The ubiquity of the image

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?