. 109 (Summer 2004), pp. 74–­75. Beshty’s title for the Barbican work is appropriated directly from Frampton. George Baker, “Photography’s Expanded Field,” October, no. 114 (Fall 2005), pp. 120–­40. I return the reader to a classic volume, Alice Jardine and Paul Smith, Men in Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1989). Especially influential from this collection for me has always been Craig Owens, “Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism,” pp. 219–­3 2. Zoe Leonard has engaged in an interview where the question of “feminist form” was the explicit subject; see Huey Copeland, “Photography, the Archive, and the Question of Feminist Form: A Conversation with Zoe Leonard,” Camera Obscura 28, no. 2 (2013), pp. 177–­89. The feminist concern with nostalgia and home will thread its way through all of the rethinkings

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of photography and film at this project’s heart. For a brilliant unpacking of the prehistory of these tropes of home in the art of the 1970s and 1980s—­a wild and wide-­ranging account moving from Womanhouse, 1972, to Bruce Nauman, from Vito Acconci to Rona Pondick—­see Mira Schor, “You Can’t Leave Home without It,” Artforum 30, no. 2 (October 1991), pp. 114–­19. Dean’s initiative in relation to film can be followed through an organization and a website, Savefilm.org, of which she is a founding member. I am paraphrasing the last line of Crimp’s “Mourning and Militancy,” p. 149.

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 aren Rosenberg, “Zoe Leonard’s ‘453 West 17th Street’ at Murray Guy,” New York Times, K October 12, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/arts/design/zoe-­leonards-­453-­west-­ 17th-­street-­at-­murray-­guy.html. Zoe Leonard, quoted in the press release for Zoe Leonard, Murray Guy, New York, September 15–­October 27, 2012, n.p. One of the artist’s longest-­standing critical supporters, Elisabeth Lebovici, published an interview-­cum-­pamphlet with the artist at the time of this show, where Leonard offers up these words on photography in a slightly altered form. See Zoe Leonard and Elisabeth Lebovici, The Politics of Contemplation (New York: Murray Guy, 2012), n.p. All art institutions, these are the addresses, respectively, of the Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; the Camden Art Centre, London; the François Pinault Foundation, Palazzo Grassi, Venice; the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; and the former home of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Matthew Witkovsky has described the differences between Leonard’s use of the camera obscura and its appearance in other projects by contemporary artists in his essay “Zoe Leonard: Radical Reversibility,” History of Photography 39, no. 2 (2015), pp. 107–­20. Elisabeth Lebovici, From There to Back Again (New York: Murray Guy, 2012), n.p. The small-­ format publication served as an exhibition pamphlet for the show with which I have begun. It is coupled with the interview with Leonard by Lebovici cited above, entitled The Politics of Contemplation. The two texts are published back to front, as if the single publication were two different pamphlets. Zoe Leonard, “A Continuous Signal: An Essay of Excerpts and Quotations,” in Zoe Leonard: Analogue (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2007), p. 172. Leonard here cites Claire L. Lyons, “The Art and Science of Antiquity in Nineteenth-­Century Photographs,” in Claire L. Lyons et. al., Antiquity and Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites (Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2005), p. 22. One thinks of Jasper Johns’s words on photography in this connection, as cited by his friend Susan Sontag, “A Brief Anthology of Quotations,” in On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 199: “An object that tells of the loss, destruction, disappearance of objects. Does not speak of itself. Tells of others. Will it include them?” “Zoe Leonard Talks about Her Show at the Camden Arts Center,” interview by Arthur Ou, Artforum.com, April 5, 2012, http://artforum.com/words/id=30700. Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia” (1936), trans. John Shepley October, no. 31 (Winter 1984), pp. 12–­3 2. For a contemporary expansion of this notion of dark space, see my essay on Knut Åsdam, “The Space of the Stain,” Grey Room 05 (Fall 2001), pp. 5–­3 7. See Jonathan Crary, “The Camera Obscura and Its Subject,” in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 38–­39, 43. My first attempt to theorize this transformation was “Photography’s Expanded Field,” October, no. 114 (Fall 2005), pp. 120–­40. In this text, I point to Leonard’s work at the essay’s end, as part of a potential “spatial” expansion of the medium, as opposed to the more fully “temporal” terms that dominate its account. My thinking on art and relationality has developed in tandem with the elaboration of the recent intellectual projects of two thinkers above all others, in which this aesthetic issue—­a buzzword of contemporary artistic practice, in the idea of what has been called “relational aesthetics”—­ has come to the fore: Leo Bersani and Kaja Silverman. See, for example, most recently, Bersani, Thoughts and Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). My dialogue with the key texts by Silverman on this issue will be tracked throughout this chapter and this book. I have devoted a series of online essays to the topic, some of which I incorporate here; see “Photographic Relationality,” Still Searching: An Online Discourse on Photography, June 1–­July 15, 2013, https://

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www.fotomuseum.ch/en/series/photographic-­relationality/. My thoughts on photographic relationality have since been deeply influenced by Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008). See, for example, Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” in The Originality of the Avant-­Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 87–­118. In France, Krauss’s essays on photography have been collected under the title Le photographique: Pour une théorie des écarts (Paris: Éditions Macula, 1990). Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” in On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 4. Sontag, pp. 7, 11. Sontag, p. 13. Sontag, pp. 22–­23. Jutta Koether, untitled essay in Information: Zoe Leonard (Cologne: Galerie Gisela Capitain, 1991), p. 35. For a brief discussion of Leonard’s participation in ACT UP, as well as of her founding role in the queer feminist collectives Fierce Pussy and Gang, see Mark Godfrey, “Mirror Displacements,” Artforum 46, no. 7 (March 2008), pp. 292–­301. Leonard has written an essay that attempts to look back upon the AIDS crisis and AIDS activism; see “Muscle Memory,” in Coming After: Queer Time, Arriving Too Late, and the Spectre of the Recent Past, ed. Jon Davies (Toronto: The Power Plant, 2012), pp. 66–­71. In a recent text, Fredric Jameson underlines the centrality of photography within postmodernity: “The transformation of photography from a minor art into a major one is one of the most significant features of the emergence of postmodernity.” See Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” New Left Review 92 (March–­April 2015), p. 109. For key touchstones in establishing photography’s centrality to postmodernism, see, among others, Douglas Crimp, “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” October, no. 15 (Winter 1980), pp. 91–­101; Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” in Originality of the Avant-­Garde; and Abigail Solomon-­Godeau, “Photography after Art Photography,” in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984). Moyra Davey stresses this point in “Notes on Photography and Accident,” in Long Life Cool White, p. 98: “Zoe Leonard later brought a love and estimation of the old-­fashioned gelatin silver print into the postmodern equation, at a time, in the early ’90s, when it was thought most uncouth to do so. Her work represented a bridge between old-­school photography and the concept-­driven practices of the post-­Pictures generation, i.e., appropriation and staged photography.” For younger photographers, the work of James Welling would have been the major “postmodern” example of the potentials of such medium-­specific photographic atavism, and this explains his formerly somewhat eccentric, outlying position in the Pictures generation or “group.” Davey aligns her practice with Welling in both Long Life Cool White and her earlier book, The Problem of Reading (Los Angeles: Documents Books, 2003). Far from eccentric any longer, Welling’s work seems to inspire at least two major positions within photographic practice today: a materialist investigation of the photographic image that engages pictorial abstraction to reveal the full potentialities of photographic form; and an archaeological exploration of the photograph’s unexamined histories that resurrects older models of the photograph in the face of the medium’s current and supposed digital totalization. On Welling’s work in this regard, see my introduction to a special issue on photography, “Totalization and Ressentiment: An Introductory Note,” October, no. 158 (Fall 2016), pp. 3–­6. The claim that the shift from modernism to postmodernism occurs around a turn from nature to culture belongs to Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-­Century Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 82–­91. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). Barthes’s model of photography and the feminist implications of the photographic amateur have been most clearly explicated in the recent work of Carol Armstrong; see, for example, “Cupid’s Pencil of Light: Juliet Margaret Cameron and the Maternalization of Photography,” October, no. 76 (Spring 1996), pp. 114–­41, and “From Clementina to Käsebier: The Photographic Attainment of the ‘Lady Amateur,’” October, no. 91 (Winter 2000), pp. 101–­39. Armstrong’s writings on photography have been crucial to me from the beginning of my own writing on photography; they influence much of what follows. This is unavoidable, as one imagines that they had their effect on the development of Leonard’s thinking on photography as well.

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I refer, of course, to the so-­called Pictures generation; see Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October, no. 8 (Spring 1979), pp. 75–­88. I am speaking of the photograph’s tie to natural processes and phenomena, an idea that emerges from, but implies something more radical than, the sheer “physical and chemical attributes that circumscribe the nature of the photograph,” in the words of photographer Stephen Shore. See Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photographs (London: Phaidon, 2007), p. 16. For an important deconstructive account of the function of the mirror in photography, see Craig Owens, “Photography en abyme,” October, no. 5 (Summer 1978), pp. 73–­88. Postdating the object photographed by Leonard here, silvered-­glass mirrors were perfected around 1835—­in other words, at precisely the moment of the invention of photography itself. The invention of the silvered-­glass mirror democratized the object, making it affordable and accessible to many more people, in a direct parallel to the early functions of photography. Silver was used in earlier mirrors, however, mixed with other materials like mercury. Godfrey, “Mirror Displacements,” p. 297. Initially dated 1998 to 2007, the artist has recently extended her labor on the project by a further number of years. The often-­discussed five-­year hiatus from making photographs that Leonard took after completing Analogue nods to the old end date for the project of 2007, with the sun photographs beginning in 2011–­12. For the history and definition of the “New York School” in photography, see the indispensable work by Jane Livingston, The New York School: Photographs, 1936–­1963 (New York: Steward, Tabori and Chang, 1992). Zoe Leonard, “Out of Time,” October, no. 100 (Spring 2002), p. 93. Leonard, p. 95. A biographical note: Leonard, although born upstate, while still a toddler returned with her mother to New York City, where she grew up in the area around Columbia University. And while still a teenager, by the mid-­1970s, she would move to the Lower East Side and to the neighborhoods depicted in the early images of Analogue, living there for around twenty years, before another displacement to Brooklyn. Svetlana Alpers provides the clearest description of the different versions in which Analogue exists as a work of art; the intentional multiplicity seems key to confront, though I will refer almost exclusively to the installation version and the book: “Analogue . . . is an archive and it is a book and it is some pictures to hang on a wall. It encompasses three basic formats in which photographs are seen: an archive consisting of almost 400 photographs (10 x 10 inches on 11 x 11-­inch paper) assembled for exhibition in grids by topics which you first view from afar, approach, meet, pass by and return to, while stopping to look again, to assess, to compare, taking in the narrative drift; 80 images (6 x 6 on a 10 x 13-­inch page) in a book bound in simplest buckram, to rest on a table and work through hands-­on—­large photo on page right with caption identifying the site small and low on page left, ending with a collation of texts in parallel play with the photos that precede; finally, a distillation of it all into 40 vibrant dye-­transfer prints (8 ¾ x 8 ¾ inches on paper 20 x 16 inches) to consider slowly, individually, as beautiful works of art.” Svetlana Alpers, “Zoe Leonard—­Analogue,” in Zoe Leonard—:­Photographs, ed. Urs Stahel (Winterthur, Switzerland: Fotomuseum Winterthur; Göttingen: Steidl, 2007), p. 219. On Walker Evans and the anonymous photograph, see Alan Trachtenberg, “A Book Nearly Anonymous,” Reading American Photographs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989). My observations are pushing at conclusions about Atget’s photographs that have been building since the 1980s and 1990s. See both Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” and Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). In this connection, see also Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-­Brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (1965; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). Zoe Leonard, “Out of Time,” p. 88. James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (New York: Dell, 1988), pp. 154–­55, quoted in Leonard, “A Continuous Signal,” p. 177. Emphasizing that appropriation inhabits Leonard’s photographic language—­which otherwise seems on the surface to participate in the logic of the photographic auteur—­the borrowed citations themselves appropriate the form of a classic essay in the history of photography, already cited, Sontag’s “A Brief Anthology of Quotations.” I refer to the name of the regular column written by Bordowitz for Documents magazine, now collected in The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). Bordowitz borrowed his title from Janet Flanner’s collection, Paris Was Yesterday. Since I first published this text in its earlier form as an essay, Tom McDonough has written on Analogue and the modernist trope of the ragpicker; see his “The Archivist of Urban Waste: Zoe Leonard, Photographer as Rag-­Picker,” Afterall 25 (Autumn 2010), pp. 18–­29.

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 . J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis T (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). I am pointing here to more than the murder of the Polish Jews during the Nazi occupation and Holocaust. Leonard’s maternal family was not in fact Jewish, but was tied to Polish nationalism and included members of the Resistance; her family remained in Poland during the war and only fled the country at the moment of the Soviet takeover. Leonard has spoken about this family history most directly in a January 2010 interview conducted by Sarah Schulman for the ACT UP Oral History Project, available at http://www.actuporalhistory.org/interviews/images/ leonard.pdf. See the catalogue by Elisabeth Lebovici, ed., Zoe Leonard (Paris: Centre national de la photographie, 1998). On the couple form in photography, see the final essay in my online blog series “Photographic Relationality,” entitled “Image Couple,” Still Searching: An Online Discourse on Photography, July 16, 2013, https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-­searching/articles/26959_image_couple. Beth Dungan, “An Interview with Zoe Leonard,” Discourse 24, no. 2 (Spring 2002), pp. 84–­85. On this aspect of photography and its former chemical basis, see the thoughts of one of our foremost digital practitioners of the medium, Jeff Wall, in his short 1989 essay “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” in Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Peter Galassi (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), pp. 109–­10. See, as well, Kaja Silverman’s essay that extends and intensifies Wall’s reflections, “Water in the Camera,” in The Miracle of Analogy, or The History of Photography, Part 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), pp. 67–­85. Zoe Leonard, “A Wild Patience,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly (New York: Dia Foundation; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 81. These thoughts were worked out by Leonard in the face, not of her own work—­though they seem to speak of that too—­but of the paintings of Agnes Martin. Within the passage cited here, she clarifies: “Agnes Martin draws many lines on a canvas, but each line is hand drawn on a slightly irregular surface, and each measure, however carefully taken, is not exact. And so we see an accumulation of similar gestures. Each line can still call attention to itself. Each line remains singular.” Here I am close and indebted to Silverman’s recent account of the photograph as an analogical form, in The Miracle of Analogy. I will address my differences as well with this recent account in what follows. Svetlana Alpers claims the shopwindow as definitional for the medium of photography over its history, in her essay for Leonard’s first retrospective catalogue: “Let us propose that the shop window has been to the photographer what the tabletop has been to the painter. . . . The window, like the tabletop, is a real thing in the world at the same time that it is a convention.” Alpers, “Zoe Leonard,” p. 223. The photograph was taken on Grand Street, Brooklyn, in 2001. For the eighty images sequenced in the book version of Analogue, published by the Wexner Center, Leonard provided simple captions identifying place and date. When location and year are given for an individual image from Analogue, I am following the captions provided in this book. Leonard devotes the entire fourth section of her essay for Analogue to citations concerning Atget, Charles Marville, and the documentation of Old Paris. There she ends with Atget’s statement to the surrealists about wishing to remain uncredited as a photographer or artist; see Leonard, “A Continuous Signal,” pp. 173–­74. See, for the key texts on the minor, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 100–­106, reprinted as “Language: Major and Minor,” in The Deleuze Reader, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 145–­5 1; and Gilles Deleuze (with Carmelo Bene), “One Manifesto Less,” in Superpositions (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979), as translated in The Deleuze Reader, pp. 204–­22. Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums, p. 110, quoted in Leonard, “A Continuous Signal,” p. 174. The key essay on and critique of Atget’s positioning for photography history remains Abigail Solomon-­Godeau, “Canon Fodder: Authoring Eugène Atget,” in Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Zoe Leonard, “James Castle: Inside Out,” in James Castle: Show and Store, ed. Lynne Cooke (Madrid: Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, 2011), p. 11. Leonard, p. 11.

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Leonard, pp. 14–­15. Leonard, p. 11. Leonard, p. 9. The poem at the origin of “Strange Fruit” was composed in 1937, by Abel Meeropol, and originally titled “Bitter Fruit.” Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” (1937), in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 564. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), in The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 316. Leonard’s work at this moment must be seen as an explicit reflection on the essay that inspires my book’s title, Douglas Crimp’s “Mourning and Militancy,” October, no. 51 (Winter 1989), pp. 3–­18. I have written in much more depth on the aesthetic possibilities of the model of melancholia for sculpture, in an essay on one of Leonard’s peers, the artist Tom Burr; see, “The Other Side of the Wall,” October, no. 120 (Spring 2007), pp. 106–­37. Leonard, “A Wild Patience,” p. 91. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 151. Fried, p. 156. Fried, p. 156. Fried, p. 156. Fried, p. 156. Leonard’s words here come from a draft text entitled “Salvage,” unpublished manuscript shared with the author, November 2002. On the effigy in Kelley’s work and as a model for postmodernism, see my essays “Mike Kelley: Sublevel,” in Mike Kelley, ed. Eva Meyer-­Hermann and Lisa Gabrielle Mark (New York: Prestel; Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 2013), and “Notes on Painting in Disguise,” in Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology, ed. Anne Ellegood and Johanna Burton (Los Angeles: UCLA Hammer Museum, 2014). In addition to their possible engagement with Kelley’s work and forms, Leonard’s sculptural projects make increasingly inescapable the vehement nature of her appropriation and transformation of minimalist and postminimalist precedents, specifically through her parasitic occupation of the forms and formats of the other key artists showing at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, like Carl Andre, where Leonard’s suitcase and doll sculptures were originally shown. Mark Godfrey points further to Leonard’s occupation, in Strange Fruit, of the postminimalist format of scatter work; see Godfrey, “Mirror Displacements,” pp. 299–­300. This is the quintessential move of the artwork as effigy—­the occupation of other forms, a labor of making that could be described as fully parasitic, a kind of aesthetic emptying out, a use of former artworks as a kind of shell. From my vantage, it marks as well the announcement of a kind of authorial divestiture, appropriation edging into the model of the author as receiver. Leonard speaks of this identification explicitly in an early interview; see David Hirsch, “Galleries/The Curious Eye,” New York Native, June 1, 1992, p. 47, quoted in Joe Scanlan, “Zoe Leonard,” text accompanying the exhibition Zoe Leonard: Photographs, Renaissance Society, Chicago, January 10–­February 21, 1993, available at http://www.renaissancesociety. org/publishing/102/zoe-­leonard/. “There’s a different approach to these anatomic models of women than any model I’ve seen of a man—­and I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds. When I first started photographing these, I was thinking in terms of providing a critique of medical history. As I became more involved with the images, with these women—­they’re my friends now—­I’ve identified with them more and more. Sometimes I feel that my sexuality is both on display in a seductive way while it is also being attacked. I want to allow for a more purely sensory reading of this material as well as the layers of critique.” Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” (1931), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–­1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 527. Benjamin, p. 519. Benjamin, p. 519. Alpers, “Zoe Leonard,” p. 220. Leonard had already signaled this dimension of her project in her first statement on Analogue: “I’m interested in the traditions of Eugène Atget and Walker Evans. In their tradition of archiving. . . . I’m equally interested in the traditions of Flemish and Dutch still life painting—­in the idea that a grouping of objects can be a portrait, or an allegory, that the owner can be described through his objects, that the assembling of these possessions reveals his

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or her class, profession, interests, education, religious beliefs, his or her status and place in the world. And that objects can be arranged, symbolically, to relate a story of the fragility of life, the temporal qualities of life. In both traditions, the archive and the still life, objects and places are employed to tell the stories of their owners and inhabitants.” See Leonard, “Out of Time,” pp. 96–­97. Margaret Iversen, “Analogue: On Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean,” Critical Inquiry 38 (Summer 2012), p. 808. Leonard, “Muscle Memory,” p. 67. Laura Cottingham, “Interview with Zoe Leonard,” Journal of Contemporary Art 6, no. 1 (Summer 1993), p. 65. Dungan, “An Interview with Zoe Leonard,” p. 80. Kaja Silverman, “The Author as Receiver,” October, no. 96 (Spring 2001), p. 21. Silverman, p. 27, quoting from Godard’s film as documented in Jean-­Luc Godard, JLG/JLG: Phrases (Paris: P.O.L., 1996). Silverman, p. 24. Silverman, p. 24. Gideon Bachmann, “The Carrots Are Cooked: A Conversation with Jean-­Luc Godard,” in Jean-­Luc Godard: Interviews, ed. David Sterritt (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1998), p. 137, quoted in Silverman, “The Author as Receiver,” p. 26. Godard, JLG/JLG: Phrases, quoted in Silverman, “The Author as Receiver,” p. 17. Silverman, “The Author as Receiver,” p. 27. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962), p. 88. Kaja Silverman, “The World Wants Your Desire,” interview by Martina Pachmanová, n.paradoxa, online issue no. 19 (May 2006), pp. 35–­36. This model is expanded upon in Silverman’s book World Spectators (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Silverman, “The World Wants Your Desire,” p. 38. Leonard, “Salvage.” Silverman, “The Author as Receiver,” p. 17. These descriptors are Leonard’s, in “1000 Words,” interview by Matthew Debord, Artforum 37, no. 5 (January 1999), p. 101. The 1998 exhibition Leonard mounted in Paris, at the moment of the initiation of Analogue, utilized the Tree + Fence series, but did so in a manner that in retrospect seems like a classic enactment of the logic of “late” style, the decimation of late form. The exhibition progressed through three rooms, arranged very much out of chronological order, beginning with Leonard’s images of fruits and trees, increasingly deadened and stripped of foliage, moving on to her images of eggs and nests, and then culminating in a room of her “hunting and gathering” photographs, images of dead game, of flayed animals, of eviscerated, opened-­up carcasses. The exhibition linked her exile in Alaska to images of her home in New York, and made exile the exhibition’s culmination; the viewer experienced a progression through the suite of rooms toward decimation, a movement from life to death, from home to exile, from fluid to bones, from color images to black-­and-­white, from fruit and rebirth to desiccation and rot, from fusion to fragments. Elisabeth Lebovici beautifully describes the parcours of the installation in her catalogue essay for the show. See Lebovici, “Spaces of Species,” trans. Jennifer Flay, Catherine Francis, and John Tain, Zoe Leonard (Paris: Centre national de la photographie, 1998), pp. 51–­5 2. Like Analogue, the project exists both as a photo installation and as a book; see Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye, The Fae Richards Photo Archive (San Francisco: Artspace Books, 1996). One might assume that Leonard used different and older cameras to make the different types of photographs in the archive. However, and paradoxically given the future course of her work with Analogue, the artist has claimed a kind of fear of working with older cameras, instead doing all of the aging of the images in the darkroom: “I didn’t want to risk working with antique cameras so I shot everything on my Nikon FM camera with a 50 mm lens on 35 mm TriX film, and did all the ‘aging’ in the darkroom. These pictures had to look as though they were taken by many different people, over a span of fifty years. With that as our goal, I drew up printing instructions for each image with sets of paper and chemistry and then worked with eight other people to get the printing done. Each person had my instructions, but they also had their interpretation and methods so the images were more diverse than they would have been had I done all the printing myself. I didn’t want my hand and eye to be completely dominant.” “Zoe Leonard Interviewed by Anna Blume,” in Zoe Leonard (Vienna: Secession, 1997), n.p.

