trash
ARCHIVING THE POOR IMAGE
Introduction
The apocalyptically named LAST FEW DAYS was a London based music collective which, despite accompanying enfant terribles LAIBACH on their Occupied Europe tour, courted obscurity as other musical acts pursue fame. Their posters and flyers merged seamlessly with low budget notices for closing down sales, poorly paid work and calls for political action which adorned the frontages of vacant shops and small businesses in the 1980s. A sight many saw as a hallmark of Prime Minister Margaret Thatchers’ Britain during that decade.
“Poor images are the contemporary
wretched of the screen the debris of audio-visual production
the trash that washes up on the
digital economies shores.�(1)
These high street montages with their ripped images and discontinued texts now seem like the distant ancestors of the online world, the new home of the ‘poor image’. Hito Steyerl, in her essay In Defense of the Poor Image(1) describes a hierarchy of images dominated by the ‘flagship’ high resolution outputs produced by multinationals, state actors and the culture industry. These have given us large format photographs by the likes of Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth whose mimetic and cinematic clarity can only be achieved with the help of resources made available by funders and collectors with deep pockets. The previous generation of high-end moving image presented 35mm and 70mm film formats in which optimised image quality was a given. Cinematic sharpness and clarity was seen as the preserve of the auteur, the expert and the (usually male) genius, fencing off the field of the professional image maker from vernacular production by less well funded artists and political propagandists. More recently these analogue formats have been replaced by high resolution digital outputs such as 5K. Marxist inflected art produced by conceptual artists during the 1960s and 70s made a point of rejecting high-end practices which they saw as the establishment expression of cultural materialism — and instead embraced adequate, workman-like productions — frequently with rough edges, which signalled their presumed authenticity and supposed lack of market value. At the bottom end of this hierarchy of the visual world are the ‘poor images’. The endless soup of self-composting jpegs, AVI files and animated GIFs, copied and compressed so often they are on their way to abstraction, in the process losing their integrity, often their titles and eventually their identity as meaningful representations as they flit around the globe. The homogeneity of images we now experience on screen due to their compressed online formats give the illusion of a kind of democracy of the image, suggesting a level playing field, but in reality misrepresenting the original state and origins of the objects portrayed. There’s no good reason why anyone would suspect Jeff Wall’s A Sudden
Gust of Wind of being a lightbox measuring 2500x3970x340 mm, when viewed for the first time on a smartphone display. The move towards abstraction which we find in images of low resolution may represent a failure of the digital dream — but it also mimics the process of decay which we experience as an essential and necessary element of what is sometimes rather chillingly referred to by silicon valley workers as “meat-space” — which is to say, the physical world we are all obliged to live in. In the traditional artistic universe a different ‘game’ is being played. Here the presentation and the subject have a more complex relationship. Printmaking, drawing and other mark-making activities have no particular preoccupation with resolution; images with gestural marks and areas of flat colour are not necessarily concerned with detail in the same way as lens based images. The removal and obfuscation of detail shifts images towards a more impressionistic universe, taking them ‘out of time’ and rendering them more mythical, less tied to the everyday. This lack of precise detail opens up new possibilities; where the factual content is reduced and our interpretation becomes more subjective. We accept the necessity of visual presentations to ‘look a certain way’. German Expressionist cinema and film noir are products of their harsh black and white contours — if we saw too much of Count Orlok in Murnau’s Nosferatu, his mythical status might be diminished — we love his spidery blackness and our imagination readily enters a space made available by the lack of photographic detail. If Warhols’ screen prints of Chairman Mao and Jackie Kennedy leant further towards a factual actuality, would we still be so engaged with them? For those of us inclined to work with existing images, the necessary research requires an extended trawl through vast reserves of material until we come across something that speaks to us, which we might extract from the pile for future examination, perhaps for reasons which we cannot immediately identify.
