SHADOW PORTRAITS semblances of arts original other
m. evans
“Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.” Samuel Butler
The origin of the painted and plastic arts, according to Pliny, began with love, and the capture of a shadow:
It was through the service of that same earth that modelling portraits from clay was first invented by Butades, a potter of Sicyon, at Corinth. He did this owing to his daughter, who was in love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by the lamp. Her father pressed clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by ecposure to fire with the rest of his pottery; and it is said that this likeness was preserved in the Shrine of the Nymphs... 1
Butades daughter, in despair for her departing lover, conspired to capture (circumscripsit) his semblance, his double, his intimate companion - his other, as a substitute or surrogate. A shadow belongs to somebody, to that body which casts it, and accompanies that body everywhere it goes. The capture of the fickle, intangible and ethereal shadow can in no way replace the body from which it is derived2, rather, the capture of the shadow secures the body’s return for it can belong to no other and immortalises the moment in which it is caught. The vertical aspect in which the lovers’ shadow is outlined upon the wall exorcises the possibility of death, maintaining the upright stance of the shadow sustains the stance of its double, the body. Though the boy may leave and be accompanied by his shadow, the captive shadow denotes a moment, an event, an instant and makes it last. Sadly it seems the boy did not return to claim his shadow or her love, but the preservation of his likeness in the Shrine of the Nymphs testifies to the lasting impression of that moment when his shadow was caught. The fathers’ intervention of crafting a clay semblance (similitudo ex argilla), whose function is to duplicate the boy who has disappeared, also acts as a receptacle for his soul (in the form of the shadow). The shadow, as the other of the soul, has also been metaphysically identified as a substitute or double of the soul.3 The loss of either the body or the shadow from the other leaves both in a perplexing state, a state which throws into question the true identity of the couple. If a solid body is without shadow, it follows that the body is not actually solid. Where a shadow exists without an obscuring solid body, it follows that it may actually be solid. The true nature and identity of either is put into question, and to answer it only the other will suffice. The vessel of the shadow fashioned by Butades for his daughter’s love immortalised the young boy for eternity, as somebody - as her endless love. And it is this event, as myth, which is the precedent of all painted and plastic works of art.
1. Pliny, Natural History, xxxv, 15 2. I am aware of only one exception. The Shadow, a childrens story by Hans Christian Andersen, entertains the concept of a shadow which not only emancipates himself from his body, but succeeds in killing it and masquerading as a body. 3. A well known European story by Adelbert von Chamisso, Peter Schlemihl, exploits the shadows metaphysical history by having the hero sell his shadow to the devil in exchange for a magical purse. The transaction ensures Peter’s soul to the devil upon his death.
The photographic work herein explores the disjunction between the shadow and its body, my body. In the hands of somebody who has never known me, these images can not be said to be of somebody for there is no body in the image. Essentially the images are of exactly that - nobody, however through the double action of the shadow they are of a likeness, a semblance, the other of myself. The semblances are recorded through the photographic process. Light records the holes in light, light captures the shadow. The photographic process however, is not without irony. It is light which exposes the film in proportion to the intensity of its reflection. This exposure is recorded as a darkening, a negative, a shadow on the film. It is this shadow on the film which later obstructs lights passage in the printing process - the roles are reversed, the photograph is developed via the holes in shadows. By invoking the Original Scene of artistic representation I bring to these images a poetic precursor as the defining intructor. Vico, “who identified the origins of poetry with the impulse towards divination, implicitly understood that a poem is written to escape dying.”1 Just as the Original Scene protected the beloved and made him immortal in the Shrine of the Nymphs, through designing and wielding the power to bestow immortality the lover herself is elevated towards divination. The poetic nature of this scene, a scene that utilises Prometheus’s gift of blind hope provides a daemonizing trope of hyperbole that identifies the repression at the conception of the act. The Original Scene of artistic representation is unthinkable without the repression of lack, the loss of the lover, and this repression is unavailable without the gift of blind hope, revealing a metonymic defence; a substitution of the divining moment