Thinking Aloud

As the final weekend for the Pavilion's current exhibitions gets into swing, the venue is packed as it sits glistening in the bright light of New Year like some vast piece of optical equipment. Reflecting and refracting shadows of the public as they roam around in such of sustinence. Culturally and otherwise, I suspect.

A tap on my sleeve. "Is this what you would call documentary photography?" a woman asks. "You know - like presenting a document?".

The term 'document' is virtually synonymous with the medium of photography itself. Indeed, it could be said that every photograph is in one sense or another a document, since it is always a record of something, a document of an occurrence. Traditionally, photography's power has resided in its referentiality and indexicality, making it the perfect vehicle with which to deal with 'real' life. But to think of contemporary art photography in these terms is limiting. The artists in this exhibition - The Sublime Image of Destruction - use a wide range of approaches to think about how the document functions and how people respond to it. Some question its assumed visual authority, while at the same time the undeermining the supposed 'truth' inherent in photography.

"Oh. So are you a critic then?"

A pause, as I hadn't anticipated that one. Ideally photographic criticism should provide one or more of the following services: introduce you to photographers of whom you were unaware; expand your appreciation of a photogrpher's work; place the images in the context of photography's history; place the images in the context of the artist's culture; and, while accomplishing these services, throw light upon the creative/artistic process. These services require that the person identified as the 'critic' demonstrates some understanding and insight, the result being photographic dialogue and writing which is informative, elevating and, above all else, useful. What do you think?

"I'll let you know. Happy New Year"

Saturday 6 & 13 December

"Given the time of year, is it significant that if these pictures (Bloomberg and Chanarin) are of the Holy Land, could they be described as being, quite literally, holy pictures?"

The theme-tune to TV's Countdown starts to chime inside my head as this is a great question with many potential solutions...

Since the 5th century, the geometrical study of sight formed part of the pictorial techniques artists were bent on codifying and we also know that from Antiquity, artists were at pains to give the illusion of depth. However, from the middle ages the background came to the surface in pictorial representation. All the characters, even the most minute details - the context, if you like - remain on the same plane of legibility, of visibility. Only their exaggerated size, the way they loom forward suggesting pride of place, draws the observer's attention to certain important personages. Here everything is seen in the same light, in a transparent atmosphere, a brightness further highlighted by golds and halos, by ornaments. These are holy pictures, establishing a theological parallel between vision and knowledge, for which there are no blurred areas.

The latter make their first appearance with the Renaissance when religious and cosmogonical uncertainties begin to proliferate along with the proliferation of optical devices. Once you have smoke effects or distant mists, it is just a short step to the notion of non finito, the unfinished vision of pictorial representation or statuary. In the 18th century, with the fashion in geological follies and the curling lines of the rococo and the baroque, architects like Claude Nicolas Ledoux at the Arc-et-Senans saltworks revelled in playing up the contrasts in the chaotic arrangement of matter, with untidy piles of stone blocke escaping the creator's grip on geometry. At the same time monumental ruins, real or fake, where very much in vogue.

Some sixty years later, chaos had taken over the complete structure of the painted work. The composition decomposes. The Impressionists deserted their studios and wandered off to catch real life in the act, the way the photographers were doing, but with the advantage - soon to be lost - of colour.

With Edgar Degas, painter and amateur photographer, composition came close to framing, to positioning within the range of the viewfinder: the subjects seem decentred, segmented, viewed from above or below in an artificial, often harsh light, like the glare of the reflectors used by professional photographers at the time. "We must free ourselves from nature's tyranny", Degas wrote of an art which, in his terms, 'sums iteslf up rather then extends itself...', and whichbalso becomes more intense. This goes to show how apt was the nickname given to the new school of painting when Monet's canvas 'Impression Sunrise' was shown: impressionist, like the pyrotechnists who created those eye-dazzling displays of flashing, flooding lights.

From the disintergration of composition we move on to that of sight. With pointillism, Georges Seurat reproduced the visual effect of the 'pitting' of the first daguerreotypes as well as applying a system of analogous dots to colour. In order to be restored, the image had to be seen at a certain distance, the observers doing their own focusing, exactly as with an optical apparatus, the dots then dissolving in the effect of luminace and vibrating within emerging figures and forms.

It was not long before these too disintergrated and soon only a visual message worthy of morse code would survive, like Duchamp's retinal stimulator, or aspects of Op Art from Mondrian.