As these images accumulate we begin to see patterns — directories of interests and concerns. We see sequences or correspondences, which start to talk back to us about who we are and where our core interests lie. In this search, there are treasures, unexpected messages, visual pleasures and historical insights that come with previously unseen or forgotten images. In the first instance archival artists seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present.(2) The ability of the museum to function as an authoritative summary and teller of historical truths has been questioned in recent years, not least because of a growing awareness of the stark disparities between the stories of the people who once owned the artefacts displayed, and those who took possession of them — where they are currently located becoming an essential element of the story they tell. In a post-colonial world it has become more or less an impossibility that these largely irreconcilable narratives can be told in the same breath. We could argue that the impulse to creatively order more informal collections emerges out of a disenchantment with the presentation of social or cultural memory, the sense that it is at odds with lived experience, if not in fact, then in presentation. It represents a reluctance to be satisfied with the current orthodoxy. Archives also have an allegorical function. Their creation represents an implicit desire to make sense of the world and to discover meaning amongst the detritus of historical past. There is a long list of writers and artists who have all brought their individual take to the possible purpose and function of the constructed collection, Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, W.G. Sebald, Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, Naeem Mohaiemen and Walid Raad among them. †The choices made by these figures reflect the interests and anxieties of their time. Warburg, Benjamin and Sebald were particularly concerned with the aftermath of WW2. Hirschhorn with the legacy of well known (and
marginalised) writers and Dean with ephemeral or forgotten histories. “…the work [in question] is archival since it not only draws on informal archives but produces them as well, and does so in a way that underscores the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private. Further, it often arranges these materials according to a quasi-archival logic, a matrix of citation and juxtaposition, and presents them in a quasi-archival architecture, a complex of texts and objects …” (2) Current preoccupations include the overwhelming intrusion of the online world into our lives and anxieties regarding the consequent loss of materiality and the disembodied existence that implies. The marginalisation of independent voices is also in the spotlight; “Twenty or even thirty years ago, the neo-liberal restructuring of media production began slowly obscuring non-commercial imagery, to the point where experimental and essayistic cinema became almost invisible. As it became prohibitively expensive to keep these works circulating in cinemas, so were they also deemed too marginal to be broadcast on television. Thus they slowly disappeared not just from cinemas, but from the public sphere as well.(1) One might also add that as the technology for displaying analogue works has faded into obsolescence, a substantial number of films, documentaries and negatives have failed to make it to digitisation. Because of this, many productions have left traces online in other forms, for example as stills or clips, which in time have attracted an almost mythical status. A 1994 film commissioned for the BBC series Relics, which described the search for Einstein’s (stolen) brain, was originally shot on 16mm film, and surfaced, some years later, as an incomplete digitised VHS copy from a Swedish TV broadcast. Its poor quality led people to speculate on the veracity of the film and whether the director was even a real person; the whole project edging further into a territory principally occupied by urban
myths and conspiracy theories. The prophets of digital egalitarianism championed a world of participation; artistic and creative opportunities for those excluded from the highend output by financial constraints. They probably didn’t imagine, and eventually didn’t care, that these flashes of inspiration and insight would be floating on a sea of outdated advertising, porn and hate speech; that dates and times would become so confused that it would be hard to establish any sense of order. Or that further down the line the nature of on-line searches would mutate from being a customer centred service to being a vast machine for the extraction of our surplus behavourial data(4), as we struggled through unevenly weighted depositories of increasingly out of date material, in order to find anything remotely readable. An eerie echo of Borges’ short story The Book of Sand. “To connect what cannot be connected, this is exactly what my work as an artist is.”(3) Girl Stowaway is an archive that implicates Tacita Dean as the artist-asarchivist within it; “Her voyage was from Port Lincoln to Falmouth,” Dean writes: “It had a beginning and an end, and exists as a recorded passage of time. My own journey follows no such linear narrative. It started at the moment I found the photograph but has meandered ever since, through uncharted research and to no obvious destination. It has become a passage into history along the line that divides fact from fiction, and is more like a journey through an underworld of chance intervention and epic encounter than any place I recognize. My story is about coincidence, and about what is invited and what is not.(5) Photobooks have also changed the landscape of documentary photography, particularly since they have attracted the attention of artists and writers who are less constricted by the conventions of journalism, and more likely to include or omit material in contravention of the established orthodoxies of that field. The scope and reach of books and other presentations which combine text and images has widened. This is in part