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 eonard once imagined the city itself as a space that echoes such hybridity: “I grew up in New L York, which is its own kind of extreme place. The edge of town, the city limits, the border, no man’s land—­these phrases also describe states of mind and states of inquiry. It’s situations where one culture meets another, where one medium combines with another, where one voice overlaps with another. These kinds of influences and exchanges interest me. They keep me going.” See Shannon Ebner, “Interview with Zoe Leonard,” BOMB, no. 127 (Spring 2014), p. 64. My thoughts here are informed by Abigail Solomon-­Godeau’s essay on the project; see “Taunting and Haunting: Critical Tactics in a ‘Minor’ Mode,” in Women Artists at the Millennium, ed. Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 371–­401. Leonard, “Out of Time,” p. 91. Leonard, “Out of Time,” pp. 92–­93. In addition to evoking a parody of conceptual art, Leonard’s words here seem to echo those of Diane Arbus: “I remember a long time ago when I first began to photograph I thought, There are an awful lot of people in the world and it’s going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them, so if I photograph some kind of generalized human being, everybody’ll recognize it. It’ll be like what they used to call the common man or something. It was my teacher, Lisette Model, who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it’ll be.” Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (New York: Aperture, 1972), p. 3. Leonard, “Out of Time,” p. 97. Helen Molesworth makes a similar point in her own essay on Leonard: “The scope of the work is historic, the scale of the piece is global, but the gesture is continually one of intimacy, proximity, a kind of tender apprehension of the world from the position of a person, a subject, an artist both implicated in and distanced from the socioeconomic and aesthetic conditions within which she finds herself.” Molesworth, “Zoe Leonard: Analogue, 1998–­2007,” in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 187–­203. Leonard, “Out of Time,” p. 97. In 1992, Levine made an edition for the magazine Parkett entitled Two Shoes, 1992, referring back to an early project, from the 1970s, involving the sale of old children’s shoes: “Many years ago,” the magazine exulted, “Sherrie Levine found and sold pairs of small shoes in a gallery in New York. A refined version, handmade in Italy from softest leather and suede, retraces the artist’s first steps.” The evocation of the appropriation artist Levine’s work itself evokes Leonard’s other appropriations of the forms and formats of artists showing alongside her during this moment at the Paula Cooper Gallery, which was the case for Levine as it had been for figures like Carl Andre, mentioned earlier. Tom McDonough speaks about the queerness of the object couples that appear as if allegorically in Leonard’s photographs; see McDonough, “The Archivist of Urban Waste,” pp. 27–­29. In a series of texts, Leo Bersani and Kaja Silverman have both explored what they call the “communication of forms”; in a long dialogue with their work, I have written recently in several essays of a “sharing of form,” a “dual articulation” of mediums, and on artists who work in the space “between” mediums. Analogy and correspondence have emerged as crucial to these concerns, and at the time of my initial writing of the earliest versions of this text they were the subject of a then forthcoming book by Silverman eventually entitled Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Silverman, Miracle of Analogy, p. 12. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, cited in Silverman, Miracle of Analogy, p. 11. Silverman’s invocation of Whitman seems to want to invert and redeem Susan Sontag’s well-­known association of Whitman’s humanism with a bygone understanding of photography, eradicated by postwar photographers like Diane Arbus. See Sontag, “America, Seen through Photographs, Darkly,” in On Photography, pp. 21–­38. Silverman, Miracle of Analogy, pp. 11–­12. Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh, p. 1. While worked on in various forms until his recent, untimely death, Sekula’s Fish Story would be exhibited just before the initiation of Leonard’s Analogue project; see Allan Sekula, Fish Story (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag; Rotterdam: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 1995), and the essay by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh contained in the same volume, “Allan Sekula: Photography between Discourse and Document,” pp. 189–­200. Leonard, “Out of Time,” p. 93. Leonard, p. 93. “Zoe Leonard Interviewed by Anna Blume,” n.p.

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 t precisely the same moment, one of the queer women artist collectives that Leonard A helped create, and that calls itself still to the present day Fierce Pussy, distributed its Political Greeting Card Campaign, 1992, sending out a holiday card to New York figures like Cardinal John O’Connor and Senator Alfonse D’Amato that included a close-­up photograph of a pussy, analogous to Leonard’s documenta prints. Leonard, “A Continuous Signal,” p. 176. Leonard’s definition of the analogue here comes from the Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, via Answers.com. Leonard, “Out of Time,” p. 91. See, for example, the introductory pages to Silverman, Miracle of Analogy, pp. 1–­12. See Stahel, Zoe Leonard: Photographs, pp. 7, 8, 263. Leonard’s more recent US retrospective occurred after this current chapter was drafted; however, in that exhibition’s catalogue, Leonard returned to this same device, allowing two photographs to “frame” the publication, sitting outside its content at the book’s beginning and its end, without comment. These photographs were now of windows, seemingly from Leonard’s early New York studio, looking from the inside out to the city. Objects from the sculpture Strange Fruit had been positioned on the windowsills and casements. The photographs underlined the sculpture’s role in recasting Leonard’s photographic forms as I have claimed here. But with their dark and thick frames against white walls, they also insisted on the home and workspace of the artist as a model for her photographs, too. For the windows seemed like photographs of Leonard photographs, her photographic aesthetic found in the world itself, found (in the manner of Moyra Davey) in the space of the home. See Bennett Simpson with Rebecca Matalon, Zoe Leonard: Survey (Los Angeles: MOCA; New York: Delmonico Prestel, 2018). The photograph was first exhibited, to my knowledge, alongside 1961, Leonard’s found-­suitcase-­ sculpture “self-­portrait,” in a 2003 gallery exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. For a recent attempt to harness the notion of the “minor” to photography theory, see Mieke Bleyen, ed., Minor Photography: Connecting Deleuze and Guattari to Photography Theory (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012). The idea of a minor usage of photography emerges as a recurring concern of artist Walead Beshty’s art criticism, in various essays; see Beshty, 33 Texts: 93,614 Words: 581,035 Characters: Selected Writings (2003–­2015) (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2016). See, especially, Carol Armstrong, “Biology, Destiny, Photography: Difference According to Diane Arbus,” October, no. 66 (Fall 1993), pp. 28–­54, and “This Photography Which Is Not One: In the Gray Zone with Tina Modotti,” October, no. 101 (Summer 2002), pp. 19–­5 2. Established as a reading of photography in some of her earlier essays, on James Coleman, this aspect of early photography is explored by Kaja Silverman in the chapter “Unstoppable Development,” in Miracle of Analogy, pp. 39–­65. Courtney Fiske, “In-­Camera: Q+A with Zoe Leonard,” Art in America, November 1, 2012, http:// www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-­features/interviews/zoe-­leonard-­murray-­guy/. Sid Grossman, with text by Millard Lampell, Journey to the Cape (New York: Grove Press, 1959). See, also, the recent catalogue by Mason Klein and Catherine Evans, eds., The Activist Camera: New York’s Photo League (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). Ebner, “Interview with Zoe Leonard,” p. 56. Jonathan Crary has outlined the history of this visual prohibition, in an extraordinary essay on Turner and his canvas Regulus, 1828/37; see “The Blinding Light,” in J. M. W. Turner: The Sun Is God (London: Tate Liverpool, 2000). Elisabeth Lebovici connects Leonard’s recent work back to Turner’s Regulus, a scene of punishment staged around staring directly into the sun; see From There to Back Again, n.p. Ebner, “Interview with Zoe Leonard,” p. 56. Ebner, p. 59. The best account of McGinley’s work remains John Kelsey, “Mobile Devices,” in Ryan McGinley, Whistle for the Wind (New York: Rizzoli, 2012), pp. 7–­9. Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” in The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), pp. 31–­45. See, for example, Leonard’s statement in Fiske, “In-­Camera”: “There’s something about dwelling in this disordered space that aligns with the unconscious: the internal, darkened space of what we don’t know and haven’t yet organized. . . . It’s a subtle space of upending and unknowing.” Leonard, “A Wild Patience,” p. 85. In the catalogue for the exhibition, Leonard gathered the writing on the myriad postcards as another essay of quotations and citations. The essay reads as if the postcards were now

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personified as a collective voice, even if perhaps excessive and schizoid; as if we were listening to the speech of a long-­past subject. See Leonard, “This Is Where I Was,” in You See I Am Here After All (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2010), pp. 8–­21.

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Tacita Dean, Wandermüde, Frith Street Gallery, London, September 20–­October 25, 2007. The original exhibition entitled Waterlog, was held at Norwich Castle and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in early 2007; beyond Sebald, the exhibition was dedicated to the landscape of the area of East Anglia. An early account of Dean’s art associated its logic directly with the allegorical activity of salvage and redemption; see Michael Newman, “Salvage,” in Tacita Dean: Seven Books, book 7, Essays (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris; Göttingen: Steidl, 2003). This turn aside was, of course, not unmotivated; as so often in her work, Dean’s filming of the Block Beuys was occasioned by the announcement that the museum would soon be renovating the rooms of the installation, removing the wall coverings and aging surrounding elements, which had, however, been chosen for his work by Beuys himself. “Translating Apples: Tacita Dean Interviewed by Claire Walsh,” Art Book 15, no. 1 (February 2008), p. 12. Tacita Dean, “Michael Hamburger,” in Michael Hamburger (London: Film and Video Umbrella, 2013), n.p. The name of the apple is actually a “Devonshire Quarrenden,” but Hamburger seems to say—­and Dean’s transcript of the film in her artist book follows this—­“quarantine.” W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998), pp. 183, 184. Roland Groenenboom, “A Conversation with Tacita Dean,” in Tacita Dean, ed. Mela Dávilla and Roland Groenenboom (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2000), p. 97. Dean states: “I have been trying to leave the sea. But the problem with that is that the sea is so intricately connected to [the drawings]. Because of the flux, the drawing and the erasure, the whole process is so like the nature and the movement of the sea. That is not just a flabby analogy at all. It is actually how they are constructed. It is very difficult [for me] to draw something that is static, that does not have that flux” (p. 97). Groenenboom, “A Conversation with Tacita Dean,” p. 93. Groenenboom, p. 97. On the contemporary potentials of the negative in photography, see my essay “The Black Mirror,” October, no. 158 (Fall 2016), pp. 30–­66. Kaja Silverman, “The World Wants Your Desire,” interview by Martina Pachmanová, n.paradoxa, online issue no. 19 (May 2006), p. 32. Silverman’s book on masculinity was published in 1992; see Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992). It has already been a key text for one of my own earlier attempts to deal with the Oedipal figure of the father; see the conclusion to my book on Dada, “Long Live Daddy,” in The Artwork Caught by The Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). “Marina Warner in conversation with Tacita Dean,” in Tacita Dean (London: Phaidon, 2006), p. 17. In the interview with Marina Warner just cited, Dean immediately suggests sound as a tool for creating “abandonment,” and here in Kodak, the intense, deep but dark coloration of the film similarly becomes a device, paradoxically, of “ruination.” See Briony Fer, “A Natural History of Chance,” in Tacita Dean: Film Works, ed. Rina Carvajal (Milan: Charta, 2007), p. 37: “Color becomes a kind of resistant material [in Kodak] that . . . fails to keep the surface of the screen intact. . . . It is not as if black-­and-­white film is the only vehicle or language of loss. On the contrary, color, in what I see as the most radical innovation, becomes the means of the film’s own ruination.” Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 3. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-­Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Dean’s major texts related to Crowhurst include “Once upon a Different Sort of Time: The Story of Donald Crowhurst,” “Disappearance at Sea,” and “Disappearance at Sea II,” all collected in

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Tacita Dean: Seven Books Grey, book 2, Selected Writings 1992–­2011 (Vienna: MUMOK; Göttingen: Steidl, 2011), pp. 16–­21. See also Teignmouth Electron (London: Book Works, 1999), also collected in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, pp. 35–­38. The most touching text on Crowhurst in the extended literature on Dean would be written by his son for Dean’s 2001 exhibition at Tate Britain; see Simon Crowhurst, “A Practical Approach to Mapping Time,” in Tacita Dean (London: Tate, 2001), p. 68. The anti-­Oedipal stakes of this latter text are key, as we face a reckoning by a son of his father; by a son, more specifically, in a position of some wisdom in the face of the failures and tragedy of his own father. Simon Crowhurst would be interviewed similarly in the wake of a documentary produced a few years later about Donald Crowhurst; see Decca Aitkenhead, “The Sins of the Father,” Guardian, October, no. 27, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/ lifeandstyle/2007/oct/27/familyandrelationships.family1. Unfortunately, in the years since Dean made her film, the ruined structure has been “completed,” with doors and paned windows added in a jarring traditional style. The property was finally sold in 2016. The relation of Sound Mirrors to Brutalist architecture was overdetermined by the site of its commission, which was for the National Theatre on the South Bank in London. Dean’s concern was with the “similarity between the structures,” with the film providing a kind of echo or rhyme and that she discusses in Groenenboom, “A Conversation with Tacita Dean,” p. 82. Tacita Dean, “Robert Frank: You Can’t Go Home Again,” originally published in Parkett 83 (2008), collected in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, pp. 101–­2. Linking the essay to the film Amadeus (Swell Consopio), Dean also gave the title You Can’t Go Home Again to a series of nine overpainted found postcards from the Dover-­to-­Boulogne high-­speed ferry. Tacita Dean, “Amadeus (Swell Consopio),” in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, p. 100. Tacita Dean, “1000 Words,” interview by Christian Rattemeyer, Artforum 42, no. 2 (October 2003), p. 135. On Lampedusa’s The Leopard and late style, see Edward Said, “A Lingering Old Order,” in On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (New York: Vintage Books, 2006). Germaine Greer, “Boots,” in Tacita Dean (London: Phaidon, 2006), p. 106. Fer, “A Natural History of Chance,” p. 15. Tacita Dean, “Teignmouth Electron,” in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, p. 38. These are the final words of Dean’s aside, and she is in actuality reporting a description of the boat solicited from J. G. Ballard. Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Hope, Tacita Dean’s Studio, Berlin, 18 August 2003,” in Tacita Dean, Conversation Series 28 (Cologne: Verlag Walther König, 2012), p. 14. It is initially a rather strange assertion, and one that Dean will parse repeatedly and in various ways. I will return to this resemblance in the second chapter of this account of her work, but see Tacita Dean, “Mario Merz,” in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, p. 59. Dean would write not-­quite obituaries of both Merz and her father for the Guardian; see, for example, Dean’s addition to Christopher Masters’s obituary for Merz of November 12, 2003, https://www.theguardian. com/news/2003/nov/13/guardianobituaries.italy, and her text in the wake of the passing of her father, “Joseph Dean obituary,” February 1, 2010, for the newspaper’s series Other Lives, https:// www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/feb/01/joseph-­dean-­obituary. Dean, “1000 Words,” p. 135. Obrist, “Hope,” p. 17. Maria Walsh, “Lost in Translation: Tacita Dean interviewed by Maria Walsh,” in Talking Art: Interviews with Artists since 1976, ed. Patricia Bickers and Andrew Wilson (London: Art Monthly / Ridinghouse, 2006), p. 569. Obrist, “Hope,” p. 17. Greer, “Boots,” p. 107. The book accompanying Boots would be included in Seven Books but also exists as a stand-­alone publication; see Dean, Tacita Dean: Seven Books, book 5, Boots (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris; Göttingen: Steidl, 2003), and Tacita Dean, Boots (Porto: Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves; Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2003). Both publications are identical aside from their covers and crediting. Walsh, “Lost in Translation,” p. 571. On the idea of the “still film” and its connection to the transformation of photography, see, again, my essay “Photography’s Expanded Field,” October, no. 114 (Fall 2005), pp. 120–­40, and its treatment of Dean’s film forms specifically, p. 134.

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J ean-­Christophe Royoux, “Cosmograms of the Present Tense,” in Tacita Dean (London: Phaidon, 2006), p. 64. Royoux, p. 62. It should be underlined that Royoux’s reading of Dean’s project is largely as an allegorical one, in line with postmodern theories of allegory. See for example Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” two-­part essay collected in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). This is a central claim of my essay on James Coleman; see “Reanimations (I),” October, no. 104 (Spring 2003), pp. 28–­70. The continuation of the essay projected by its title became the current project, in its original essay form published in 2008. Greer, “Boots,” p. 109. Fer, “A Natural History of Chance,” p. 28. Tacita Dean, “L’Invention du Kinétophonographe,” in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, p. 112. Dean’s recent work Event for a Stage, 2015, seems to directly follow this intuition, heralding Dean’s increasing work with actors and the theater. Silverman, “The World Wants Your Desire,” pp. 33–­34. Silverman, p. 38. “Marina Warner in conversation with Tacita Dean,” p. 13. On the strategy of the found object in Dean’s work, see the interview with the artist that I have devoted almost entirely to this subject: “A Conversation with Tacita Dean,” in my book Dive Bar Architect: On the Work of D. E. May (Los Angeles: LAXART Books, 2018). “Marina Warner in conversation with Tacita Dean,” p. 44. “Marina Warner in conversation with Tacita Dean,” p. 34; Groenenboom, “A Conversation with Tacita Dean,” p. 81. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, p. 177. Clearly, having been raised in Germany as a child and living in his old age in the United Kingdom, Boots is a figure that Dean seems to compare subliminally with Michael Hamburger. Her film of 2007 about the poet thus should be seen as a kind of continuation of the earlier Boots, from 2003, with the later work clarifying some of the mysteries of the earlier, and then developing further some of its central tropes. On sound in Dean’s early projects, see Sean Rainbird, “Agitated Layers of Air: Sound in the Work of Tacita Dean,” in Tacita Dean (Philadelphia: ICA, 1998), pp. 16–­22. Walsh, “Lost in Translation,” p. 571. Of course, in Palast, we also confront a soundtrack, another sonic record, like Berlin Project, of the street life, crowds, and vehicles of the city. The film thus explores receiving in both its visual and sonic registers. The filmic interstice is a key aspect of Deleuze’s theory of cinema, explored in Cinema 2. I expand upon these claims in “Reanimations (I),” especially at pp. 44–­48 and pp. 54–­67. Silverman, “The World Wants Your Desire,” p. 41. Dean, “1000 Words,” p. 135. In his essay on Dean, Jean-­Christophe Royoux emphasizes that correspondences are at the basis of the artist’s practice. See Royoux, “Cosmograms of the Present Tense,” pp. 85, 95, 101. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, pp. xvi–­xvii. Boym, pp. 30–­31. See, for example, “An Aside: Texts by Tacita Dean,” in Tacita Dean (Basel: Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2000). Dean comments on the longer theatrical history of this term, and its centrality to her working method, in an exhibition that she curated at the Camden Art Centre in 2005; see An Aside: Selected by Tacita Dean (London: Hayward Gallery, 2005). The Uncles documents an interview by the Museum of Modern Art curator and film scholar Larry Kardish with the music scholar Winton Dean and the politician Jonathan Balcon. Winton Dean was the brother of Dean’s father, and Dean’s paternal grandfather Basil Dean had effectively founded Ealing Studios, with its central importance in the history of British film. Jonathan Balcon—­the husband of Dean’s aunt, the sister of Dean’s mother—­was the son of Sir Michael Balcon, who took over the running of Ealing in the wake of Basil Dean’s difficulties, turning it into a successful studio. Dean’s description of the film in a textual aside begins with a memory of her grandfather’s death, and her father’s “refusal to acknowledge” it, and then details how Basil Dean had been “autocratic, unpopular and a womanizer who bullied those he worked with. Failing to make the Studios a success, he was pushed out by his backer and replaced by Michael Balcon, who was his opposite. Mick went on to make the Studios a household name

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with the Ealing Comedies: films, which have gone a long way in forming a British cinematic identity.” Dean discusses various mishaps from her finding of correspondence between the two men, where it is Balcon who tells Basil Dean that his grandchildren are sick with chickenpox, or Balcon’s announcement to Basil Dean of the news of the intertwining of the two families through the marriage of Dean’s mother and father—­upon which, it is rumored, Basil Dean “is supposed to have nudged Mick so that he fell down the steps of the club and broke his ankle.” The excessive, vengeful father and the limping, wayward father, indeed: Dean concludes the text by describing how in her film the two uncles sit “at either ends of my anamorphic frame in comfortable chairs” and speak “in triangular conversation with Larry Kardish. It is my cousin Stephen, Winton’s only son, who interjects sometimes to make it a square. Late on, my aunt Sally arrives. There is something incredibly tender and revealing in this old men’s discussion, which begins with their fathers and the early days of British cinema, then meanders off to other places including the Second World War and the effect of behavior on one’s legacy. Basil soured this memory. . . . The film is a conversation and a piece of oral history. Both uncles have learned how to define the impact of their famous fathers on their lives; have honed and recited those memories over many years, in order perhaps to make them less powerful, or at least, less painful.” See Dean, “The Uncles,” in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, pp. 71–­72. I lean here and in what follows on Juliet Mitchell, Siblings: Sex and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003). See also Tamar Garb and Mignon Nixon, “A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell,” October, no. 113 (Summer 2005), pp. 9–­26. “Marina Warner in conversation with Tacita Dean,” p. 15. The same oblique line would be played with as a form in a contemporary set of Cy Twombly–­ inspired gravures, given by Dean the title More or Less, 2011. “Marina Warner in conversation with Tacita Dean,” p. 15. On the idea of the “prodigal father” as opposed to the prodigal son, see “Long Live Daddy” (see chap. 2, n. 13). For a turn to the more properly Freudian idea of the “primal father” in relationship to Jarry’s tale, in order to probe the logic of Trumpism and our contemporary political predicaments, see Hal Foster, “Père Trump,” October, no. 159 (Winter 2017), pp. 3–­6. Rina Carvajal, “Film Is a Medium of Time: A Conversation with Tacita Dean,” in Tacita Dean: Film Works, p. 52. Walsh, “Lost in Translation,” p. 571. Polyglot like Dean’s multilingual versions of Boots, and a (perhaps bad) pun in French and English, the word “pervert” as I am playing with it here could also be fully carried over to the French, becoming a labor of the père-­vers or père-­vire, a turn toward or then away from the father. The actual etymology of the word “pervert” comes from the Latin pervertere, from vertere (to turn) and per (away)—­to overthrow or overturn, to turn from the right path, to subvert, to corrupt, to turn the wrong way, to turn about. The linked texts thus include Tacita Dean, Boots; Dean, “1000 Words”; Dean, “Boots” (2003), in Tacita Dean: Seven Books, book 1, Selected Writings (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris; Göttingen: Steidl, 2003), n.p.; and Dean, “Boots” (2011), in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, p. 60. The 2003 and 2011 versions of the aside “Boots” change tense from the present to the past, in the wake of Steane’s passing, but the texts are quite different in many other ways, not otherwise signaled in the artist’s own encapsulation of this project. The rewriting of the aside in 2011 seems to occur at a significant moment and in ways that need to be unpacked. Dean, “Boots” (2003), n.p. “Marina Warner in conversation with Tacita Dean,” p. 37. In this game of names, one also wonders about the possible connections linking Dean’s own name to the love object of her film, the mistress of the home, namely “Blanche.” For Tacita means “mute, silent,” and Blanche signals “blank, white,” a relation that does not equate the two, but perhaps places them in analogy to each other. And these analogies spread, to the “whiteness” of Dean’s blackboard drawings’ lines or her overpainted photographs, or even to the otherwise anodyne titles of works like the subsequent film Noir et Blanc. On Dean’s name and its ramifications in the work, see Jean-­Luc Nancy, “The Taciturn Eternal Return,” trans. Anne O’Byrne, in Tacita Dean: Seven Books, book 7, Essays, n.p., and Douglas Crimp, “Tacet,” in Tacita Dean: Seven Books Grey, book 7, Essays, pp. 31–­37. See especially chapter two, “Did Oedipus Have a Sister?,” in Mitchell, Siblings, pp. 32–­57. Hans Ulrich Obrist, “After the Event, on the Train from Hamburg to Berlin, June 2010,” in Tacita Dean, Conversation Series 28 (Cologne: Verlag Walther König, 2012), p. 91.

