pictures - douglas crimp

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by Doug las C rim p

Pictures Cl I tl il ogwi th e s s ay by Dougl as C r imp , p u b li sh e d by Ar ti st s Sp ac e, "9n -

,. M o rg an F is he r, " Ta lk in g w ith J ac kGoldstein," LAICAJo~mQI . n o. '4(April-May 19n). pp . 4 2' 45 .

FoUowing is a reprint of the ongina/essay written byDou.glas Crimp fo r Pictures atArtists Space in N ew York(September 24-0ctober 29, 1977). The exhibition,organized by Cr imp , fea tured the w or k o fT I'O Y Brauntuch,Jack Goldstein, Sherr ie Leuine , Robe r t L on go an d Philip Smith .Th e angina! c a ta lo g , w h i ch includes (his essay, is ouailablefrom Artists Space .Jack Goldstein is currently at work on a new film calledThe Jump . Itis to be nineteen seconds long and will showa diver performing a somersault from a high board. Butthe high board and the water into which he plunges willbe absent from the finished film. Using a process calledmtoscoping-a form of animation made by tracing overlive-action footage-Goldstein is removing everythingfrom the shot but the jump itself. Against a blackbackground a mechanistic figure, tinted gold will leap,somersault, plunge, and disintegrate into fragments ..Inmaking this picture of a dive, Goldstein i s performing aset of operations that isolate, distil, alter, and augmentthe filmed recording of an actual event. He does this inorder to impose a distance between the event and itsviewers because, according to Goldstein, it is only througha distance that we can understand the world. IWhich is tosay that we only experience reality through the pictureswe make of it.To an ever greater extent our experience is governedby pictures, pictures in newspapers and magazines, ontelevision and in the cinema. Next to these picturesfirsthand experience begins to retreat, to seem moreand more trivial. While it once seemed that pictures hadthe function of interpreting reality, it now seems thatthey have usurped it. It therefore becomes Imperative

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jack Goldstein, Shan.,197S. Stili image from 16 mm colo, sound film, 3 minute s.

to understand the picture itself, not in order to uncovera lost reality,but to determine how a picture becomesa signifyingstructure of its own accord. But picturesare characterized by something which, though oftenremarked, is insufficiently understood: that they areextremely difficult to distinguish at the level of theircontent, that they are to an extraordinary degree opaquetomeaning. The actual event and the fictional event,the benign and the horrific, the mundane and the exotic,the possible and the fantastic: all are fused into theall-embracing similitude of the picture.Arenewed impulse to make pictures of recognizablethings characterizes a wide range ofcontemporary art,constituting a line of continuity drawn through itsmuchtouted pluralism. The extensive use ofthose media thathave the power of replicating the world around us-photography, film,video-is but one of its manifestations.In addition, the realm ofthe imagination has reappearedtodisplace the analytic and perceptual modes ofour

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recent past Oneofthe first and most significant instancesofthis transformation was in the theater of RobertWilson,which had, in its initial appearance in the late sixties, theforce of a shock.AlthoughWilson's work is not Surrealist,it does invoke important aspects of that style: the spaceofrepresentation populated by the images of a dream,images like Einstein and Patty Hearst, whose simultaneouspresence can onlybe in the imagination. Howdid this shiftto a new kind ofrepresentation come about?In the art ofthe past decade, many of those conventionsthat had always been considered as belonging to therepresentational image-spatial illusionism, for example-were shown to be indistinguishable from our apprehensionof any object whatsoever, In the work of the Minimalistsit was no longer a question of creating an illusion ofsomething exterior to the work, as the illusion of spacebehind a painting's surface; rather illusionism was shown -to inhere in the verybeing of an object.' When confrontedbyone of SolLeWitt's open cubic structures, for example,