With the same implacable logic, publicity-seekers pop up on the art scene. Futurism is upon us, notably in the form of Depero's promotional architecture, followed by Dada in 1916 and then Surrealism. In Magritte's view, painting and the traditional arts from this moment on lose any sense of the sacred. An advertising executive by profession, Magritte wrote: "What surrealism officially means is an advertising firm run with enough nous and conformism to be able to as well as other businesses to which it is opposed only in details of pure form. Thus 'surrealist woman' was just as stupid an invention as the pin-up girl who has now taken her place...I'm not much of a surrealist at all, then. To me, the term also signifies 'propaganda' - a dirty word - and all the inanity essential to the success of any 'propaganda'.

But the syncretism, the nihilism, of which the techniques of the pseudo-communications company are carriers, are also to be found in Magritte as anxiety producuing symptoms. For Magritte, words are 'slogans that oblige us to think in a certain pre-ordained order...contemplation is a banal feeling of no interest'. As for the 'perfect image', this could only produce an intense effect for a very short time. With the industrial multiplication of optical equipment, the artist's human vision is no more than one process among many of obtaining images. The following generation would attack 'the very essence of art', thereby putting the finishing touches to their own suicide.

In 1968 Daniel Buren explained to Georges Boudaille: "It's funny when you realise that art was never a problem of depth but one of form. The solution lies in the creation - if the word can still be used - of something totally unconnected with what has gone before, completely unburdened by the past. This thing would thereby express itself just for the sake of it. Artistic communication is then cut off, no longer exists..."

Well before this, Duchamp wrote: "I have never stopped painting. Every image must exist in your mind before it is presented on the canvas and it always loses something in the painting. I'd rather see my painting without the murk". Can this be true of photography also?

The painter takes his body with him, Valery said. Merleau-Ponty added: "It's hard to see how a mind could paint". If art poses the enigma of the body, the enigma of technique poses the enigma of art. In fact devices for seeing dispense with the artist's body in so far as it is light (or lack of it) that actually makes the image.

We have all had enough of hearing about the death of God, of Man, of Art and so on since the 19th century. What in fact, I believe, has happened was simply the progressive disintergration of a faith in perception founded in the Middle Ages, after animism, on the basis of the unicity of divine creation, the absolute intimacy between the universe and the God-man of Augustinian Christianity, a material world which loved itself and contemplated itself in its one God. In the West, the death of God and the death of art are indissociable; the zero degree of representation merely fulfilled the phrophecy voiced a thousand years earlier by Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople, during the quarrel with the iconoclasts: "If we remove the image, not only Christ but the whole universe disappears".

...and a final consonant please Carol.

Sunday 30 November

"What is a photograph then?" A simple question but not that sinple to answer. "How long have you got?", I respond to my enquirer...

Photography, and the nature of photographic communication, has attracted debate since it's arrival in our collected cultural horizons. The photograph is a particular sort of image, one which operates through seemingly freezing a moment in time, portraying objects, people and places as they appeared within the view of the camera at that moment. Photography has thus contributed to the dislocation of time and space, enlightening and enlivening history and social geography. As such, it has attracted scrutiny from philosophers concerned with its semiotic structure and its phenomenological impact.

So let's get the theoretical truisms out of the way first. An image of a thing isn't the thing itself. When an image is made, whether processed from the flux of life through a lens or, indeed, conjured with paint and brush, it takes on all kinds of other qualities - metaphoric, iconic, whatever. And there you go. You're immediately in a realm of ambiguities, multiple meanings, dreadful or exciting uncertainties. In photography the lens makes real and the lens falsifies. Digital technology has perhaps intensified this dichotomy.

In figurative painting, for example, the work is as much a play of variations on inherited pictorial traditions as it is a depiction of the apparent subject. In abstract painting, despite the concerted attempts of minimalists and structuralists to create self-sufficient, non-referential presences, poetic allusion still leaks in.

Some photographers today, and these are some of the best ones around, like to stress these uncertainties. The artists in this show are such artists.

"That's not a bad answer."

Saturday 23 November

Thinking Aloud will return next weekend.

Saturday 15 November

Two things are for sure. One: we cannot escape the lens. We are surrounded by its images and increasingly perceive the world through it. So some people believe we are heading for a brave new non-physical world of endlessly manipulatable virtual realities. Two: we cannot, at present anyway, escape painting. And why on earth should we?

The history of painting, especially in the West and to an often unrecognised degree, still colours our perceptual filter on the world. It remains our predominant inherited visual vocabulary. Most photography (if not all) is inescapably influenced by compositional structures laid down during the last few centuries through painting. Some artists today like to stress these uncertainties - it all gets mixed up and mixed in. The artists in this show do so with notable ingenuity and subtlety.

Saturday 8 November

It is both poingnant and pertinent as we approach Rememberance Day and Armistance week that these photographs are availible for viewing at the Pavilion. Visitors continue to refer to beauty as opposed to appocalypse. There lies an irony which is almost beyond comprehension.