for the possibilities of the future, and a trope of restitution, the deamonizing trope of hyperbole which heightens the representational power with an accent of excess, the metonymic substitution. These images lend themselves to be interpreted, via the Original Scene, as expressions of self-love informed by a desire to have that love immoralised, but this would be to miss the instructive dimension influencing the work. Through Pliny’s revision of the Origin of Painting and Sculpture, as a written documentation in the Natural History, the Scene is given the breath to invoke memory, a public memory. Employing the ancient Greek cultural metaphysics of the spirit as a muse which “symbolically linked shadow, soul and a person’s double”2, the Original Scene is given the possibility to “record and preserve the powers of life already belonging to mankind.”3 These powers, invoked in the daughter’s initial act, are transposed into public memory, again through the daemonizing trope of hyperbole, as an instructive Original Scene by way of Pliny’s documentation. To be clear, the daughter’s actions were born of and as an expression of love for and of one other person, the departing lover. Although she employs the cultural beliefs of the Greeks, her repression and mode of protection is thoroughly personal. She captures and retains the double of her love, protecting his soul, ensuring the constant presence of their love and his bodily return for no one else but herself and her lover. The Origin of Painting and Sculpture was not an event intended to mark the Origin of Painting and Sculpture, rather it took Pliny’s documentation to determine it as such and endow it with the power to act as such, along with Pliny’s personal keenness to document it. It is an encounter with the intra-textual and intra-poetical relationships at work within the written scene that then influence painted and sculptural creations and their interpretations, returning to the story the force of being the Original Scene and determining its instructive dimension. 1. Harold Bloom, ‘Poetic Origins and Final Phases’ in A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York 2003. p 19. 2. Victor Stoichita, “The Shadow Stage” in A Short History of the Shadow, Reaktion Books, London, 1997. p. 18. 3. Harold Bloom, ‘The Primal Scene of Instruction’ in A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York 2003. p 54.
The repression of death motivates the poemogogic1 invention of artistic Original Scenes, however, the Original Scene is not available to public memory without documentation or transposition into the Scene of Writing. As Derrida explains in “Freud and the Scene of Writing”: “there is no psyche without text.” Writing-as-such is identified with the daemonizing2 trope of hyperbole3, a trope which drives or directs a persons destiny4, providing the inspirational energy for poemogogic invention. The Artistic Original Scene of the Origin of Painting and Sculpture was driven by the first deamonizing trope of the hyperbole and was thoroughly personal symbolising the ego’s creativity, the Written Original Scene of the Origin of Painting and Scultpure was driven by the second trope of daemonizing hyperbole, albeit determined by Pliny’s ego, and was to document for prosterity and culutral memoryproviding the means to employ both the Artistic Original Scene and the Written Scene for instructive means. This series of images begin with the capture of the shadow, my shadow: singlular. They capture precisely what Roland Barthes explains as flat death.5 The image, as photograph, captures my double, my other, which is by nature flat and the susbstitute for my soul, and provides the proof of my life. But the photograph itself is perishable, it will fade, weaken and vanish, and some day be thrown away. It is not a monument, it is a moment, a paradox of duration. In the later photographs the shadow develops its own shadow. If the shadow can cast a shadow then it follows that the shadow may be solid. However the intersection between the two shadows is now what gives away their shadowy nature. There are actually three shadows formed, two cast shadows and their darkened intersection. The darkened intersection seems more solid than either of the accompanying shadows, it becomes the subject of the image, the insubstatial body of the image. The accompaying shadows surround it and act as its vessel. With the advent of photography a way of capturing the shadow and providing it with its own vessel was invented, a thoroughly modern invention of capturing a moment without monumenatlising it. Although they refer to the Original Scene of Painting and Sculpture they also regard modernist principles of art. This conceit of influence (since modernity often rejected traditional conceptions of art) opens a path toward interpreting the works critical message. There is on one side a return to Origins, a kind of Oedipal trespass upon a private sacred moment made immortal, and a reference to its monumentalisation; on the other I invoke a modernist power that transposes the work into a new register, one that considers the between of Origin and Horizon.