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Dean, An Aside, p. 12; see also pp. 14–­20. See Marcia Tucker, ed., Bad Girls (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), and Mignon Nixon’s critical reading of this moment and mode in “Bad Enough Mother,” October, no. 71 (Winter 1995), pp. 71–­92. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 177–­78. See also Kaja Silverman’s thoughts on the “ruination” of masculinity in chapter six of Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 214–­96. Dean, “1000 Words,” p. 135. Dean, “Boots” (2011), p. 60.

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 acita Dean, “Fernweh,” in Tacita Dean: Seven Books Grey, book 2, Selected Writings 1992–­2011 T (Vienna: MUMOK; Göttingen: Steidl, 2011), p. 104. On Dean’s earlier use of found photographs, see Mark Godfrey, “Photography Found and Lost: On Tacita Dean’s Floh,” October, no. 114 (Fall 2005), pp. 90–­119. These words are just a fragment of the many handwritten inscriptions found on Dean’s photogravure piece Blind Pan, 2004. One finds this phrase scrawled on an important early work by Dean, Sixteen Blackboards, 1992, a single blackboard subjected to erasure and alteration whose various states are preserved today only in photographic form. The photographs in Sixteen Blackboards record a compendium of Dean’s early interests that recur in her later work. Other inscriptions on the various states of the documented blackboard drawings detail “the story of a relationship to a name,” or “the story of an object,” or “the story of perfect feet,” with various drawings taking on the shape of a disconnected foot, in the manner of her film The Story of Beard, 1992. We see and read “An Oedipus,” or “A Byron,” and follow contour drawings, of a lower calf, an ankle, a foot. Eventually, the final state of the drawing yields to an almost total field of erasure marks, punctuated by an isolated and final inscription: “bye bye.” We recognize here already, in 1992, the final words, the almost childlike and sweet valediction of Boots, in Boots, more than a decade later. As happens repeatedly in this key early work’s changing and erased inscriptions, Dean is citing and altering a passage from Marguerite Yourcenar, Fires, trans. Dori Katz (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), p. 23. Dean has substituted the word “feet” for the last word of Yourcenar’s text, which is instead “body.” Like so many of the other elements of Sixteen Blackboards, Yourcenar’s Fires becomes a text that will recur in Dean’s later projects and writings, providing, for example, the conclusion to her essay on Cy Twombly, “A Panegyric” (see note 16 below). As the critic Elisabeth Lebovici writes on the film, it traces “a rhizome of drawn routes, which lead to nowhere.” See Lebovici, “Slow (E)motion: Tacita Dean’s Art of Reflection,” in Tacita Dean: The Friar’s Doodle, ed. Lynne Cooke (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2010), p. 47. See also Briony Fer, “A Natural History of Chance,” in Tacita Dean: Film Works, ed. Rina Carvajal (Milan: Charta, 2007), p. 31, where she discusses Dean’s recurrent thinking of her film works in terms of a journey, following another form or art: “[Kodak] follows the process of making film through the factory (its ‘journey,’ as Dean puts it, linking it to all the other journeys she has filmed).” Tacita Dean, “The Friar’s Doodle,” in Tacita Dean: The Friar’s Doodle, p. 38; reprinted in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, p. 110. Eric Doyle, St. Francis and the Song of Brotherhood (London: The Catholic Book Club, 1980). Dean, “The Friar’s Doodle,” p. 38. Dean, p. 39. Dean’s aside further informs us that the author of the doodle, the young friar named in strangely plural form as Martin Jeffs, eventually gave up his calling, and could not in the end be found, as Dean made her film in 2010. The passages I have just cited in the text come from the aside’s conclusion, and in their full form read as follows: “I tried hard to trace Martin Jeffs. . . . I tried every M. Jeffs in the Australian phonebook but still couldn’t find him. Something had made me seek out his doodle. I look at the swirls and ducts, stairs and passageways, voids and cul-­de-­sacs, and at the bulging heart, crosses and stars that make up its composition, and try to see in it the internal world of vocation and decision. The doodle has no exit. Its continuing cyclical journey

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reminds me of the Benedictine monk in the Abbey at Silos who walked round and round the cloisters above our heads. . . . Friars were mendicant and wandering, unlike monks who were cloistered and contemplative. . . . Martin Jeffs didn’t manage to stay the course: those bold lines took him elsewhere and he left the page.” The line (we have heard it before) is from Berlin Project, 2002, the first instance of many in which we hear Boots speaking. Tacita Dean, “The Story of Beard,” in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, p. 3. A third initial film by Dean and its related projects centered as well on a woman, namely St. Agatha of Sicily, whose martyrdom included the severing of her breasts, on which Dean focuses. See Dean, “The Martyrdom of St. Agatha (in Several Parts),” in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, pp. 4–­6. Tacita Dean, “Girl Stowaway,” in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, p. 7. Jean-­Christophe Royoux, “Cosmograms of the Present Tense,” in Tacita Dean (London: Phaidon, 2006), p. 95. On Girl Stowaway, see also Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October, no. 110 (Fall 2004), pp. 3–­22. Inscription on Tacita Dean, Sixteen Blackboards, 1992. Again, Dean is citing Marguerite Yourcenar, and altering her passage (which speaks of “hands”) to use instead the word “feet.” See Yourcenar, Fires, pp. 33–­34. Tacita Dean, “A Panegyric,” in Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, ed. Nicholas Serota (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), p. 33. Dean, p. 33. Dean, p. 33. Dean, p. 33. The lines are from Berlin Project, 2002. The male voice, which recurs, is not in this case Boots and seems to be that of Dean’s father. Tacita Dean, “Unmade Project,” in Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar, Place (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2005), p. 158. Dean, p. 158; the photographs from the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art are reproduced on pp. 159–­62. Tacita Dean, “1000 Words,” interview by Christian Rattemeyer, Artforum 42, no. 2 (October 2003), p. 135. Mark Godfrey, “The ABC of TCD,” The Hugo Boss Prize 2006 (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2006), p. 51. Godfrey, p. 51. Hans Ulrich Obrist, “A Conversation at the Hochschule für Bildenden Künste Hamburg, June 2010,” in Tacita Dean, Conversation Series 28 (Cologne: Verlag Walther König, 2012), p. 77, and “Hope, Tacita Dean’s Studio, Berlin, 18 August 2003,” in the same volume, p. 13. The latter claim has been repeated by Dean in her interview with me; see “A Conversation with Tacita Dean,” in George Baker, Dive Bar Architect: On the Work of D. E. May (Los Angeles: LAXART Books, 2018), p. 199. Obrist, “A Conversation at the Hochschule für Bildenden Künste,” p. 78. Obrist, “Hope,” p. 14. “Lost in Translation: Tacita Dean interviewed by Maria Walsh,” in Talking Art: Interviews with Artists since 1976, ed. Patricia Bickers and Andrew Wilson (London: Art Monthly / Ridinghouse, 2006), p. 570. Godfrey, “The ABC of TCD,” p. 51. The uncanny announcement of this film’s exhibition in summer 2018, at the moment of my own work on concluding this text, caught me entirely by surprise, as if Dean had long been working on a “secret” project. And while I cannot, then, incorporate a reading of Antigone yet into my reading of Dean’s work, we have a beautiful description of the film, by the art critic Adrian Searle, reviewing Dean’s exhibition Landscape at the Royal Academy in London. I will cite the entirety of his description: Dean’s latest film, Antigone, has been on her mind for more than 20 years, and she wrote about it in the Guardian in 1997, as part of the diary she kept of her residency at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab in Utah. Part of her conversation there—­with Stewart Stern, screenwriter of Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean—­has become part of the script here. As does Canadian poet (and classics scholar) Anne Carson’s 2001 poem TV Men:

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Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2). Carson’s poem is a retelling of Antigone as if gone over by TV executives. What is really at the heart of the film is Dean’s relationship with her elder sister, named Antigone, who appears for a few frames in this looped, double-­screen 35mm film. It is impossible to do justice to this almost hour-­long film, with its multiple layerings, masked exposures and multiple viewpoints, its innovative technical manipulations of analogue film and its camerawork. The film is edited in the camera itself, as was her 2011 work film at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and the recent, tiny triple portrait His Portrait in Little, at the National Portrait Gallery. We go from closeups of smoking and steaming volcanic vents in Yellowstone National Park to the mists of Bodmin Moor. We visit the floodplains of the Mississippi in Wyoming, the town of Thebes, Illinois, and the courthouse where Abraham Lincoln first practiced. Here we meet Anne Carson and actor Stephen Dillane. For much of the film, Dillane is an Oedipus blinded by tinted glasses made for viewing the eclipse, and wearing a huge, straggly beard. He maunders across the world as though without purpose, at one point followed by a pair of curious dogs. As he walks out of frame, the dogs start copulating. Think ZZ Top. Think Saint Jerome. Think Harry Dean Stanton in the film Paris, Texas. A man on a mission, escaping his fate. Eagles circle the sky, their call a distant mewing. There are vultures and a crow stalks the horizon. Every moment of Antigone is a confusion, a complexity and a delight—­a rich muddled stew of words and images, places and atmospheres. And through the imaginary day on which everything takes place, the sun is slowly eclipsed. At full eclipse, a black sun with a flaring corona looks back, like an eye. Colour is drained from the world and then all light. Film picks out the gradations of dying light, the last and first glimmers, and the florid corona of the eclipsed sun, to a degree and with a nuance that digital recording cannot approach. Through the film there are speeches and observations, bits of Sophocles, a parable told to Dean by Stern and snatches of Carson’s poem. It is often hard to tell where we are. Frequently, we are in several places at once. Dillane passes across the world like a cloud, his beard awry. Carson does a little dance on the courtroom steps, the zips and buckles of her leather jacket jangling with light. I can’t tell you what all this means. It is a whole world come together, splitting and parting and rejoining. Antigone is a film of origins and arrivals, incidence and coincidence and alignments, less a landscape than a world entire.

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See Adrian Searle, “A Total Eclipse of the Senses,” Guardian, May 14, 2018, https://www. theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/may/14/tacita-­dean-­landscape-­review-­a-­total-­eclipse-­of-­ the-­senses. Inscription on Tacita Dean, Sixteen Blackboards, 1992. Again, the source is Yourcenar, Fires, p. 43, the concluding words of a section of this love-­letter-­cum-­prose-­poem dedicated to Antigone. The last connection is pointed to by Dean’s comments on Giotto and the images reproduced in “Marina Warner in conversation with Tacita Dean,” in Tacita Dean (London: Phaidon, 2006), p. 44. As mentioned here, Dean then went on to produce a film completely focused on Giotto’s work, Buon Fresco. In one of Dean’s earliest asides, she includes a long digression on the traditional painterly form of the altarpiece; see “The Martyrdom of St. Agatha (in Several Parts),” in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, p. 5. All of the tropes explored by Dean’s Wake have been engaged in one of the most recent exhibitions by Zoe Leonard, entitled “In the Wake,” Hauser & Wirth, New York, September 13–­October 22, 2016. Rephotographing family snapshots taken by Leonard’s mother and grandmother of their postwar displacement, many of Leonard’s images show the passage between Europe and the United States on board a ship. Underlining a structural chiasmus, Mark Godfrey stresses the importance that this work involves still images, engaging through the single photograph the plot and narrative structures that her moving images and films resist. See Godfrey, “The ABC of TCD,” pp. 49–­5 1. On Boots as a “wreck,” see Germaine Greer, “Boots,” in Tacita Dean (London: Phaidon, 2006), p. 109. These are a selection of some of the more legible inscriptions on one of the panels of Blind Pan, 2004. “Marina Warner in conversation with Tacita Dean,” p. 37. In the passage in question, Dean relates: “Blind Pan is about Antigone and her journey through the wilderness with her father,

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Oedipus. And swollen ankles. It goes back to Delphi, really. I always remember the ankles of the charioteer statue I saw there. I wrote about them when I was there. They are beautiful, perfect—­the most exquisite ankles I have ever seen. I have always made a connection between them and the swollen ones of Oedipus.” In an essay that builds toward a reading of Blind Pan, this limit is described as an experience that links the artist’s various works; see Wolfram Pichler, “Horizon and Line of Fate (with Tacita Dean and Leo Steinberg),” in Tacita Dean: Seven Books Grey, book 7, Essays, p. 10: “Now, what is to be held onto is no longer the fleeting object itself, but something that appears or becomes visible in the moment of its evanescence or its vanishing: as it were, the last glance that it casts at us, or the last glimpse of it that we can catch, which often takes the form of a back view. Dean seems convinced that in the exact moment of their vanishing or turning away, things and people convey something or allow us to experience something about them that otherwise would have remained unspoken or unseen. Put more forcefully, this means that for her, the essence of things cannot be found in their centre, in ‘the core of their being,’ but rather at a boundary line—­the boundary that separates being from non-­being, presence from absence. Dean attempts to come close to this boundary and bring it into representation.” See Margaret Iversen, “Analogue: On Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 4 (Summer 2012), pp. 816–­17, where the author posits a link between Blind Pan and Fernsehturm: “Part of Disappearance at Sea . . . shows the beam of light from a lighthouse panning across the dark sea. This shot creates an effect similar to a film technique called the blind pan, a term that refers to a sweep across the field of vision without focal point or object.” This island has since become an object of desire in Dean’s published writings and thoughts, a kind of land outside time, or disconnected from modernity, to which she has often imagined fleeing. See Tacita Dean, “Tristan da Cunha,” Artforum 43, no. 10 (Summer 2005), p. 275, reprinted in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, pp. 78–­79. The explorer Tristão da Cunha evokes another Tristan in Dean’s pantheon, which is the figure from the story of Tristan and Isolde, with this Tristan afflicted with a poison, and then surrendering himself to the sea to arrive by fortune in Ireland (like the “Girl Stowaway”), where he would be healed by Isolde. See Jeremy Millar, “Messieurs les inventeurs d’épaves,” in Tacita Dean (Philadelphia: ICA, 1998), pp. 30–­42. Dean, “A Panegyric,” p. 15. Tacita Dean, “Presentation Sisters,” in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, p. 75. Tacita Dean, An Aside: Selected by Tacita Dean (London: Hayward Gallery, 2005), p. 4. Marina Warner in Warner and Tacita Dean, Footage, book 5 of Tacita Dean: Seven Books Grey, p. 17. Also see Warner’s essay “Light Drawing In: The Art of Tacita Dean,” in Gehen (Walking), ed. Theodora Vischer and Katrin Grogel (Basel: Schaulager; Göttingen: Steidl, 2008). Pichler, “Horizon and Line of Fate,” p. 14. See, for example, Michael Newman, “Salvage,” in Tacita Dean: Seven Books, book 7, Essays, n.p., on the film Teignmouth Electron: “It is a loving camera that explores the beached wreck, caressing its surfaces, moving back and forth to see it from different sides and angles, surrounded by palms and beach, like a fossil from another time, or the relic of a bygone civilization. Filming truly becomes an act of salvage, even a desired redemption.” Germaine Greer sketches the feminist stakes of Dean’s model of visuality most explicitly, in relation to a reading of the bathers in Dean’s earlier film Gellért, 1998: “There is no sense of a gaze dominating the naked female figures, which remain utterly contained, moving calmly through a field of vision unheated by lust or disgust, in an implicit and characteristically understated comment on every heap of frolicking ‘baigneuses’ ever assembled on canvas. . . . The images remain whole like the perceptions of a child who has not learnt to name what she sees. In much of her work, Dean uses this stranger’s eye perspective, as if refusing to organize her material, and in this I find something truly female, distanced from the self-­assertion of proto-­feminist artists[,] predicated as it is on the self-­promotion of the masculinist tradition . . . Her style is a flight from style, backing away from ego rather than building a monument to it.” See Greer, “Tacita Dean,” in Tacita Dean (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2001), pp. 40–­41. Elisabeth Lebovici, in her essay “Slow (E)motion,” p. 49, compares Dean’s cinema to the “oral stage” in psychoanalysis and its logic of introjection, not projection. This is the voice of Boots again, in Berlin Project. Tacita Dean, “Robert Frank: You Can’t Go Home Again,” originally published in Parkett 83 (2008), collected in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, p. 101. Tacita Dean, “Roni Horn: Such as It Is,” in Roni Horn: 153 Drawings, ed. Michaela Unterdörfer (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2013), p. 314.

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 ean, “The Uncles,” in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, p. 72. D Dean, “Roni Horn,” p. 314. Dean finishes the story: “I send Roni a text: ‘What was your father’s name?’ She writes back: ‘Dad’s name was Arthur. When he died we including my mother discovered it was Abraham. His father was a button maker.’ In one text, a family lineage told, of skill, duplicity and elsewhere.” Tacita Dean, “Mario Merz,” in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, p. 59. Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Il Tempo del Postino, at the Manchester Opera House Stage Door, 2007,” in Tacita Dean, Conversation Series 28, p. 48, and “A Conversation at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste,” p. 60. Dean, “Mario Merz,” p. 59. Walsh, “Lost in Translation,” p. 572. Obrist, “A Conversation at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste,” pp. 60–­61. Obrist, p. 61. Rina Carvajal, “Film Is a Medium of Time: A Conversation with Tacita Dean,” in Tacita Dean: Film Works, p. 60. Dean has made at least one work about her familial home, an elliptical postcard edition showing an emptied-­out room (a bedroom?) after the passing of her father and the sale of this home, with the desolate space a catalogue of indexical traces—­dust, stains, and discoloration from the sun—­the shadows of so many absent objects. Hans Ulrich Obrist, “After the Event, on the Train from Hamburg to Berlin, June 2010,” in Tacita Dean, Conversation Series 28, pp. 90–­91, where Dean states: “I should have filmed my father. I did film my parents’ house after Folkestone, after I filmed Amadeus (swell consopio) [2008]. I haven’t looked at the footage yet, I can’t do that, but I know there’s a shot of the front of the house when it was all lit up and he’s just walking from his study to his bedroom and back again with no purpose. I think the point is, you’ve probably been interviewing hundreds of people in their last years in order to interview your father, and I’ve been filming them and that’s why I said I didn’t think I’d film any more men after Merce and after my dad died. But now I have nowhere to go, I’m sort of lost in the wilderness.” Obrist, “After the Event,” p. 91. Dean, “Mario Merz,” p. 59. As so often has been the case, Dean here borrows some of her words and phrasing from Marguerite Yourcenar, from a specific passage in Fires (p. 38) on Oedipus and Antigone cited by Dean already in her early work Sixteen Blackboards, and cited by me here in the asides of this text, below; see p. 207. Dean published her father’s obituary in February 2010 in the Guardian, in its “Other Lives” series, which is defined by the paper thus: “Obituaries pages traditionally describe and celebrate the lives of the great and good, the famous and infamous. There is another type of life that deserves noticing: people less in the public eye, or lives lived beyond formal recognition.” See Tacita Dean, “Joseph Dean obituary,” https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/ feb/01/joseph-­dean-­obituary. Setting the tone of the text, the caption under the portrait of her father reads, “Joseph Dean never recovered from the disdain he was shown by his father Basil Dean, the founder of Ealing Studios.” Dean’s obituary of her father might be grouped as one of a number of key texts, all published in major British newspapers, linked to her family biography, or the Antigone project, from her account of the project’s genesis, in Dean’s “Zen and the Art of Film Making” (Guardian, October 15, 1997), to her personal account of her own illness and treatment in the Charité hospital in Berlin (“The English Patient,” Independent, February 3, 2001, https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/europe/the-­english-­patient-­5365585.html). Dean would also publish a text that served as the basis for her aside on the Merz film, as a postscript to the official obituary for Mario Merz in the Guardian; see Christopher Masters, “Mario Merz,” Guardian, November 3, 2003, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/nov/13/guardianobituaries.italy. This is the voice of Boots in Dean’s Berlin Project, speaking of his childhood affliction and treatment in Berlin at the Charité hospital, decades before Dean herself would be treated there. Marina Warner first mentions that the Masaccio was traced by Dean, but points to her blackboard drawings instead; see Warner and Dean, Footage, p. 16, and the 2006 lecture by Dean, “The Story of Perfect Feet,” in Gehen (Walking), pp. 7–­14. Georges Bataille, “The Big Toe,” Documents 6 (November 1929), reprinted in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–­1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 20–­23. “Marina Warner in conversation with Tacita Dean,” p. 30. See, too, Tacita Dean, “Foley Artist,” in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, p. 24.

