OCTOBER FILES

JAMES COLEMAN

5
JAMES COLEMAN
OCTOBER FILES

Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, George Baker, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin

H. D. Buchloh, Leah Dickerman, Hal Foster, Denis Hollier, Mignon Nixon, and
Malcolm Turvey, editors

Richard Serra, edited by Hal Foster with Gordon Hughes

Andy Warhol, edited by Annette Michelson
Eva Hesse, edited by Mignon Nixon
Robert Rauschenberg, edited by Branden W. Joseph
James Coleman, edited by George Baker
 JAMES COLEMAN

edited by George Baker

essays by Raymond Bellour, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Lynne Cooke, Jean Fisher, Luke
Gibbons, Rosalind Krauss, Anne Rorimer, and Kaja Silverman

OCTOBER FILES 5
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

All images, diagrams, and quotations from the artist’s works © James Coleman. All rights
reserved.

This book was set in Bembo by Graphic Composition, Inc., Athens, Georgia, and was
printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

James Coleman / edited by George Baker ; essays by Raymond Bellour . . . [et al.].
p. cm. — (October files ; 5)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-262-02541-8 (hc. : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-262-52341-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Coleman, James, 1941– —Criticism and interpretation. 2. Conceptual art—
Ireland. I. Baker, George (George Thomas), 1970 – II. Bellour, Raymond.
III. Coleman, James, 1941– IV. Series.
N6797.C585J36 2003
700'.92—dc21
2003043640
 Contents

Series Preface vii

Acknowledgments ix

Anne Rorimer James Coleman 1970–1985 (1985) 1

Jean Fisher The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James

Coleman (1983) 19

Jean Fisher The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James

Coleman (1983) 37

Raymond Bellour The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead )

(1996) 57

Luke Gibbons Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE

(1993) 73

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Memory Lessons and History Tableaux: James

Coleman’s Archaeology of Spectacle (1995) 83

Lynne Cooke A Tempered Agnosia (1992) 113

Kaja Silverman Live Vocals (2002) 139

vi Contents

Rosalind Krauss “. . . And Then Turn Away?” (1997) 157

Rosalind Krauss Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to

Photograph (1999) 185

Index of Names 211

 Series Preface

OCTOBER Files addresses individual bodies of work of the postwar pe-

riod that meet two criteria: they have altered our understanding of art in
significant ways, and they have prompted a critical literature that is seri-
ous, sophisticated, and sustained. Each book thus traces not only the de-
velopment of an important oeuvre but also the construction of the critical
discourse inspired by it. This discourse is theoretical by its very nature,
which is not to say that it imposes theory abstractly or arbitrarily. Rather,
it draws out the specific ways in which significant art is theoretical in its
own right, on its own terms and with its own implications. To this end we
feature essays, many first published in OCTOBER magazine, that elabo-
rate different methods of criticism in order to elucidate different aspects
of the art in question. The essays are often in dialogue with one other
as they do so, but they are also as sensitive as the art to political context
and historical change. These “files,” then, are intended as primers in signal
practices of art and criticism alike, and they are offered in resistance to the
amnesiac and antitheoretical tendencies of our time.

The Editors of OCTOBER

 Acknowledgments

Many of the essays in this collection have been revised or expanded for re-
publication here, in some cases quite significantly. “James Coleman 1970–
1985” by Anne Rorimer was originally published in James Coleman:
Selected Works (Chicago and London: Renaissance Society at the Uni-
versity of Chicago and ICA London, 1985). “The Place of the Spectator
in the Work of James Coleman” by Jean Fisher first appeared in Open
Letter 5–6 (Summer-Fall 1983). Her essay “The Enigma of the Hero in the
Work of James Coleman” was published as an eponymous catalog (Lon-
donderry, Northern Ireland: The Orchard Gallery, 1983). “The Living
Dead (Living and Presumed Dead)” by Raymond Bellour was originally
published as “Les morts vivants (Living and Presumed Dead)” in James
Coleman (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996) and has since been col-
lected in Bellour’s L’Entre-Images 2 (Paris: P.O.L, 1999). “Narratives of No
Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE” by Luke Gibbons first appeared in Art-
forum 32, no. 4 (December 1993) and has since been collected in Gibbons’s
Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork:Cork University Press, 1996). “Mem-
ory Lessons and History Tableaux: James Coleman’s Archaeology of Spec-
tacle” by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh was first published in James Coleman:
Projected Images, 1972–1994 (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1995)
and has since been collected in Buchloh’s Neo-Avantgarde and Culture In-
dustry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). “A Tempered Agnosia” by Lynne
Cooke first appeared in James Coleman (Lyons: Musée d’art contemporain,
1992). “Live Vocals” by Kaja Silverman is an expanded version of one of
four essays on Coleman published by the author in an exhibition catalog
for the Lenbachhaus Munich, entitled James Coleman (Ostfildern-Ruit:
x Acknowledgments

Hatje Cantz, 2002). “. . . And Then Turn Away?” by Rosalind Krauss was
first published in James Coleman (Vienna and Brussels: Wiener Secession
and Yves Gevaert, 1997); the current version then appeared in October 81
(Summer 1997). Her “Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photo-
graph” was published in a preliminary version as “First Lines: Introduction
to Photograph” in James Coleman (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies,
1999); its current version includes passages from Krauss’s essay “Reinvent-
ing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry 25 (Winter 1999).
The editor wishes to thank Hal Foster for his support, Roger Conover,
Paula Woolley, and Matthew Abbate for their assistance and expertise,
Lisa Pasquariello for last-minute aid, and the authors for their willingness
to participate in this project and to reexamine essays long since sent to
publication. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Kaja Silverman for
the intensity of her reexamination, a “communication” that has opened
up a dialogue with transformative effects upon the editor’s own work.
Thanks are also due to Rachel Haidu for inspired assistance in the task
of translation, to Sarah Pierce and Gerard Byrne for facilitating travel
to Ireland, and to James Coleman and Aebhric Coleman for making
this publication a possibility in every other way. The editor was also sup-
ported in this endeavor by a Faculty Support Grant from the State Uni-
versity of New York at Purchase.
JAMES COLEMAN
Projections, 1958–71
Two projected 8 mm color films, silent,
profile spot, pastel drawing. Studio
installation, Milan.
 James Coleman 1970–1985

