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!

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?