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.