Interesting example, that one of Robin Collyer and his ‘semiological cosmetics’ (J.F.)!
The profusion of images is inversely proportional to their legibility. The profusion itself acts as a form of ‘noise’, in the semiotic sense of the term, that prevents us from seeing! Stripped of contents, Collyer’s ‘empty’ images become more ‘visible’ than before.
Starting out from the perception that every image appears in a world already full of images, another young artist, the Swiss-French Matthias Bruggmann, no longer satisfied with examining photography’s relationship with the real, sets out to make visible the relationship between the new image and the images that already existed before it was created.
Apparently, all of Matthias Bruggmann’s photographs belong to the category of reportage, and were taken in the field, often in very difficult conditions - Iraq, Haiti, Somalia. The ethics of photo reportage is respected: no staging, no manipulation after the shot is taken. And yet, in every instance, his image not only bears witness to the photographed instant but deliberately evokes the style of a well-known photographer or, in some cases, makes direct reference to a familiar image. In the case of this image of Chernobyl, made in 2006, a confrontation between two drunks outside a bar -a frequent occurrence in a place where alcoholism is endemic- is photographed in a way that resorts without hesitation to the celebrated mises-en-scène of Jeff Wall. By inverting the relations, the real scene invokes the fiction of the mise-en-scène. Bruggmann thus deconstructs the myth of a photography that would offer direct contact with the real and reminds us that every photograph has a double referent: that of its subject and that of the world of the images that have preceded it.
As always, Joan is exaggerating, incurable agitator who ends up being right… It’s quite clear that we discovered the images by Robin Collyer at the same time. The difference is that I don’t read them the same way he does: what is erased from the images is ‘only’ the text. It is still there, aesthetic for some, absurd for others, this construction of ‘places’ -because they are not spaces- that have invaded the city, marking it, occupying it. What I find interesting is that spaces, surfaces, have been created in the city just to accommodate texts and slogans and that they end up becoming structural elements of the city.
Words still having a meaning -for how much longer?- it would not be a question of the victory of an ‘occupation’ of the city by the communication. We no longer live in a world that ‘must’ create spaces of communication under pain of breaking its economic logics. We live in, and have become dependent on, a world that is based on the image. How many of you have managed to resist the iPhone? Who is not to some degree fascinated by the possibility of instantly transmitting to others a souvenir image to remember that will be all the more quickly forgotten that it will have to be destroyed in order to conserve memory capacity. Memory, moreover, which is only of concern to us in terms of technical ‘capacity’ and not of meaning.
It seems to me that one cannot ‘deactivate’ images with other images because the critique of the images that circulate and are consumed will never have any effect unless a specific structure is created for that purpose, the endless flow of consumption, entertainment, playing with images. It would be necessary to declare war… Or it would be necessary to find a way for these critical, perhaps alternative images to be accessible to a greater number of people.
We need to reflect on what the difference between images and imagery is based on.
So: against the idolatrous cult, sacrilege! Against the vertigo of the flows of icons, critical aplomb! By way of illustration, I find myself thinking of the work of Robin Collyer, a Toronto-based artist who has made a name for himself in the fields of sculpture and photography.
In the past, when documentary photographers such as Walker Evans or William Klein engaged with an increasingly dominant urban landscape they would obsessively register images of billboards, shop signs and advertising. The city was becoming -in that term of which Barthes was so fond- the ‘empire of signs’, a realm that photography celebrated under the influence of Pop culture and the fascination with the increasingly potent presence of the mass media. Collyer’s gaze seeks to warn us against excess. His way of doing so is to offer us panoramic views of characteristic pieces of the North-American urban space, with cables criss-crossing the sky, huge advertising hoardings, shop signs, traffic signals and so on. These are humdrum, anodyne, everyday photographs, but there is always some detail in each of them that will not escape the attentive observer: the images and the texts have disappeared. In effect, the pandemonium of linguistic signs that inescapably surrounds and overwhelms us has vanished, and all that is left are the empty surfaces, dotted in places with residual graphisms and logos, but now stripped of meaning. Collyer’s digital retouching amounts to an operation of semiological cosmetic surgery, its aim being to cleanse the residential and commercial façades of the post-industrial world. With the linguistic and iconic pollution eradicated, the city returns to a pre-signic state, to the primal realm of things not yet contaminated by images, to the nakedness that is prior to semiocratic saturation. In other words, Collyer liberates the city of the authoritarianism with which all of these messages impose themselves.
What is more, his gesture is underpinned by a series of crucial questions: can we deactivate images with other images? Is the artist’s action confined to the symbolic order? Does it have a utility beyond its testimonial value? Can these one-off actions really have a prophylactic effect?