Anne Rorimer

In 1968 James Coleman began to assimilate in his work a recognition that

“art can never totally be reduced to a concept of simple acts of self-
expression.”1 From his first exhibited pieces of 1970 to present achieve-
ments, Coleman has evolved a significant and diverse body of work that
gives new parameters to traditional image-making processes. Like other
artists of his generation, he has chosen to adopt a variety of media, in-
cluding film, photography, video, recorded sound, and live performance.
While each work possesses its own distinctive features, one may, for the
sake of discussion, observe to date three separate phases in his oeuvre. As
such these may be divided into periods that encompass perceptual instal-
lations (1970–74);installations involving a psychological, social, historical,
or cultural dimension (1975–79); and works that take place in a theatrical
context (1980–85).
Works of the early 1970s differ from, but lay the foundations for,
Coleman’s later works. An examination of a number of individual pieces
from this period reveals the nature of his intent at the beginning of his
career.
In retrospect, it might be said that Flash Piece, when shown at the Stu-
dio Marconi gallery in 1970, set the stage for all of Coleman’s ensuing
work. Although by no means predicting the future complexity of his work,
it introduced a new element for consideration with respect to the experi-
ence of viewing. Flash Piece consisted of four instantaneous electronic
flashes of light (1/800 second)—two blue appearing in between two yel-
low—directed upon the gallery wall in six cycles of three minutes each.
The sequence of flashes was spaced as follows: yellow to blue, 60 seconds;
2 Anne Rorimer

blue to blue, 35 seconds; and blue to yellow, 85 seconds. While the time
between the individual cycles differed, the cycles themselves were exactly
three minutes. As a result,

The spectator, reacting to the light flashes (which operate to divide the
intervals), will perceive the “event” period as of variable duration. In
fact, the length of this duration, difficult to memorize, and its variable
location within the cycle . . . lead to different perceptions of time.2

As the above description suggests, the significance of this work lies in the
way it drew attention to the viewer’s sense of time insofar as time as mea-
sured and time as experienced did not coincide. By thus indicating how
memory is a factor of perception, Coleman included the perceiver’s re-
sponse within the subject matter of the work as a whole. Rather than pro-
ducing a finite, stationary object, he created a piece which not only dealt
with the effect of time on seeing but also incorporated the subjective re-
ception of the spectator within the work’s total meaning.
From the start, Coleman has been concerned with the way in which
something is seen rather than with the thing itself in isolation. Projections
(1958–71), for example, studies a specific object in relation to a location in
time as well as in space. The work includes a pastel drawing of a beech tree
in Tullamore, Ireland, done by the artist when he was seventeen. The pas-
tel hangs on the wall in line with two Super 8 mm film projections. While
the first projection shows the site where the tree once stood, the second
focuses on the surface of the remaining stump. Projections adds a new note
to the landscape tradition and extends the notion of painting to include
other methods of rendition. Coleman’s use of film allows him factually to
record change over a twelve-year period by documenting a particular spot
in existing time. The location stays the same, but the scene changes with
the passing of time and the disappearance of the tree. The filmed tree
stump bears witness to the formerly present tree while the growth rings of
its cross section mark the years. Through views of before and after span-
ning a period of years, this work allows the passage of time to be captured
visually. The work of art, like the stump, thus serves as a gauge for our
knowledge of the past in terms of the evidence of the present. The tree
survives only as a representation, however, not as a living presence.
Whereas Projections gives definitive, straightforward evidence of the
part played by time on what is seen, a work entitled Memory Piece (1971)
reflects on the role of memory with regard to perception. If the former
work is about time as an external factor for visual change, the latter inves-
tigates the internal operation of memory in its attempt to hold on to real-
ity in terms of the past but with reference to the present.
In Memory Piece Coleman replicates the mnemonic process. He ac-
complishes this by means of two tape recorders. The first tape recorder
supplies a text of about three to five minutes in length. The participant in
the work may hear the original text just once and, having attempted to
memorize it, must record it on the second machine. This text, in turn, must
be recorded once again as remembered. The activity may be repeated, the-
oretically, ad infinitum, or until the nearly inexhaustible supply of tapes
runs out. Previously recorded texts are not accessible, and as completed,
are kept in a provided storage unit.
Paradoxically, one cannot repeat the past, but memory retains the
knowledge of its existence nonetheless. Memory Piece documents memory
functions—that is, how the mind is responsible for change and loss as it
accumulates, filters, transmits, and distorts. The storage unit, in essence,
becomes an archive of mental processes. The person who participates in
this piece activates a work which exists as a record of transformation, not
as a graspable object or image per se. It is work shaped by the perceiver
who is the one to realize the nature of memory and, in so doing, realize
the work itself.
In the following year, Coleman introduced language into his work as
a means of inducing the active participation of the spectator. For Stereo
(or Mono-Dialogue) (1972), two loudspeakers, hidden from sight, were in-
stalled at opposite ends of a room. At alternating intervals the speakers
emitted phrases that gave the impression of coherency and demanded
differing degrees of attention. As described when first shown:

A voice coming from a two track stereophonic tape delivers words or

short phrases, from opposite ends of the room. The spectator (or
rather, the listener) . . . is assailed by these vocal statements in a very
complex rhythm, so that the intervals between them can be either
brief or long, and the words more or less accentuated or even com-
pletely unstressed:making a greater or lesser impact on the listener and
at the same time creating the impression of their being correlated, or
deriving from the other by evoking their semantic meaning or pho-
netic value.3

James Coleman 1970–1985 3

4 Anne Rorimer

According to the artist, the work at one moment would lure visitors to
one side of the room, or at another, to the other side—as if they were in
the middle of multiple conversations attracting their attention—in their
attempt to catch the potentially more forceful statement or interesting in-
formation.4 Although specific narrative content could not be construed
from the text, the text exerted control upon the spectators, directly in-
volving them—in their desire to assign meaning—within the structure of
the work.
As one writer has observed, Coleman’s work requires the “confronta-
tion of the spectator with his or her act of perceiving.”5 Instead of seeking
to re-present reality in the form of a static image, Coleman explores the in-
terval between viewer and viewed. The content of his work derives from
his investigation of the gap that separates what is seen from how it is seen.
A work of 1972 called Pump serves as a kind of visual anecdote eluci-
dating the rationale behind Coleman’s approach. During the continuous
cycle of a Super 8 mm film projection, one observes the interior of an
empty bucket hanging beneath the spout of a pump. Water rushes out of
the spout to fill the bucket. Once the water has settled, the image of the
bucket’s interior appears just as it did without the water. The empty and
full bucket look exactly the same despite the intervening information.
The work thus reminds us that what is seen in the present has a past and a
future, to which the mind has access through memory and anticipation,
and which a single, fixed image does not suggest.
Slide Piece (1972–73) examines the nature of single-image representa-
tion. Three versions of the work exist, one in Italian, one in French, and
another in English. A slide projector synchronized with a tape recorder al-
lows the same color slide (a photograph of a deserted city square taken by
the artist in Milan) to be projected in coordination with a text. The text,
recited by one speaker, is the aggregate of separate descriptions made by
various individuals who were asked by Coleman to characterize what they
saw within the photograph.
While concerning itself with a static image, Slide Piece takes place in
time. It is a collection of verbalized viewpoints, and possesses no thematic
beginning or end. The text brings the photograph to life, so to speak,
and—functioning on the basis of accumulation—gives the work its open-
ended quality. No two descriptions are the same. The multiple readings
subject what otherwise seems circumscribed, definitive, and matter-of-
fact to potentially endless visual interpretation. Marked by precision, the
descriptions concentrate on detail, and no one of them can register the
Seagull, 1973
Double-screen slide projection with
synchronized audio.

