The ubiquity of the image

The debate is becoming more and more difficult, because we agree on the essentials. What’s left are the points that need clarifying.

Unlike Joan, I don’t produce images, so for all that I love -actually it’s more than that…- his work and his ideas, I can’t say right now how far they may be a form of resistance to the dominant imagery. It all depends on their dissemination, not on their nature. Dream: we invent a network for the transmission of images on the Net that can blue-pencil and disrupt all the conventions, clichés, stereotypes and manipulations that impose themselves on us every day. But where do we find the means?

Radu is right to say that terrorism is not a solution: the best proof is that when the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan, erasing those unique sublime objects from human history, they created -intentionally or not- a new image: that which bore witness to their loss. It would not be out of place to relate this to the fact that every mediatized video ‘intervention’ by Bin Laden is an event… Well, it’s been a while since he last showed himself in images. What is he ‘really’ preparing? An attack on the TGV?

One of the issues underlying our common rejection of the dominant and debilitating imagery is the question of how to reject it. Even if they’re not always convincing, the attempts to inscribe images in the urban space that fight against the spaces of advertising, occupying them, hijacking them, circumventing them, make sense. At least the sense of questioning, disrupting. I’m thinking here of the young Frenchman JR: www.jr-art.net/

But I think we have to accept that we’re doomed to be a minority. Because we have no way of blowing up the system or overturning it from within. The case of Matthias that Radu referred to is really interesting. His work is remarkable, and he has not and will not find the spaces for presenting it that it deserves because it challenges the system. We should take note.

In the history of images, for centuries now each new modality of representation has referred to -whether agreeing with or breaking with- that which preceded it. About fifteen years ago Paul Virilio marked out the field of images between ‘mental image’ (dream) and ‘instrumental image’ (what we now know as the virtual, illusions, 3D). Today, relayed by the art market, neo-pictorialisms are manifest and dominant, among others with the large, colour ‘picture’ format. That doesn’t mean we have to throw the baby out with the bath water. But…

The question of speed (Virilio again), so that the notion of time, of the change of temporality between the photograph and the digital image is essential. We have gone from the crystallization of memory to flux and beyond, to evanescence. Never before in human history have so many images been produced at the same time, there have never been so many images in circulation. At the same time, n ever before have so many pictures been destroyed so soon after their creation. This takes us back to my questions about memory: questions that start with technical data (the short reliable life of disk media, only a few years at most) and continue with the fact that the idea that ‘all’ information is ‘immediately’ accessible means that every piece of information, like every image, banishes and negates the previous one.

We are a long way from Plato’s cave and we are indeed in a state of ‘hallucination’. How do we make it known today that there are very few images of the bloody repression in Tibet? And how do we combat the iconic convention of the few we do receive, which repeat the stereotypes of demonstrations, flags being burned, and devastated, deserted streets that could have been taken somewhere else and at some other time? Photography once served to denounce, to raise awareness, sometimes to mobilize. But today?

I can only agree with two points of view expressed here. With that which says that any contemporary image is constructed by reference to pre-existing images (which is why we re-cognize them), which confirms my conviction that images have become a constituent element of our society. And, as I’ve been saying for years, with the fact that the shortcomings of our education system have produced a society of illiterates who can only take in the visuals that manipulate them.

I don’t have any solution with regard to alternative images and their dissemination or impact, but I’m convinced that the base, the real issue, is a choice of a political nature: namely, the choice of teaching children from an early age the alphabet of images, in the same way that they’re taught the alphabet of letters and words.

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!

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.