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Feature hy Douglas Crimp

one sees is always, fromwhatever vantage point,a network ofinterlaced bars. Although we are copresentwith this obdurately three-dimensional thing, we see onlya lattice, a diagram, in which a maze of angles, shadows,and open spaces constantly shifts as we move about it.Wegenerally think ofperspective as the illusionistic deviceby which we represent a three-dimensional object witha.two-dimensional image, but when we look at a LeWitt,--,twhatwe see is perspective. LeWitt points to the processof,converting the complex data of sensory experience intothe,schematic representation of it that is captured by thenotion cube, but he does so not by making the image of acube but by making a c u b e itself.Another Minimal sculptor, Joel Shapiro, has createdobjects that are experienced simultaneously as physicalthings and psychological images. Atinybronze horse or aminiature iron house reveal themselves in all their materialaspects-small, heavy, handmade-while they also clearlyrepresent things that we recognize and with which wehave many psychological associations. It is the strengthoftheir presence as little objects that ensures that theywill be experienced psychologically,as RosalindKrausshas suggested. ':Asone stands above that miniature object,looking down, one has an extraordinary sense of distancefrom it-a distance, one realizes, that will not be overcomemerely by stooping to look at it fromdoser range....Becauseof the types of objects Shapiro fashions, and because of thedistance enforced by their scale, the sense ofremotenessthey create is quite specific;the most accurate word todescribe it is: memory. Shapiro's houses seem tobe inperpetual retreat because they are simultaneously presentwithin our space an d infected bymemory. It is this thatidentifies them as psychologized objects."?

2. S"" Ro,alind Krauss. "Objecthood,"Critica/ P.,.p.ctiv e s i n A m er i, aM Ar t(Amherst Fine Arts Center Gallery.University of Massaohuset ts . 1976).PP2527

3 Ibid .. p. ~74. See my essay " Joan [onas' Performance

Works," Studio International, vol , 192,no. 982 UulyAugust 1976). pp. 10-12.

The shift in the conception of illusionism from arepresentation of something absent to the condition of ourapprehension ofwhat is present, and the psychologizationofthe image, were extended by a number of artists usingthe medium of performance. Working in a tradition inwhich the creation of images is always a function ofpresence, these artists wished to establish those imagesas representational without, however, returning to theanteriority of the theatrical text. In particular, JoanJonas adopted strategies for presenting the space ofperformance as illusionistic.' Working outdoors, withperformance and audience separated bygreat distances,she exploited such natural illusionistic phenomena asdepth-of-field distortion' and discontinuity of sound andimage. In later indoor works, Jonas converted event intoimage using the simultaneous broadcast capacity ofvideo.Often itwas onlybylookingat the video monitor that theviewers could fullyapprehend what was happening directlyinfront of them. And the images that Jonas used confrontedpsychological subjects directly:narcissism in Organic Honey'sV is u a l T e le p a th y , childhood memory in the games ofDelay,Delay,the imagination of the exotic in Thlilight.The result of these and other similar developments in theart of the past decade has been that a group of youngerartists sees representation as an inescapable part of ourability to grasp the world around us. It is not, therefore,relegated to a relationship to reality that is either secondaryor transcendent; and it does not achieve signification inrelation to what is represented, but in relation to otherrepresentations. Representation has returned in theirwork not in the familiar guise of realism, which seeks toresemble a prior existence, but as an autonomous functionthat might be described as "representation as such."It isrepresentation freed from the tyranny of the represented.

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5. 'acques lacan, "The insistence of the letter 7.i n t he unccnscious," in St ructural i sm, ed .[acques E h rm an n (G a rden City, Ne w York:Anchor Books) , p. 106 . Lacon is not speakingabout pictures, b u t a b ou t s ig ni fi er s in general.

6. Goldstein 's phonograph records, of whichthe music from this performance is one,are made b~splicing together fragments.som eli rnes no Ion ger In .n twe nty.fives ec o n d s , of so u nd from e xi s ti ng r ec e r d in gs.

Saussure uses such a spatial imagewhen speaklng of the syntagrnatlc andasscctatlve relationships of language:"From the associative and syntagmatkviewpoint a li ngu is tiC un it i s l ike a fixedpart of a bUilding. e.g, a column. Onthe one hand, the column has a certainrelation to the architrave tha t it supports;the arran gemen t of fhe two IInits ins pacesuggests th e syntagmatic relation. Onthe other hand . If t he column i s Dor ic.it suggests a mental comparison ofthis s tyle with othe rs (Ionic, Corinthian,e Ie . ) although none ef these elementsis present in space, the relation isassociative." See Ferdinand de Saussure,

Cour s e in Gen t r o l U ng ui nic s ( Ne w Y or lc :McGraw-Hili. 1966). pp, li31:!.4. For ad l sc us sic n of Ih e ci nern alic shot as a~ntagmati c unit , s ee Christ ian Metz ,F i lm LD n g u ag e : A S em io tic s o flh e Q n em o ,trans. Michael Taylor (N_ Y ork: Ox fo rdUniversIty Press. 1974), pamcul.rly"Problems of Denotation in th e fictionFilm: pp . 1~146.