due to the influence of image makers and writers, such as W.G. Sebald whose works contain an implicit critique of documentary photography. Between 1992 and his death in 2001, Sebald moved from relative obscurity to international renown, making the UK, and especially East Anglia, his home. In some circles he was being spoken of as a likely Nobel laureate. He continues to influence writers, and those concerned with the linkage of text and image. Memory is a constant theme in Sebald’s work and he suggests that the past of a civilization works on cultures in the same way that personal trauma affects individuals. He employed his strategies to refer obliquely to the holocaust which he felt could not be described by those who had not witnessed it directly. An article in the Guardian Newspaper once described Sebald’s writing as: “…like being spoken to in a dream. He does away with the normal proceedings of narrative fiction — plot, characterization, events leading to other events — so that what we get is the unmediated expression of a pure and seemingly disembodied voice”.(6) A devoted creator and manipulator of images, Sebald used his own photographs, found images, postcards and newspaper cuttings which he often prepared for print using a photocopier. The images appear without captions acquiring their meaning from the surrounding text. Most of the images that Sebald uses are “…not part of history in the usual sense. The places and things appearing in most of the photographs are insignificant, mundane and often neglected. They are anonymous places, buildings or everyday objects. There are also family photographs often depicting unrecognisable or forgotten people and ephemera such as pages of diary, a child’s drawing, a ticket and other small scraps of paper that were not made to last or to keep”.(7) Commentators have speculated that his writing tested, “much more than that of most other writers, the boundaries of what we consider fiction. I think the photos, many of which were found photos, and many of which
were intentionally worn away by repeated photocopying, were there to create a mood.” (8). In Sebald’s books, the images are generally small and reproduced in black and white, which makes them open to a wide variety of possible interpretations — none of the books published during his lifetime were labelled as fiction or non-fiction, novels or essays. ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) has become a feature of the online world. ASMR videos aim to create a sensory experience through a digital environment. The subjects for these videos may include hair brushing, whispering, popping bubble wrap or pushing sticks into crunchy green floral foam. While not overtly sexual, ASMR is within a whisper of something more directly fetishistic. In some sense it can be seen as a kind of faux nostalgia for a presumed loss of sensory engagement — the re-presentation of a physical environment for those of us supposedly too immersed in our on-screen life to have sufficient traction with everyday life. ASMR also coincides with a renewed appetite for analogue photography and other print-related processes, whose resurgence is partly motivated by the recognition of the unlimited textural variants that accompany material transformation, which digital technologies can only mimic. Image-creating technologies of the digital age do not accommodate the accident and variation, which processes that rely on the interaction of materials are heir to. These have to be added afterwards by means of filters or digital controls. The aesthetic provided by these devices is a given — it arrives fully formed and in consequence is often of less interest to image makers for whom convenience is not necessarily a priority. The continued interest in the textures and physical qualities of images, to transmit mood and atmosphere, suggests that the apprehension of physical clues in the environment is hard-wired into our perception, and hence into the appearance of images. It is these subtle differences in appearance and tone which become central to the range of impressions and meanings that images help to create.
| references: (1) Hito Steyerl - In Defense of the Poor Image, Journal #10 - November 2009 (2) Hal Foster – An Archival Impulse, Source: October, Vol. 110 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 3-22 Published by The MIT Press (3) Thomas Hirschhorn in Hal Foster’s An Archival Impulse Source: October, Vol. 110 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 3-22 Published by The MIT Press (4) See: Shoshana Zuboff - The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Profile books (2019) (5) Tacita Dean from Girl Stowaway (1994): in Hal Foster’s – An Archival Impulse, Source: October, Vol. 110 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 3-22. Published by The MIT Press (6) Mark O’Connell - Why You Should Read W. G. Sebald ,The New Yorker, December 14, 2011 (7) Alia Zapparova - The Poetics of Dust: Sebald and the Failure of the Document, Interdisciplinary Companion to Photography Ed. Dijana Metlic and Mia Cuk. University of Novi Sad Academy of Arts (2019) (8) Teju Cole - Known and Strange Things Random House, Trade Paperbacks (2016)