Index of Reflections on the Index

Illustration of single A1 sheet map folded format for Part 3

Index of Reflections on the Index

Expanding the logic of the index from the photographic to the material.

Foreword

The term ‘index’ has several related meanings both current and obsolete. Originally used to refer to the ‘index fnger’ (with which one points), it then came to mean ‘pointer’ (late 16th century) and is now used in relation to the pointer on an instrument (hand on a clock), and fguratively something that serves to point to a fact or conclusion; hence a list of topics in a book (‘pointing’ to their location).1 The word ‘index’ is also used in more specialist felds including in relation to change, self-multiplication and relationships between things.2

Developments, re-interpretations and reworkings of these defnitions have been utilised in the felds of philosophy, semiotics and arttheory - most notably by Rosalind Krauss in her 1977 essay ‘Notes on the Index’, in which she uses the photograph as the exemplar of an indexical sign to underpin her argument for a particular approach to the painting and sculpture of her time.3

Here I ofer a close reading of Krauss’ text along with my refections on how the idea of the index can be applied and expanded into materiality. I do this in the context of a range of examples taken from contemporary art as well as natural and everyday phenomena.

Presented in the form of index, but organised spatially rather than alphabetically - one item might follow from two or more previous ones, and often several separate paths fork out from one. Presented on a single sheet of paper to facilitate this unusual spatial arrangement of text, folded like a map. This unique form of spatial indexing has been the form of my refective thinking - but I hope that by arranging the text in this way it might also begin to speak of the disruption to thinking on linear, progressive time that is ofered by spatial and material processes (a conclusion that I do not make frmly here, but that nonetheless my refections are pointing towards).

1 ‘Index’, Etymonline, <https://www.etymonline.com/word/index> [accessed 18 March 2022].

2 Change - ‘Index: (n) a system by which changes in the value of something and the rate at which it changes can be recorded, measured, or interpreted.’ ‘Index’, Collins Dictionary, <https://www.collinsdictionary.com/ dictionary/english/index> [accessed 29 March 2022].

Self multiplication - ‘Index (n) the little numbers that show how many times you must multiply a number by itself. (In the equation 3² = 9, the number 2 is an index)’. ‘Index’, Collins Dictionary, <https://www. collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/index> [accessed 29 March 2022].

One step in a sequence- ‘Index (v) (of a machine or part of one) To move from one predetermined position to another in order to carry out a sequence of operations. ‘Index’ Oxford Languages <https://www.google.com/search?q=index+definition&oq=index+definition&aqs=chrome.

.69i57j0i512l5j69i61j69i60.1990j1j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8> [accessed 29 March 2022].

3 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p58–67.

Introduction

Krauss’ defnition of the index is multi-faceted, specifcally and intentionally grounded in the photographic process and itself derived from other thinkers. From C.S. Pierce in the feld of semiotic theory she obtains the notion of the index as a ‘sign by physical connection’ - expanding his defnition to say that being ‘connected to its referent along a purely physical axis’ is an ‘indexical quality’. She then introduces Pierce’s discussion of the photograph as an exemplar of the indexical sign - ‘photographs…having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature…belong to the second class of signs [indices]’.4

Roland Barthes’ term ‘message sans code’5 is the basis of Krauss’ argument that the photograph (and by extension all indexes) are ‘distant from syntax’, that they are ‘beyond the reach of those possible internal adjustments which are the…property of language’ not ‘drawn from an institutional reserve’ and are therefore ‘not coded’.6 For Krauss the relationships between the parts inside an indexical sign (‘the connective tissue binding the objects’7) must be that of the world itself, rather than that of a linguistic or other cultural system. The logic of nature must be conserved.

Expanding the purely physical axis

In photography, light waves refect from surfaces in the world, move through the camera aperture and lens, then onto the photographic flm to imprint their image. There is no code or syntax injected into this message, and hence in her focus on the photographic process Krauss counts the passage of light in photography as operating on a ‘purely physical axis’.8

We fnd an opportunity to extend the idea of a physical axis from the physical sciences. Here light is just one example of a wave form, part of the electromagnetic spectrum that also includes non-visible light such as UV and infrared (heat) waves. Light waves transfer a property of matter (its refectance spectrum - perceived as brightness and colour, and with those shape and pattern) to another locus or site, via a transmission of energy. Other properties of things in the natural world (other than its visible light refectance spectrum) can be transferred in a similar way. For example via ultraviolet radiation, heat radiation, and sound refections (echoes).