8. Saussure, C ourso in GMell1/ Unguistics, p.123. S au ss ure c alls the relation oppositeto synta gmati c. ass oc ia tive. but those whohave extended Saussure's theory into thefield of semiotics prefer paradigmatic. SO ! f ' ,for example . Roland Bar th .s, EI .murbo f S em i o lo ID ', trans. Annette Lavers and

Colin Smi th (Boston : Beacon Press , 1970) .Th e fi.nguistic categorie.s, syntagmaticand usociat ;ve. proposed by Saussureare parallel to those used by Roman'akobson when b e speaks of the two polesof languag . . as metonomy and metaphor .s . . e hi. "Two Aspect.s of Language andTwo Typo:sof Aphasic Disturbances,"in Roman,akobson an d Morris Haile.Fundc""mkl/s o f l.onpag. (Th~ H . g ue :Mouton, 1971). pp. 67.96.

For their pictures, ese artists ave turne to eavailable images in the culture around them. But theysubvert the standard signifying function of those pictures,tied to their captions, their commentaries, their narrativesequences-tied, that is, to the illusion that they aredirectly transparent to a signified. Walter Benjamin'sdictum that the caption will become the most importantcomponent of the shot is taken as prophetic. Because thisubiquitous captioning is nothing but an insistent attemptto force upon the picture a relation to the signified that itdoes not intrinsically have, these artists seek the possibilityin their work that the picture does not have "to answer forits existence in the name of any signification whatever.">Last year Jack Goldstein presented a performance entitledMO Fencersat an exhibition in Geneva. During the first partof the event the audience watched two men in fencinggear dueling on a stage before them. The controlledtheatrical effects of their presentation-dim redspotlighting, fifty-foot distance from the audience,recorded music like that of a Hollywood sweshbucklers=-gave them the appearance of a remote, spectral image.Their presentation had the quality of representation,providing that kind of sensation that we experience asdeja vu. During the second part of the performance, afterone fencer had appeared to kill the other, the lights wentdown, but the music continued to play at lower volumefor seven minutes. Sitting in the dark, the audience wasleft to remember the image of fencing, but since theperformance itself had the character of a mnemonic image,the second part seemed to suggest a re-remembering. Inthe difference between those two kinds of mnemonicexperience the paradoxical mechanism by which memoryfunctions became apparent: the image is gradually

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forgo t ten , altered, replaced. Cuedby the continuedpresence of the music, whose relationship to the initialimage was ambiguous (fencing, an athletic exercise, is notidentical with the dueling of cavaliers), one might replacethe original image with a scene from, say, a DouglasFairbanks movie. This kind of replacement is possible notonly because the music suggests it but because the stagedduel was so free of specific reference. It was not, somehow,these particular fencers in this particular place; rather itwas simply fenc ing , dueiing,jighting.It is in this regard that we can understand why Goldsteinhas erased the surrounding context of the diver in the filmin progress described at the beginning of this essay. Itisan erasure that isolates the image in such a way that itparallels the image retained inmemory. When Goldsteinrotoscopes the stock footage of a diver, what he is doingis paring away everything in that shot that provides thedive with a specific context. This context, sometimesreferred to as interior montage, might also be identifiedas the syntagmatic features of the image. Although thelinguistic syntagm is a temporal sequence (backwardsand forwards in the time of speech), we may use it whenspeaking of a spatial image to denote all of the separateelements that are contiguous in the image/Thus forthe original footage of the dive: the diving board, theswimming pool, the entire surrounding scene. When thesecontiguous elements are absent from the image, as is thecase with Goldstein's rotoscoped version, we have thealternative possibility of relating it to another image basedon association. Such a relationship is the opposite of asyntagm: a paradigm; and paradigmatic relations uniteimages in a mnemonic series+Thus we might associate thisparticular image with a similar trajectory such as that ofa gymnast.


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Feat re 'f DOUg'~5 Cr!n1p

Pic tu re s , Installation view, Artists space, '977. Pictured: Robert Longo.