contents of the whole at once. The intricacies of description—whose

vivid, poetic, or even amusing turns of phrase add to the richness of the
piece—display the fact that a totality may only be perceived in time as a
sum of its parts; and, equally important, is dependent upon the viewer’s
own outlook.
Subsequent installations, in 1973 and 1974, build time and viewpoint
as factors of seeing into the resulting work. For the first of these installa-
tions, Seagull (1973)—also conceived as a work using boats on a river—
Coleman divided the gallery in half, placing screens from floor to ceiling
at the ends of the two rooms. On each of the screens he projected a con-
tinuous sequence of slides, with an accompanying soundtrack, of a seagull
on a river arriving, picking up pieces of bread, and departing. Because of
the wall between the two slide projections, viewers of the work could ob-
serve only one sequence of gulls at a time. Unable to be in two places at
once, they had no means of knowing if the image of the bird, on its en-
try and exit from left to right in both instances, was the same bird going
from room to room in a complete circle or if two birds were traveling in
separate circles within the individual rooms. Viewers could not decipher
whether they had seen the same bird twice or two different birds. The

James Coleman 1970–1985 5

6 Anne Rorimer

viewers’ confinement to one series of events in conjunction with their

memory/anticipation of a parallel set of circumstances determined their
temporal and spatial relationship to the work.
Similarly, Installation Made for Location (1974) brought the question
of the viewer’s location in time and place to bear on the structure of the
work. Each time the work was exhibited, Coleman utilized elements of
the existing architecture. At the Ulster Museum in Belfast, a window with
a balcony, off of a corridor that adjoined the main exhibition area, per-
fectly suited his purposes. Earphones, placed in opposite locations to the
left and right sides of the window, contained prerecorded tapes. On each
side of the window, respective tapes described the balcony, first in terms
of what the person using the earphone on the other side of window was
seeing (and in terms of what the present viewer would see, or could have
seen, as well).
When he installed this work at the Rotterdam Arts Foundation in
Holland, Coleman took advantage of two columns at the center of the ex-
hibition space. The texts of the tapes, symmetrically installed in relation
to the columns, in this case were identical. From either side of the two col-
umns they delineated for the observer how the columns would be seen
from the other side.
The same work was also shown in the “Contemporanea” exhibition in
Rome. For this installation, Coleman set up earphones in an underground
parking lot. The recorded text, as in the Rotterdam piece, spoke of the op-
posite viewer’s perception of spotlit, linear car park divisions. Despite the
variations of each installation, the underlying principle of each work re-
mained the same. The identical optical relationships pertained to the past
and future as well as to the present. The mental projection of what had
been—and was to be—seen, or else what the other viewer saw, involved
the spectator in the activity of seeing. Memory and anticipation were re-
flected in the knowledge of the other spectator’s viewpoint and by the
viewer’s own experience of the past and future “present” in the installation.
Two related works of 1974–75, Playback of a Daydream and Images, fur-
ther illustrate the mechanisms of perception that the preceding installa-
tions exposed. Taken from a textbook on perception, ambiguous images
which may be read either as a duck or a rabbit in the former—or as a gob-
let or a face in the latter—provide the imagery of these two works. Play-
back of a Daydream is projected on the wall as a film, whereas Images takes
the form of a half dozen or more individual metallic paintings on paper
pasted to the wall.
Playback of a Daydream, 1974
Projected 16 mm black-and-white film,
silent. Continuous cycle. Installation
view.

Both Playback of a Daydream and Images produce an unending interac-

tion between the image and the spectator, who alternatingly sees a duck
or a rabbit (or a face or a goblet). The viewer, through knowledge, can spe-
cify that a duck was seen or that a rabbit will be seen or vice versa, while
viewing one or the other in the present. However, the viewer cannot de-
termine which image takes precedence or where one begins and the other
ends, visually or temporally. By showing the phenomenon of the alternat-
ing duck and rabbit as a film, moreover, Coleman pointed out how an im-
mediate visual experience and the documentation of it, in this case, could
not be distinguished separately. In the process of drawing the goblet/face
painting, the artist maintains that he tried “to get in between the space of
when one image became the other.” Each painting represents this impos-
sible task and is slightly different. Although the perceptual present domi-
nates, knowledge of past and future intervenes. The work itself, therefore,
steps in to postulate where the viewer might stand in relation to the mech-
anisms of perceiving.
The “ambiguous figures” signal the end of Coleman’s predominantly
perceptual installations. As of 1975, more complex aspects of perception

James Coleman 1970–1985 7

8 Anne Rorimer

enter into the work as psychological, historical, and cultural factors of ex-
perience are taken into account.
Photographs of two faces projected larger than life-size on a wall on
either side of a large pillar provide the visual component of Clara and Dario,
as conceived in 1975. The faces of these two figures change position in
relation to each other and in tandem with a narrative text on an audio-
tape. The text pertains to two adults, referred to as Elsa and Andrea, who
intend to revisit the place of their childhood romance near Lake Como
in the north of Italy. The text is composed of descriptive reminiscences
of a time gone by, which arise out of an intention, never carried out, to
return to where they had spent the memorable moments of their youth.
As the text begins, “io penso che . . . ,”6 the viewer is immediately given
access to the thoughts of the speaker, who continues, “non so se ho
voglio di partire in questo momento.”7 During the course of the narra-
tive, the carrousel of slides completes two cycles. Half of the text repeats
itself, in reverse and in alternation with new material. The specific sub-
ject matter of the text—the proposed journey that leads to a reflection
on the past—is thus reflected by the very structure of the text itself.
The faces projected on the wall turn back and forth, to and from each
other, sometimes—or sometimes not—in response to the words of the
audiotape.
The absorbing nature of the text in conjunction with the presence of
the faces draws the spectator into the work. Rather than presenting a
straightforward story, the work—turning back upon itself as it does—re-
volves around and involves the viewer, who is brought in on the roman-
tic reverie. The artist specifically intended to create an emotional rapport
between the spectator and the two figures, who occasionally exchange
glances.
In this work, as in life, nostalgia for the past and desire for the future
combine in the experience of the present.8 The subject matter of Clara and
Dario transcends the particular to become a discourse on separation and re-
union in time and place:“Che tardi! Ormai non parto più”9 is followed by
“ma si! Rimani . . . parliamo ancora”10 at the end of the first cycle of the
piece. The text is deliberately ambiguous as to whether it is a monologue
or dialogue. Elsa and Andrea are simultaneously divided and connected as
images, separate and fused as psyches. They mirror each other, both visu-
ally and within the text, in a work that ultimately is a reflection upon the
interaction of the inner self with the present in view of the past and future
and in relation to another.
Clara and Dario, 1975
Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.
Installation at Studio Marconi,
Milan, 1975.