At the surface of the photographic flm, the image comes into being via a chemical transformation (the conversion of silver halides to silver).

Considering chemical reactions on surfaces more widely presents us with second avenue for expanding the index. In Index for a Purely Physical Axis I consider other electromagnetic rays and other chemical surface reactions, and propose that these other modes of transfer, and the forms and phenomena they create, could also be said to operate ‘along a purely physical axis’.

Expanding the absence of syntax

The ability of the photographic process to avoid the insertion of a code is attributed, by Barthes, to the fact that the transformation taking place is not a distorting translation. This does not preclude all and any kind of shift or movement though. In fact the term ‘displacement’ is explicitly permitted by Krauss when she quotes Barthes in this regard saying - ‘….the photograph implies a certain displacement of the scene (cropping, reduction, fattening), but this passage is not a transformation’.9 Displacement is allowed, coded transformation is not. There must be no space for ‘internal adjustments’, no opportunity for syntax to creep in.10

Cropping, reduction, fattening - Barthes’ gives a (non-defnitive) list of photographic processes that operate in an indexical way and as such ofers an invitation to consider how we might extend this list. What other ‘non-transformational passages’ might exist ? Does this need for a lack of syntax preclude any kind of distortion or manipulation of the elements - or might there be examples where what comes out does not resemble what goes in? How might we think of non-transformational displacements of the scene outside of the context of the fat, pictorial plane of the painting or photograph? In Index of non-coded processes I consider a direct mapping of Barthes’ three photographic operations (cropping, reduction, fattening) into three-dimensions (giving operations like cutting out chunks, selecting fragments, compression or shrinking). I also challenge the non-coded nature of the rectangular crop to ofer further potential for expanding the criteria for the index.

The potential for multiple indices

The photographic process is not a single-stage operation. Unlike earlier forms of photography (for example cyanotypes, or camera obscura where the light from the world directly imprints the image onto its substrate) modern flm-based photography is a multi-stage transfer process. For Pierce, and Krauss after him, this did not preclude the photograph from being a direct imprint of the natural world‘the natural world imprints itself on the photographic emulsion and subsequently on the photographic print…beyond the reach of those possible internal adjustments which are the…property of language’.

The number of stages, the number of processes lined up in succession, does not matter then - so long as, at each step, there is no opportunity for a code to be introduced. In the feld of engineering the term ‘index’ is a verb meaning ‘to move from one pre-determined position to another in order to carry out a sequence of operations’.11 In Index of Multiple Steps I discuss ways in which, once the parameters for a ‘noncoded, purely physical axis’ are met, allowing repeated operations or successive steps provides further useful extensions to the logic of the index.

Krauss alludes to the temporal power of the index, saying that there is a “paradox of presence seen as past’ again using Barthes’ discussion of the photograph as a basis;

The type of perception [the photograph] implies is truly without precedent. Photography set up, in efect, not a perception of the being-there of an object (which all copies are able to provoke, but a perception of its havingbeen-there. It is a question therefore of a new category of space-time: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority. Photography produces an illogical conjunction of the here and the formerly. It is thus at the level of the denoted message or message without code that one can plainly understand the real unreality of the photograph. Its unreality is that of the here, since the photograph is never experienced as an illusion; it is nothing but a presence … Its reality is that of a having-been-there, because in all photographs there is the constantly amazing evidence: this took place in this way. We possess, then, as a kind of precious miracle, a reality from which we are ourselves sheltered.13

She argues that, in the paintings and sculpture she is discussing in her essay, the works success in ‘forcing the presence of the object to the surface’ comes from their indexical nature and that;

‘as this presence surfaces, it flls the work with an extraordinary sense of time-past. Though they are produced as a physical cause - the trace, the impression, the clue, are vestiges of that cause that is no longer present in the given sign. Like traces, [indexical works] represent their referent through the paradox of being physically present but temporally remote.’14

The index in its physical directness and non-codifed nature, allows true presence to seep through from the object to its indexical copy or trace. But, this presence brings with it a sense of ‘time past’ - an understanding of an event (the event that took place to make the mark) in the past, this paradox she terms as ‘physically present but temporally remote’.15

We can only see the trace after the event that made it has passed. This idea, that an index is physically present but temporally remote, assumes that the referent itself has disappeared from view. But might there be special kinds of indexes where this is not the case? Can an indexical image be coincident with - both present and visible at the same time as - its referent? Of such special indexes Krauss would concede that the ‘presence’ is still able to seep through to the surface (since there is still a direct, physical and non-coded transformation taking place) but there would now also be a temporal present (replacing the temporal remote of the ‘cause that is no longer present’). In Index for temporal nowness I propose some examples of natural phenomena that might challenge this mutual exclusivity between temporal presence and physical presence.

