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.

I couldn’t agree more with what Radu has just said. And I underwrite it both at an intellectual level and in practice. For example, in a recent project of mine, which has been published under the title of Landscapes without Memory (Landscapes without Memory, Aperture, New York, 2005), I created virtual images with a convincingly photorealist appearance using a topographic applications programme, a scene renderer. These kinds of software -like flight simulators, for instance- give an illusory experience of space, with all its geographical features, based on interpretations of cartographic data in the form of levels of colour, contour lines, satellite images or whatever. In other words, they transform a two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional image according to the instructions of certain codes of interpretation. The programme was conceived for the purpose of providing elevations of the terrain on the basis of the input -a ‘map’- that the operator keys in to it, but I frustrate this expectation and force it to interpret an existing landscape: a Turner, a Friedrich, a Cézanne, a Weston… The programme is tricked into making a landscape out of a map that in reality was already a landscape. What obviously lies behind this process of recycling is that to make a landscape nowadays there is no need for any direct experience of nature: all that is needed is the experience of the existing images that have helped us arrive at the idea we have of nature. The images feed back. Vilém Flusser explained very graphically that images are screens charged with meaning that interpose themselves between us and the world. The reality remains remote and inaccessible, and we are left with no other option but to react and make do with the images, which constitute a metareality, but at least an accessible metareality. If the images in Plato’s cave were simply shadows, images have since become very complex ideological constructs: no longer the mere reflection of the world, they have now, as we have said, managed to supplant the world and leave us immersed in a state of ‘hallucination’ (Flusser dixit).

The contemporary creative arts cannot ignore this state of affairs. But there are two aspects to be considered here, or nuanced, if you like. On the one hand there is a framework of visual culture that conditions us. It has always been so, since the times of Altamira and Lascaux, and the producers of images have accepted with situation quite naturally, spontaneously cannibalizing the images handed down by their predecessors in the same way as they inherited ideas and values. The situation changes when the natural impulse to recover and transform becomes a conscious, critical act. This change has made itself felt above all since the invention of the notions of the author and originality canonized by Modernity. Think back to the 1980s, when, under the influence of the postulates of the postmodernists, photography was swept along on the effervescent tide of parody, quotation, appropriation, pastiche, copy, plagiarism… From Cindy Sherman with her Film Stills to Sherrie Levine unashamedly reproducing Walker Evans, before succumbing to the dérives of a reiterative sensationalism, the underlying gesture of facing up to the past - of facing up to the past of the images.

And this brings us back to the question of memory that preoccupies Christian. Up until the digital era, photography functioned as a ‘mirror with memory’. The future now opens up a territory of uncertainty, but the historical balance of photography is the tautological sensation of memory. This sensation has operated on two levels: as a document, as a vestige, but also as an agent that models a certain collective consciousness of the past. Many of the processes of mass communication and propaganda instrumentalize this dual principle. In an essay on the graphic treatment of the events of the 11th of September, in the journal Études Photographiques (Clément Chéroux, “Le déjà-vu du 11 septembre. Essai of intericonicité”, Études Photographic no. 20, Société Française of Photographie, Paris, June 2007) Clément Cheroux makes use of the term ‘intericonicity’ in order to explain the déjà-vu effect as a hegemonically implanted strategy. After the images of the Twin Towers wreathed in smoke, the most reproduced -and most emblematic- image of the attack and its sequels is the picture by Thomas Franklin (AP) which shows a group of firemen raising the stars and stripes over the ruins of Ground Zero. In the North American collective imaginary the shots of the towers evoked the columns of smoke from the explosions on the ships anchored in Pearl Harbour, which were also the victims of a treacherous attack. Franklin’s photo, meanwhile, invokes the denouement of that conflict and the photo by Joe Rosenthal of the group of Marines raising the US flag on the island of Iwo Jima, the conquest of which marked the overcoming of the last line of Japanese defence and thus symbolized the final victory over the enemy. The images of 11-S thus articulate its meaning through an appeal to the last great national conflict that the United States engaged in without getting its fingers burned, and with a certain consensus about a ‘just cause’. Could it be that this ‘intericonicity’ demonstrates the tendency to privilege recognition over knowledge? What is evident is that it has become a habitual resource for controlling the narration.

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.