Beauty - neither Kantian nor personal in taste - and not only as the French psycho-analyst Lacan would have us think about a missed encounter with Death can be both. It can arise not as an aestheticisation of the suffering of others, but as the result of an affecting and transforming encounter that opens up a transport-station, a passage to a beyond that is not death, but a future in which trauma is carried, processed, remembered.

We cannot simply abandon others at the mouth of hell. Yet ethically how can our looking back not condemn anyone caught in such images of atrocity to the repeated death structured into the photographic index of time and space? There is an intimacy between the aesthetic process, the relations of the making and positioning of a viewing subject - the creation of a kind of gazing that is the passageway of ethical encounter with an unknown otherness and with the unknowness of trauma - and the theoretical elaboration of this practice as metramorphosis and the matrixial gaze.

A windswept pensioner hunches into view, poppy ablaze against his dark and wet coat. "Ben Nicholson?", he enquires. I take him by the arm and steer him down the stairs.

Saturday 1 November

Visitors to 'The Sublime Image of Destuction' continue to gasp and grasp for understanding and meaning. The idea that they should consider the photographs as paintings is not so wide of the mark as this encourages investigation of marks and signs contained within the frame (and beyond it).

The critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing in the early part of the 20th century, penned his reflections on painting in a characteristically brief set of remarks. It is possible that the first lines he wrote were about Kandinsky's paintings, and he offers the phrase: 'the simultaneous occurrence of conjuring and manifesting'. What is conjured would be what is invoked subjectively, brought forward, attributed; and what is manifested seems to emerge from the object itself. He goes on, in an essay, 'Painting, or Signs and Marks', to define the picture as a set of marks. The mark, he tells us, is not to be confused with the sign. And though there are various instances of signs there is also something he will call 'the absolute sign' and 'the absolute mark'. These absolutes are not found separate from various particular marks and signs; they are, in his words, 'buried within them'. Every sign contains within it the absolute sign and every mark contains within it the absolute mark; and whereas the absolute sign is magical, the absolute mark is mythical.

The mark is distinguished from the sign. A mark resembles nothing else in its manifestation. Indeed, a mark is a manifestation, and so these photographs, conjuring and manifesting, are composed of marks, marks that manifest without sustaining resemblance to anything else. The absolute sign is magical, not by virtue of what it represents, but precisely for the means of representation that it is, as well as the semblances it can and does contain. The mark resembles nothing else. Moreover, marks take on a meaning first when they appear on things (living or otherwise) and the examples in the photographs of Norfolk, Seawright and co. are the blush and stigmata of the event. On the other hand, the marks distinguish the images.

Thinking aloud, as it will turn out, what defines the picture is what also links the picture to a realm of morality. Ultimately, we can argue, that to see these pictures is to reckon with seduction, beauty, life and guilt. And if we reckon well, or understand the picture with respect to its truth, we will understand the paradoxical necessity of averring seduction and attending to the lifeless aspects of what appears. This involves no less than a critical destruction of the work of art, one that entails a critique of law as well, specifically of retribution and revenge in the name of a utopian possibility.

Saturday 25 October

There are urgent mutterings of excited recognition from a group of visitors in the gallery. Is it because they recognise one of Simon Norfolk's images from an editorial portrait in this week's Guardian newspaper? This reaction occurrs again throughout the afternoon as people interpret the familiarity from the memory of the newspaper article to what it is on the wall(s) in front of them.

There is obviously a lot of thinking going on (you would almost certainly hear it were it not for the shrieks of little ballerinas that have descended upon the DLWP) and I begin to volounteer some comments; about thinking, about memory and that together with art (these images) involves articulating art with trauma and its foreclosure. Witnessing the traumatic event/thing cannot give a proper witnessing concerning the event, but it attests to its uniqueness and validity, creating a space for it in the world by aesthetic means that becomes of ethical value.

Working on the process of moving from trauma to cultural memory raises the concerns with the problem of looking back, of that space between memory and history. Here we are talking about the historian's problem of reviewing the image archive which serves at once as evidence of the event (the document) and of its institution as history (the archive): a condition, I suggest, that requires a retrospective witness to an event otherwise lost in the passage of time. Thus we encounter the ethical as the 'gaze of retrospect'.

Saturday 18 October

A fiesty group became very animated in front of the image containing the remains of Saddam's statue - the symbolism of the outstretched arm and the defiance of the 'boy-king' looter. The subject of the art of destruction inevitably lead to the questions surrounding the destruction of art. This suggests visual systems of energy transfer passing out of existence and a pre-occupation with the question of why and how things come to be, stay, and ultimately pass away.