4 C.S Pierce, ‘Logic as Semiotic:The Theory of Signs,’ Philosophical Writings of Pierce, New York, Dover Publications, 1955, p106 quoted in Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p.63.

5 Roland Barthes, ‘Rhetorique de l’image’, Communications, no4 (1964), 42 - quoted in Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p.59.

6 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p.59.

7 Ibid, p.60.

8 Ibid, p.63.

9 Roland Barthes, ‘Rhetorique de l’image’, Communications, no4 (1964), 42 - quoted in Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p.59.

10 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p59.

11 ‘Index’ Oxford Languages

<https://www.google.com/search?q=index+definition&oq=index+definition&aqs=chrome. .69i57j0i512l5j69i61j69i60.1990j1j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8> [accessed 29 March 2022].

12 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p.65.

13 Roland Barthes, ‘Rhetorique de l’image’, Communications, no4 (1964), 42 - quoted in Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p.65.

14 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p.65. (my italics).

15 Ibid, p.65.

Index for a Purely Physical Axis

A heat mediated photogram

Heat is, as light, an electromagnetic wave. Light is the mediator of photography, heat is the mediator of many sculptural processesincluding melting, burning and other chemical transformations that happen inside a ceramic kiln fring.

In the ancient ceramic technique of Raku a pot is fred until it reaches red hot temperatures (about 1000oC), it is then removed from the kiln and exposed to organic material. In one particular variation of Raku an individual object (the referent) - say a feather or lock of hair - is allowed to touch onto the pot’s hot surface. The heat causes the object to immediately ignite and the burning carbon afects the chemistry of the clay on the pot’s surface, resulting in a permanent black ‘print’ of the object’s shape.

Figure 1: Harriet Bowman, Horsehair plaque, 2019.

The image produced is of the same order as a photogram (a cameraless photographic technique in which an object is placed directly onto light-sensitive paper and exposed to create a silhouette). Such processes produce a simple outline of the object (a ‘reduction’ - one of Barthes’ original three indexical operations). The light-mediated photogram does this in a ‘negative’ way - in that the outline is produced in the area of the paper where the light has been blocked out by the object. In the heat-mediated process the image is a positive one (the mark comes from the carbon in the object burning onto the ceramic surface). The Raku-gram is then, arguably, even more direct and even more ‘purely physical’ than its photographic equivalent.

Such a process could also be compared to making a print of an object by coating it in ink and pressing it onto a piece of paper. Ink-printing must be mediated by another material (the ink), whereas in the Raku process the actual materiality of the referent (the carbon inside the molecules it is made of) are what mediates the mark making. The Rakugram is more physically direct than an inkprint or photogram, and also more materially direct. A material as well as a visual index.

A vapour mediated mark

In a related kiln phenomenon, called ‘fashing’, objects are subject to diferent amounts of ash in a fame fred kiln (because the fames move around the objects in an uneven way). A very specifc example of this is ‘chrome fashing’when the presence of a chrome-oxide glazed object next to a tin-oxide glazed one will cause a localised reaction in the white tin glaze, turning it pink.

Direct echoes to the photographic process exist here too. Properties of the referent are transferred from one locus to another and a chemical reaction takes place at this new locus to create an image copy. The transferrent in photography is light, in raku and ‘fashing’ it is heat or vapour moving by heat convection.

There is a potential for distortion during the ‘displacement’ in the fashing process however. The gap between the object and the locus of the index causes the image to be more or less difuse - but such distortion is much the same as that which results in a blurred, out of focus photograph. This gap also means that a disruption or difraction of the transferring rays can take place - the movement of air in the kiln can swirl the smoke and move it. Again though, this is no diferent to a photograph taken through a difractive medium such as water or glass in which the light rays are bent and the resultant image distorted. Neither of these displacements constitute the introduction of a code or syntax, (mediated as they are only by chance and the physics of nature). Flash marks on ceramic surfaces, like blurred photographs, despite their distortion still meet our criteria for an index.

