‘”The photograph was very old the corners were blunted from having been pasted in an album, the sepia print had faded and the picture had managed to show two children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory, what was called a Winter Garden in those days.” 1
In the often-quoted reference from of the most recognizable and significant pieces of literature in photography, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes first describes a material object (the photograph) before drawing attention to the two children captured in it. Barthes acknowledges the fact that the photograph itself belongs to its own narrative beyond the image captured. It can carry evidence of the marks of its own history on its surface. “Photographs are both images and physical objects that exist in time and space, ‘capable of depicting and being a vessel for memories.”2
Slippery and invasive in nature, memory can rarely be relied on as a candid recording mechanism. Memory has the power to formalize and make claims that can change our understanding of our actions and the world. I am interested in how memory is documented and represented in the context of contemporary art, specifically the separation that occurs in the process of selection, categorization from the whole. These archives are snapshots, synecdoche’s that are unable to represent the whole, but they do carry traces of it. Skin can have a similar function as a snapshot of our lived experience. In my practice, I have been utilizing these forms of inquiry to explore the notion of skin as a sight and site for our experience and engagement with the world. This idea that skin can be a form of archive has been the main conceptual focus for my bodies of work. To ground this, I will be discussing texts by Elizabeth Edwards, Janice Hart and Joan Gibbons. The texts I have chosen to unpack contain themes related to memory, trace, the archive in contemporary art. These themes examine the complexities of the nature of memory, the process of recording and collecting memories', the selection of knowledge and representation of it. These texts question how we perceive the representation of archived memory and skin’s function as a material, medium and metaphor in contemporary art.
Photographs Object Histories: On the Materiality of Images by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart
Photography is often reduced to a medium that tells the truth about a moment and is still one of the most realistic forms of representation. Its time freezing abilities allow it to act as a time capsule and mode of preservation. The photograph, however, is not a pure simulacrum. It is unable to capture the bigger picture, it fragments and isolates a moment in time. Edward and Hart draw attention to the physical qualities of the photograph as an object and emphasize its significance in affecting our reading of what is being represented. “'the functional context of materiality’ is often ‘glossed merely as a neutral support for image.’' 3 Edwards and Hart disputes the need to break this conceptual connotation and acknowledge the role of a medium's material properties in understanding image and subject represented. Shifting the focus away from content, the material and its presentational forms are central to the function of a photograph as an object, highlighting its integral relationship to image and association.
Reflecting Edwards and Harts notion, Mike and Doug Starn’s works subvert the initial premises of analogue photography and treat image as an object reflecting Edwards and Harts research. Constructing dream worlds, materiality and photography is open to a variety of sensory experiences, “that include the slow and layered accumulation of memory and history, and the melancholy decay of flesh and matter.”4 The insistence of material lifespan of the photographic medium is one of the foremost disconcerting elements of the Starn Twins works. Triple Christ is riddled with evidence of the handmade and constructed. Fragmented glossy papers veiled by various extended light exposures are held together by fingerprint covered scotch tape strips to form a contiguous image. Intervention of the artist in this fabrication is not hidden, breaking the state of mental transportation that is traditionally enabled in photographic images. The sickly yellow tones associated with death and decay stain the bruised images skin. The fact that the subject in this case Christ is secondary as opposed to any dead figure is drained of meaning and hierarchy. “The illusion must struggle to exist. The medium has a greater reality, and by calling so much attention to the artefacts of the medium, the artificiality of the medium is exposed.” 5 Focusing on the physical attributes of the photograph, the aesthetic choices of the maker, the traces of usage and time are all indicators that inform our understanding of the image and its status. This illustrate material's ability to act as a catalyst for object histories and highlights the significance of its relationship to interpretation representations and in turn its ability to distort and add additional layers of meaning.
Traces: Memory and Indexicality , Joan Gibbons
In Joan Gibbon’s book Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance, she discusses how memory is presented in the context of the gallery and museum. Gibbons unpacks the varied forms memory can take including personal, public and historic. She explores memory as trace, art as autobiography, the archives' function, postmemory, and the obliteration of memory. I will be examining the following chapter ‘Traces: Memory and Indexicality’ that surveys work by Rachel Whiteread, Miyako Ishiuchi, Nan Goldin and Bill Fontana that grounds memory through their signified connection to the represented subject. Discerning the role of the index present in these works, Gibbons unpacks how the approach of each of these artists to capturing these traces impact the position of the objects represented.
Gibbons argues that Whiteread’s sculptures, inverted casts off objects surfaces are the closest to a pure indexical connection. They have a ‘'status of direct attachment to the signified, they essentially trace off the object and not part of an extension of it, and so are degenerate, or at least in the first stages of degeneracy.’'6 This degeneracy Gibbons refers to occurs due to the separation caused by the release agent in the casting process and therefore is not continuous materially. It is significant to note that this separation or gap that is created is a ‘liminal space at which both the fact of the object and its representations, imaginings and associations overlay one another. ‘7 Gibbons references Duchamp's notion of the infra mince, emphasizing that the attributes of the medium define the nature of the portrayal and the referent captured. Whitread’s works mark the absence of an object through the presence of a negative that carries evidence of the original's existence like a scar on a skins surface. This forensic status and gap are further reinforced by the monochromatic materials utilized by Whiteread such as plaster, creating a filtered version. This reductive process reveals only a segment of a whole but still carries indicators of a story personified in the residual. A counter process takes place through this method of subtraction of color, form, and materiality allowing additional meaning to be composed through our own lens.
This method of subtraction is also present in the photographic works of Miyako Ishiuchi specifically her series Mother who also monumentalizes her subject. Dispossessed of color her subjects are removed from their usual contexts, adds a loss of vitality. Differing from Whiteread’s work, Ishiuchi medium of choice photography generates a different kind of signifier compared to an imprint on a cast and is based directly on the human body, in this case her own mother and her belongings. This allusion to the subject is ambiguous. Photography has an unequivocal connection to reality, however despite photography's venerable history of reproducing realistic images the introduction of digital photography opens further the interference of fabrication and degradation. ‘'The photographic process involves a ghostly transference of the real (loss of corporeality) in which objects are dematerialized and transformed into images, so that the connection to the real is not just a transmutation assisted by certain mechanical and chemical processes, it is also alchemical. ‘'8 Gibbons notes the transitory nature of photography as a medium and alludes to it as a phenomenon that finds the fantastic in the mundane. This notion that photography can possess the ‘spirit’ of a moment in time or subject captured and is not limited to physical resemblance. Indexicality is important of reinforcing the existential status it does not provide the whole story. Viewer comes with pretextual knowledge. Gibbons focusing on the medium to lead this examination of memory practice. It is significant to note how the properties of a medium alter the index or trace being recorded in memory art practices.
Notes:
Roland Barthes quoted by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, Photographs Object Histories: On the Materiality of Images. Tauris & Co Ltd, London, United Kingdom, 2007. 1
Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, Photographs Object Histories: On the Materiality of Images. Tauris & Co Ltd, London, United Kingdom, 2007. 2
Ibid
Robert Rosenblum, Introduction in, Mike and Doug Starn. Harry N. Abrams Incorporated, New York, United States of America, 1990.13
Papadakis, New York New Art. Art & Design Academy Editions, New York, United States of America, 2004 61
Gibbons, Joan. Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance. London, United Kingdom. I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd. 2009. 30
Ibid. 31