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 arry Schwabsky, “Cine Qua Non: The Art of Tacita Dean,” Artforum 37, no. 7 (March 1999), B pp. 100, 129. On Foley Artist, see also “Tacita Dean: Interviewed by Jean Wainwright, London, 1999,” in Speaking of Art: Four Decades of Art in Conversation, ed. William Furlong (London: Phaidon, 2010), pp. 191–­92. Theodora Vischer, “The Story of Linear Confidence,” in Tacita Dean: Analogue, Drawings 1991–­2006, ed. Vischer and Isabel Friedli (Basel: Schaulager and Göttingen: Steidl, 2006), p. 17. Julia Garimorth, “Tacita Dean: Time Frames,” in Tacita Dean: Seven Books, book 7, Essays, n.p. See also Achim Horchdörfer, “Tacita Dean Makes a Film,” in Tacita Dean: Seven Books Grey, book 7, Essays, p. 41, on the condition of “lessness” in Dean’s cinema, where a film shot regresses to a state of stillness and duration such that it can attain the status of a “picture.” One of Dean’s most important works to grapple with the dialectic between still photograph and moving film image would be the 2008 artist book that accompanies the film Darmstädter Werkblock. The book displays no title, no name, no text whatsoever on its cover; instead we are given an extreme close-­up of the film’s close-­up of the jute covering the walls of the Block Beuys, showing repairs and bandage-­like patches. The book emphasizes throughout the photographic nature of the film. Taking on the extended horizontal format of the film, with each page a “shot,” we instead gaze at a series of literal stills. And while it seems at first like the book might record and document the sequence of shots in the film, this is not the case. The book instead approximates the filmic shots, actively rearranging and reordering them, creating in effect a different wander through the museum space, but this time in photographic form. Tacita Dean, “Baobab,” in Selected Writings 1992–­2011, p. 54. Given the reference in Czech Footage Sequence to Masaccio’s Expulsion, the nonsensical red egg floating through each of the collages seems a displaced reference to the biblical “forbidden fruit,” like a red apple—­intimating that these early collage works had already reared their head in subsequent films by Dean, for example in the focus on all the apples and the garden that takes up so much of the duration of Michael Hamburger. Warner and Dean, Footage (see chap. 3, n. 45). In the French, this is the title of a 2002 blackboard drawing by Dean, structured (like the film Antigone) as a diptych, with two large blackboards positioned side by side. This lateral or sibling dynamic, as I have been calling it, accompanies a vertical or paternal one, as Dean’s Chère petite soeur is based on the film of the same name by Marcel Broodthaers, with its own basis in a found postcard from 1901, inscribed by its sender: “Dear little sister, this is to give you an idea of the sea during the storm which we had last night. Will give you details of this, best wishes and see you soon. Marie.” (Chère petite soeur, celle-­ci pour te donner une idée de la mer pendant la tempête que nous avons eue hier. Donnerai détail à ce sujet, bonne amitié et à bientôt. Marie.) Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 57. Butler here leans on George Steiner’s text Antigones (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). Butler, p. 57. Butler, pp. 22–­23. I have elided the specificity of Butler’s questions in this passage, which have to do with the movement beyond Oedipal positions raised by the possibilities of gay marriage and gay families, and their multiple potential shapes. Butler, p. 24. Butler, p. 23. Butler, p. 58. Butler, p. 60. Butler, p. 67. Butler, pp. 67, 82. “Tacita Dean Talks with Simon Schama,” Financial Times, September 30, 2011, https://www. ft.com/content/b94bfcb4-­e973–­11e0-­af7b-­00144feab49a. On the notion of an “imagined family,” see Warner and Dean, Footage, p. 25: “Boots, like Mario Merz, Michael Hamburger, and Merce Cunningham, is a figure from Tacita Dean’s pantheon, the family of her imagination, who steps towards the threshold of death—­in allegory and in reality.” In a postscript to Dean’s curatorial project An Aside, p. 69, curator Roger Malbert depicts the “community” of artists gathered in the exhibition as analogous to an extended family: “If Tacita Dean’s extended family has occasionally provided the subject-­matter for her works, the community of artists in An Aside forms an equivalent circle, interconnected in curious ways, sometimes objectively, sometimes through coincidences of interest intuited by Dean.” Dean describes a similar dynamic using a metaphor of inhabitation, like a home, in her aside on Robert Smithson; see Tacita Dean, “Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty,” in Selected Writings

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1992–­2011, p. 30: “Robert Smithson has become an important figure in my working life . . . His work allows me a conceptual space where I can often reside. Artists don’t talk about this very much, because it is extremely difficult to describe. It’s like an incredible excitement and attraction across time; a personal repartee with another’s thinking and energy communicated through their work.” Tacita Dean, “Craneway Event: A Film with and about Merce Cunningham,” in Five Americans (New York: New Museum, 2012), p. 32. Inscription on Tacita Dean, Sixteen Blackboards, 1992. The passage is an unaltered citation from Yourcenar, Fires, p. 38. See, too, note 63 above. Described as “a book about film and the importance of analogue in the digital age,” Dean’s catalogue for the Turbine Hall commission was conceived in large part as a protest against the killing-­off of analogue-­film production, and included short statements on the situation by more than eighty figures involved in the world of film—­scholars, artists, Hollywood directors, actors, avant-­garde filmmakers, critics, archivists, etc. See Nicholas Cullinan, ed., Tacita Dean: film (London: Tate Publishing, 2011). Tacita Dean, “Film,” in Tacita Dean: film, p. 28. René Daumal, Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-­Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, trans. Roger Shattuck (Baltimore: Penguin, 1974). Dean clarifies in her publication on the project that the image of Mount Analogue also calls up specific cinema histories, like the mountain logo that was used by Paramount Pictures, see Dean, “Film,” p. 25. As opposed to Dean’s singular exploration of the bodily metaphor of the foot and footage for the medium of film, there exists a long tradition of thinking the medium of photography in relation to the hand, or to its displacement of manual labor and making. See, for example, Allan Sekula, “An Eternal Esthetics of Laborious Gestures,” Grey Room 55 (Spring 2014), pp. 16–­27 (as a lecture by Sekula, I first heard this essay delivered in the mid-­1990s), and Sally Stein, “Peculiar Grace: Dorothea Lange and the Testimony of the Body,” in Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life, ed. Elizabeth Partridge (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994). The Line of Fate communicates with film also in its alternation of images between color and black-­and-­white, a hybridity that Dean’s Turbine Hall commission not only shares, but exacerbates. The issue of these works’ twinning seems larger than a shared vertical format or image mode. The initially strange connection between the Steinberg portrait and this film becomes more comprehensible when one realizes that the Steinberg piece is titled after the art historian’s essay on Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. The architectural site and scale of the initial projection of FILM calls out to the memory of the Renaissance fresco, and its specific place in architectural (sacred) space, maybe even its specific late position in Michelangelo’s oeuvre. Interview with Tacita Dean in the documentary short Tacita Dean: film, 2011, directed by Zara Hayes, about the project for the Turbine Hall; available at https://zarahayes.com/A-­Portrait-­of-­ Tacita-­Dean-­Film. Dean, “Film,” p. 28. The swinging of a horizontal representation into the vertical field of vision, and the connection of the work of art to the world thereby, was in fact a deep obsession of Leo Steinberg’s art history, from his work on Picasso to his identification of what he called the horizontal “flatbed picture plane” in the work of Robert Rauschenberg. The underground connection of film to Dean’s simultaneous portrait of Steinberg should also be extended to this dialogue between phenomenological vectors, between the horizontal and the vertical and what their interrelation would do for film. See Leo Steinberg, “The Philosophical Brothel,” October, no. 44 (Spring 1988), pp. 7–­74, and “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). Dean, “Film,” p. 19. In Dean, “Film,” pp. 30–­31, a series of images catalogue the myriad aperture-­gate masks designed for the project in collaboration with the architect Michael Bölling. A series of notebook sketches and collages for the project follow Dean’s essay, with the inscribed phrase here visible on p. 34. Baker, “A Conversation with Tacita Dean,” in Dive Bar Architect, p. 198. Mathew Hale and Roni Horn, in “Film and the Importance of Analogue in the Digital Age,” in Tacita Dean: film, pp. 78, 79, respectively. For another reading of the reflexive, medium-­specific gestures of film, see Rosalind Krauss, “Frame by Frame,” Artforum 51, no. 1 (September 2012), pp. 417–­19. Nicholas Cullinan glosses the idea of a vertical cinema through reference to Maya Deren, with her association of “horizontal” cinema with sequential narrative, and an alternative “vertical”

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cinema with a poetic structure that frustrates the “teleological thrust” of the narrative drive. See Cullinan, “Film Still,” in Tacita Dean: film, pp. 12–­13. The theorization of this structure would be advanced by Roland Barthes through reference to the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of language, and associated with the semiotics of the film still in Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 41–­62. Tacita Dean, “Analogue,” in Tacita Dean: Analogue, Drawings 1991–­2006, ed. Theodora Vischer and Isabel Friedli (Basel: Schaulager, 2006), p. 8. The vertical screen experienced as a “monolith” in the Turbine Hall space invokes another cinematic memory, of course, which is the already self-­reflexive appearance of the strange monoliths repeatedly discovered in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968. There is self-­reference here too, however, as not only is Eliasson’s project perhaps the most spectacular of all the prior Turbine Hall commissions but he has also been one of Dean’s studio mates in her studio arrangement in Berlin. This memory may be overdetermined by the specific echoes Dean’s film produces, as the window Kelly used from the current Palais de Tokyo building in Paris represents an art deco architectural form that rhymes historically with the windows of the Casa de Serralves in Portugal, and that seem remembered by Dean’s work in the Turbine Hall here. On the indexical basis of much of Kelly’s early work, a tactic of “anti-­composition” employed to negate the values of technical mastery and the will to self-­expression, see Yve-­Alain Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly in France: Anti-­composition in Its Many Guises,” in Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 1948–­1954, ed. Bois, Jack Cowart, and Alfred Pacquement (Washington, DC: National Gallery, 1992), pp. 9–­36. On an earlier historical model of abstraction based on the alteration of an indexical and often photographic model, see my chapter “Prolem Sine Matre Creatam,” in The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 198–­286. Contrary to what has been called intermedia, or even the postmedium condition, I have theorized the possibilities of medium sharing or the “dual articulation” of forms in my chapter on cinema in The Artwork Caught by the Tail, and in the essay “Reanimations (I),” October, no. 104 (Spring 2003), pp. 28–­70. See also Hubert Damisch, “Concert (Portrait of an Artist as Michael Snow),” in Michael Snow: Panoramique; Oeuvres photographiques et films / Photographic Works and Films, 1962–­1999 (Brussels: Societé des expositions du Palais des beaux-­arts, 1999). Roland Barthes, “The Metaphor of the Eye,” in Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972). On Barthes’s notion of a “round phallicism,” see Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), especially pp. 163–­6 8. Edward Said, “A Lingering Old Order,” in On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), p. 114. This is a voice again from Berlin Project, the voice that seems to belong to Dean’s father. Tacita Dean, “Antigone,” in Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2018), p. 91. As another document in this catalogue, Dean has republished her 1997 article for the Guardian on the initiation of the Antigone project at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab that summer. As part of the workshop, Dean relates her interaction with Hungarian director Gyula Gazdag. In this connection, she relates: “Immediately, he asked me if there was a personal thing going on beyond the fact that Antigone is my sister’s name. I said yes, it’s about my relationship to my father. Ah, your relationship, not your sister’s? Yes. Is your sister older than you? Yes. So, he said, she got your name.” See Tacita Dean, “Zen and the Art of Film Making,” Guardian, October 15, 1997, republished in Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life, pp. 108–­9. Dean, “Antigone,” p. 100. Dean, p. 104 Tacita Dean, “His Picture in Little,” in Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life, p. 166 Dean, p. 166. See, for example, Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay; How Art Reprograms the World, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Lukas and Sternberg Press, 2002). Tacita Dean, “Conversation with Stewart Stern, Sundance Screenwriting Lab, 1997,” in Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life, p. 110. Dean, p. 111. We hear this sound fragment in Berlin Project, and it is Leonard Cohen, of course, the opening salvo of “Sing Another Song, Boys,” a live track from the album Songs of Love and Hate, 1971,

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the vinyl record in this case skipping and repeating the last words. Dean has recently produced the film Ear on a Worm, 2017, presented as a kind of homage to Cohen in the context of the exhibition Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything, at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Jewish Museum, New York, 2018–­19.

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 erhaps most important would be the 2011 special issue of the photography magazine Blind Spot P that Davey and Leonard edited together, on the entwinement of photography (light-­writing) and writing. The issue (no. 43) reads as a curatorial effort in magazine form, and the artists simultaneously mounted a group exhibition at Murray Guy in New York, “Vision Is Elastic, Thought Is Elastic,” April 21–­June 4, 2011. As described then, the project explored “various intersections between photography and writing.” Taking its title from a notebook phrase of David Wojnarowicz, the exhibition sought to propose “a closeness of camera and notebook, assembling works that embody a range of relationships between photography and activities of reading, writing, and note-­taking.” The project seemed to be a search for relationality between the two activities, embodied in this intense collaboration between the two artist curators: “In contrast to a certain iconoclastic tradition often associated with conceptual art—­one which pairs texts with photographs in order to fragment or unhinge the image, to point to its insufficiency or artificiality—­the affiliations here could best be described as symbiotic. (Symbiosis: the intimate living together of two dissimilar organisms in a mutually beneficial relationship.)” See the documentation archived at https://murrayguy.com/exhibitions/vision-­is-­elastic-­thought­is-­elastic-­2011/. Sharon Lockhart, “Film and the Importance of Analogue in the Digital Age,” in Tacita Dean: film, ed. Nicholas Cullinan (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), p. 96. Lockhart, p. 96. “James Benning Interviews Sharon Lockhart,” in Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break (St. Louis: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2010), p. 103. Lockhart produced and compiled many research images for her project, publishing some of them in the volume entitled Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break II (Vienna: Secession; St. Louis: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2011); here we see a whole section of her archival collection of images of factory life devoted to the activity of reading, and enjoying the newspaper; see especially pp. 27–­37. She would go as far as to produce multiple issues of her own newspaper, engaging (like Dean) a panorama of figures to write in these volumes, entitled The Lunch Break Times (July 2010 and October 2011). In her interview with Benning, p. 109, she describes the latter project: “I imagine the copies of the newspaper floating around the different factories for a few weeks until they all disappear. I like the ephemeralness of the analog information flow. It seems to me more on the level of storytelling. Something that circulates and then disappears.” This text is not signed by another writer (or any writer), and seems to record Lockhart’s own words, printed as part of an artist project in an issue of the Art Journal, pointing both to her project Lunch Break and to the newspapers created alongside it; see Sharon Lockhart, “Lunch Break Times,” Art Journal 69, nos. 1–­2 (Spring–­Summer 2010), p. 35. Lockhart, “Film and the Importance of Analogue,” p. 96. Lockhart, p. 96. Benning and Lockhart would become close interlocutors, and indeed Benning would have a crucial role to play in Lockhart’s Pine Flat project, intensifying in her work Lunch Break. While some critics see the relationship conventionally, as an older artist inspiring a younger figure, this unidirectionality flattens and betrays the actual fabric of the dialogue here, with Benning having repeatedly admitted that Lockhart’s films in the 1990s began to inspire his own work, too. His California Trilogy, for example—­El Valley Centro, 1999, Los, 2000, and Sogobi, 2001—­involves a structure of thirty-­five shots in each film, with each shot lasting two-­and-­a-­half minutes, the shorter of the two conventional formats for an entire roll of 16 mm film. Benning had been struck by Lockhart’s turn in Goshogaoka and other works to the use of the longer 16 mm film length, to rolls of four hundred feet of film, with each of Lockhart’s shots lasting the full length of the roll, or around eleven minutes. Later films by Benning, such as 13 Lakes, 2004, and Ten Skies, 2004, then turned to the longer rolls and shots as well. On the interrelation of Benning’s and Lockhart’s filmmaking, see Scott MacDonald, “Sharon Lockhart and James Benning:

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Decelerating Cinema,” Dok.revue, July 17, 2017, http://www.dokrevue.com/news/sharon-­ lockhart-­and-­james-­benning-­decelerating-­cinema. “Sharon Lockhart and James Benning,” public conversation, moderated by Kathy Halbreich, Walker Art Center, June 29, 2006, video available at https://walkerart.org/magazine/sharon-­ lockhart-­and-­james-­benning. Walead Beshty raises the issue of relationality in Lockhart’s work through the dynamics of a project I will not analyze here, Noa Eshkol, 2011. See Beshty, “In Medias Res,” in Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol (Vienna: Thyssen-­Bornemisza Art Contemporary, 2012), pp. 30–­36. Rosalind Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (Winter 1999), an expanded version of which is reprinted in George Baker, ed., James Coleman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). On this turn, see the conversation that I organized with Malcolm Turvey, “Round Table: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art,” October, no. 104 (Spring 2003), pp. 71–­96. Lockhart’s work comes to be treated at a central moment in this discussion, which also included Hal Foster, Chrissie Iles, Anthony McCall, and Matthew Buckingham. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1979), in The Originality of the Avant-­Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 277. Discussing Picasso’s cubism and collage work, André Breton uses the term “lamentable expedient” in the debates over painting sparked by the surrealist group; see Breton, “Le surréalisme et la peinture,” La révolution surréaliste, no. 4 (July 1925), p. 29. The last paragraphs have been a slightly edited version of part of the opening of my essay “Photography’s Expanded Field,” October, no. 114 (Fall 2005), pp. 120–­23. The essay immediately continues, clarifying the end of the section above: “To reconstruct one’s object: this is a structuralist vocation, as long ago described by Roland Barthes . . . precisely the critical gesture made twenty-­five [now forty] years ago in Krauss’s demonstration ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field.’ . . . If today the object of photography seems to be ever so definitively slipping away, we need to enter into and explore what it might mean to declare photography to have an expanded field of operation; we need to trace what this field has meant for the last two decades of photographic practice, in order to situate ourselves with any accuracy in relationship to the putative dispersal—­whether melancholic or joyful—­that the medium of photography is supposedly undergoing” (p. 124). In an earlier publication, beyond the pages devoted to Pine Flat in the essay version of “Lateness and Longing” from 2008, I turned specifically to Lockhart’s work and the idea of the expanded field. See my chapter, “After ‘Photography’s Expanded Field,’” in Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms, ed. Eivind Røssaak (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011). I am paraphrasing Theodor Adorno’s well-­known description of the opposition of high art and mass culture, in a 1936 letter to Walter Benjamin. “Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.” See Adorno, “Letters to Walter Benjamin,” in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1980), p. 123. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970). While there exists a by now substantial and growing literature on expanded cinema practices, Krauss’s essay on the “expanded field” of sculpture has given rise to its own secondary literature and historiography at this point. See, for example, the conference proceedings collected in Spyros Papapetros and Julian Rose, eds., Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2014). Mark Godfrey, “The Flatness of Pine Flat,” in Pine Flat, Sharon Lockhart (Frankfurt: Revolver Books; Bilbao: Sala Rekalde, 2006), pp. 114–­15, draws a comparison between the first episode of Pine Flat and German Romanticism and its landscape paintings, but the scene mounts a different and more radical challenge to representability than this comparison initially allows, or that discourses such as the “sublime” would countenance. “The World, Considered: Sharon Lockhart’s Watchful Eye,” interview by Drew Tewksbury, KCET, February 8, 2013, https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/the-­world-­considered-­sharon-­ lockharts-­watchful-­eye. On the fort/da game, see Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (London: W. W. Norton, 1961), especially pp. 12–­17. Lockhart quoted in Inés Katzenstein, “Sharon Lockhart, Ethnography Home,” in Pine Flat, Sharon Lockhart (Sala Rekalde), p. 119.