Thus the ethical reflection provoked by the destruction of art is an experience with which most of us are familiar. It is usually associated with iconoclasm or the intentional destruction of works of art. In the logic of iconclasm, destruction is visited upon works of art from without, the context of care catastrophically ruptured. A relevant recent case of the spectacular iconoclastic destruction of art was the 'blowing-up' of the second-century sculptures known as the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban government of Afghanistan in March 2001. This event served as a powerful example for what has been labelled 'iconoclash' - and is one that recurs as the most recent moment of a long history of iconclastic onslaughts against Mahayanna Buddhist artefacts.

The destruction sharpened aesthetic and ethical perceptions of a global cultural heritage for which global civil society and its institutions had assumed a responsibility of care - the statues were reproduced, projected on the Pompidou Centre, and after their destruction reflected upon and thought about. The event disclosed a fundamental lack of consensus surrounding the grounds on which these statues might be said to have a right to exist. In 1999, following international cultural diplomacy, the Buddhas were placed 'under the protection' of the Taliban government, an assumption of responsibility which Mullar Omar not only subsequently recinded but even atoned for with the sacrifice of 100 cows.

The destruction of the Buddhas, while bringing into visibility an implicit sense of global ethical responsibility for works of art - even among those who did not previously know of the existence of such statues - also highlights the limits of thinking of the destruction of art in terms of iconclasm. The Taliban government did not consider themselves to be destroying works of art, but as purifying their land; in tthe words of Mullah Omar: 'How could we justify having left these impurities on Afghan soil?' The question, note, is not of justifying why the statues were destroyed, but the hypothetical case of why they should not be destroyed: what right had they to continue in existence? The statues were destroyed as Idols, since not destroying them would have signified an impious care for their existence.

The attempt by the representatives of UNESCO to save the statues by arguing that they were works of art and no longer of primarily religious significance spectacularly backfired. It was because they were not of religious significance, there no longer being a significant Buddhist community in Afghanistan, that they had to be destroyed. Mullar Omar, perhaps disingenuously, maintained that if they were of religious significance to a hypothetical Afghan Buddhist community, then their right to exist would be secured: 'If they were objects of the cult of an Afghan minority, we would have to respect their belief and its objects, but we do not have a single Buddhist in Afghanistan so why preserve their false idols? And if they have no religious character, why get so upset? It's just a question of breaking stones'.

In the face of iconclastic logic modern aesthetic is literally disarmed. If the only recognised ground for care is religious, then arguments to aesthetic and perhaps even economic and political value are irrelevant. Iconoclasm is indifferent to art, it is aimed at attacking the beliefs of others, or underlining the belief of one's own community, or usually both.

The destruction of art is collateral damage - art is destroyed for what it is taken to mean to others rather than what it means for itself. Iconclasm uses the continued existence of a work of art as a means to attack the context of care that sustains its existence.

Saturday 11 October

"All photography is a form of editing. By pointing a camera in a certain direction a photographer selects a version of reality to present to the world" Gerda Taro - photojournalist.

It is intriguing then that photographic art can act as a vehicle of reality by which we can address one another by virtue of our common humanity.

Many of the visitors to Gallery 2 feel disconnection i.e abstracted from conflict by distance; sense of danger removed by sense of scale.

A gentleman in a wheelchair arrives, pauses, and the takes more time than anybody else to look, see, view and encounter. We talk of the symbolism and symmetry of the work (Norfolk) and its classical references and then the detached beauty (Seawright). "Nobody reads anymore" he says. (No bodies reads anywhere - I suggest?) Perhaps this is the negative beauty of modernist art as opposed to television's war as entertainment.

"This is very dignified" he says. I agree.

The act of photography is like going on a hunt in which photographer and camera merge into one invisible function. This is a hunt for new states of things, situations never seen before, for the improbable, for information, dialogue and, yes, dignity.

The Sublime Image of Destruction evokes two of Kant's definitions of the sublime

a) mathematical = ungraspable magnitude and, b) dynamic = ungraspable force

Both magnitude and force defined by the sense of scale became apparent issues with the steady flow of visitors on Saturday. The sheer sense of scale that these images render producing a hushed reverence, akin to being in a library, or place of worship but this as we often encounter ourselves is the 'gallery effect' of old. And once people woke up to the fact that I was not, in fact, the person responsible for the photographs, dialogue ensued.

(are we guilty of trivialising?)

Disturbingly serene to the point that they invite closer viewing which can render the images cold to the point that they exist on the verge of brutality. This can be explored as possibly a loaded response to the post-modern/anti-aesthetic critique as iconclasm - not only that the images be dead, but tthat they be shown to be dead.

Many people were often confused at what they were being invited to look at (be confronted with?). Do they have the right to comment, or is it more about having the right language to comment? I referenced Steve McQueen's piece 'Queen and Country' as a recent method of evoking the non-trivialisation of war through art. The question then became "Does our care for art reflect our care for others?"

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