As a psychological meditation, Clara and Dario paves the way for the
intense psychological drama of Box (ahhareturnabout) (1977), a Super 8 mm
black-and-white film in a continuous seven-minute loop with a synchro-
nized audiotape. For this work, Coleman adapted original documentary
footage of the historic 1927 boxing match between heavyweight cham-
pion Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey. Projected in an enclosed, blackened,
tunnel-like space, the film flashes on and off in front of the viewer, who
is surrounded by darkness. The fast, abrupt appearance and disappearance
of the image results in the experience of an afterimage in between the
frames. The effect is that of “a low pulse similar in frequency to that of
a heartbeat,”11 while breathy words and signs, issuing as if from Tunney,
are uttered in the same staccato rhythm. Tunney’s thoughts and the blows,
given and received, interlock as the viewer has the impression of being
both in the fight and in the mind of the fighter.
The subtitle of the piece, ahhareturnabout, refers to the fact that the
fight of 1927 was the rematch for Tunney to retain his championship title
after the famous fight of 1926. The work was inspired by Coleman’s in-
terest in the idea that Tunney was the world champion in 1926, yet had to
reaffirm that distinction in a second bout the following year. As he has

James Coleman 1970–1985 9

10 Anne Rorimer

pointed out, the interim represents a precise moment in Tunney’s life dur-
ing which he simultaneously had and did not have a certain status. Dur-
ing the fight he must regain what he already “is.” That moment in time
opens Tunney’s identity to question. In the fight, therefore, one witnesses
his struggle for mastery, title, and personal status.
Box dramatizes the interrelationship between the inner and outer self
and between the individual self and society. The physical and mental sides
of Tunney’s being are made apparent when language, conveying his
thoughts, plays against the visual record of his actions. By fusing sound and
image, Coleman is able to portray the interior and exterior person at the
same time. The script emphasizes the association between mind and body
with phrases such as “ooh . . . aah . . . the liver . . . the liver,” while it also
alludes to the desire for power:“the sticks . . . not capital’s . . . right.” Tun-
ney is not merely flesh and blood, a body and a soul, but an individual
striving to maintain his contested role—and, ultimately, his self-image—
within the social order.
Installations following Box, including Strongbow and A-Koan of 1978
and The Ploughman’s Party of 1979–80, refer to the ambiguities and dichot-
omies within the social order itself. As in Coleman’s preceding pieces, au-
dio and visual elements play upon and against each other, enabling the artist
to create works that reflect on the contemporary situation and the state of
society in general. The earlier two of these works, Strongbow and A-Koan,
were conceived for exhibition in Ireland. Referring to the separation of
the country into two sectors, they both contain political overtones.
In Strongbow, Coleman juxtaposed a spotlit replica of a twelfth-century
tomb effigy from a church in Dublin close to the exhibition space, its hands
clasped in prayer, with a spotlit video film of two hands clapping. One of
the clapping hands was red and the other green. As the hands moved back
and forth, they left ghostlike traces while their colors mixed on the screen.
At the same time, the accompanying sound effects in repeated cycles grad-
ually rose from a hushed silence to a resounding boom.
The clapping hands, in actual motion, near the stationary figure of
Strongbow, carved in stone for posterity, might seem to have awakened the
sleeping monarch, whose reputation, carried down through the centuries,
has been maintained by history. Strongbow, a Norman invader and king,
is a heroic figure of legendary note from the annals of Irish history. Hav-
ing married a Celt, he stood at the crossroads between the original Celtic
and the imported Anglo-Norman cultures. The old never completely rec-
onciled itself to the new, and the color of the hands in the video connotes
the division of Ireland into North (red) and South (green). In this work,
Coleman links the historical past to the present and confronts the con-
temporary media. Distinctions are maintained, yet the politically colored
red and green hands blur optically, as well as symbolically, on the video
screen. The sound of the television reaches a crescendo as the hands con-
tinue to move back and forth in ceaseless repetition while Strongbow,
a motionless effigy, paradoxically lives on in spirit. Television, a represen-
tational device of the media as well as an artistic medium, comments on
itself. Without directly addressing the past, yet within its range, the tele-
vision clamors for attention. Although echoing the noise and confusion of
the present, it offers no particular insight on the past nor resolution for the
future.
In a related manner, A-Koan amplifies, quite literally, the idea of sense-
lessness. The title of the piece, as it sounds in Gaelic, means “a lament.”
Having been invited to participate in the Galway Arts Festival, Coleman
employed for his work a child actress to recite a short text as if she were
crying for her mother: “I’m ready, I’m calling you, I’ve done a poo . . .”
Megaphones transmitted the voice of the wailing child while the Irish flag
blew violently above in the breeze. The words of the child, which were re-
peated over and over again, in combination with the frenetic activity of the
flapping flag, produced an eerie aura of helplessness, with the self-directed
summons of the little girl remaining unanswered. The work itself elicits
no logical interpretation, but articulates instead a lack of rational response.
The Ploughman’s Party displays the pretension and artifice that has in-
filtrated contemporary culture. To this end, the work plays on the image
of the plough:heavenly constellation and instrument of earthly (and earthy)
labor. The plough, set at the end of a velvety, white room, figures as the
centerpiece of the installation. Made from a piece of iron, which has been
covered in gold leaf, the plough takes on the curving, almost rococo shape
of the constellation (also known as the Big Dipper) for which it is named.
Blue neon lights, highlighting the gilded iron from behind, and white
light from a projector illuminating it frontally give the object its corporate
sign and jewel-like look. Upon entering the room with its posh interior,
the viewer also hears the voice of a man speaking with an affected accent
in double-entendres related to culture and cultivating. He lapses into
French phrases and adapts advertising imagery to his talk of perfumes and
other such products. The Ploughman’s Party capitalizes on culture. Accord-