Figure 2: Aya Schmidt and Giles Watkins, Chrome fashing on tin oxide glaze, June 2022 .

The transferring force in fashing (the vapour) is not, as light is, a ray of energy. It is matter in gas form (smoke - foating particles of carbon or chrome). It is a material moving through space rather than a wave of electromagnetic energy. It is not a property of the referent being transferred, but instead of an actual piece of the referent moving to the new locus, there to react with it materially.

Index of Non-Coded Processes

A non-rectangular crop

Whilst Krauss does not explicitly state that the crop in photography must be a particular shape for it to be non-coded, the rectangular shape of a cropped image is an implicit given when thinking about the photograph (or the painting, or the screen or, in fact any other of the many rectangular-shaped, visual-cultural forms). Krauss does not consider (or at least she does not feel it necessary to discuss) the rectangular shape of a photograph’s crop. But can the shape of a crop potentially jeopardise the ‘non-coded’ status of the photograph?

Lindsay Seers uses regular rectangular photographic paper to make her photographs, but the image itself is not rectangular, it is cropped to a circle or the outline of her mouth (the aperture in her ‘Human Camera’).16

Figure 3: Lindsay Seers, Human Camera - Series 5: C11. 2007

Figure 4: Lindsay Seers, Human Camera Photograph, 2007

The rectangle is the standard shape we have become used to when we apprehend an image, so when a photograph like Seers’ appears - one that exists in another shape - our intuitive response is, perhaps, to assume a conscious interference with the ‘default’ of the rectangular. Such an interference, being chosen by the photographer, would then be an ‘internal adjustment’, a syntactical manipulation, destroying the photograph’s status as an index. But Seer’s process does not feel like a syntactically loaded interference. In fact, Seer’s photographic process is even less coded, and even more direct than that of standard flm-based photography.

In the frst place, a circular crop refects a shape that is truer to the process. Light passing through any camera creates a naturally circular image, but in standard flm cameras this image is cropped down to its central rectangular section17 - in Seers’ photograph a circular crop is used (or merely the naturally occurring crop determined by the irregular outline of her mouth aperture).

Secondly, there is no double transfer in Seer’s pinhole like technique - her body is more a camera obscura than a standard flm-camera (where the image requires a second stage of processing - from flm to paper - to make it manifest). The light moves through Seer’s mouth shutter directly onto the photosensitive paper to make its image.

When we remember that the rectangular shape of a standard photographic image is not in fact a ‘point by point’18 correspondence with the natural world (it is not part of the logic of nature) - but instead determined by the design of the camera and flm, we can look at the non-rectangular diferently. We can see that images such as Seers’ - made directly onto their fnal substrate, cropped into a circle that retains the natural logic of light moving through an aperture - are, in fact, more compliant with the criteria of the index than the standard rectangular photographic crop.

A cutting out a chunk

A ‘crop’ is a framing of a certain portion of a visual scene, with the exclusion of the surrounding vista. It is straightforward to translate this process into the threedimensional realm. I cut a slice of cake. I dig a chunk of earth from the ground. I scoop a cup of water from a river. I cut a chunk of ice from a glacier.

An index produced by such a threedimensional crop is not merely a displacement ‘of a scene’ but also a displacement of an object - it is of the material in addition to being of the visual.

Figure 5: Olafur Eliasson, Ice Watch, 2014.

A chunk of time past

Cores bored from soil, ice or ocean foors are chunks dug directly from a place, material ‘crops’ of the scene. They refer to their location indexically. They also refer to the passage of time. The layers of diferent soil or ice indicate transitions in climate and conditions. These layers thus mark diferent periods in the history of the earth through centuries and even millenia. In this way, they are not only indexing on a visual and material register, but also a temporal one.

Figure 6: Olafur Eliasson, Ice Watch, 2014.

A melting in the here and now

Olafur Eliasson’s ice chunks are an example of materially temporal indexes. Their layers, though not visible to the naked eye, have built up over millennia of snow fall at the glacial site from which they were sourced. Through this, these objects engage strongly with a sense of time past. But they ofer a diferent kind of temporal index too. Ice melts, and as it does it engages with a sense of time passing - passing in the here and now. In Eliasson’s transported hunks of glacier, a material property of ice (its melting point) has given rise to a process (melting) that is itself an index of immediate time-passing, the perpetual refreshing of kairos as well as the slow build up of chronos.19

Figure 7: Olafur Eliasson, Ice Watch, 2014.