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9 . W alte r Senjamin, "A Short Hi .to ry o fPhotography: $c,.... (London), vel. '3.no . 1 (Spring 1971), P.25.

cp aneis spelled out in Goldstein's work called The Pull, a set ofthree photographs each showing a tiny floating figurein a large field of color: a deep-sea diver against a greenbackground, a free-falling man against blue, and anastronaut in a field of silver. The parallelism of theseimages operates on the level of the images as such, noton that of the activities shown. Our impulse to link theirsensations is thus highly arbitrary. That we do so hasnothing, in fact, to do with our sensory experience, for itis unlikely indeed that any of us has felt the sensationof falling through space (to one's death?) or of floating inouter space. These are events that we have experiencedonly as pictures (in newspapers, on television) and ourimaginative leap from one to the others stems entirelyfrom their associative relationship as pictures.The pictureis thus shown to be separable from that which it might besaid to picture.Tothe extent that The Pull suggests speculation onproblems of a semiotic nature, it invites comparison witha work of the same year (1976)by John Baldessari, who hasexerted a significant influence on the group of youngerartists who have begun to make pictures. ConcerningDiachroni c/Synchron ic T ime: Above, On, Under (w it h Me rma id )takes as its subject semiotic analysis, but converts it, andparticularly its penchant for diagrams, into a wry anddeceptive object. Itconsists of six photographs hung inthree pairs that are read across (diachronically) and down(synchronically). The only pair that is actually a diachronicsequence is, however, the center one, each photographshowing the same speed-boat at a different point along apath. The other two "diachronic" pairs are in fact relatedalong the axis of association (a synchronic relationship):

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(however that latter pair is ambiguous; it could also be anarrative sequence in which the submarine is speedingtoward the mermaid, thus constituting a diachronic pair).Baldessari's deliberate confusion of the linguistic termsis characteristic of the humor that is constant feature ofhis work. Although he has consistently used phqtographicimages, his emphasis has not been on the images as such,but on the way they subvert analytic thought, and is thusheir to a Duchampian tradition. If Goldstein's and hiscontemporaries' work moves in that direction in whichsense emerges out of nonsense, Baldessari's moves inthe opposite direction. Apart from this reversal, theseyounger artists have turned to the peripheral aspects ofBaldessari's work: to the beauty of its images, its incipientromanticism, and the veiled anxiety that underlies thebanality of his pictures.It seems almost incidental that the central image of ThePull is taken from a photograph of a suicide, for it is theresimply as another instance of the body's uninhibitedmovement through space. Yet it is characteristic of muchrecent work that the pictures used are often morbid orviolent. Goldstein's recent series of variously coloredphonograph records are of disastrous occurrences: amurder, an earthquake, a forest fire, a drowning. But for antheir horrifying associations, these images are neutralizedby the distance that representation necessarily imposes.If a sense of impending disaster haunts these pictures, itis usually detached from the subjects that might suggestthem. The psychological resonance is like that of dreams,where often itis the most apparently banal dream thatterrifies us the most, or the most overtly horrible thatmakes us feel oddly at ease.


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This paradox of the picture-that it is simultaneouslypresent and remote, that itaffects us psychologically in away that cannot be explained by its subject-is addressedin a series of works by Troy Brauntuch that use bothphotographs and photographic reproduction techniques.Golden Distance is a pair of prints each reproducing a blackand white picture of the head of a woman seen frombehind. This image is inscribed in a circle, printed onblack, reprinted on gold, and provided with a caption. Butto what does this caption "Whispers around a woman"refer? Itseems only to reinforce the inaccessibility of thephotograph itself. This image remains one of those "secretpictures" which Walter Benjamin says "are able to shockthe associative mechanism to a standstill. At this pointthe caption must step in, thereby creating a photographythat literarizes the relationships of life and without whichphotographic construction would remain stuck in theapproximate .... 'The illiterate of the future,' it has beensaid, 'will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet,

Piau,n. installation view, Artists Space, '9n. PiCIIJred: [ack Goldstein.

but the one who cannot take a photograph.' But must wenot also count as illiterate the photographer who cannotread his own pictures? Will not the caption become themost important component of the shot?"? Brauntuch'scaption does not, however, provide this photograph witha legibility of the standard kind. Itis instead an insistentreminder of the picture's withdrawal from signification.The typical use of the caption as a means of articulating-the mute photograph was illustrated by,]on Borofsky in anexhibition last year. 'Of the several pictures that made upthat show, Borofsky included one entitled Mulatto Man whosesource was dearly a newspaper photograph, and when heprojected that image on the wall to make his copy drawing,he reproduced at the bottom the caption that accompaniedit. That caption did not state the signification of the picture;rather, it provided the drawing with a meaning that it didnot otherwise have. The picture is not transparent tosuch a meaning, while the caption is self-sufficient, has

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Pia ..",., Installation view, Artis ts Space, 1977.Pic tured , f rom left to r ight : Sherr ie Levine,Robert Longo, Phi lip Smith.