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 atherine Wood, “Entr’acte,” in Pine Flat, Sharon Lockhart (Sala Rekalde), p. 136. C This element of the Pine Flat installation at the Sala Rekalde, in Bilbao, remains the only evident aspect of the installation not credited in the catalogue. In Lockhart’s second catalogue for the project, a very different hand-­drawn map in a very similar hand would be reproduced, credited to artist James Benning, 2006, and now showing “Pine Flat” marked on a much wider charting of the state of California. See Pine Flat, Sharon Lockhart (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2006), pp. 122–­23. Both catalogues for Pine Flat could be cited with their titles in the same, somewhat counterintuitive form, as Pine Flat, Sharon Lockhart. The artist worked with a designer on typography for the film titles, and this same design was then used as well on the cover and title pages of her catalogues, showing a bold sans serif title over the artist’s name in both cases. My reading of the project will intimate that this titling should be read as significant; it speaks to a resistance to conventional authorship and intimates an equivalency between author and subject from the start, prioritizing one over the other, the latter over the former. While often cited as Sharon Lockhart: Pine Flat, I will use this alternate titling, and for clarity’s sake will include the publisher of each version with each subsequent citation. The Sala Rekalde edition was for the first exhibition of Pine Flat, running from December 14, 2005, to February 12, 2006. The Charta publication served as a catalogue for exhibitions of Pine Flat that took place at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (April 23–­July 16, 2006); the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University (August 26–­November 19, 2006); and the Museu do Chiado, Lisbon, Portugal (October 3, 2006–­January 7, 2007). This is from one of the first, and best, of the critical responses to the Pine Flat project. See Michael Ned Holte, “The Observer,” Frieze, no. 95 (November/December 2005), pp. 98–­103. Wood, “Entr’acte,” p. 136. Lockhart quoted in Katzenstein, “Sharon Lockhart, Ethnography Home,” p. 119. Along with Catharine Wood, Linda Norden also repeats this claim and these words in her essay on the project; see Norden, “So Here’s My Holiday,” in Pine Flat, Sharon Lockhart (Charta), p. 129. On the anthropological basis of Lockhart’s earlier works, see Wood, “Entr’acte,” pp. 136–­3 7, as well as Norman Bryson, “Sharon Lockhart: The Politics of Attention,” Artext 70 (August–­October 2000), pp. 57–­59. On this turn in art more generally by the 1990s, see Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 171–­203. Halbreich, “Sharon Lockhart and James Benning.” Wood, “Entr’acte,” p. 137. In what could be called his “palinode”—­as Roland Barthes described the relation of the second half of his book Camera Lucida to the first—­Godfrey productively points out the limitations of his early reading of Pine Flat as the opening of his second major essay on Lockhart’s work, noting especially his blindness to the issue of class the project raised (it is a blindness my own earlier published thoughts on Lockhart also shared). This recantation occurred as he wrote subsequently on Lockhart’s Lunch Break, where the issues of labor and class were now explicit. See Godfrey, “Photography And: The Discourses of Sharon Lockhart’s Photographic Practice,” in Lunch Break, p. 81. On the parameters of Sander’s typology, see my essay “Photography between Narrativity and Stasis: August Sander, Degeneration, and the Decay of the Portrait,” October, no. 76 (Spring 1996), pp. 73–­113. I have written about one specific photograph by Lockhart, Untitled, 2007, based on a Sander portrait of blind children reading Braille, from 1930. See “Sharing Seeing,” in Sharon Lockhart: Milena, Milena; A Work in Progress (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2015), and the expansion of this essay published in October, no. 174 (Fall 2020), pp. 163–­75. As Lockhart’s projects have increasingly and repeatedly focused on the figure of the orphan, this detail of Disfarmer’s life should not be overlooked in terms of her gravitation to this historical body of work. On Disfarmer’s biography and history, and the issues possibly raised by his chosen name, see the excellent recent catalogue by Chelsea Spengemann, ed., Becoming Disfarmer (Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum of Art, 2014). For a reading that contests the manner in which photography history and the market have positioned Disfarmer since the 1970s—­perhaps in parallel to Lockhart’s appropriation and misuse of Disfarmer’s conventions—­ see the essay in the same publication by Gil Blank, “Eccentric Subjectivity and Authenticity Fiction,” pp. 125–­3 2. Specifically, and tellingly, Avedon took inspiration from the large-­scale exhibition prints made in the 1970s to display Disfarmer’s work in the context of art photography. See Julia Scully and Peter Miller, Disfarmer: The Heber Springs Portraits, 1939–­1946 (Danbury, NH: Addison

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House, 1976). Avedon had no interest in Disfarmer’s vintage prints, in work that was always on a smaller scale, in the actual appearance of Disfarmer’s original photographs. For a key critique of Avedon’s In the American West, see Richard Bolton, “In the American East: Richard Avedon Incorporated,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 262–­83. Kaja Silverman, “The Author as Receiver,” October, no. 96 (Spring 2001), p. 21. Walead Beshty reads Lockhart’s Noa Eshkol, with its presentation of the work and career of another artist in the space of a “solo” exhibition, as a moment where Lockhart’s larger attitudes toward authorship become reflexive. For Beshty, the project involves a displacement of authorship, a dissipation of the author, with the latter becoming a site of exchange rather than the source of a unidirectional artistic message. See Beshty, “In Medias Res,” pp. 34–­3 5. Kaja Silverman, “Seeing for the Sake of Seeing,” in World Spectators (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 24. Silverman, p. 25. These thoughts were first broached in my essay “Sharing Seeing,” October, pp. 168–­70. Timothy Martin, “Documentary Theater,” in Sharon Lockhart: Teatro Amazonas (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1999), p. 17. Norden, “So Here’s My Holiday,” p. 132, directly claims that Lockhart entered into collaboration with the children in Pine Flat, as she had done previously for the photographic portrait series related to her project Teatro Amazonas. She continues: “In the tradition of a late-­nineteenth or early-­twentieth-­century portrait photographer, Lockhart opened this studio in a barn in the center of town. The children could come to the studio whenever they wanted and have their portraits taken as they were, and Lockhart has said she particularly relished the ways in which this open studio setup recapitulated her initial encounter with the children, as a result of their approaching her. So that they could see the results of each shoot almost immediately, Lockhart used a large-­format camera with the capacity to make Polaroids, which she would show to the children, as well as 4 x 5 negatives of the same frame.” Halbreich, “Sharon Lockhart and James Benning.” Lockhart described her way into the project in this 2006 conversation as follows: “I was interested in this idea of the ‘town photographer’ and setting up a portrait studio that was a different kind of social space in the town that people could come to . . . which was . . . the beginning of photography and it’s kind of died.” She attests that she was, however, making the film for a year and a half before opening the “portrait studio.” This unrealized project is attested to by Linda Norden, who commissioned what became Pine Flat for exhibition at Harvard University. The Beauviala portrait project was Lockhart’s initial proposal. See Norden, “So Here’s My Holiday,” p. 129, and “Linda Norden in Conversation with Sharon Lockhart,” Rudzienko (Toronto, CA: TPW Gallery, 2016), p. 3, available at http://archive.gallerytpw.ca/wp-­content/uploads/2016/09/Lockhart-­interview-­ Web-­Ready-­1.pdf. For a recent account of the debates on cinema around the events of May ’68, see Tom McDonough, “Cinema at a Standstill,” October, no. 177 (Summer 2021), pp. 79–­95. Wood, “Entr’acte,” p. 137. Small Change is replete with other scenes that reflect on the structures of the cinematic and the photographic within the film, such as the various moments when Truffaut deploys a photographic freeze-­frame, or when the children visit the local movie theater, or watch a projectionist, or—­a key scene—­when their teacher attempts and fails to operate his Rolleiflex camera at the birth of his first child. Some of the set photography from Truffaut’s production of this scene records a similar approach to the children, which might also have influenced Lockhart’s framing—­I am thinking of images that exist by the photographer Christian Simonpietri. On this shift from the private to a public basis for the meaning of the work of art after minimalism, see Rosalind Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility: Reflection on Post-­’60s Sculpture,” Artforum 12, no. 3 (November 1973), pp. 43–­5 2. The characterization here of memory as “solipsistic” comes from Krauss. Martin, “Documentary Theater,” p. 20. Many students over the years have responded to the Goshogaoka images when I teach them as reading cinematically—­as in dialogue with Japanese cinema and the nation’s apocalyptic histories and mass-­cultural fantasies, in the wake of the country’s nuclear bombing at the end of the Second World War. To the extent this reading could be supported, it connects the Goshogaoka photographs to other series by Lockhart, like the earlier Shaun, 1993, that borrowed conventions from melodrama and horror-­film aesthetics.

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 artin, “Documentary Theater,” p. 20. M More recently, Lockhart has spoken to her engagement with ethnography in the early work: When I first started my engagement with anthropology, it was among a number of discourses centered on the issue of objectivity in representation. What drew me to it was the fact that no matter how objective photographers and filmmakers attempted to be, the more obvious it was that their subjectivity slipped into the discussion. . . . In my early work, I was looking for any methodology I could employ to both engage the idea of the document and then somehow undermine it. I was drawn to both the ways in which any photographic or cinematic representation was somehow a document and how those representations were somehow a construction. My first film was an odd conflation of medical photography and Cassevettian melodrama. My early photographic series also tested the relationship between constructions and documents. . . . When I really began to engage anthropological or ethnological image making, it was because I thought it was a genre filled with paradoxes and inconsistencies that would generate interesting conflicts. I wouldn’t consider Goshogaoka or Teatro Amazonas successful as anthropological constructions. They were never meant to be that. I don’t think I would even know how to judge them on those terms.













See Lucien Castaing-­Taylor, “Interview with Sharon Lockhart 2015, Chapter One,” Herb Alpert Awards in the Arts, accessed June 4, 2020, https://herbalpertawards.org/artist/chapter-­one-­1. 52 Norman Bryson, “From Form to Flux,” in Sharon Lockhart (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2001), p. 82. 53 Bryson, p. 84. Clearly, Bryson’s terms “counterpresence,” “absorption,” and “inadvertent” photography demand comparison to Michael Fried’s subsequent work on photography. Bryson’s essay is from 2000–­2001, emerging prior to Fried’s now well-­known book on contemporary art photography, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). Bryson’s text is a crucial essay and deserves to be better known. 5 4 Bryson, “From Form to Flux,” p. 88. 55 Bryson, p. 88. 5 6 Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-­Brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (1965; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 57 Timothy Martin, “Documentary Theater,” pp. 18–­19. As an aside, it is important to note that Martin was a teacher of Lockhart’s during her time as an MFA student at the ArtCenter College of Design, in Pasadena. There, she also worked with figures like Mike Kelley, whose Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction series—­performance videos based on photographs of students sourced from American high school yearbooks—­has much in common or in dialogue with Lockhart’s Untitled Studies series. Kelley would use these high school images as he worked toward the more monumental project Day Is Done, 2005–­6. However, Lockhart’s use of childhood photographs as image “models” for later reenactment and performance predates Kelley’s emphatic turn to similar tactics, inverting the expected teacher-­student dynamic. Clearly there are earlier works by Kelley to which Lockhart’s work on nostalgia and memory responds. Kelley’s work becomes a perhaps surprising precursor, then, to many of the feminist strategies at question in the transformation of photography and film traced in this account, from Zoe Leonard to Lockhart. 58 The orphic dimension of this turn away from the camera, which I am reading as a turning “back” to the past, could be stressed. It is one of the founding metaphors of Kaja Silverman’s initial study of analogy, Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); see especially her chapter “Orpheus Rex” and her study of similar poses in the chapter on the work of painter Gerhard Richter, “Photography by Other Means.” 59 There is little “proof ” that Lockhart sees her Untitled Studies series as intimately connected to the Pine Flat project; rarely seen or reproduced prior to the making of Pine Flat, as if they were in fact “private,” the Untitled Study works have hardly been discussed, and the artist has not commented on any such relation. In recent years, she has increasingly allowed their exhibition. However, it is suggestive that prior to this loosening, the largest grouping of the rephotographed snapshots that to my knowledge had ever been reproduced appear at the back of the catalogue Pine Flat, Sharon Lockhart (Charta), along with the rephotographed

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commercial portraits of Lockhart herself, and a sampling of other early images like the Untitled works of 1995 and 1996. I owe thanks to Tom Gunning for pressing the comparison of the Auditions series to Warhol’s Screen Tests with me, during a seminar/conference entitled “Still Moving,” in Norway in 2008. Howard Singerman explores the comparison of Warhol with Lockhart in his essay “Discipline and Movement,” in Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol, pp. 37–­40. In the wake of Pine Flat, Lockhart will explore similar territory for the photograph with the “portraits” of workers made for the project Lunch Break—­by turning away from recording their faces and features and instead photographing the lunch boxes they carried to work each day, imaging these receptacles outside and in. The photographs in the series Lunch Boxes present “subjects” envisioned through containers filled with smaller containers inside others, like Russian dolls, with each lunch box “individualized” in their sameness through inscriptions—­ stickers and other impressions on their surface, on their outside. Each worker portrait also creates thereby a portrait of photography, too, as Lockhart understands it. Written originally before the present book’s emergence, I am placing these thoughts in more explicit dialogue now with Silverman’s recent account The Miracle of Analogy, or The History of Photography, Part 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). But this description of attunement emerged from my longer dialogue with her evolving thinking on analogy and the relational, from the books World Spectators to Flesh of My Flesh, a dialogue concretized and made public in the interview “Primal Siblings: George Baker in Conversation with Kaja Silverman,” Artforum 48, no. 6 (February 2010), pp. 176–­83. Mark Godfrey explores the multivalency of Lockhart’s title in his essay “The Flatness of Pine Flat.” See also the essay by Dominic Molon, “The Delicate Structure of the Everyday,” in Sharon Lockhart (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago), appearing prior to the creation of Pine Flat, where the curator describes the simultaneously “detached and intimate” aspect of Lockhart’s formal languages (p. 13). Molon, “The Delicate Structure of the Everyday,” p. 14. Bryson notes the “careful adjustment of scale” in the two photographs; see Bryson, “From Form to Flux,” p. 84. This dynamic recurs in Lockhart’s work, becoming recognizable as one of her photographic strategies, in ways to which I will return. It seems to begin here, in the Lily and Jochen diptych. Allen has described the origins of her work with Lockhart; see Becky Allen and Michel Assenmaker, “About Teatro Amazonas of Sharon Lockhart: Fragments of a Conversation,” Gallery Newspaper Jan Mot, no. 20 (November–­December 1999), available at https://janmot. com/files/020_jan-­mot-­newspaper.pdf: “The first film I worked on was Khalil, Shaun, A Woman Under the Influence with Sharon. Our friendship began a year or so before we started collaborating in 1992. We lived together in a loft in downtown LA with several other artists and we eventually started working together. For this film, I composed a simple melodic piano piece, influenced by some of Satie’s piano works and the film soundtracks of John Cassavetes. Very different from Teatro Amazonas. Prior to this film, I had also worked on several student films while at California Institute of the Arts where I received my Master’s Degree in music composition. Teatro Amazonas is actually our third collaboration. We also worked on a country song together, Crush on Du sort of a spoof of country music with some ironic German phrases tossed into the mix. My part was that of the country singer.” Sharon Lockhart, “1000 Words,” interview by Yilmaz Dziewior, Artforum 38, no. 6 (February 2000), p. 105. All citations in this paragraph are from Allen and Assenmaker, “About Teatro Amazonas of Sharon Lockhart.” Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary Innes (London: Penguin, 1955), book 3, p. 84. Lockhart, work notes shared with the author, unpublished. There are now other contenders for Lockhart’s most “musical” single-­image photograph. In 2011, for example, she photographed Pete Seeger’s banjo, as an object portrait or homage. Wood, “Entr’acte,” p. 139. Lockhart quoted in Wood, “Entr’acte,” pp. 137–­38. Wood, “Entr’acte,” p. 137. Kathy Halbreich, “Chance Operations: Growing Up in Pine Flat,” in Pine Flat, Sharon Lockhart (Charta), p. 126, writes beautifully of the scale adjustments in the photographs: “In the final images, all the children rather miraculously occupy the same proportion of the photographic

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frame. . . . When the photographs are lined up, this strangely egalitarian composition makes it difficult to distinguish the ages of the children, robbing each of them of some small distinction and creating a system of unnatural similarities.” In one of the more misguided and hostile “reviews” of Pine Flat published upon its first exhibition, Jerry Saltz seemed not to realize that the portrait photographs often captured the same child more than once, at different ages. The critic also compared Lockhart’s photographic aesthetic unfavorably to Sander’s and Disfarmer’s portraits, not recognizing the direct appropriation of Disfarmer’s language the project instead involved. See Jerry Saltz, “She’s Not There,” Village Voice, June 1, 2006, available at http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/ saltz/saltz6–­2-­06.asp. I am pointing to the reading and terminology of Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-­Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). It is Mark Godfrey who has pursued the analogy of Lockhart’s work with modernist painting most interestingly, in his essay “The Flatness of Pine Flat,” pp. 112–­17. This is a reading he has undone in his later essays on Lockhart, as discussed above. The oppositions structuring each episode of Pine Flat were clarified by discussion with participants in my fall 2019 UCLA seminar “Photography’s Expanded Field,” after a screening of Lockhart’s film. And these signifiers like the harmonica and rifle in individual episodes are precisely those that most often also signal the transformed reflexive conditions of Lockhart’s project: the rifle echoing the camera, the harmonica echoing the filmstrip, but also the book and its turned pages in Reader pointing to another serial, framed structure of progression, no matter how slow or “slowed,” or the water in Creek or the rain in Guns in Rain pointing to the liquidity of analogue mediums, their developing baths and chemicals. This can be continued for each and every episode of the film: the activity of Sleeper pointing to and redoubling photographic stillness and filmic duration; or Bus and other episodes to the photographic conditions of waiting, to “take” an image or to have it be developed and thus seen; or Kissing to photographic and filmic issues of contact and doubling, “indexicality” in a new form. A personal anecdote underlines the transformation of the staged image here: I had been thinking about The Testing of Assumptions for some time before I attended closely, as one should always do, to Lockhart’s long-­form title for the series. As the series, like so many of Lockhart’s photographs, seeks to document work but also amounts to a kind of portrait, I suddenly realized with a kind of shock that the painting conservator here was not anonymous, and that Glenn Gates was in fact one of my childhood friends, someone with whom I had grown up and gone to school, someone with whom I had in fact once been close. I had been looking at images of an old friend for a long time without realizing this. As with what Roland Barthes says about the photographic “punctum,” the staged image suddenly had a very powerful connection to the “real” for me, a subjective horizon that increased its power and urgency in completely unexpected ways. The opposition of staged image and photographic document, of the double and the index, fell here for me in a quite direct and palpable sense. Mark Godfrey reads the series as insisting in the end on the differences between the mediums involved, painting and photography, with each attesting to what the other cannot do. See Godfrey, “Photography And,” p. 83. The comparison that would have to be explored here would be Michael Fried’s extension of his ideas on absorption to the photographs of Jeff Wall, and specifically his recent claims for Wall’s photograph Adrian Walker, Artist, Drawing from a Specimen in a Laboratory in the Department of Anatomy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1992, a comparison that I suspect would pit the Lockhart series against Wall’s photographic tableau in each and every particular. See Fried, “Jeff Wall and Absorption,” in Why Photography Matters as Art, pp. 37–­62. Since Mark Godfrey’s early account, many critics have attempted to engage Fried’s ideas on absorption to think further about Lockhart’s work; see Singerman, “Discipline and Movement,” pp. 37–­40; Norden, “So Here’s My Holiday,” pp. 128–­3 2; and Sabine Eckmann, “Times and Places to Rest,” in Lunch Break, pp. 23–­29. Godfrey, “Photography And,” p. 84. In this chapter I have been bracketing one of the crucial ways that Lockhart has achieved what Godfrey describes here, which is through another collaboration—­ enlisting the expertise of the architects Escher GuneWardena (Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena, an architect couple themselves working in collaboration) to design the physical spaces or projection surfaces for the majority of her installations, photographs, and films.

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 odfrey points to this in “Photography And,” p. 85. G An earlier photographic series enacted the connection between the compositional oblique and this image structure of incompleteness, of something lying always off-­screen or beyond the frame: Lockhart’s reflexively titled On Kawara: Whole and Parts, 1964–­95, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, January 24–­April 5, 1998, 1998. Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art. To confront Fried’s influential text exceeds the parameters of my own project, but in the terms explored here, Fried’s extension of his own earlier modernist criticism to contemporary debates on photography clearly needs to be framed through the lens of nostalgia. Perhaps significantly, Walter Benjamin’s writings on photography come to be dominated by fabric and textile metaphors, to which I will turn in the next chapter. See, for example, Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” (1931), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–­1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). Mark Godfrey analyzes the literalization of absorption, its “theatricality”—­to use another of Fried’s terms—­and thus in some sense its cancellation, in Lockhart’s various Duane Hanson series (Lunch Break Installation had been preceded by another series, Maja and Elodie, 2002, that also combined living figures with the inanimate realist sculptures); see Godfrey, “Photography And,” p. 83. The subjects of these two Hanson series—­workers and children—­replay in miniature the central topoi of Lockhart’s larger projects. Frances Stark, “Not Church, Not School, Not Home,” in Pine Flat, Sharon Lockhart (Charta), pp. 134–­36. For an important reconsideration of the dynamics of identification and identity, see Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995). Catherine Wood has been one of the few critics to assert this about the Pine Flat project, seeing it as a “form of substituted self-­portrait.” See Wood, “Entr’acte,” p. 139. Double Tide focuses on the work of a female clam digger named Jen Casad, working on an extraordinary and rare day in which there would be two low tides, two moments for the harvesting by hand of the seafood that Maine is now known for, economically speaking, like the shipbuilding at the center of Lockhart’s Lunch Break. The film thus records her at the liminal moments of dawn and dusk, between day and night and the inverse. Documenting a fading form of labor, connected to manual work and to nature, Double Tide would be the film by Lockhart that brings the appropriationist and the constructed image maker closest to what might seem the different concerns of an artist like Tacita Dean (who, coincidentally, was herself in Maine at the same time as the production of Lockhart’s film). For like Dean’s film Boots with its old man, a kind of stand-­in for the artist, and all the other films about aging men that Dean has made since—­which can all be read as strange, displaced, gender-­flipping and time-­traveling self-­portraits—­Double Tide is evidently and inescapably to be read in the tradition now, for Lockhart, of what I have called the displaced self-­portrait or “other-­portrait.” Like so many of the artist’s photographs, if it too calls up the history of painting and its thematics of theatricality or absorption, it does so in a special, almost manifesto-­like or programmatic way. For Double Tide does evoke Caravaggio’s Narcissus, ca. 1597–­99, but only to invert the solipsism of the myth. Bent over the waters in her labors, Casad is presented by the film in the guise of the double, seemingly like Narcissus in the guise of self-­love, in the guise of the way the pictorial tradition depended on mimesis and the copy as a kind of enclosure from the world, a process of separating off art from simply being the “ape of nature”—­a history and a set of cultural anxieties in which photography had a crucial role to play. But instead of all this, what we are given in Double Tide actually amounts to a stand-­in for the artist; a deep connection between work and nature; between film time and cosmic or earthly rhythms; a series of doubles, in other words, that are extensions, connections, echoes, and attunements. Casad is a graphic artist of serious ambition, whose drawings resemble black-­and-­white photography; her works have been shown at, for example, the Alexandre Gallery, in New York. Of the motivations for her images, Casad would be quoted in a newspaper article (“Our Maine Woman,” in the New Maine Times, May 23, 2012) speaking of the deep connection between man and nature that she seeks to represent, and that fishermen often embody. Clam digging, in the mud and in the bog, in the crepuscular moments of a double tide, at dawn and at dusk, between night and day, day and night, between cinema and photography, film and painting, self and other, nature and culture: in Lockhart’s work, again, oppositions come everywhere undone.