A melting of times together

If we consider not only the melting process but its outcome, the a pool of liquid, we might also think of Barthes’ third indexical operation ‘fattening’. A melted block of ice is a fattened version of itself. It has changed shape, but materially it is the same object. It is, perhaps, a material index of its former self.

When an ice core melts the chemical remnants of the atmosphere that it contains become mixed together. Previously separate solid layers - marker of successive periods of time passed - become mixed together. Inside the pool of water, all these points of time are, not just fattened, but also disorderedhomogenised. In this way Eliasson’s gigantic ice chunks, when they have fnally melted, are an index in which time-points are equivalised and thus one in which the idea of the linear succession of time is destroyed.

Figure 8: Olafur Eliasson, Ice Watch, 2014.

A becoming of liquid

In Hannah Rowan’s work Triple Point, ice melts slowly inside hanging glass vessels. Like Olafur Eliasson’s giant melting ice blocks, the melted pool of ice acts as a material index. Having become a diferent state and shape but staying materially the same, it is an index of its former self. But Rowan’s sculptures operate in another, more interesting, way. As the ice inside melts, it cools the container and surrounding air, causing droplets of condensation to form on the outside of the glass. This water accumulates, pools together and then submits to gravity as droplets falling to the ground.

Whilst it might appear to the casual onlooker that the glass vessel is merely leaking out of its pointed base, this is not the case. It is not the same water dripping down the outside as is held inside. Liquid water is forming on the inside of the glass interface and, by a transfer of heat, is directly instigating the formation of liquid water on the outer side. On both sides water is becoming a liquid. Inside, solid ice melts to become liquid. Outside, gaseous water vapour condenses out of air. What is happening on the outside of the glass is not a transfer of image, form or matter from the interior, but rather a copy (albeit reversed) of the process that is taking place on the inside. A materially-mediated index of a state change - an index of becoming of liquid form.

Figure 9: Hannah Rowan, Triple Point, 2017.

Index of Multiple Steps

A silver foot

A metal cast of a footprint, such as those often made of a new baby’s feet, is perhaps the most intuitive example of a three-dimensional index. It is the mould though, not the cast, that is the true (or at least the frst true) index here. But when a cast is taken from this mould to produce the ‘positive copy’ the same process is surely taking place again? In making a cast foot there is a creation of two indices (the mould, the cast) as well as the creation of a double index (the cast made via two successive indexical processes).

Figure 10: Everlasting castings. Special Classic 8x8” Square Frame Baby Casting Kit, 2022.

A blood head

Marc Quinn’s Self is a cast of his head, made using his own blood. It is not simply a physical index but also a material index. Not only is the form directly connected to its referent along a purely physical axis but its material constitution is made of a material ‘crop’ - a sample of the referrent’s very material matter (blood). Here the referent actually becomes the material for making the index.

Figure 11: Marc Quinn, Self, 1991.

A rock recast from itself

Katie Paterson’s work Campo del Cielo, Field of Sky is described on her website as ‘a meteorite, which has travelled through space and time for over 4.5 billion years, was cast, melted, and then recast back into a new version of itself, replicating its original form. The meteorite was later returned to space by the European Space Agency’.20

Unlike Quinn’s Self where the material used is a sample from the material of the referent, here the referent is used, materially, in its entirety. To make the indexical object required the complete destruction of the referent itself. But - as an exact copy (in both form and material) - can we distinguish between the thing that Paterson sent back into space and the thing she dug from a crater in Mexico. Is Campo del Cielo at once both index and referent?

Figure 12: Katie Paterson, Campo del Cielo, 2012.

A crystallised nugget

Take a pile of ash (the burnt remains of a pile of leaves perhaps), and again subject this material to intense heat. At a temperature of 1260 degrees, the minerals that survived the frst hot insult, now begin to transform and interact - melting and changing in unpredictable ways. A glassy, crystallised nugget emerges from the ashes.

In this emergent crystallisation from double fring an object of visual and physical complexity has emerged from a homogenous, grey pile of powder. There has been no manipulation or control imposed on this form, no human hand has shaped it. Throughout every step - from tree, to leaf, to ash to nugget - no code or syntax has sneaked in.