James Coleman 1970–1985 11

12 Anne Rorimer

ing to Coleman, the work is about the power of propaganda and mer-
chandizing in a society where a symbol of labor, the plough, may be trans-
formed into a purely decorative tool of the cultural system.
In the last five years, Coleman has extended his method of working
from stage environments to the domain of theater, where image and text,
performance and narration, are woven together within the framework of
the viewer’s actual viewing time. So Different . . . and Yet (1980) is the first
of these ensuing works, whose meaning derives from the theatrical con-
text in which they are presented.12
The artifice of The Ploughman’s Party carries over to So Different . . .
and Yet, a 50-minute video installation. On the screen of a television mon-
itor, a male piano player and a female model—the latter poised on a chaise
longue and successively changing from one stock pose to another—to-
gether relate an intricate narrative, which is punctuated by piano music.
The images on the video screen are richly colored and back-lit to give
them the unnatural quality of the color found in advertising brochures. Set
against a deep-blue background, the male figure at the piano—with horns
growing out of his head—wears a black tuxedo, while the female speaker
is garbed in a shiny green décolleté evening dress, one leg wound with a
red ribbon. The narrators’ contrived deliveries, French accents included,
are filled with verbal cliché. The story, told in the first and third person, is
composed of two intertwining plots and begins on the premises of the
dress shop of Vanna, the female narrator, and Laura. It is made up of an ac-
cumulation of hackneyed, though riveting, episodes that are associated
with sensational romances and thrillers. The two intersecting narratives
share several of the same characters. The incidents are held together by
phrases such as “meanwhile, back at the dress shop,” but the traditional
sequential narrative—with a beginning, middle, and end—is disrupted,
shattered into fragments of literary convention replete with characters
who, despite constantly changing identities, retain a stereotypical nature.
So Different . . . and Yet is, in one regard, about revival and re-creation,
with the evening dress functioning as the unifying element of its plots.
The work harbors multiple possibilities for interpretation on a specifically
political level or in more general terms. The dress—which, after all, is
green—may be read as a symbol of “an Irish nationalism which has never
been destroyed”13 or considered in relationship to aesthetic issues. To what
extent is “the latest creation,” an “updated version of the old dress,” trans-
formed and to what end, with what significant results? Brought “into line
with today’s fashion,” at one point in the spoken text, it is again “out-
moded” by the conclusion of the tape, having been replaced at the previ-
ous point by an imitation, a fake.
As the narrators/performers recount the complex series of events,
one witnesses the various machinations of the work’s fictional structure
rather than being told what happens as a result of connected incidents
leading from one to another. The work does not provide a window onto
a fiction that is posited as a duplication of real life. Instead it exposes the
underpinnings of this activity. In So Different . . . and Yet, artificiality and
deception assume an authenticity and authority because of the way the al-
luring devices of its media are revealed. As Jean Fisher has commented, the
audience is “captivated by [the speaker’s] image and her unfolding narra-
tive” and “also alienated from both,”14 since the viewer becomes aware,
perhaps, of the enjoyment of being taken in. The work as a whole, there-
fore, achieves an independent reality through its thematic attention to role
playing and to the illusions of society as well as to its own illusory content.
Coleman’s first work to be performed live, Now & Then (1981), fur-
ther deals with the subject of illusionism.15 Its scenario is based on the
reverie of two adults who in childhood had crawled into a shop window
and pretended to be mannequins. Now grown, they reenact their child-
hood fantasy of bringing themselves in line with the latest fashion. A pi-
anist accompanies the two performers as they demonstrate some twenty
different ramp-walk poses in a symmetrical manner and, alternatingly,
half-sing, half-recite a text. They are elaborately dressed—he in a yellow
suit, she in a pink and blue frock and bonnet—in a style evocative of 1950s
fashion. Yellow and pink spotlights saturate the colorful atmosphere with
artificiality.
The reality of the work is, paradoxically, fabricated upon the display
of interwoven fictions. As in Clara and Dario, adults romanticize a bygone
past “when time seemed to stand still.” In addition, Coleman brings the
idea of role playing—as he did in Box—to bear on the broader meaning
of the piece. The adults-cum-children imitate the postures of the adult
world of fashion, whose styles likewise attempt to recapture the past. The
text alludes to the way in which the fading outdoor light increases the in-
door light. The changing light transforms the transparent window of the
shop into a mirror, allowing the fantasizing adults to see their reflections
in the glass. In Now & Then the static interface between past and present,
interior and exterior, surface and depth, artifice and actuality becomes
blurred. In the glamorous dream world of fashion depicted here, self-
image and projected image fuse.

James Coleman 1970–1985 13

14 Anne Rorimer

During the last several years Coleman has succeeded in integrating

language, performance, and sound in a totally original manner. His most
recent works cross traditional boundaries to borrow from the disciplines
of literature, theater, and music, although their fundamental inspiration
and form remain pictorial. As the artist maintained in an interview:

I never did feel I abandoned painting. Long before I ever began to in-
troduce other media into my work—when I began to lose interest in
a simple retinal reality—I began to sense a feeling that I needed to take
cognizance of the psychological dimension. To do this I initially used
film to document, and later on, as a device of expression. I realized that
my medium was also part of things as much as my mind or eye was.16

Ignotum per Ignotius (1982–84) and Living and Presumed Dead (1983;
second version, 1985) analyze, in different ways, the fundamental nature
of visual representation in its relationship to reality.17
The earlier of these two works, Ignotum per Ignotius, utilizes two simply
dressed performers and prerecorded sound.18 On a basic narrative level the
work centers upon an inquiry into the cause of a death. It takes place as if
it were set in a funeral parlor or a lawyer’s office. A male and a female player
perform successive roles: detective, suspect butler, lawyer, family mem-
bers, and the corpse. The standard “who-done-it” and “who-will-get-
the-inheritance” situations afford the basis for the work’s other levels of
investigation.
The laconic speech and abrupt gestures of the players, interspersed
with strains of different kinds of music, convey the story, in which, ac-
cording to Coleman, an “applied rationale does not yield the expected re-
sults.” The guilty party turns out to be the one who has attempted, through
language or cultural encoding, to impose a system of interpretation on
that which cannot yield its essence or spirit. Later on in the performance
the female figure, dancing her fingers childlike on the floor, endeavors to
recapture a nostalgic and simplified interpretation of the performed event
up to that point. The dance is abruptly terminated by an invisible force
which propels her hand to inscribe on the wall:“A Message is Found.” This
resurrects the male performer as corpse who attempts to cover up the in-
scription. As in the case of the writing hand, the canceling hand is visually
consumed to a bloody stump. Prior to the finger dance, the two per-
formers had approached one another, symbolically removing each other’s
masks in a gesture of transferal to the hand. Traces of the body and, by
symbolic inference, the mask are left on the wall. As the artist has pointed
out, “the mask may be equated with the representational aspects of human
activity, and the projected image of the self is now transferred to the hand,
the instrument of implementation.” The work closes with the two per-
formers attempting to scrape away the red paint and replace their masks in
order “to recapture the representation of the self.”
Living and Presumed Dead further examines the complex modes of rep-
resentation. Its meaning derives from the union of several aesthetic forms,
in this instance the orally narrated epic with intervals of music, the the-
atrical performance, and the photographic slide presentation. On a purely
narrative level, the work involves four protagonists: Abbas, Borras, Chris
or Capax, and Mr., the villain whose past dealings are obscure. The many
details of the plot may briefly be summarized as follows:

Capax was an acrobat, performing with daggers and fire, and dicing
with death. He was “presumed dead” after cutting his throat during a
performance. However Borras, his lover, has searched for him for
many years in the belief he was still alive. Abbas rescues Capax . . . and
discovers that he is disguising himself as his father to avenge his father’s
murder.19