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Feature byl}.)ugias Crimp

_ _!!!'~~~o~~~~~ without the picture. Can the picture itselfbe said to be intrinsically without meaning? Borofsky'sdrawing leaves that question open. But for Brauntuchthe picture, opaque as it is to signification, becomes forthat reason the object of desire. The caption is only oneof many expressions of a desire that treats the image 'with the mechanistic devotion appropriate to a fetish.The obsessive manipulations, alterations, applicationsofwords are the materialization of a reverie. Butbecause,.,ltlesirecomes about only in the sphere of frustration,the image remains forever at a distance. Frustrationoperates here not in relation to the subject of the picture,but in relation to the absence of signification. It is notbecause this is a particular woman, but because this is noparticular woman, that the picture becomes a fetish.The same fascination is attached, in a work called 123,to three rather conventional drawings. The work is a setof three photographic silkscreen prints which reproducesketches of a stage set, a vestibule, and a tank. Each isprinted on a deep, blood-red background, with the screenof the photographic enlargement process clearly visible.Their placements at various locations on the red fieldsdistend the spatial conventions ofthe drawings. Tothequestions that might arise about the kinds ofassociationsthat are generated by the juxtaposition of these threedrawings there is a deceptively simple answer: these arethree drawings byHitler.That information, not providedbythe work itself, functions like a hidden caption. Wemayknow it from having seen them before (these drawingsare often reproduced, and indeed it is their appearance asreproduction that Brauntuch has chosen to emphasize)or we may be told it, but the images themselves do notrender it. The name Hitleris connotative in a waythat

the drawings from his hand can never be. Ifa picture hasany transparency tomeaning, it is not in the direction ofthe psychology of its maker, nor of its apparent subject.Itis this remoteness, this opacity that Brauntuch's workconfronts as it attempts to recapture the horror ofNazismin the mute presence of a set ofimages fromHitler's hand.123 is ultimately about his failure to do so, about hisresignation in the face ofthe utter banality ofthose pictures.The picture's resistance to specific meaning does not,however, abolish meaning altogether. The very lack ofaccess to an obvious nexus of meaning can be a stimulantto the invention of a whole structure of narrative. ShenieLevineemploys images that are even more deliberatelybanal than those of Brauntuch. Last year she conducteda sale at the Mercer Street Store of seventy-five pairs ofshoes. Theywere all nearly identical, odd little things,sized for a small child but designed to look like those foran adult male, the kind of standard footwear worn bybusinessmen. Levinehad bought them from a job lot inCalifornia, and sold them all at a slight profit in a singleday.This latter fact adds to the mystery of the event, forthese shoes were certainly not useful to their purchasers,nor were they particularly attractive, and they seemedsingularly devoid of aesthetic interest: Were they intendedas a latter-day species ofDuchampian readymade? Orfetishistic objects of a Surrealist kind? Orwas Levine'sstatement simply "Here are seventy-five pairs of littleshoes"? But isn't it precisely the impossibility of acceptingthat statement, a statement that ismerely an indication ofpresence, that opens the way to signification? Seeing all ofthose shoes spread out on a table, one inevitably wishedto animate them, to invent stories in which they becamethe synecdochic characters. This temptation, the very

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"

mechanism of fantasy, is familiar if we think of childhoodgames. e oy pays or ays cons c .g a aof roads for a toy truck that, though the visible excusefor this elaborate project, is all the time left aside. Theobject having fulfilled its signifying role is used up, freeto disappear. Surely, though, a toy truck does not signify aroad. And that is precisely the point, for the imaginationseeks meaning in the correlation of one signifier andanother, thus creating a narrative.Narrativity in the absence of a specific narrative is alsoinstanced in Levine's Sons an d Lovers, a suite of thirty-sixdrawings of silhouetted heads executed in fluorescenttempera on graph paper, There are, in all, five different"characters ":Washington, Lincoln, John Kennedy,an unknown woman, and a couple. The presidents'silhouettes are familiar emblems from the faces of coins,while the bland couple and the "other woman" are takenfrom wig advertisements, Each drawing pairs two ofthese silhouettes facing each other; the only variationthroughout the series is the scale of these heads and theircombination. The act of confrontation that is the onlypsychological relationship fully stated by the images isall that is required to establish a narrative. From thesebanal pictures emerges a scenario that moves from as-sassination to adultery. Levine's genre is the melodrama,where the cliche is the vehicle for the larger-than-lifestory. One thinks of the TV soap opera with its stultifyingrepetition of drab sets, bland characters, tedious dialogue.Where is there a single image in that daily routine thatwould indicate the dramas of life and death that arealways enacted there? Sons an d Loversis just such a dumbrepetition of images and it just as surely leads to a dramathat it does not portray.