This array of bright colours has emerged directly from the mineral depths of the cherry tree - laid down in its leaves, held onto in the ash, re-incarnated as shiny blue, pink and rust nodules on a cherry-sized lump of glass. A reduced, abstracted, prismatically exploded but still indexical mark of the original tree.

Figure 13: Abi Freckleton, Phoenix, double fred Autumn cherry tree leaves, 2021.

Index for Temporal Nowness

A muddy tyre track

A tyre track is an indexical mark of a wheel. It contains information about the referent (the wheel’s outline and tread mark pattern). It also contains information from the world beyond the referent (the person on the bike, the direction in which they were travelling from and to). Having been made in a soft, thick, clay-y medium it is also a trace of the weight of the rider and the speed of travel. It indexes physical properties as well as visual ones, properties of the referent and of the indexical medium itself (the wetness of the mud).

But this particular wet mud is more than just a lump of soft clay. It is situated in nature and so is subject to rainstorms or dry spells - its softness will vary over time. The mud might become baked in the sun, solidifying the track mark into a kind of fossilised mould of the tyre - a lasting index. But it might also become submerged, liquifying any recognisable mark or walked over by other treads that will render its mark invisible under their own. The index inside this wet, soft, malleable, changeable, uncertain medium is ephemeral, and thus it exudes a sense of recency. As I walk through the forest, and look down at this tyre mark, I know it was not long ago that the rider also passed through here.

Figure 14: Abi Freckleton, Sun in the mud, 2021.

A cast still in its mould

Krauss speaks of the index as being ‘physically present but temporally remote’ - that it is ‘produced by a physical cause that is no longer present in the given sign’.21 Might it be possible for the physical cause to remain present? And how might that happen without it occluding the indexical trace it makes? It is difcult to imagine how this might work - in the realm of, say, a fngerprint - after all we cannot see the print until the fnger has moved away.

Figure 15: Abi Freckleton, Porcelain cast of pine cone in stoneware mould, 2021.

An obvious solution is simply to just not move the referent too far away, to keep it in view. A cast shown alongside its mould, for example. But this requires a shift - even if a small one. When the cast is presented still inside its mould, a physical contact remains between the index and its referent. The action of making the indexical mark remains present in time. But then we reintroduce the problem of occlusion. Our view of the moulding surface becomes blocked by the cast - we cannot see the indexical surfaces themselves, only the process by which the index is being, or has been, created. Temporally present then, but not quite physically, at least not visibly so. Krauss’ paradox of physical presence with temporal absence, remains.

A shadow

Typically, it is impossible to have an index (the mark) and its referent (the thing that makes the mark) both fully visible. The fnger must move away before the fngerprint can be seen. But it becomes possible when we consider the phenomenon of a shadow. In a shadow, both the thing and its indexical trace can be in the same place at the same time. In fact, the index is necessarily coincident with its referent - if the event that caused the trace was no longer present, the trace would cease to exist.

This special kind of index gives us, as Barthes terms it ‘a perception of the having-been-there of an object’.22 It also gives us a perception (or an awareness) of the being-there now. The existence of the indexical image is dependent on the enduring presence of its referent, and it is in this temporal dependence that the shadow becomes an index of the now.

Figure 16: Abi Freckleton, Taking a photograph of my shadow, 2021.

Like the shadow, the refected image - such as that on a dark window, mirror or other shiny specular surface - is dependent on the live presence of the object being refected. It is also dependent on the position of the viewer. The shadow image does not move if I circle around it (it only moves if the light source or referent does) but if I step a metre to the left or right when infront of a refected image, the content of that image changes. In this way, the presence of the subject viewing the refection (as well as the presence of the object being refected) is drawn into to the surface of the indexical image. In gazing at a refection, I am not only aware that this image represents what-is-therein-the-world-now, but also that this now-is-alsowhere-I-am.

Unlike a photograph which is eternally frozen at an undefned location in the past, the refected image is in a perpetual state of live-ness. As such a refection is a unique order of index. With the power to give us a sense of the being-there (of the object), the having been-there (to make its trace) and the beinghere-now-with-me (through its live-ness). Pierce alluded to the special power of immediacy in his discussion of the photograph - singling out the ‘instantaneous’ photograph as having particular power as an indexical sign.

Figure 17: Abi Freckleton, Studio window sunset, 2021.