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 avey tells the story of the button-­vendor photographs in the interview “Accidents among the D Slow Things: Adam Szymczyk Interviews Moyra Davey,” in Moyra Davey: Speaker Receiver, ed. Adam Szymczyk (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel; New York: Sternberg Press, 2010), p. 142: “One last instance of ‘accident’: I have a button phobia—­the psychoanalytic understanding is that buttons, because they are close to the skin, have a scatological association—­and then one day I happened to come across a storefront in a very unlikely place, a little marina island in the Bronx called City Island, that was filled with boxes of hundreds of thousands of old, dirty buttons. I photographed them out of morbid fascination.” Moyra Davey, Burn the Diaries (Brooklyn: Dancing Foxes Press, 2014), p. 31. Jess T. Dugan, “Conversation with Moyra Davey,” Big Red and Shiny 1, no. 79 (April 2008), http://www.bigredandshiny.org/4125/a-­conversation-­with-­moyra-­davey/. In a recent statement on her working methods, Davey writes in a similar vein: “I find the image of Miss Havisham inspirational: She is surrounded by cobwebs and decay, but she lives on, insulated by the accretions of time, alive in death[,] so to speak. Dust, the mausoleum, the library: all are collections. One of the ways we make our peace with impermanence is by holding on to the famous dead, their remains entombed in cemetery-­gardens, their words and images enshrined in books.” See Davey, “Channeling,” in The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology, ed. Dieter Roelstraete (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 91. The preceding year, Davey rephotographed $10 and $100 bills for a still-­lesser-­known series entitled simply Banknotes, 1989, alighting on specific, often narrative details in the engravings imprinted on the currency paper. Moyra Davey, artist’s statement in Copperheads (Toronto: Bywater Bros. Editions, 2010), n.p. In this statement, Davey clarifies that the ideas on potlatch contributed to the series’ title, which “comes from the Kwakiutl and Haida ritual of tossing ‘armloads of coppers into the sea.’” Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art,” Artforum 21, no. 1 (September 1982), pp. 43–­56; Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October, no. 12 (Spring 1980), pp. 67–­86, and October, no. 13 (Summer 1980), pp. 58–­80. Helen Molesworth stresses the “excremental” reading of the Copperheads in “Long Life Cool White: An Introduction to Moyra Davey,” in Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays by Moyra Davey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 2008), pp. 11–­12. Davey, artist’s statement in Copperheads. In her interview with curator Adam Szymczyk, the artist speaks of the larger motivations of her copy-­stand photographs and use of a macro lens; see “Accidents among the Slow Things,” p. 142–­44: “All these things—­buttons, pennies, dust, with their scatological associations that lead us to the body—­are clearly memento mori. It’s a known paradox that the camera loves to enact its transformation on the abject—­like Irving Penn’s cigarette butts—­but I don’t think that’s why I gravitate to these subjects. I’m interested in what close looking reveals about the world. I’ve been doing this macro-­looking for a long time: at toes and women’s faces on 19th-­century tintypes in the 1980s; at money in the 1990s; at names and titles on record spines, the dregs in coffee cups, and Métro tickets with handwritten notes to the dead more recently. My approach to the photograph is essentially Barthesian, in that it’s about mortality.” Davey admits to the flea-­market finds at coin dealers in “Accidents among the Slow Things,” p. 142. Molesworth, “Long Life Cool White,” p. 12. Asked by Adam Szymczyk about the absence of people in her photographs, but also the role of the conventional idea of landscape or nature in them as well, Davey responded in a related way: “I’d say ‘landscape’ and ‘nature’ are conspicuously absent from my photographs—­though I sometimes refer to Floor, 2003, as a ‘desert landscape under a bed.’” See “Accidents among the Slow Things,” p. 145. As this chapter will eventually turn to Davey’s moving-­image works, it bears noting that her making of a publication that acts like a flip-­book enacts and alters the scene we see most often in all of her videos in recent years: the artist filming her own hands and fingers while flipping through images in a book, or through photographs in albums of her own working prints. I want to remember here the notion of “Oedipal fatigue,” previously described in relation to the aged men represented in artist Tacita Dean’s film works, as phrased in the original essay version of the current project; see “Lateness and Longing,” in 50 Moons of Saturn: T2 Torino Triennale,

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ed. Daniel Birnbaum (Milan: Skira, 2008), pp. 74–­75: “In Oedipal fatigue one does not return to the father as origin and as progenitor; instead Oedipal fatigue gives witness to the running down and the old age of subjectivity. Now, the father abdicates his role and is no longer a patriarch, nor a symbolic avatar of ‘patria’—­nation or homeland. Instead, Oedipal fatigue emerges like a Deleuzian ‘line of flight,’ an evacuation of symbolic authority, and with it the father becomes—­ through sheer exhaustion—­an exile and a wanderer, displaced from a symbolic domain. Often occasioned by the softening of age, and even more by the confrontation with one’s mortality, Oedipal fatigue transforms the father from a figure of Law and renunciation, of punishment and retribution, into something else: a repository, perhaps; a ‘human treasure,’ at times; a ruin, ultimately, like Walter Benjamin’s vision of the same, ‘merging with the setting’ or with nature. Oedipal fatigue presents us with the ruins of the father, and these ruins can be wonderfully capacious, giving, and open.” All of these thoughts should be associated now with Davey’s Copperheads series. Davey, artist’s statement in Copperheads. On the interplay of photography and cinema in contemporary art, see my essay “Photography’s Expanded Field,” October, no. 114 (Fall 2005), pp. 120–­40. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” (1931), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–­1934, Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 519. Benjamin, p. 518. Benjamin, pp. 518, 517. The “seeping” Benjamin here describes adds liquid metaphors to the fabric ones being discussed, and these are the essay’s two great recurrent metaphorical chains. I discuss both at more length in an essay related to this chapter; see my “Photography and the Philosophers,” in What Is Photography?, ed. Carol Squiers (New York: International Center of Photography, 2014). Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” p. 517. Benjamin, p. 514. Benjamin, p. 527. Ken Johnson, “Moyra Davey, American Fine Arts,” New York Times, December 19, 2003. I write about my own visit to this specific gallery exhibition in an earlier text; see “Some Things Moyra Taught Me,” Frieze, no. 130 (April 2010), pp. 19–­20. Davey, “Notes on Photography and Accident,” in Long Life Cool White, p. 85. Dugan, “Conversation with Moyra Davey.” See, in this regard, the first footnote to chap. 4, for the project on photography and writing brought to fruition by Davey and Zoe Leonard a few years after this interview, and their definition of the “symbiosis” of the two activities. This connection is not random or willful, of course, on Davey’s part; it is part of the longer history of the photograph, the book being an origin point for its initial display. On this origin, see, for example, Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–­ 1875 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). Davey articulates precisely this origin in “Notes on Photography and Accident,” p. 92: “Photographs have been embedded in books almost from day one, beginning with Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature, and they continue to be happy companions. I’m convinced that reproducibility in book form is part of the vocabulary of the photograph.” Moyra Davey, The Problem of Reading (Los Angeles: Documents, 2003), p. 7. Davey, p. 16. Davey, pp. 5, 16. Davey, p. 29. Davey, p. 38. One should beware of assuming that Davey’s images of light falling on objects in darkened spaces is a “natural” or realistic effect; that it can be constructed cinematically, through scrims and artificial lighting, seems to be asserted in one of the recent films, titled Horizontal and Vertical Biography, 2006, that Davey has made for the annual “One Minute Film and Video Festival” that her partner Jason Simon organized (originally with artist Mark Dion) each summer in upstate New York, from 2003 to 2012. See Jason Simon, The One Minute Film Festival (North Adams, MA: MASS MoCA, 2014). It is worth remembering in relation to this image by Davey that, prior to writing Camera Lucida, Barthes introduced the ideas that would lead to his notion of the punctum in an essay on Eisenstein. See Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning (Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills),” in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 52–­68. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” p. 527.

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 n this “video epilogue to the film Greed,” see the beautiful essay by Bill Horrigan, “Bibliopolis,” O in Moyra Davey: Speaker Receiver, pp. 125–­38; the photo collage the artists made of the project for Documents 1, no. 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 20–­27; and the essay responses to the project in Documents, again by Horrigan, “Need as in Greed,” pp. 28–­30, and Mark Seltzer, “Dead Again: The Series,” pp. 31–­3 5. Duggan, “Conversation with Moyra Davey.” Davey, Problem of Reading, p. 33. It is not the only time, however; Davey also includes several now canonical photographs by James Welling of the inside of a diary from his series Diary of Elizabeth and James Dixon (1840–­41) / Connecticut Landscapes, 1977–­86, another family heirloom. In other works, like her video Fifty Minutes, 2006, or photographic installations like the Calendar of Flowers, Gin Bottles, Steak Bones, 2008, Davey often depicts the act of reading itself: the open book, a reader flipping pages. Moyra Davey, ed., Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), p. xvi. More recently, Davey has published a pamphlet/essay, returning to the Mother Reader, responding in a way to a prompt by critic Elisabeth Lebovici, who wondered whose thoughts on motherhood Davey would include if she redid her project today. Significantly, Davey begins this text with a long exploration of the work and words of artist Frances Stark, whose reading of Sharon Lockhart’s Pine Flat in terms of motherhood was explored in the last chapter. See Moyra Davey, Mothers, pamphlet, edition of five hundred (London: greengrassi, 2015), for the exhibition You’re a nice guy to let me hold you like this, 2015. After the video was produced, in 2006, Davey turned increasingly to moving-­image works and to writing, and to new photographic formats like her folded and thus internally fragmented “aerograms,” photographs sent like letters through the mail, covered in tape, stamps, postmarks, and writing. Domestic photographs would still appear, indeed sometimes in great quantity, but the video announced a turn in the artist’s work that is beyond the immediate purview of this chapter. It is the author’s hope that the foundation for reading Davey’s project laid out here can serve as a platform for extending this reading into the later projects, and to works like My Necropolis, 2009, or Les Goddesses, 2011, and the works and forms that have followed. Davey, “Fifty Minutes (Video Transcript),” in Long Life Cool White, p. 121. Davey, p. 122. Elisabeth Lebovici, “Moyra Davey,” BOMB, no. 129 (Fall 2014), p. 34. The work in question was rephotographed and made into a new work for the exhibition You’re a nice guy to let me hold you like this, at greengrassi, London, 2015. Entitled Dr. Y., Dr. Y., 2014 (the name given to Davey’s psychoanalyst in the work Fifty Minutes), the piece involves a grid of photographs sent through the mail that reconstitute internally another grid or array of photographs—­the scenes of pregnancy and excretion described in Davey’s interview—­a double fragmentation and recombination echoed by the written line that calls out from within the rephotographed scene, from Anne Sexton’s 1978 collection of poems, Words for Dr. Y.: “Why else keep a journal, if not to examine your own filth?” I remark here that Davey’s title for the greengrassi show in 2015 returns to her concerns throughout with what she calls “maternal holding,” and the line is from a conversation (reported in the pamphlet Mothers) that she had after hugging her now adult son, the show thus titled after a larger concern with motherhood and the maternal. Lebovici, “Moyra Davey,” p. 34. Davey, “Fifty Minutes (Video Transcript),” p. 122. Davey’s passage here continues: “Once every ten days or so the fridge fills up with food and the Sisyphean cycle of ordering and chewing our way through it all begins anew. This rodentlike behavior is my metaphor for domestic survival: digging our way out, either from the contents of the fridge, or from the dust and grit and hair that clog the place; or sloughing our way through the never-­ending, proliferating piles of paper, clothing, and toys” (pp. 122–­23). Davey, “Notes on Photography and Accident,” p. 81. These new kinds of photographic series and installation practices seem to concretize the Benjaminian notion of a critical “constellation.” The writer Chris Kraus has written beautifully on the many “constellations” that Davey’s aligned work in photography, writing, and video performs; see Kraus, “Description over Plot,” in Moyra Davey: Speaker Receiver, pp. 37–­5 2. Davey, Mother Reader, p. xviii. Davey, Problem of Reading, p. 41. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 73. That Barthes explores a “maternal” model of photography has been

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asserted most eloquently by the recent essays of Carol Armstrong; see, for example, “Cupid’s Pencil of Light: Julia Margaret Cameron and the Maternalization of Photography,” October, no. 76 (Spring 1996), pp. 114–­41. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 73. In a luminous passage, Barthes links the figures of nostalgia and the mother and makes both central to his understanding of photography: “For me, photographs . . . must be habitable, not visitable. This longing to inhabit, if I observe it clearly in myself, is neither oneiric (I do not dream of some extravagant site) nor empirical (I do not intend to buy a house according to the views of a real-­estate agency); it is fantasmatic, deriving from a kind of second sight which seems to bear me forward to a utopian time, or to carry me back to somewhere in myself: a double movement which Baudelaire celebrated in Invitation au voyage and La Vie antérieure. Looking at these landscapes of predilection, it is as if I were certain of having been there or of going there. Now Freud says of the maternal body that ‘there is no other place of which one can say with so much certainty that one has already been there.’ Such then would be the essence of the landscape (chosen by desire): Heimlich, awakening in me the Mother (and never the disturbing Mother).” See Barthes, p. 40. I am relying here and in the passages that follow on the brilliant reading of Camera Lucida by Margaret Olin, “Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’ ‘Mistaken’ Identification,” Representations 80 (Autumn 2002), pp. 99–­118. On the connections between Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Benjamin’s “Little History,” see Geoffrey Batchen, “Camera Lucida: Another Little History of Photography,” in The Meaning of Photography, ed. Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 76–­91. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 53. Barthes, p. 53. Or, in the case of the image of the VHS tapes, titled Barney’s Collection, 1999, we seem to be shown objects passed down from another paternal figure, Jason Simon’s uncle, the South African playwright and director Barney Simon. Barney is also the name of Davey’s son, but we are shown a drawer full of keepsakes belonging to Simon’s uncle in Davey’s video Fifty Minutes, and the old tapes—­which include Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen, and John Cassavetes movies—­are not likely to belong to a young boy, no matter how precocious and extraordinary. In interviews and statements, Davey has spoken about her own love for vinyl records and for collecting LPs, as opposed to just books. But again, one of the most beautiful scenes in Fifty Minutes shows Jason Simon reading a book, recumbent on a kind of couch that rocks, set up in front of a wall of shelves stuffed with nothing but old vinyl records—­associating this collection with him, again. Davey’s alliance of the photograph with the world of analogue sound equipment has been written about most deeply by Eric Rosenberg, “Dust on the Needle: Moyra Davey’s Phono/ Photographics,” in Moyra Davey: Speaker Receiver, pp. 101–­24. Kaja Silverman, “The Author as Receiver,” October, no. 96 (Spring 2001), pp. 17–­34. I am indebted here again to Silverman’s reflections on analogy—­initially, when this chapter was first written, through her text Flesh of My Flesh (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). One can now turn as well to The Miracle of Analogy, or The History of Photography, Part 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). With this reading, I am following for one last time the talismanic value that Davey seems to attribute to her refrigerator photographs; see again Dugan, “Conversation with Moyra Davey,” and the passage about these photographs quoted above. If I continually refer to “talismanic” images for Davey, this is because the word is part of her own lexicon, borrowed in this case from Susan Sontag. See, for example, Davey, “Notes on Photography and Accident,” p. 94: “All of these images, the ones at hand and the ones remembered, become part of a psychic landscape; they feed a fantasy, have what Sontag calls a ‘talismanic’ quality.” Davey, “Notes on Photography and Accident,” pp. 118–­19. All of these remarks come from “Accidents among the Slow Things,” p. 141. Davey makes the direct connection between her title Speaker Receiver and the operation of her video Fifty Minutes again in another interview; see “Reading Is Writing,” interview by Gigiotto del Vecchio, Mousse, no. 26 (November 2010), p. 44. The idea of the author as receiver has also been discussed explicitly in Davey’s interview with Lebovici; see “Moyra Davey,” BOMB, pp. 31–­3 2: “Since your exhibition Speaker Receiver at the Kunsthalle Basel,” Lebovici says to the artist, “I am struck by the variety of ways you position yourself, not only as somebody who makes images and who ‘writes them,’ but also as someone who actually receives images and writing. To me, it positions you as one of us.” To which Davey responds: “I would like to be ‘one of you’ more of the time! I have not written a statement or essay in a while. . . . But yes, the notion of a receiver, someone

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who collects, who has things fall into her lap, accidents, all of which I try to filter, has become a useful device. I take the most salient aspects, the things that speak to me most strongly.” Since my first drafting of this chapter’s initial version, Davey has continued to work in the mode of video, intensifying the formal strategies of Fifty Minutes, so this claim would now need to be qualified—­as this “expanded photograph” has been joined by many others. In her self-­statement “Channeling,” p. 91, Davey writes: “My point of departure when I make something is almost always an archeology of the self. The Copperhead series originated in my personal hang-­ups around money; all the photographs of dust (on vinyl, on bookshelves, the arid desert under my bed) are linked to some notion of entropy, the idea that dust is memento mori. Conscious or not, the drive behind this work is a preoccupation with mortality.” Calling her work an “excavating [of] the self,” Davey continues: “This interpolation of the self is nowhere more evident than in the videos I’ve made, but (hopefully) the problem of narcissism is mitigated by my efforts to shape connections to the larger world.” Davey, “Fifty Minutes: Video Transcript,” p. 126. Davey is reading from Vivian Gornick, “Reading in an Age of Uncertainty,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 20, 2001. Davey, p. 126. Davey, p. 128. Davey, p. 133. Davey, p. 134. Here Davey has moved from Ginzburg’s novel Voices in the Evening to the text “The Son of Man,” in Natalia Ginzburg, A Place to Live and Other Selected Essays, trans. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002). Davey, “Fifty Minutes: Video Transcript,” p. 137. Davey, p. 137. Davey, p. 139. Davey, p. 130. Davey, “Notes on Photography and Accident,” p. 119. Davey, pp. 115–­16. Molesworth, “Long Life Cool White,” p. 17. Davey, “Notes on Photography and Accident,” pp. 106–­7.

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 ee Jean Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes 54 (1966), p. 96, and Svetlana Boym, The S Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 5. For a longer history of this tactic, linked to the occupation of nostalgia today, one could point again to Walter Benjamin, and his thoughts on surrealism and the outmoded. This aspect of Benjamin’s thinking has been explored most productively by Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 157–­91, 209–­13. I have written a related account of the queering of the discourse on melancholia in the recent work of sculptor Tom Burr; see “The Other Side of the Wall,” October, no. 120 (Spring 2007), pp. 106–­37. Paul Chan, “Letter to Young Artists during a Global Pandemic,” 4Columns, May 15, 2020, https://4columns.org/chan-­paul/letter-­to-­young-­artists-­during-­a-­global-­pandemic. Chan’s text was originally delivered as an online lecture to Hunter College MFA students at the end of April 2020. Karl Kraus, “Der sterbende Mensch” [The dying man], in Worte in Versen, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1919). Both Benjamin and Adorno grappled with this phrase by Kraus, with Benjamin citing it in his crucial late essay, formerly translated as “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” as an epigraph to his well-­known fragment on Jetztzeit, or “now-­time,” and the dialectical image. See Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–­1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 395. Adorno inverts and thus negates Kraus’s dictum in his text Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), pp. 155–­56, predicting Chan’s action upon the same words: “Karl Kraus’s line ‘The origin is the goal’ sounds conservative, but it also expresses something that was scarcely meant when the line was uttered: namely, that the concept ‘origin’ ought to be stripped of its static mischief. Understood this way, the line does not mean that the goal had better make its way back to the origin, to the phantasm

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of ‘good’ nature; it means that nothing is original except the goal, that it is only from the goal that the origin will constitute itself. There is no origin save in ephemeral life.” Ben Hutchinson, Lateness and Modern European Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 2. Hutchinson devotes a chapter of his important book to fin de siècle Vienna and lateness; see “‘Fin de Siècle and No End’: The Austrian Art of Being Late,” pp. 214–­34. He confronts Kraus and his play The Last Days of Mankind (1919) specifically in the chapter “Lateness as ‘Eschatology’: Futurism, Expressionism, Decadent Modernism”; see, especially, pp. 319 and after. Harrison C. White and Cynthia A. White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (1965; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). The Frankfurt conference and its proceedings have been published; see Daniel Birnbaum and Isabelle Graw, eds., Canvases and Careers Today: Criticism and Its Markets (Frankfurt: Institut für Kunstkritik; New York: Sternberg Press, 2008). The proceedings include a severe critique of my idea of late criticism by the artist Merlin Carpenter. My response would be a work of what I see as late criticism in an experimental text for a subsequent publication by Carpenter; see “die artist scum,” in Merlin Carpenter: The Opening (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011). Pushing the analogy, I cite once again Jasper Johns on photography, as already cited long ago by Susan Sontag: “An object that tells of the loss, destruction, disappearance of objects. Does not speak of itself. Tells of others. Will it include them?” See Sontag, “A Brief Anthology of Quotations (Homage to W. B.),” in On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 199. This is a point made repeatedly in the roundtable discussions included in James Elkins, ed., The State of Art Criticism (London: Routledge, 2007). Fraser takes this position in her text “What’s Intangible, Transitory, Mediating, and Rendered in the Public Sphere, Part II,” in Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser, ed. Alex Alberro (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). The narrative here of conceptual art’s voiding of the functions of art criticism leans heavily on the claims of conceptual art’s greatest critic and historian, namely Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. In ways that extend beyond the scope of the present text, Buchloh and his larger critical project—­ the relation of his more recent essays to his earlier ones—­might also be taken as a key exemplar now of various dynamics of what I am trying to isolate as the project of “late criticism.” See Buchloh’s remarks on conceptual art and criticism in “Round Table: The Present Conditions of Art Criticism,” October, no. 100 (Spring 2002), pp. 200–­228. “Autonomy,” as I am using the word, obviously needs to be redefined in relation to the transformations of recent historical shifts. In the model to which I am holding, autonomy lies only in the mutual alteration of two fields that interact, and thus mutually (freely) deform each other. Art criticism and art history surely have interacted in this way since the onset of postmodernism. I elaborate on such a model of autonomy in the cinema chapter of my book The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). See George Baker, “An Interview with Paul Chan,” October, no. 123 (Winter 2008), p. 209. Groys takes this position in the group discussions in Elkins, State of Art Criticism. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-­Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 141. This passage directed my thoughts in the essay that preceded this current book project (the book originated from my work on the planned second part of this earlier essay); see “Reanimations (I),” October, no. 104 (Spring 2003), pp. 28–­70. Yamamoto says this in Wenders’s film Notebook on Cities and Clothes, 1989. Wenders’s documentary on Yamamoto has always been a prod to my larger project, given the particular nostalgia forms embraced by this designer; even more crucial, however, was Wenders’s use of Yamamoto’s pronouncements to reflect on subjective identity and the cinema itself. Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven” (1937), in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 564. Edward Said, “Timeliness and Lateness,” in On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (New York: Vintage, 2006), p. 17. Or, as Leo Steinberg long ago put the critic’s dilemma: “It is in the character of the critic to say no more in his best moments than what everyone in the following season repeats; he is the generator of the cliché.” See Steinberg, “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-­Century Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 23.

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 dorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” p. 567. A Stathis Gourgouris, “The Late Style of Edward Said,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 25 (July 2005), p. 168. See Said’s comments on the music of Richard Strauss, in “Return to the Eighteenth Century,” in On Late Style, pp. 45–­46. Rosalind E. Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-­Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000); Thomas Crow, “Unwritten Histories of Conceptual Art: Against Visual Culture,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). Beyond claiming these two essays as examples of late criticism, we could also point to their subjects—­Broodthaers, Williams—­as quintessential “late artists” via the same criteria of a position of “anachronism and anomaly.” Said, “Timeliness and Lateness,” p. 8. Said, p. 13. Said, p. 13. Said, p. 11. Kobena Mercer, “Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary,” as edited and revised in “Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe,” in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 219. I point to Mercer’s canonical writings on Mapplethorpe, specifically the two essays “Imaging the Black Man’s Sex” (1986) and “Skin Head Sex Thing” (1989), for they amount to another signal example of “late criticism,” given Mercer’s development of a reading of Mapplethorpe’s photography over multiple essays in terms we could associate with Barthes and his idea of a critical “palinode”—­a criticism involved in the undoing of one’s own critical reading in each further moment of writing on the work. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” p. 567. Said, “Timeliness and Lateness,” p. 14. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 3; Hal Foster, “This Funeral Is for the Wrong Corpse,” in Design and Crime and Other Diatribes (London: Verso, 2002). Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” p. 566; emphasis mine. Adorno, pp. 566–­67. Adorno, p. 567. Adorno, “Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis” (1959), in Essays on Music, p. 582. Adorno, p. 580; emphasis mine. As an indulgence, I ask that the reader perform one last analogical task, thinking of the parallel and correlation in these final words between photography and criticism again. To read this last paragraph one more time, to repeat it, with “photography” substituted for “criticism” each time the latter word occurs: this would be to position these thoughts as my last in this book on the subject of the expansion of photography as well.