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That sequential images, re ardless of their ambi iwill inevitably elicit a narrative is also demonstrated ina painting by Michael Hurson; because it inflects thissituation differently it provides an interesting comparisonwith Levine's work. Edw ard an d Otto Pfa f f is composed oftwo side-by-side cartoon images showing nearly identicalscenes of two figures sitting at a desk. In the first frameboth men stare at a blank sheet of paper in front of them,while in the second the left-hand figure has suddenlyturned his head over his shoulder in the direction of thefirst frame. What he seems to have noticed is, of course,himself in that other picture. In this wry confounding ofthe duration implied by a sequence of images, Hursonhas constructed a narrative in which what is narratedis narrative itself. Caught in this tautology, the viewersuspends those questions about the picture that mightpoint outside of it: "Who are Edward and Otto Pfaff andwhat are they doing?" has become irrelevant to this story.Sons an d Loversmoves, however, in exactly the oppositedirection. Its narrative seems to be about nothing thatis contained within the pictures, but instead all that isoutside of them.Levine has recently published a book consisting of twosets of pages inserted into the facing pockets of thecovers. On one set are printed the names of rooms in ahouse-"kitchen," "living room," "bedroom," etc.-whileon the other are printed the names of family members-"mother," "father," "sister," "brother." Each of us, needlessto say, has the story to complete that book. Philip Smith'searly slide projection pieces include a work that bears aninteresting affinity with Levine's book: Relinquish Control isbuilt around a succession of pictures of domestic interiors.


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Feature by Douglas Crimp

Pictures. Installation view. Artists Space, '977,Pictured, rrom left to r igh t : [ aek Goldstein.Troy Brauntuch,

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Smith refers to these works, which also include Partial objects (a tourist view of the Tai Mahal and a hand holdinzBiography and StiliStones,as "extruded cinema, Eachnarrative segment of RelinquishControlconsists of fourslides projected simultaneously: two large ones ofdifferentshots of the same room and two smaller ones, projectedabove them, ambiguously detailing the disintegration of awoman whose bodily functions are gradually taken overbymedical technology. Action and sets are split apart,appearing not only separate but also unrelated; mediumshots and tight dose-ups appear both in conjunction and insuccession. Everything that has a logical function incon-stituting the narrative sequence of an ordinary filmis heredeconstructed, so that instead of a story unfolding beforeus, we are given only groups ofunassociated pictures.Ifwe are topiece together a narrative from this strangesequence, we can do so only by sensing its ambience.Smith's large oil pastel drawings retain a similar relation-ship to the cinematic flowof images. They look as if theywere intended to be read, like a storyboard, a rebus, ora pictographic text. The kaleidoscope ofpictures thatmakes up each drawing is dispersed in a fairly regularizedpattern ofhorizontal registers, with each image occupyingapproximately equal space on the sheet. If,however, weattempt to derive a coherent narrative from them, weencounter such disjunctive combinations of images thatwe despair of making particular sense of them. What, forexample, is to be made of this sequence that is the top rowof pictures of Bring:a running man carrying a large banner,a Japanese puppeteer, a girl with a parakeet, a parachutistlanding, another parachutist, two Chinese children withstreamers? But it is not only the multifarious subjectsof Smith's images that inhibit their logical combination.Hispictures may be entire scenes or close-up details of

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. . . . .