1. Anton Ehrenzweig coined the term ‘poemagogic’ to “describe its special function of imducing and symbolizing the ego’s creativity. (The Greek word poema means all kinds of creative making, not only the making of poems.)” Poemagogic images “reflect the various phases and aspects of creativity...through the cental theme of death and rebirth, of trapping and liberation” which seem to “overshadow the others”. “Part IV: The Theme of the Dying God; The Minimum Content of Art” in The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of the Artistic Imagination, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971. p 176-177. 2. J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, Penguin Press, London, 1998. p. 204 - explains: adjective for a “daemon who is a spirit which occupies a middle place between the gods and men and is associated with inspiration...and it might easily be destructive or self-destructive (hence the concept of a daemonic/demonic agency).” 3. Harold Bloom, ‘The Primal Scene of Instruction’ in A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York 2003. p48-49. 4. as suggested by Goethe in his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811-33), ref J. A. Cuddon. footnote 2. 5. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Vintage Books, London, 2000. p.92
With the transposition of the memorial immortal into the now1 the intersection or between acquires a poetic force that can bring together, subtly, the estranged others of artistic representation, however these others arrive with a continually renewed interpretation of both love and death (the catalytic powers already belonging to mankind). These images expose the presence of doubt, a being in two minds, or more precisely - a being between two minds. They capture the love of indeterminacy, immortalise the deaths of every moment, and prophesy the death of the next to come. The being between is the axis of the modern being. There is an axonometry of the modern being that, always ‘for now’, is distorted through memory and imagination, with extents in the Original Scene and the Written Scene. The emphasis here is on considering the trope of spatial irony that connects an earlier concept with a later manifestation of its influence. Spatial irony limits the rigidity of the past and the possibilities of the future through forming intra-poetic manifestations or creations that replace, employing blind hope, the repressed loss or lack with a new meaningful representation. The substituted representation becomes a spatial field of interpretation which allows the past a presence in the future and the future a presence in the past. Irony, as the Roman rhetoricians Cicero and Quintilian understood it, exhibits a “double-edgedness” which “appears to be a diachronic feature” (ironia), and for the Greeks figures as one who “does not come out into the open”, of a shadowy nature (eiron).2 However theorists of later centuries considered irony in conceptual terms that charted understandings such as ‘tragic irony’ (i.e. Oedipus); ‘Philosophical Irony’ “which begins with a contemplation of the fate of the world” (Karl Solger); ‘Romantic Irony’ where “irony” is a mode of seeing things, a way of viewing existence” (Kierkegaard’s thesis on the Concept of Irony 1841) where there emerges a distance between the viewer and the thing viewed, such as an artist contemplating his creation from a distanced vantage point, or better, the eminent position God takes in viewing Creation “with a detached, ironical smile.” “[Irony] is often the witting or unwitting instrument of truth.”3 Spatial irony is the developed understanding of the aforementioned concepts where the tragic is by nature romantic, encountering a distanced philosophical position from which to view fate and the existence of the world.4 Applied to the Original Scene of Painting and Sculpture we understand that the young lover cannot return: his fate was necessary as a precursor for the eternal return of lack which is at the conception of every artistic creation. Her capture of his shadow, the vessel fashioned by her father, and even Pliny’s documentation of the event are all equally necessary and, given to spatial irony, inescapable and inevitable. The shadow of fear is deeply influential, and in an effort to repress the anxiety it causes two strategies of defence which act to sublimate it (Sublimierung - Freuds most praised defense condensed from “the supposed resemblances between sexuality and intellectual activity”5) by way of introjection and projection.
1. “‘Modernism’ is of Alexandrian descent where scholar Aristarchus “first contrasted the neoteroi or “moderns” with Homer... Modernus, based on the word modo, for “now”, first came into use in the sixth century A.D., and it is worth remembering that “Modernism” always means “For Now”.” Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. p.35. 2. J. A. Cuddon, ‘Irony’ in The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th ed., Penguin Books, England, 1999. p. 428. 3. ibid. p. 431. 4. An exemplary example of this is in Proust’s Time Regained. 5. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. p.101.
Introjection “is a fantasy transposition of otherness to the self, and as an identification seeks to defend against time and space.” “Projection seeks to expel from the self everything that the self cannot bear to acknowledge as being its own. Whereas introjection incorporates an object or an instinct so as to defend against it (thus overcoming object-relationships), projection attributes outwardly all prohibited instincts or objects to others. It should be noted that both these defenses represent, in that both hold forth the possibility of extending both space and time.”1 The transumptive nature of these defences, their ability to “carry/take across” the substitution through space and time, tends to sacrifice the present moment for an idealised past or a hoped-for-future. They allow for a movement out side of time and across space that carries the force of the repressed lack or loss into ever renewed representations, objects and instincts. As defences of repression they conceal the trope of spatial irony, a trope that reveals the metaxological intra-poetic daemonizing hyperbole of deep creative production. The work herein, recognising the process of its creation and influence, finds its meaning in the intersection of the shadows. The being between is a representation of the transumptive force. Recognising the fear of the loss of love or life, it makes flat death of the subject, the distorted intersection of memory and imagination, defending against the time and space of the present, and substitutes it with the modern axonometric character that is never wholly present (it has no solid body from which is projected) nor totally absent (the shadow and its likeness is still discernable) but more truly exists for itself in its idealised past and/or hoped-for future.
1. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. p.102.
It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face. Robert Stevenson