The ubiquity of the image

Christian was right to say that the iconoclast option doesn’t really exist. I would add that to be a iconoclast it’s not enough to become a terrorist: that would serve only to destroy images on order to replace them with others, because terrorists have imagery of their own. 

I share his pessimism when he doubts the possibility of ‘deactivating’ images with images, so of course it’s difficult to stop ‘the endless flow of consumption, entertainment, playing with images’. Having said that, we cannot stem the flow of images with a flow of words! Only images can confront the power of images! Now more than ever we need the production of images that are critical of the production of images. What we need is images like those of the young photographers already mentioned, Matthias Bruggmann and Robin Collyer, or those of our host Joan Fontcuberta: images whose concern is no longer with how to represent things but with the nature of the representation. What these images have in common is a questioning of iconicity, this essential and yet still so little-understood attribute that defines the image. In any photograph there is a relationship of collusion between its indexical dimension and its iconic dimension, and this connivance obscures the understanding of the image as a fabrication. By virtue of its double referent, which simultaneously takes us back to the scene photographed and the history of photography, a picture by Matthias Bruggmann functions in a different way and obliges us to consider the real complexity of the production of images. In many of his pictures, Joan Fontcuberta deliberately sets the indexical aspect and the iconic aspect in conflict: mosquitoes spattered on a windshield become constellations or macros of Yale keys become mountain ranges. There are few ways of shattering the blind faith that one might have in images.

How can we ensure that profoundly subversive images of this kind are not swamped by the mass tide? Almost everyone would agree that we live in a civilization of the image, but at the same time our schools’ curricula are still almost entirely founded on the supremacy of the written word. Our schools produce visual illiterates. So, the first priority is to inform the iconodoules!

Rapidly -and because of insomnia…- a brief comment in relation to Radu’s contribution, as always both elegant and cultured. He is absolutely right to stress the extent to which our relationship to the image has for centuries been based on the way that organized religion has alternately made use of it (promotion) or forbidden it (another, ‘anti’ form of promotion). I’m afraid to say that if I had lived in the 17th century, I would have been an iconoclast. And that would have made sense. Or it would, at least, have been adopting a position.

Today, I can only be an iconoclast if I decide to become a hermit, to go and live me in an ashram in some part of Tibet not controlled by the Chinese, to cut myself off completely from everything that happens in the contemporary world. To be an iconoclast today involves, quite simply, withdrawing from the world. I well remember my stupefaction, a few years ago, on arriving in a remote village in Laos and seeing, in the one and only shop in the valley -grocery, tobacconist, restaurant, guest house, guide service, pharmacist and many other things on request- plastic bags that were obviously being sold as a rare commodity printed with the face of Leonardo di Caprio!

How can one be an iconoclast, without becoming a terrorist, when the image has become a constituent and essential element, the driving force of our society at the start of the 21st century. Malraux -of whom almost the only good thing I have to say is that he invented, in France, the now virtually moribund idea of a Ministry of Culture- claimed that the 21st century would be religious or it would not be. Andy Warhol said that everyone would have their quarter of an hour of fame -which in the age of You Tube would be equivalent to their quarter of an hour (but that’s too long…) of image. Clearly they were both right: they anticipated a world that they helped shape. And here we are, impotent in the face of the parade of images that no longer have a meaning, that are both merchandise and a summons to consume.

How can one be an iconoclast today????