Drama, adventure, and confrontations fraught with incidents of mistaken

identity contribute to the story’s association with legendary tales, myths,
and literary genres in which heroic pursuits are coupled with the quest for
truth.
For the current exhibition, Coleman has revised the work’s earlier vi-
sual content. He has replaced the previous black-and-white line drawings,
which were projected on the wall to illustrate the story, with slides that
show a cast of twenty characters lined up frontally across a stage. The cast
includes live actors and several mannequins, all colorfully and flamboy-
antly dressed. The costumes locate the individual characters in different
historical periods—in either the Middle Ages or the Restoration—and in
differing social strata. A goblin, a skeleton, an elf, and even a fairy with
magic wand complete the cast. As the narrator unravels the story in syn-
chronization with the projected images, the characters appear in different
places in the line. An optical dissolve system is timed so that the successive
photographic images fade into and out of one another.
Playing on the realistic aspects—yet fictitious nature—of photogra-
phy and theater, Coleman links the two together in an unprecedented

James Coleman 1970–1985 15

16 Anne Rorimer

manner. Despite the interchange of character positions, the slides display

the same image of the theatrical cast throughout the accompanying nar-
ration. As in Slide Piece, Coleman here subjects one view to many inter-
pretations. Telescoping historical time and the social spectrum into a
single, two-dimensional scene, he succeeds in capturing the past—as por-
trayed by the costumed figures—and the present within the frozen mo-
ment of the photograph. By means of the optical dissolve mechanism,
furthermore, he animates the static image of the photograph. Paradoxi-
cally, the stationary image is thus set in motion and changes while re-
maining the same.
On many levels Living and Presumed Dead depicts the multifaceted,
layered fusion—and confusion—of reality and fiction on literal and aes-
thetic planes. The narrative abounds with references to perception and
deception. Representation of the action within the story takes place in the
zone where theatrical make-believe and real life intercept each other. The
characters retain their masks and costumes while they stand in a row as if
they were posing for a series of publicity stills. Additionally, the line-up of
the entire cast, ready to take a bow, occurs in that interval when the play
has ended but before the actors step out of their fictional roles. As the pho-
tographic images merge into and out of each other, the characters dissolve
into one another and appear to exchange roles continuously. The narra-
tive resists interpretation as a series of events determined by a logical se-
quence of cause and effect. Instead, the narrative provides a structure for
the creation of characters who function to unmask the artifice in which
they play a part.
Living and Presumed Dead exemplifies the way in which the work of
James Coleman expands the definition of pictorial representation to en-
compass new thematic content, thereby extending the previous bound-
aries of artistic expression. His work reveals the reality of its own fictional
structure as art and, in the process, provides a framework for addressing the
fictional constructs of the self and society.

Notes

1. James Coleman, quoted in Richard Kearney, “Interview with James Coleman,” The
Crane Bag 6, no. 2 (1982), p. 130.
2. Descriptive subtitle in Lisa Ponti, “How Does Your Garden Grow: Documenti e discorsi
sul lavoro di James Coleman,” Domus 570 (May 1977), p. 53.
3. Gillo Dorfles, “Mono-Dialogue by James Coleman,” in Irish Exhibition of Living Art, exh.
cat. (Dublin: Project Art Centre, 1972), p. 14.
4. James Coleman, conversation with the author, April 1985. Unless otherwise noted, sub-
sequent statements by the artist quoted in this text were made at this time.
5. Jean Fisher, “James Coleman,” in James Coleman, exh. cat. (Dublin:Douglas Hyde Gallery,
1982), p. 13.
6. “I am thinking . . .”
7. “I’m not sure if I’ll leave just yet.”
8. See Fisher, “James Coleman,” p. 7.
9. “How late it is! I guess I’m not leaving.”
10. “Stay! Do stay . . . let’s talk awhile.”
11. Fisher, “James Coleman,” p. 34.
12. See Jean Fowler, “So Different . . . and Yet: Language and Theatre in the Work of James
Coleman,” Circa 17 ( July-August 1984), pp. 18–24; and Dot Tuer, “Feminine Pleasure in
the Politics of Seduction,” C 4 (Winter 1985), pp. 22–23.
13. Luke Dodd, “Five Recent Works by James Coleman” (B.A. thesis, Trinity College,
Dublin, 1985), not paginated.
14. Jean Fisher, “The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman” (1983),
reprinted in this volume, p. 28.
15. See Jean Fisher, “James Coleman,” Art Monthly 49 (September 1981), pp. 17–18.
16. Coleman, quoted in Kearney, “Interview with James Coleman,” p. 127.
17. On Ignotum per Ignotius, see Jean Fisher, “James Coleman and Operating Theatre,” Art
Monthly 61 (November 1982), pp. 11–13; on Living and Presumed Dead, see Fisher, “The
Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman” (1983; reprinted in this volume).
18. There have been three versions of this work to date, two of which used prerecorded
sound and one of which used live harmonium music.
19. Mark Francis, “A Story Projected: LIVING AND PRESUMED DEAD,” poster (Lon-
don: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1983).

James Coleman 1970–1985 17

So Different . . . and Yet, 1980
Video installation. Installation at the
Nigel Greenwood Gallery, London,
1980.
 The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman

Jean Fisher

Plays are normally acted as if the stage had four walls not three; the
fourth being where the audience is sitting. The impression given and
maintained is that what happens on the stage is a genuine incident from
“real life,” which of course doesn’t have an audience. Acting with a
fourth wall, in other words, means acting as if there wasn’t an audience.
Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues

Brecht’s Dramaturg states a condition common to naturalistic theater,

commercial cinema, and “narrative” painting, which, while creating a sem-
blance of reality (the Renaissance window on the world), nevertheless sit-
uates the viewing subject in an imaginary position outside the real time
and space of the action. Brecht recognized that this was an authoritarian
mode of representation, which held the audience in a pseudodominant
and uncritical relation to it. By contrast, he advocated a thaëter which, im-
itating reality without reproducing the illusions of naturalism, would al-
low the audience to share actively in its experience. Brecht emphasized
the performance in which the actor produced an illustration of the gestus, a
dramatized recitation defining, not character motivation, but the social
significance of the action.1 I should like to discuss how, in the work of
James Coleman, the visual image is an anchor for a dramatized recitation
whose psychological implications for the spectator invite certain compar-
isons with performance art and theater.2
In visual art, it was Marcel Duchamp who initially raised the question
of the social and psychological status of the art object and the spectator’s
20 Jean Fisher