Photographs, Peirce says, especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive, because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect, then, they belong to a second class of signs [indices], those by physical connection.22

This instructive power is even further heightened in the case of the refection. A refection is not just an instantaneous image, it remains perpetually so. That is to say it is always temporally active- it is not a still image made in the past (even if that past was only an instant ago) but a live image of now. It is perpetually making a new image at every given moment.

This liveness means that, on encountering a refected image, we don’t just know that the image is exactly like the objects it represents but we also know that we are in the same exact world alongside them both.

A puddle

The special encounter with a live, refective index often occurs on apprehending a puddle. The glassy surface of a shallow pool of dirty water often provides the perfect medium for a refection with photographic levels of resemblance and resolution.

But a puddle is not just a refected image, it is an image cast onto the meniscus of a body of water. This body of water - accumulated at a low point of landscape, a dip in the earth, a hole - is an index in another, more material way. The water in a puddle has travelled through and over the ground - perhaps from a centimetre’s distance, perhaps for miles and miles - passing through diferent rocks, soils and stones, over roots, worms and long ago disposed of crisp packets.

As water fows over and through this ground, it is silent but not inert. The H2O molecules (and other minerals and salts contained in rainwater) react with the objects it touches. Dissolving the things it passes over and between, taking a little piece of them with it. This sampling of material from all around is, in a way, a cropping of the worldthe puddle is cutting out material chunks from the world all around it.

A puddle, then, is both a material index of time, from places in the world beyond it, and (when apprehended by me, a seeing being) a live, refective index of my being in that exact same place alongside it.

Figure 18: Abi Freckleton, Muddy puddle, 2021.

A ripple

A ripple on the surface of a body of water is a transfer of energy. Kinetic energy held in air waves moving as wind, or from the impact of a stone dropped into its surface, is transformed into tiny waves that spread out across the puddle’s surface.

This ripple breaks up, distorts and disrupts any refected image on a puddle’s surface but it also reveals its material make up - as a pool of fuid with depth and dimensionality. Light energy converted into a refection on its surface - that special kind of live index - becomes intertwined with the kinetic energy of the material rippling through it. As such, the ripple brings into temporal and physical coincidence the materiality of the puddle with the visuality of the puddle. It ruins the photographic acuity of the puddle’s refection, but it deepens its power as a material index for time.

Figure 19: Abi Freckleton, Pink boots, 2021.

Footnotes

16 Lindsay Seers, Human Camera, (Article Press, BIAD, University of Central England, 2007).

17 The rectangular shape of photographic flm was designed as such for several reasons - practically led by the design of the flm camera apparatus in which a roll of flm needs to be a strip to move through the camera, and culturally because it was engineered with the supposition that photographs would be intended - like paintings - to be displayed on walls, and thus that a rectangular shape would be both easier to construct frames for and easier to arrange aesthetically against the rectangular shape of a wall.

‘How Does a Round Camera Lens Produce a Rectangular Picture?’, Wonderopolis, <https://www.wonderopolis.org/wonder/how-does-a-round-camera-lens-produce-a-rectangular-picture> [accessed 31 March 2022].

18 A photograph’s ‘resemblance is due to [it] having been produced under such circumstances that [it is] physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect then, [photographs] are … indices.’ C.S Pierce, ‘Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs,’ Philosophical Writings of Pierce, (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), p.106 in Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p.63.

19 ‘the classical literature reveals two Greek words for ‘time’ - chronos and kairos…. -chronos expresses the fundamental conception of time as measure, the quantity of duration, the length of periodicity, the age of an object or artefact….kairos points to a qualitative character of time, to the special position an event or action occupies in a series, to a season when something appropriately happens that cannot happen at ‘any’ time, but only at ‘that time’ …or the conception of a special temporal position’.

John E. Smith, ‘ time, Times, And The “Right Time”; “Chronos” And “Kairos” ’, The Monist, 53.1 (1969), p.1–13.

20 Katie Paterson, ‘Campo del Cielo, Field of Sky’, Katiepaterson.com, <https://katiepaterson.org/artwork/ campo-del-cielo/> [accessed 30 March 2022].

21 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p.65. Roland Barthes, “Rhetorique de l’image,”, Communications, no4 (1964), 42 - quoted in Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p.65.

22 C.S Pierce, ‘Logic as Semiotic:The Theory of Signs,’ Philosophical Writings of Pierce, New York, Dover Publications, 1955, p106 quoted in Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2’, October, 4 (1977), p.63.