IND E X

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Aaton camera, 257 abandonment, 4, 6, 9, 11–­1 2, 40, 43, 70, 72, 104, 108, 131, 140, 215, 232–­34, 271, 321, 351, 382–­85, 398n15; of the analogue, 238; architectural, 98, 107, 125, 130, 132, 176, 178, 269, 274, 329; of the object, 63; of the paternal function, 233; of photography, 242; self-­, 113 Abbott, Berenice, 99 absorption, 269, 303–­10, 312, 315, 320–­21, 334, 363, 414n53, 416n63, 417n89, 417n93. See also Fried, Michael Adorno, Theodor, xi, 9, 11–­1 2, 15, 62–­63, 70, 72, 95, 243, 377, 379–­82, 384–­8 5, 422n5 affirmation, 294, 358, 378–­79; visual, 252 afterlife, 14, 29, 140, 179, 181, 210, 229, 269–­71, 322, 330, 338, 362, 370, 386; as Nachleben, 9, 30. See also Warburg, Aby Agatha of Sicily, St., 183, 403n12 Agee, James, 274 AIDS crisis, 22, 35, 63, 68–­69, 391n19 Albert, Johann Valentin, 344 Ali, Monica, 359 Allen, Becky, 290–­92, 415n67 Alpers, Svetlana, 69, 392n33, 393n48 anachronism, 6, 9, 12, 14, 23, 35, 39–­40, 50, 94, 96, 128, 131, 169; and Benjamin, Walter, 17; and camera obscura, 29; and film format, 3, 70; of human beings, 133, 145; and lateness, 11, 15, 99, 224, 379, 381–­82, 385, 424n23; Luddite, 87; and social categories, 47 analogue, 17, 94, 104, 117, 119, 149, 166, 168, 187, 192, 199, 203, 211, 213, 217–­21, 227, 233, 236–­38, 240, 286, 298, 387–­88n11, 397n114, 408n89, 416n80; film, 22, 112, 120, 122–­23, 127–­28, 130, 143–­44, 147, 151, 163, 196, 209–­10, 229, 257, 285, 295, 314–­15, 358, 404n31; image, 3, 42, 93, 105,

367; photography, 2, 5–­6, 40, 46, 183, 210, 241, 285, 321, 327, 389n42; technology, 59, 70, 72–­73, 84, 205, 248, 269, 285–­86, 320, 355 analogy, 38, 54, 85–­89, 91–­92, 94–­96, 99, 101, 107–­8, 116, 118, 122–­23, 125, 127, 132, 149, 151–­5 2, 158, 160, 163, 182–­84, 188, 190–­93, 195, 197, 199, 203, 211, 227, 233, 264, 284, 286, 295, 301–­2, 308, 313–­14, 330–­31, 334–­3 5, 341, 346, 349, 352, 358, 360, 366, 374–­75, 383, 385, 396n104, 401n72, 414n58, 415n63, 424n37. See also Silverman, Kaja Anaximenes, 153 Andre, Carl, 31, 59, 394n69, 396n102 anomaly, 11, 104, 345, 381–­82, 424n23 anthropology, and Sharon Lockhart’s work, 247, 268, 271, 279, 290, 412n28, 414n51 Antigone, 160, 175–­76, 178–­79, 181, 183–­84, 193, 203–­7, 219, 227, 230–­34, 403–­4n31–­3 2, 404n38, 406n63–­64 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 364 aperture, 147; and Tacita Dean’s filmmaking, 178–­79, 205–­8, 210, 212, 215, 222–­23, 225, 227, 232 appropriation, 47, 62–­63, 80, 94, 103, 108, 194, 246, 249–­5 1, 279, 317, 392n37, 394n69, 417n93; photographic, 33, 180; postmodern, 35, 84, 99, 240, 252, 261, 297, 391n21, 396n102 Arbus, Diane, 94, 99, 101, 103, 359, 396n98, 396n106 archaeology, 30, 168, 331; of film, 175; of nostalgia, 388n26; photographic, 29, 341, 391n21 archive, 3, 16, 39, 43, 61, 76, 79–­83, 87, 95, 108, 248, 270, 301, 326, 394–­95n74, 410n4 Ariadne, 353 Armstrong, Carol, 100–­101, 391n23, 397n120, 419n23, 420n47 Åsdam, Knut, 390n9

INDEX 426

atavism, 17–­19, 35–­36, 38, 40, 88, 99–­102, 104–­5, 348, 370, 391n21 Atget, Eugène, 3, 43, 47, 58, 94, 99, 250, 394n74; and Walter Benjamin, 68–­69, 329–­30 attunement, 149, 163, 284–­93, 297–­306, 309–­10, 312–­17, 370, 415n63, 417n93 aura, 284, 289; and Walter Benjamin, 329 authorial divestiture, 72, 142, 251, 358, 394n69. See also Silverman, Kaja autobiography, 31, 128, 145, 147, 160, 190–­91; and François Truffaut, 261; and Jean-­Luc Godard, 72–­74 autonomy, 241, 373–­77, 383–­86; modernist, 33–­34, 82, 123, 285, 308–­9; negative, 12; provisional, 386; zombie, 12 Avedon, Richard, 251, 412–­13n35 Azoulay, Ariella, 391n12 Balcon, Jonathan, 400–­401n60 Balcon, Sir Michael, 400–­401n60 Baldwin, James, 50 Ballard, J. G., 399n27 Barthes, Roland, 182, 224, 331, 363–­64, 366, 418n8, 424n28; and the “death of the author,” 335, 359, 382; Camera Lucida, ix, 17, 36, 236, 353–­54, 387–­88n11, 391n23, 412n31, 420n47, 421n48; punctum, 335, 354, 416n81; Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 353–­54; “The Structuralist Activity” essay, 411n15; studium, 335; “The Third Meaning” essay, 409n102, 419n30; “Winter Garden Photograph,” 353 Bataille, Georges, 160, 195, 218, 224 Beauviala, Jean-­Pierre, 257, 413n43 Becher, Bernd and Hilla, 81, 269 Beckett, Samuel, 344 becoming, 34, 60, 104, 108, 190, 267–­68, 293, 307, 327, 334, 354, 375, 378 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 11, 382, 384–­85 Benjamin, Walter, 68–­69, 331, 335, 377, 411n17, 420n44, 422n2, 422n5; “Little History of Photography,” 15, 17, 328–­30, 344–­45, 353, 355, 417n68, 419n16; The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 320; on ruins, 162, 310, 419n12. See also aura Benning, James, 237, 240, 247, 410–­11n8, 412n24 Berger, John, 369 Bersani, Leo, 390n12, 396n104 Beshty, Walead, 18, 19, 389n48, 397n119, 411n10, 413n36 Beuys, Joseph, 113, 152–­53, 162, 398n4, 407n71 Birnbaum, Daniel, 372 Blank, Gil, 412n34 Blink-­182, 297 Bois, Yve-­Alain, 389n40 Bordowitz, Gregg, 50, 392n28 Bourdieu, Pierre, 279 Bowie, David, 173 Boym, Svetlana, 9, 13–­14, 123, 151–­5 2, 389n37

Brecht, Bertolt, 335 Breton, André, 242, 411n14 Brodovitch, Alexey, 103 Broodthaers, Marcel, 145, 153, 156, 407n75, 424n23 Browne, Thomas, 1 Brueghel, Pieter the Elder, 262 Bryson, Norman, 269–­71, 277, 285, 308, 414n53, 415n66 Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., 396n109, 423n11 Buren, Daniel, 375 Burr, Tom, 394n61, 422n3 Butler, Judith, 203–­7, 407n78 Byrne, Gerard, 5–­6, 7, 387n4 Byron, Lord, 159, 168, 171, 176, 177, 192, 402n3 Cage, John, 198, 246 Caillois, Roger, 31 camera obscura, 29–­3 2, 34, 53, 102, 104–­8, 147, 276, 332, 335, 370, 390n4 Cameron, Julia Margaret, 35, 101 Caravaggio, 315, 417n93 Carlson, Trevor, 198 Carpenter, Merlin, 423n7 Carson, Anne, 403–­4n31 Cartier-­Bresson, Henri, 261, 359 Casad, Jen, 417n93 Cassavetes, John, 287, 415n67, 421n52 Castle, James, 59–­60 castration, 183, 196, 227 catastrophe, 2, 15, 86, 117, 176, 180–­81, 194, 267, 362–­63, 380, 383 Cauer, Robert, 295 Chan, Paul, xi, 371–­72, 377–­79, 388n13 chance, 4, 104, 125, 143, 155, 173–­74, 183, 187, 232, 245–­46, 283, 291, 306, 327, 334, 359, 366. See also objective chance chemistry, 327, 355; of film, 210, 232, 416n80; of photography, 2, 35, 38, 40, 54, 101, 104–­5, 392n25, 393n45, 395n94 chiasmus, 38, 190, 263, 283, 294, 404n35 cinema, 19, 74, 76, 79, 103, 116, 119, 125, 132, 136, 147, 152, 196, 210, 213, 215, 219, 223, 229, 231, 240–­43, 261–­63, 297, 301, 314, 328, 335, 408n102, 409n108, 423n12 cinematic, 241, 243, 269, 291, 316, 413n45, 417n93 class: bourgeois, 329, 373–­74; petit-­bourgeois, 46–­47, 96; working, 4, 23, 46–­47, 248, 251, 311, 412n31 Clouzot, Henri-­Georges, 166 Cohen, Leonard, 146, 409–­10n120 Coleman, James, 397n121, 400n40 collaboration, 309, 377; of Julie Mehretu and her studio assistants, 145; of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, 351; of Merce Cunningham with his dancers, 189, 207; of Moyra Davey and Jason Simon, 335–­38; of photography and film, 316; of Sharon Lockhart and Balam Garcia, 296; of Sharon Lockhart and Becky Allen, 290, 292,

I N DEX

415n67; of Sharon Lockhart and children, 248, 253, 255–­56, 266, 413n41; of Sharon Lockhart and Escher GuneWardena, 416n84; of Sharon Lockhart and families in Brazil, 268; of Sharon Lockhart with Jen Casad, 23; of Sharon Lockhart with Polish orphans, 315; of Sharon Lockhart with Tacita Dean, 236; of Sid Grossman and Millard Lampell, 103; of Tacita Dean with her father, 190; of Tacita Dean and Michael Bölling, 408n98; of Walker Evans and James Agee, 274; of Zoe Leonard with Cheryl Dunye, 76, 79; of Zoe Leonard and Moyra Davey, 236, 410n1 conceptual art, 80–­82, 269, 375–­76, 381, 396n98, 410n1, 423n11 constructivism, 217, 222 contemporary, the, 5, 62, 382, 387n3 contemporary art, 5–­6, 9, 15, 20, 33, 36–­3 7, 241–­43, 248–­49, 264, 305, 370, 373, 387n10, 390n12, 419n13 correspondences, 4–­5, 42, 56, 82–­8 5, 91, 94, 96, 112, 116, 122, 149, 151, 159–­60, 174, 179, 284, 292, 298, 301, 308, 315, 396n104, 400n56. See also analogy; relationality counterpresence, 269–­71, 285, 308, 414n53. See also Bryson, Norman couple, 31, 37, 53, 55–­56, 85, 87, 276, 290, 316, 393n43, 396n103 Crary, Jonathan, 32, 397n125 Crimp, Douglas, 388–­89n34, 394n61 criticism, art, 366, 372–­78. See also late criticism Croce, Benedetto, 389n47 Crow, Thomas, 381 Crowhurst, Donald, 125, 131–­3 2, 137, 156, 182, 398–­99n18 Crowhurst, Simon, 399n18 Cunha, Tristão da, 182, 405n41 Cunningham, Merce, 145, 155, 188–­89, 198, 205–­7, 407n86 Dada, 351 Daguerre, Louis-­Jacques-­Mandé, 101 daguerreotype, 344 Damisch, Hubert, 409n108 darkroom, 77, 217, 395n94 Daumal, René, 210; Mount Analogue, 210, 211, 213, 221, 225, 227, 408n91 Davenport, Nancy, 242 Davey, Moyra, 6, 13–­14, 23, 236, 286, 319–­67, 372, 389n43, 391n21, 397n117, 410n1 Dean, Antigone, 133–­34, 159–­60, 176–­78, 186, 203, 230, 404n31, 409n112 Dean, Basil, 135, 185–­86, 400–­401n60, 406n64 Dean, Joseph Jolyon, 175, 185–­87, 191, 230, 406n61, 406n64, 409n111 Dean, Ptolemy, 160, 186 Dean, Tacita, 4, 12, 14, 19, 22–­23, 111–­63, 165–­234, 236–­3 7, 240, 248, 252, 257–­58, 264, 285–­86, 295,

315, 346, 390n53, 398–­410, 417n93, 418n12 Dean, Winton, 400–­401n60 Deleuze, Gilles, 378, 400n54; and Guattari, Félix, 58, 95 Demand, Thomas, 242 Demos, T. J., 51 Deren, Maya, 116, 408n102 Descartes, René, 32 Deschenes, Liz, 105 diCorcia, Philip-­Lorca, 242 digital, 17, 35, 51, 93–­95, 101–­2, 104–­6, 117, 166, 205, 210, 218, 220, 233, 236–­38, 241–­42, 285, 297–­98, 387n11, 391n21. See also photograph: digital digitalization, 15, 40, 86, 278 Dijkstra, Rineke, 242 Dillane, Stephen, 404n31 Dion, Mark, 419n29 Disfarmer, Mike, 249–­5 1, 256–­57, 280, 412n34, 413n35, 416n77 displacement (affective), 73–­74, 79, 89, 92, 142–­43, 145, 147, 153, 178, 187, 191, 196, 204–­5, 213, 215, 219, 339, 354. See also Barthes, Roland; Silverman, Kaja document, 38, 58, 81, 83, 95, 104, 261, 289, 309, 316–­17, 320, 349, 354, 388n11, 414n51, 416n81 documenta, 89, 95, 116, 118, 186, 397n113 documentary, 6, 33, 38, 43–­44, 50, 58, 72, 99, 104, 247, 257, 259–­61, 268, 271, 298, 301, 316–­17; and postmodernism, 35, 94 domestic, 6, 22, 50, 60, 98, 115, 123, 269, 271, 274–­76, 286–­87, 320, 322, 328–­31, 335, 339, 347–­48, 351, 355, 358–­61, 420n37, 420n42 double, 56, 79, 84, 89, 173, 185–­87, 192, 219, 222, 293, 306, 417n93; film, 178, 205–­6, 404n31; narcissistic, 37; photographic, 37, 47, 55, 82, 85–­87, 95, 191, 252, 267, 284, 286, 328, 416n81; and the visual, 184, 252, 273, 313–­14 Doyle, Father Eric, 170–­71 drawing, 72, 116–­19, 144, 162, 168–­72, 176, 179, 182–­85, 187, 192–­95, 213, 220, 227, 398n9, 402n3; photogenic, 19 dual articulation (of forms), 60, 223, 396n104, 409n108 Duchamp, Marcel, 246, 321, 351; as Rrose Selavy, 351 Dunye, Cheryl, 76–­79 Dürer, Albrecht, 1 Düsseldorf School of photography, 81, 249, 269 Dyer, Geoff, 359 Ebner, Shannon, 105 echo, 38, 43–­44, 47, 53, 58, 63, 89, 123, 140, 147–­49, 174, 207–­8, 211–­12, 221, 232, 252, 281, 285, 292–­94, 305–­6, 308–­11, 313, 315–­17, 341, 349, 399n20, 417n93 Echo, 293–­94, 308, 315–­16 effigy, 67–­70, 79, 84, 89, 91, 96, 99, 187, 198, 201, 213, 229, 394n69

427

INDEX 428

Eisenstein, Sergei, 335, 336, 419n30 Eliasson, Olafur, 222, 409n105 Eliot, T. S., 26, 379 entropy, 113, 115–­16, 118, 163, 188, 322, 328, 422n59 Escher GuneWardena, 416n84 ethnography, 247, 268–­69, 317, 414n51; self-­, 277 Evans, Walker, 3, 17, 43, 44, 94, 99, 274, 394n74 exile, 12, 14, 31, 51–­5 2, 56, 62, 104, 113, 131, 172–­74, 196, 231; and anabasis, 140; of the camera, 115–­ 16, 125, 148; Canadian, 325; of the father, 158, 162, 168, 184, 207, 234, 419n12; and lateness, 11, 96, 108, 379, 381, 384; and memory, 264, 315; of Oedipus, 178–­79, 183–­84, 193, 203, 205, 220, 229, 233; and Robert Frank, 128; self-­, 50, 112, 128, 178, 316–­17, 395n92 expanded field: of the index, 86; photography, 19, 32, 34, 60, 241–­43, 390n11, 399n37, 411n15, 411n16; sculpture, 241, 243, 411n15, 411n18. See also Krauss, Rosalind expansion: of form, 19, 102, 118, 123, 143, 151–­5 2, 163, 168, 202–­3, 364; of kinship, 203–­5; of medium, 19, 208, 276; of the photograph, 19, 30, 32–­34, 61, 241, 243–­44, 286, 308–­9, 325, 328, 331, 335, 341, 351–­54, 358–­59, 370, 374, 422n58, 424n37; of politics, 19; of subjectivity, 19, 243–­44 father, 22, 134–­3 5, 153, 159–­60, 162–­63, 167–­68, 171–­72, 180, 187, 189–­92, 202–­3, 207, 233–­34, 325; accursed, 184; blind, 183–­84; complex, 155–­56; -­in-­pieces, 218; non-­Oedipal, 157; Oedipal, 160, 196, 199, 204–­5, 219, 398n13, 399n18, 418–­19n12; photographic, 58; primal, 156, 401n65; prodigal, 157, 401n65; toe of, 218; wayward, 136, 158, 401n60 Fellini, Federico, 132–­33 feminism, 19–­23, 98, 120, 131, 162, 193, 195, 230, 324, 370, 389n50, 391n23, 405n47, 414n57; constructivist, 20; essentialist, 19–­20, 313, 346, 358 Fer, Briony, 131–­3 2, 142 Fierce Pussy, 391n19, 397n113 film, 5–­6, 9, 14, 112, 116, 118–­19, 122–­23, 125, 127, 130, 132, 143, 147–­49, 162–­63, 175, 179–­80, 182, 195–­97, 199–­200, 202–­3, 205, 208–­11, 213, 218–­19, 221, 227, 229–­34, 236–­38, 243, 284, 293, 298, 301–­3, 308, 316, 370, 372, 390n53, 408n92; anamorphic, 142, 152, 178, 206, 212, 219, 231; blind, 116, 178–­79, 232; photochemical, 19, 22, 168, 210, 219, 232; photographic, 302, 305, 316; silent, 128, 134–­3 5, 147, 168, 196, 207, 215, 338; still, 140, 170, 197–­98, 220, 229, 240, 242, 285, 295, 312, 399n37; structural, 143, 240, 286, 302 flatbed picture plane, 408n96. See also Steinberg, Leo formalism, 20, 175, 219, 243, 339, 341 Foster, Hal, 8–­9, 382, 387n11, 388n13 found object, 66, 72, 74, 143, 193, 245, 400n47

fragment, 2, 14, 19, 24, 33–­34, 52, 93, 148, 167, 182, 184–­85, 188, 193, 201–­2, 208–­10, 230, 267, 269, 293–­94, 315, 369; and lateness, 9, 12, 15, 62, 66, 96, 210, 232–­33, 308, 362, 384–­8 5 Frampton, Hollis, 18–­19, 360, 363 Francis, St., 145, 171, 179 Frank, Robert, 6, 128, 185, 187 Fraser, Andrea, 375 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 56, 63, 73, 99, 196, 252, 324, 353, 360, 383, 401n65, 421n48 Fried, Michael, 65–­67, 70, 303, 305–­9, 387–­88n11, 414n53, 416n83, 417n87, 417n89 Friedlander, Lee, 6 Gallop, Jane, 13 Galsworthy, John, 186 Garcia, Balam, 296–­97 Garimorth, Julia, 199 Gates, Glenn, 294, 305–­6, 416n81 Gazdag, Gyula, 409n112 Gazzara, Ben, 287, 288, 289 Genet, Jean, 173 George V, King, 134, 136 Ginzburg, Natalia, 360–­61 Giorno, John, 284 Giotto, 145, 153, 179, 404n33 Glass, Philip, 339 Godard, Jean-­Luc, 72–­74, 242, 257, 358 Godfrey, Mark, 38, 176–­78, 248, 306, 394n69, 404n35, 411n19, 412n31, 415n64, 416n79, 416n82, 416n83, 416n84, 416n85, 417n89 Gornick, Vivian, 360 Gourgouris, Stathis, 380 Graham, Rodney, 142 Graw, Isabelle, 372 Greenaway, Peter, 349–­5 1 Greenberg, Clement, 380 Greer, Germaine, 131, 136, 142, 404n36, 405n47 Grossman, Sid, 103 Groys, Boris, 378, 423n14 gum-­bichromate process, 102 Gunning, Tom, 414n60 Gursky, Andreas, 242 Haacke, Hans, 376 Hale, Mathew, 216, 218 Hale, Rufus, 202, 218 Halpern, Emilie, 287, 289 Hamburger, Michael, 112–­16, 118, 123, 145–­47, 153, 190, 398n7, 400n50, 407n73, 407n86 Hanson, Duane, 294–­95, 312, 417n69 Hawarden, Lady Clementina, 35, 391n23 Herzog, Werner, 290 Hesse, Eva, 63, 64, 65 Himmel, Paul, 103 Holiday, Billie, 62 Hollingdale, R. J., 331 Holte, Michael Ned, 246