contribution to its production of meanings. Duchamp’s “readymade” ges-

tures, directed against the valorized object of the museums, argued for art
that was founded in life: an art that “obliges the spectator or reader to be-
come himself an artist or poet.”3 This implied a move away from the ob-
ject as a self-contained and pregiven reality whose meanings were imposed
by the producer, toward art as a context in relation to which the spectator
introjects and reconstructs his or her own reality; that is, the work itself
becomes a “theater” in which the spectator is a “co-performer.”
Of the various ways in which artists have attempted to demolish the
“fourth wall,” two tendencies are germane to performance art: one stem-
ming from dadaist-futurist activities and traceable through New York hap-
penings, Fluxus, and situationist events of the fifties and early sixties, in
which the artist initiated a spontaneous “intervention,” often in the street
and akin to an impromptu “theatrical” spectacle; and another, more con-
templative approach, in which the artist presented the viewer with an
installation event which engaged his or her perceptual and associative fac-
ulties in real time and space (for example, minimalist sculpture, manifes-
tations of structuralist cinema, and conceptual art).
Performance art, emerging from such diverse trends in the late sixties,
encompasses a wide range of activities about which it is impossible to gen-
eralize. However, a performance may be broadly characterized as an event
of fixed duration executed before a collective audience with the artist as
principal executant. While it indeed presents an organized spectacle of live
bodies and props, it differs from orthodox theater in two major respects:
the action is performed in real time, not the logical time of fictional nar-
rative; and usually the artist functions not as a fictive character whose def-
inition or motivation is the rationale of the narrative, but as a signifier in
the production of meaning of the action. The audience’s relationship to
the performance artist remains, however, ambivalent, since what is enacted
is often a narcissistic display which, while it avoids viewer identification
with the character typical of theater, nevertheless also fails to provide a re-
ality into which the audience may enter. On the contrary, the viewer is of-
ten held at a distance in an exhibitionist-voyeur relationship (one might
cite certain performance strategies of Joseph Beuys or Vito Acconci). An
ensuing tendency toward the valorization of the artist himself is reinforced
through oral dissemination which virtually mythologizes the performer.
In such cases, the “fourth wall” remains intact.
James Coleman is not a performance artist. He suppresses his own
presence as an “author” in the interests of the text, whose structure as work
of art restores the spectator’s “performance.” The work presents a projec-
tion, an installation, which both draws and comments on the languages of
representation using various time-based media with narration and within
a defined space. Coleman uses time as a primary signifying element refer-
ring directly to the spectator’s perceptual and mnemonic faculties. His text
unfurls and reveals itself in the real time of one’s experience. It is, more-
over, a continuous cycle, an endless repetition: a narrative with no implied
prehistory, whose inauguration is whichever point the viewer enters its
cycle. Thus, unlike conventional narrative, there is no end that would sat-
isfactorily explain a beginning. The spectator’s desire for unity—for the
resolution or masking of those contradictions that are the contingent re-
ality of one’s life and which is the lure of fictional (especially naturalistic)
narrative—is not gratified.
Coleman nevertheless exploits repetition, a characteristic of the die-
gesis: those enigmas and returns of the action which temporarily suspend
the forward impulse of the “plot.”4 Repetition, according to the psycho-
analytic schema, is a ritual of return whose logic was clarified for Sigmund
Freud through his observation of the Fort! Da! game, in which the child—
perceiving his mother’s comings and goings, and attempting to accom-
modate this traumatic loss—stages the disappearance of an object to
experience the pleasure of its return. But this staging refers to an alien-
ation of the self and the symbolization of its desire for the other through
representation.5 Repetition becomes the symbolized refutation of the
moment of loss, an act which thereafter enacts that which, effaced in per-
ception, cannot be remembered, but within which—as Lacan somewhat
enigmatically describes it—the subject “is there to rediscover where it was
. . . the real.”6 The real, the immediacy of an often traumatic lived expe-
rience, is what is betrayed by discourse, which henceforth mediates the
subject through the agency of the signs of language. This incommensu-
rable difference, or “lost history” of the subject is, however, reenacted in
a constant vacillation of repetitions-in-transformation, but an “originary”
moment can never be recovered. In much of Coleman’s work repetition
is presented in changing contexts. One’s perception of what is repeated
becomes converted into memory, but with each successive recurrence and
each new juxtaposition there is a shift in what is signified. In recognizing
this transformation, viewers become aware of themselves as perceiving
subjects, which suggests that the work functions in that ungraspable space
between perception and its conscious representation: the “space in which
the space of the Other is situated, in which the subject is constituted.”7

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman 21

22 Jean Fisher

I Matti, 1968–72
Project notes, 1972.
 In 1968, Coleman conceived I Matti [The Crackpots], which was to
be a filmed performance by three actors, designated A, B, and C, one of
whom, C, was to assume the subjective role of the spectator, critically ob-
serving the others’ game, yet simultaneously desiring to intervene in their
mutual reality. During the course of the piece, the protagonists were to in-
teract on each other’s sense of identity through a confusion between fan-
tasy and reality. This complex work was never fully realized, but it provided
the basic plot for those works which followed, namely, a time-dependent
sequence of interactive events whose causal relationships would be deter-
mined by the audience through an interplay of immediate perception,
memory, and anticipation.
In simplifying I Matti, the artist focused initially on the spectator’s di-
rect perceptual experience. Flash Piece (1970), and several subsequent
installations, utilized (dis)orientating spatiotemporal transformations to
enhance the spectator’s self-awareness as a perceiving subject, and to com-
ment on the way that one invests representations or objects with meaning.8
This dialogue continued in Slide Piece (1972–73), with two significant ad-
ditions: instead of “abstract” contents, the audience is presented with a
vocal soundtrack and an “ordinary” pictorial image, extending meaning
outside formal art language into everyday perceptual reality. Slide Piece po-
sitions the audience in the role of the spectator-identified madman of
I Matti, presenting the viewer with a wall-sized image of an unpopulated
urban street, repeated in continuous cycle. It is an image analogous to
Christian Metz’s cinematic “other mirror,” which, like Lacan’s Mirror
Stage, “alienates man in his own reflection and makes him the double of
his double . . . desire as a sure effect of lack and endless pursuit.”9 The
commentary, delivered by a male voice, directs one’s attention to features
of the image described from several subjective viewpoints, creating a dia-
logue between the sameness of the repeated image and the different details
of each description. Through information accumulated over successive
and remembered accounts, one develops a changing relationship to the
image. The spectator, however, becomes subject to a psychological ten-
sion, deriving on the one hand from his or her captivation by the image
and the lure of the commentary, and on the other from a disturbing sense
of being controlled by an outside “will”—the “other” as the unseen com-
mentator. To resolve this entails the displacement of imaginary subjectiv-
ity to a progressive identification with the narrator who, one finds, sets up
a subtle complicity with the viewer:

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman 23

24 Jean Fisher

Slide Piece, 1972–73

Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.