a praying mantis are found on the same drawing); real orartificial beings (aman riding an escalator and an Egyptianstatue inhabit that same drawing). They move withouttransition from the depiction of the easily credible (alittleboy playing with a dog) to the fanciful (apersonified doggetting out of bed). Is the source of this latter image afantasy, a cartoon, an illustration in a children's book? It isimpossible to say, for all of Smith's pictures are rendered inthe same schematic style, thereby reducing every possiblekind of picture to an equivalence.Where else dowe encounter this diffuse and undifferenti-ated array of pictures? Where else but on these drawingswould the image of a parachute follow that of a parakeet?Or a real dog be transformed into a personified dog? Itis, of course, inour imaginations, where the movementfrom one signifier to another is free to take its owncourse, and thus to escape rational order. The point isnot, however, that these drawings represent fantasies ordreams or memories, but that they take as their model theimagination's mode of representation. Representationis, ofcourse, one of the most important words in the writings ofFreud, and in his descriptions of dreams and memory heconstantly uses such metaphors as pictograph, hieroglyph,and rebus: "Ifwe reflect that the means of representationin dreams are principally visual images and not words,we shall see that it is even more appropriate to comparedreams with a system ofwriting than with a language. Infact the interpretation of dreams is completely analogousto the decipherment of an ancient pictographic script suchas Egyptian hieroglyphs. Inboth cases there are certainelements which are not intended to be interpreted (orread, as the case may be) but are only designed to serve as

'.


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--"..........rminatives', that is to establish the meaning of someother elements.~lo,Smith's drawings do not, of course, demand a particularinterpretation, but rather a play of the viewer'simagination equivalent to that play that has producedthem. this is not to say that Smith's pictures are theinvention of his imagination; they obviously have theirsources in the world of images that "isavailable to all of-~us. Representation is not born in the imagination; it is afunction of the imagination. It is by way of representationthat reality comes to us. Pictures of things do not signifythose things, but, like ideograms, signify only what issuggested by those things. And therefore those picturesare juxtaposed in relationships that are determined notby the logic of things but by the logic of representation.If Smith's drawings seem to be about particular subjects,war (\Vatch I an d II) or entertainment (Spins)for example,it is not because they illustrate or narrate those subjects,but simply because a certain genre of image dominates.From the infinite array of possible pictures a givendrawing assembles those that might be associated inan imaginative system, and for that particular momentconjoins pictures of Sufi.dancers and bowlers, sculptorsand magicians, with all the force of an irrefutable logic.If for Smith the logic O J the picture is inits contiguitywith other pictures, for Robert Longo it is in the picture'sabsolute isolation. His S e 1 1 e r t Sealsfor MissouriBreaks is anelaborate description, but a description that converts itsobject into a paradox. In an attempt to relate the sequencefrom Arthur Penn's movie Missouri Break s in which thebandits gallop out of their hideaway in the geologicalfault that gives the movie its title, Longo resorted tomaking a,sequential sketch. In making that drawing of

1o. S igm und F,eud , ."The Claims of Psyc.hoAnalysi s to a Scienti fic lnter es I; (1913) .T I le $ f ll ndQrd fdilion o f Ih e O lm p lt: UP s ' l" lt o lo g i ~1 Wo r k s . vel. X I I I (London:The Hogarth P,ess, 1953). p. In.

the diachrany of a film sequence, however, one cowboyinevitably became seven; for it is characteristic of thepicture that it produces stasis where there is motion:it stops time. this is hardly a revelation, but like otheraspects of the picture it is taken too much for granted; itis, after all, this stasis that gives the picture its particularuniqueness. (The extraordinary power ofMuybridge'sphotographs af animal locomotion is accounted for by thisfact.) Longo made his descriptive image of Missouri Break sinto a large cast aluminum wall relief, thereby freezing itinto a materialized presence. the peculiarity of Longo'spictures is that they are things.Prior to making his picture objects, Longo worked withvideo performances (he continues making videotapes).Composed of a barrage of textual fragments and images,those works frustrated the ability to retain particularimages that would provide a structure of meaning: nothingwould stand still.That frustration is emblematized in aphotograph that Longo published in a flyer documentinga work called Ariful Dodger.The photograph, showing apair of hands holding photographs of two video imagesthat appeared simultaneously on two monitors during theperformance, encapsulates the fundamental psychology ofpictures: they allow us to hold onto, to possess an instantof time.There is a convention in film called the freeze frame inwhich the flow of images suddenly halts and becomes,as ifby magic, a huge still photograph. The shock thatthis device produces in the viewer is very different fromthe feeling engendered by another technique where thecamera holds for an unexpectedly long time on an imagethat is itself static. this difference occurs because the

Volume 8 Number 1 Fail2005 X;JRA 29


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,11. Both of these methods of cinematic s tasi s

are often used by Fassbinder himself,notably in his Eff iB r im.

~i"I IIII -~freeze frame is lw.

pictures - douglas crimp

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