I N DEX

home, 3–­6, 12–­13, 26, 47, 50, 52–­5 3, 55, 60, 65, 68–­70, 73, 76, 88, 98, 113, 115–­16, 122–­23, 125, 127–­28, 130–­3 2, 140, 149, 151, 157, 190, 236, 248, 269, 274–­76, 314–­16, 321–­22, 329, 358, 360–­62, 370–­71, 389n37, 389–­99n52, 395n92, 397n117, 406n60 Homer, 140, 371 Horn, Roni, 185, 186, 187, 217–­18, 406n52 Huebler, Douglas, 80 Hughes, Ted, 113, 115 Hutchinson, Ben, 387n7, 423n6 identification, 54, 63, 68, 125, 153, 159, 190, 204, 267–­6 8, 271, 289, 314, 372, 383–­84, 394n70, 417n91 incorporation, 32, 59, 63, 74, 81, 99, 370 index, 33, 35, 84–­87, 95, 101, 208, 222, 285, 298, 308, 312, 327, 330, 354, 387n11, 406n60, 409n107, 416n80, 416n81. See also Krauss, Rosalind intimacy, 81, 115, 122, 184, 219, 232, 280, 284, 289, 301, 313–­14, 316, 330, 345, 353, 370, 396n100, 410n1, 415n64; of form, 285 introjection, 208, 211, 222, 405n47 Iversen, Margaret, 69, 405n40 Jameson, Fredric, 391n20 Jeinnie, Jean, 173, 187 Jocasta, 203, 207 Johns, Jasper, 390n7, 423n8 Joyce, James, 182 Joyce, William (“Lord Haw-­Haw”), 136 Judd, Donald, 65 Judson Dance Theater, 246 Kafka, Franz, 341, 353 Kahnweiler, Daniel-­Henry, 373 Kalpakjian, Craig, 105 Kardish, Larry, 400–­401n60 Käsebier, Gertrude, 101, 391n23 Kelley, Mike, 13, 67, 84, 394n69, 414n57 Kelly, Ellsworth, 222, 223, 409n106 Kelly, Mary, 331, 349 Kelsey, John, 397n128 Kennedy, John F., 324 Kentridge, William, 5 Kermode, Frank, 16 kinship, 30, 38, 179, 191–­92, 199, 203–­7, 211, 218–­19, 221, 223–­24, 227, 230, 232, 279 Kipling, Rudyard, 118 Klein, Melanie, 187 Klein, William, 103 Kodak, 120–­23 Koether, Jutta, 35 Kracauer, Sigfried, 119 Kraus, Karl, 371–­72, 422n5, 423n6 Krauss, Rosalind, 33, 317, 391n13, 424n23; on Atget, 392n35; on Barthes, 409n109; and expanded field, 241, 243–­44, 411n15, 411n18; and medium

specificity, 381, 388n14; on memory, 413n47; and photography within postmodernism, 391n20; on Tacita Dean, 408n101; and theoretical object, 241. See also expanded field; index Kruger, Barbara, 331 Kubrick, Stanley, 131, 291, 409n104 Lacan, Jacques, 167, 187, 204 Lampedusa. See Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe Lampell, Millard, 103 Land, Colin de, 349 late criticism, 372, 379–­86, 423n7, 423n11, 424n23, 424n28 lateness, 5, 9–­12, 14–­16, 19, 23–­24, 29, 63, 66, 70, 72, 94, 96, 99, 104, 106, 108–­10, 132, 162–­63, 168, 181, 203, 209–­10, 215, 224, 229, 232–­33, 285, 308, 316–­17, 321–­22, 349, 351, 360, 362–­63, 370–­72, 379–­86, 388n13, 423n6 late style, 9, 11, 15, 62–­63, 70, 72, 95, 131, 209, 224, 243, 379–­80, 382, 384–­85, 388n13, 395n92, 399n24 Lawler, Louise, 331 Lebovici, Elisabeth, 29–­30, 390n2, 390n5, 395n92, 397n125, 402n4, 405n47, 420n36, 421–­22n57 Le Gray, Gustave, 101 Leibovitz, Annie, 364 Leica, 40 lens, 26, 29, 59, 102, 104–­5, 125, 147, 212, 232, 276, 345, 355, 395n94, 418n8 Leonard, Zoe, 4, 12, 14, 22–­23, 25–­110, 191, 236, 248, 252, 257–­58, 276, 285, 315, 346–­47, 364, 388n32, 389n34, 389n51, 404n34, 410n1 Leslie, Jolyon, 187 Levine, Sherrie, 85, 324, 376, 396n102 Levitt, Helen, 104, 271 Lincoln, Abraham, 323–­24, 328, 404n31 Lippard, Lucy, 64 Lissitzky, El, 222, 225 Lockhart, Sharon, 4, 12, 14, 23, 235–­317, 346, 420n36 longing, 13–­14, 23, 52, 94–­96, 122–­23, 125, 166–­67, 279, 285, 287, 289, 300, 314–­16, 361, 370, 389n35, 389n37, 421n48 lost object, 2, 17, 59, 63, 65, 73, 81, 95, 252, 297, 353–­54, 358, 364, 383. See also melancholia; receiving Louis, Morris, 294–­95, 305–­6, 312 Love, Heather, 8 Malcolm, Janet, 366 Malle, Louis, 257 Manet, Édouard, 172 Man Ray, 351 Martin, Agnes, 107–­8, 364, 393n46 Martin, Timothy, 253, 267, 279, 414n57 Marville, Charles, 393n50 Masaccio, 194–­95, 406n66, 407n73 maternal, 58, 73, 98, 345, 349, 351–­54, 358, 360, 364,

429

INDEX 4 30

420n47, 421n48; care, 314, 346; gaze, 313–­14; holding, 347, 352, 420n40; love, 202; metaphor, 347; place, 204. See also motherhood McDonough, Tom, 392n39, 396n103, 413n43 McGinley, Ryan, 106, 397n128 medium, 9, 16, 19, 33–­34, 38, 74, 79, 102, 213, 215, 220, 232, 240–­44, 268, 286, 293, 299, 317, 325–­26, 364, 371–­72, 388n14; sharing, 30, 396n95, 396n104, 409n108; specificity, 19, 38, 54, 60, 82, 94, 106, 122, 276, 304–­5, 309, 326, 381, 391n21, 408n101 Meeropol, Abel, 394n59 Mehretu, Julie, 145, 205, 207 melancholia, 1, 12–­14, 59, 63, 76, 81, 122, 130, 146, 181, 297, 309, 314–­15, 320–­22, 369–­70, 382–­83, 387n11, 389n37, 394n61, 411n15, 422n3 Mercer, Kobena, 382, 424n28 Merz, Mario, 132–­34, 144, 153, 156, 168, 187–­92, 205, 399n29, 406n64, 407n86 Michelangelo, 155, 384, 408n93 minimalism, 31, 59, 63, 65, 70, 127, 264, 339, 375–­76, 394n69, 413n47 minor, 11, 95, 99, 393n51, 396n96, 397n119; language, 58. See also Deleuze, Gilles: and Guattari, Félix modernism, 5–­6, 8–­9, 16, 82, 95, 122–­23, 136, 156, 175, 210, 218, 222, 303–­6, 309, 371, 391n22, 392n39, 416n79, 417n87; anachronistic, 128; and lateness, 372, 381, 385, 423n6; and nostalgia, 14, 151, 308; obsolete, 6; photographic, 15, 35, 50, 94, 101–­2, 285, 341 Model, Lisette, 103, 396n98 Modotti, Tina, 101 Moholy-­Nagy, László, 15–­16, 276 Molesworth, Helen, 327, 366, 396n100, 418n7 Mondrian, Piet, 222 Morandi, Giorgio, 145, 153, 198 Morris, Robert, 65 motherhood, 23, 201–­2, 216–­17, 224, 278, 284, 313–­14, 324, 345–­54, 358, 364, 402n76, 420n36, 420n40, 421n48. See also maternal mourning, 1, 12, 14, 63, 68–­70, 153, 170, 203, 382–­83, 388n34, 389n40, 390n54, 394n61. See also Crimp, Douglas; Freud, Sigmund Muybridge, Eadweard, 101 Nachleben, 9, 179, 387n10. See also Warburg, Aby Nancy, Jean-­Luc, 401n72 narcissism, 37, 74, 315, 370, 382, 422n59 Narcissus, 293–­95, 308, 315, 417n93 negative (film), 99, 117, 119, 179, 232, 332, 398n12, 413n41 Nesbit, Molly, 58 Neue Sachlichkeit, 249, 253 Newman, Michael, 398n3, 405n47 New Vision photography, 16 New York School of photography, 40, 99, 103–­4, 392n30

Niépce, Nicéphore, 101 Nikon, 40, 395n94 Nixon, Mignon, 402n76, 401n61 nonsynchronicity, 6, 9 nostalgia, 13–­14, 17, 52, 56, 70, 73, 94–­96, 98, 113, 122–­23, 125, 128, 130–­31, 136, 151–­5 2, 166, 168, 256, 261, 263, 274–­75, 279, 286, 300, 307–­8, 314, 321, 359–­64, 369–­72, 382, 385, 388n26, 389n35, 389n52, 414n57, 421n48, 422n2, 423n16; abstract, 123; black, 13; and Hollis Frampton, 363; and Michael Fried, 417n87; reflective, 14, 19, 389n37; restorative, 389n37. See also Boym, Svetlana; Starobinski, Jean; Stewart, Susan Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), 236 Nyro, Laura, 338 Obrist, Hans Ulrich, 160, 177, 187, 189 objective chance, 143, 245–­46. See also chance; surrealism obsolescence, 3, 6, 50, 73, 87, 112–­13, 127–­28, 131, 143, 156, 166, 320–­21, 327, 367, 387n5; of the analogue, 248, 286; of art criticism, 375; of film, 120, 122–­23, 210, 229, 257, 314; modernism and, 6; of photography, 94, 179, 328; of philosophy, 382; of this book, 230 October (magazine), 335 Oedipal, 22, 134, 156, 159–­60, 170, 193, 196, 199, 203, 217–­19, 231, 398n13; anti-­, 162, 399n18; conflict, 191, 233; drama, 134–­3 5, 233; dynamic, 233; father, 160; fatigue, 162–­163, 167–­6 8, 215, 233, 310, 328, 418–­19n12; law, 325; metaphor, 200, 202; non-­, 157; positions, 218, 407n78; post-­, 162, 203–­4; pre-­, 162; story, 183; triangle, 217–­18, 227; trinity, 201; wander, 173–­74 Oedipus, 136, 160, 175–­76, 177, 183–­84, 192–­93, 194, 196–­97, 199, 202–­4, 213, 219–­20, 227, 230–­33, 401n73, 402n3, 404n31, 405n38, 406n63; dramas by Sophocles, 177–­79, 232–­33; meaning of name, 160, 176, 218, 229 off-­modern, 8, 151–­5 2. See also Boym, Svetlana Oldenburg, Claes, 155, 188–­89, 193–­94, 205–­6 Olin, Margaret, 421n49 optics (of photography), 56, 101, 104–­5, 252 O’Sullivan, Timothy, 101 outmoded, 3, 5–­6, 35, 42, 46, 50, 59, 62, 72, 112, 148, 241–­42, 248, 251, 257, 274, 276, 287, 320, 339, 355, 387n11, 422n2. See also Benjamin, Walter; Foster, Hal; obsolescence Owens, Craig, 376, 389n50, 392n26, 400n39 Paglen, Trevor, 16 painting, 15, 37, 69, 102–­3, 107–­8, 118, 133, 145, 172, 179, 184, 206, 213, 222, 276, 303, 308–­9, 321, 371–­72, 394n69, 411n14, 411n19, 416n82, 417n93; abstract, 123, 162, 294; color field, 123, 306; history, 242, 381; modernist, 8, 222, 303–­6, 309, 416n79

I N DEX

palimpsest, 23, 169 Pan, 175, 183 Paramount Pictures, 498n91 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 133 patriarchy, 22, 135–­36, 156, 162, 189, 205, 324–­25, 327–­28, 418–­19n12 Penn, Irving, 418n8 photograph, 1–­2, 9, 15–­19, 29–­38, 40, 43–­44, 46–­47, 50, 53–­56, 60, 68–­70, 72, 74, 76–­79, 81–­89, 91–­93, 94–­96, 98–­110, 117–­18, 140, 143, 147–­49, 162–­63, 167, 180–­84, 197–­99, 219–­20, 236–­38, 240–­44, 248–­5 3, 261–­63, 268–­71, 276, 279, 283–­86, 293, 297–­99, 301–­9, 314–­17, 321–­22, 325–­3 5, 341, 345, 347, 349, 351, 353–­55, 358–­60, 363–­67, 369–­72, 374–­75, 383, 385, 387–­88n11, 389n42, 389n46, 389n47, 390n7, 390–­91n12, 391n13, 391n20, 391n21, 391n23, 392n25, 393n43, 393n45, 393n47, 397n119, 397n121, 398n12, 399n37, 410n1, 411n15, 414n53, 415n62, 416n82, 417n87, 417n93, 418n8, 419n13, 419n23, 421n48, 423n8, 424n37; absent, 353–­54, 363–­64, 366–­67; aerial, 37, 168; aerogram, 420n37; analogue, 5–­6, 46, 94, 183, 210, 236, 321, 327; chemical, 2, 35, 40, 101, 104–­5, 392n25, 393n45; cinematic, 242, 279, 284, 305; commercial, 43, 248, 250; constructed, 79, 242, 257, 263, 268, 297–­98, 331, 417n93; digital, 106, 242, 285, 387n11, 389n42, 393n45; directed, 263, 276, 294, 305, 312; found, 112, 166, 181–­83, 402n1; meta-­, 349; objectivist, 81; overpainted, 113, 170, 401n72; portrait, 191, 238, 249, 277, 413n41, 415n77; recursive, 252, 261, 297, 316, 349; snapshot, 29, 37, 43, 50, 77, 266–­69, 271, 274–­84, 289, 313, 366, 404n34, 414n59; staged, 79, 245, 264, 268, 276, 294, 297, 305, 312, 391n21, 406n81; straight, 77; street, 6, 50, 59, 69, 76, 99, 242, 321; vernacular, 249, 253; victim, 94 photographic, the, 89, 105, 140, 241–­43, 268, 297, 309, 316, 330, 360, 413n45 photogravure, 166, 177, 180–­82, 402n2 Picasso, Pablo, 155, 166, 408n96, 411n14 pictorialism, 102–­3, 166, 242, 268, 309, 387–­88n11 Polyneices, 203–­4 Pop art, 193, 284, 339 postminimalism, 63, 394n69 postmodernism, 5–­6, 8, 14, 16, 22, 33, 35–­36, 38, 85, 95, 99, 240–­41, 243, 252, 261, 297, 317, 324, 331, 370, 376, 382, 391n20, 391n21, 391n22, 394n69, 400n39, 423n12 postproduction, 196, 233, 409n117 Proust, Marcel, 334, 345, 346 psychoanalysis, 56, 63, 142, 160, 162, 187, 190, 203, 219, 252, 314, 358, 360, 370, 383, 405n47, 418n1, 420n40 Rainer, Yvonne, 246 Ramses II, 201, 202

Rauschenberg, Robert, 408n96 receiving, 32, 35, 59, 75, 79, 81, 94–­95, 99, 149, 168, 171, 285–­86, 293, 315, 327, 335, 355–­66, 400n53; author as receiver, 72–­76, 82, 86, 89, 91, 94, 142–­43, 148, 162, 179, 215, 222, 251–­5 2, 259, 261, 297, 358–­60, 363–­64, 394n69, 421n57. See also Silverman, Kaja receptacle, 32, 52–­56, 59–­60, 63, 65, 68, 70–­72, 82, 84–­85, 89, 91–­92, 94, 99, 142, 144, 269, 285–­86, 346–­47, 415n62 recursivity, 94, 123, 263, 273, 285, 297, 308, 311, 316, 326; of vision, 252, 261. See also photograph: recursive reflexivity, 36–­38, 50, 53–­54, 60, 82, 85, 94–­95, 105, 115, 122–­23, 125, 128, 144, 148, 179, 183, 195, 198, 210, 218, 221, 223, 227, 245, 261, 267, 276, 286, 291, 293, 297, 304–­6, 308, 326, 408n101, 409n104, 413n36, 416n80 relationality, 15, 32, 37–­38, 56, 63, 83–­87, 119, 122–­23, 152, 160, 162, 179, 199, 203–­7, 218–­19, 221–­23, 225, 230–­3 2, 238, 240, 283, 285, 292, 410n1, 411n10, 415n63; relational field, of the photograph, 33–­34, 390–­91n12, 393n43 reparation, 136, 156, 184, 190–­91, 194 repetition, 16–­17, 45, 47, 53–­54, 63, 81, 100, 143, 191, 193, 252, 260, 263, 294, 298, 306, 311, 347, 379 reverberation, 37, 44, 207–­8, 211, 252, 283, 293, 311, 313 Richter, Gerhard, 162, 414n58 Rolland, Romain, 56 Rolleiflex camera, 3, 40, 42, 58, 99, 248, 257, 413n45 Romanticism, German, 411n19 Rose, Walt, 237 rostrum camera, 169 Rouch, Jean, 257 Royoux, Jean-­Christophe, 140, 174, 400n39, 400n56 Ruff, Thomas, 106, 249 Ruhlman, Émile-­Jacques, 137 Said, Edward, 9, 11, 229, 379, 381–­82, 388n13, 388n17, 424n21 Sala, Anri, 5, 9, 387n6 Sander, August, 43, 248–­50, 412n32, 412n33, 416n77 Satie, Erik, 146, 415n67 Saturn, 1–­2, 112, 115, 146, 418n12 saturnine, 1. See also melancholia Schelling, F. W. J., 328–­30, 360 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 328–­31, 341, 344, 345, 360 Schor, Mira, 390n52 screen, 29, 59, 68, 71, 84, 116, 127, 140, 142, 148–­49, 208, 210–­12, 215, 217–­18, 221–­25, 227, 229, 231, 293, 303, 307, 309, 359, 363, 398n15, 409n104 sculpture, 30–­31, 51, 54, 61–­68, 70, 74, 99, 127, 148, 200–­202, 205, 241, 294, 312–­13, 371, 384, 394n61, 394n69, 397n117, 411n18, 417n89, 422n3 Searle, Adrian, 403–­4n31

4 31

INDEX 4 32

Sebald, W. G., 1–­2, 112, 115, 146–­47, 398n2 Seeger, Pete, 415n72 Sekula, Allan, 87, 389n47, 396n109, 408n92 self-­difference, 37, 56, 125, 222, 317 self-­portrait, 74, 145, 147, 160, 162, 198, 206, 215, 315, 317, 397n118, 417n92, 417n93 seriality, 30, 54, 122, 180, 191, 193, 268, 270, 304, 327, 416n80 Serra, Richard, 60 Sexton, Anne, 420n40 sharing, 35, 94, 202, 248, 316; of forms, 285, 328, 396n104; medium, 30, 409n108; seeing, 412n33, 413n39 Sherman, Cindy, 240 Shigeyama, Sensaku, 153 Shore, Stephen, 392n25 sibling, 12, 23, 37–­38, 84–­85, 88–­89, 95, 152, 159–­163, 170, 178, 205–­7, 219, 230–­31, 284, 310, 401n61, 401n73, 407n75, 415n63 silhouette, 193, 324, 326, 328 Silva, José Marques da, 137 silver: in photography, 35, 38, 291n21; mirrors, 38, 393n27 Silverman, Kaja, 72–­74, 86–­87, 94–­95, 142–­43, 149, 251, 286, 358, 390n12, 393n45, 415n63; Flesh of My Flesh, 396n104, 414n58, 421n54; Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 119–­20, 398n13, 402n77; The Miracle of Analogy, 393n47, 396n106, 397n121; World Spectators, 252, 395n87. See also analogy; authorial divestiture; displacement (affective); receiving Simon, Barney, 421n52 Simon, Jason, 338, 355, 363, 419n29, 421n52 Simonpietri, Christian, 413n46 Sly and the Family Stone, 338 Smith, Tony, 65 Smithson, Robert, 137, 153, 156, 176, 1­78, 407–­8n86 Sontag, Susan, 1, 33–­34, 364, 366, 390n7, 392n37, 396n106, 421n55, 423n8 Sophocles, 178–­79, 203, 232, 404n31 Spero, Nancy, 193 Stark, Frances, 313, 420n36 Starobinski, Jean, 388n26 Steane, Anthony (“Jack Trevor”), 135, 136 Steane, Robert (“Boots”), 133–­37, 140, 146–­47, 149, 151, 153, 156–­60, 163, 172, 176, 184–­85, 187, 192, 197, 201, 218, 234, 400n50, 401n69, 402n3, 403n10, 403n20, 404n36, 405n48, 406n65, 407n86 Stein, Sally, 408n92 Steinberg, Leo, 154, 155, 205, 212–­13, 391n22, 405n39, 408n93, 408n96, 423n19 stereoscope, 328 Stern, Stewart, 233–­34, 403–­4n31 Stewart, Susan, 13 Steyerl, Hito, 106 Stieglitz, Alfred, 50 still film, 140, 170, 197–­98, 220, 229, 240, 242, 285, 295, 399n37

Strand, Paul, 359 Stroheim, Erich von, 335, 338 Struth, Thomas, 249 Sumac, Yma, 339 surrealism, 31, 58, 143, 217, 222, 224, 242, 245–­46, 327, 393n50, 411n14, 422n2 survival, 11, 43, 179, 181, 210, 243, 280, 322, 366, 381–­82 swollen, 198–­99, 229, 281; ankles, 405n38; foot, 160, 176, 178, 181, 183, 192–­93, 196–­97, 199, 201–­2, 213, 218; footage, 199, 202–­3, 218, 229; masculinity, 203; photography, 199. See also Oedipus Talbot, William Henry Fox, 101, 419n23 Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, 130, 229, 399n24 Trachtenberg, Alan, 392n34 Truffaut, François, 261, 263, 264, 290, 315, 413n45, 413n46 Twombly, Cy, 145, 155, 174–­75, 182, 193, 205–­6, 401n63, 402n3 typology, 81, 249, 320, 326, 328, 347, 412n32 unmaking, 2, 12, 176, 179–­81, 206, 209, 382, 385 untimeliness, 15, 46, 310, 380, 382, 386 unworking, 76, 233 Van Der Zee, James, 354 Vertov, Dziga, 215 Vischer, Theodora, 197 Visconti, Luchino, 229 Wall, Jeff, 242, 393n45, 416n83 Warburg, Aby, 9, 30, 387n10 Warhol, Andy, 251, 284–­85, 383–­84, 414n60, 415n61 Warner, Marina, 155, 162, 183, 200, 398n15, 406n66 Washington, George, 324 Waters, John, 349 Watkins, Carleton, 101 Welles, Orson, 133 Welling, James, 105, 391n21, 420n35 Wenders, Wim, 379, 423n16 Weston, Edward, 339, 341, 343 White, Harrison and Cynthia, 372–­73 Whitman, Walt, 87, 171, 396n106 Williams, Christopher, 381, 424n23 Winogrand, Garry, 6 Wojnarowicz, David, 63, 410n1 Wood, Catherine, 245–­47, 259, 297, 417n92 Woolf, Virginia, 334, 352 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 136 Yamamoto, Yohji, 379, 423n16 Youngblood, Gene, 243, 411n18 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 402n3, 403n15, 404n32, 406n63, 408n88