Considérons maintenant le carré qui a pour base la ligne ornementale

chromée de l’auto à gauche et, pour côtés, le petit arbre qui se trouve
derrière le clignotant et le bord gauche de la photographie. Or, le
tronc du petit arbre, en penchant légèrement, efface une partie du L,
de TOTAL sur le kiosque de la station d’essence, touche l’angle droit
de la fenêtre du premier étage de l’immeuble au fond, continue à
monter et rejoint le bord de l’image. Retournons à gauche . . .10

This complicity, expressed through the first person plural present tense—
“considérons . . . retournons . . .” [Let us consider . . . Let us return . . . ]—
is the means by which the narration enters the immediate reality of the
spectator’s thoughts. One is given only what is present and verifiable in the
image, and while the narration describes the objects within the image, it
also continually returns the spectator to the fact that it is an image, so that
one does not remain ensnared in an imaginary illusion in which the signi-
fier itself, the photograph, is transparent.
While this text exists in the syntagmatic plane, the texts of subsequent
works are encoded paradigmatically, allowing the viewer to enter into a
freer flow of associative verbal and visual images. With the introduction of
the human image, the work also begins to speak of how one’s imaginary
relationship with the image-object becomes displaced into the symbolic
realm of interpersonal exchange. In the original installation of Clara and
Dario (1975), a double slide projection with synchronized sound, the au-
dience is confronted with wall-sized faces of a man and a woman, cine-
matic “close-ups” encouraging the viewer’s emotional identification. They
are posed to suggest an intimate conversation, and yet are separated archi-
tecturally; they are therefore perceived both as individuals and as a couple,
a construction which points toward the self ’s dual identity as both separate,
yet inseparable, from the other. This visual duality is reinforced through a
narrative which, although containing equal contributions from both part-
ners, is spoken in a single voice. Their conversation is narrated as a two-
part cycle, each part of which differs in its order of sequences, and through
whose reordered repetitions the audience develops differing interpretations
of the couple’s identity.11 As in I Matti, their responses are interdependent,
their sense of self mediated through their relationship to each other.
Clara and Dario also speaks about how one projects an idea of one’s
historical sense of self through the image of the present. The couple “in-
vent” a childhood idyll that the spectator enters through their present. A
past is wistfully recalled as an imaginary tableau vivant, a piquant first ro-
mance enacted by two adolescents who may have been themselves, but
who over time and innumerable life encounters have evolved other iden-
tities. With Clara and Dario the spectator recognizes his or her own sense
of longing for another, earlier self, whose image cannot with certainty be
determined as a memory or a fantasy.
Memory produces a private image of the past, but one that maintains
an uneasy coexistence with a present social identity while, simultaneously,
projecting us into the future and the knowledge of our eventual death.
Coleman explores this cruel temporal dilemma in his installation Box
(ahhareturnabout) (1977), using the return fight between Tunney and
Dempsey in 1927, in which Tunney was defending the title he had won
the previous year.12 Coleman’s interest in this historical event stemmed
from a consideration that the challenge to a return bout precipitated a cri-
sis in Tunney’s sense of identity—at that moment he was both “champ”
and “not-champ.” As a consequence, it was his own sense of coherence
that he was fighting to maintain in the second match.
Coleman orchestrates short passages of film footage interrupted by
lengths of black leader with a soundtrack comprising an insistent pulse

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman 25

26 Jean Fisher

Box (ahhareturnabout), 1977

Projected 16 mm black-and-white film.
Continuous cycle. Extract of voice-over
script.

similar in frequency to a heartbeat, and a monologue of gasps, grunts, and

abbreviated phrases representing Tunney’s physical exertions and thoughts
during the fight. Through the pulsating rhythm of this continuous loop
we catch glimpses of the protagonists circling the ring, seemingly into
eternity. Tunney, like Sisyphus, is trapped in a perpetual repetition in
which he must forever play out the fantasy of mastery over the other, eter-
nally delaying his own death. Box is emotionally shocking by virtue of the
manner in which its visual and acoustic space encloses the viewer as if in
the mind and body of the boxer: the viewer becomes both voyeur and par-
ticipant in an erotic struggle with his or her own otherness.
The play on circularity in the work—its structural periodicity, the
movement of the boxers round the ring, and Tunney’s thoughts—induces
a near-hypnotic state of attention in the viewer, through which the seem-
ingly irrational spoken text begins to acquire sense; indeed, the effect is
sensual in its ability to play on the rhythmic chords of the viewer’s mind
and imagination beyond the merely visual. Elliptic as dream thoughts and
images, it propels the audience into a labyrinth of associations whose mean-
ings oscillate in and out of the image. Phrases concerned with the imme-
diacy of the fight are interwoven with oblique metaphors that seem to
refer to Irish identity (“Murphy’s the best . . .”13); to the individual in con-
flict with an authoritarian Other, specifically the English colonial author-
ity in Ireland (“. . . the wood . . . the sticks . . . not capital’s . . .”);and a type
of public, historical immortality contrasted with a realization of individ-
ual, physical death (“. . . the liver . . . an evergreen . . . soul . . .”). Neither
prose nor poetry, the text may perhaps be described as an exteriorization
of an interior monologue, or “inner speech”: a preconscious/conscious
reverie of abbreviated and apparently disconnected phrases and mental
images saturated not with “meaning” but with “sense.” As the film theo-
rist Paul Willemen (quoting Vygotsky) says, “the sense of a word is the
sum of all the psychological events aroused in our consciousness (and un-
consciousness) by the word.” Inner speech is “a discursive process deter-
mined by the social and psychological histories that combine to produce
that particular individual in that time and place.”14
Coleman’s dramatized recitation addresses itself to listening, not to
reading. This is due in part to its use of phonetic puns and of fragmentary
phrases that do not locate a subject as such; but it is also the result of the
way that the voice produces meaning, relying as much on what Roland
Barthes described as the “grain of the voice” (enunciation) as on those ex-
pressive qualities which are signifiers of character in theater.15 Insofar as it
is a performed recitation, Box may be said to be “theatrical,” but in pre-
senting an associative rather than syntagmatic narrative, it is not typical of
conventional theater.16
Coleman’s use of language may perhaps be understood partly by refer-
ence to an Irish dramatic tradition revitalized by J. M. Synge, who first ex-
pressed in drama those convoluted poetic but politicized idiosyncrasies of
Anglo-Irish vernacular syntax stemming from the translation of English to
and from Gaelic.17 Like Synge, Coleman has a high regard for the oral art
of storytelling. Until comparatively recently it was common in the rural
districts of Ireland to find an audience gathered intimately around the teller
(seanachaí) to hear him spin his tale. This tale (an scéal) would have been
known to the listeners (and indeed they would have disputed any deviation

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman 27

28 Jean Fisher

in the narrative), but it was through the drama of the delivery—the power
of the voice, the elaboration of gestures—and in the telling that meaning
was created in the minds of the company.
Storytelling is a unique kind of “performance,” but it is a dying art,
mostly relegated to childhood; and in Ireland, television has been largely
responsible for its passing. It is with some irony, therefore, that Coleman
chooses to present a storytelling performance as a video installation, So
Different . . . and Yet (1980).18 Television has a certain intimacy: one sits
facing the screen as the company once gathered round the seanachaí; and
yet its intimacy is an illusion, lacking that human exchange of experience
fundamental to the storytelling situation. Coleman exposes this ambiva-
lence through a play on our relationship to the TV image.
The principal narrator is a female model wearing a shiny green dress
who, through a sequence of coquettish poses and gestures familiar from
fashion photography, seemingly addresses herself to the camera/audience.
The piece is a single continuous take in which the camera moves imper-
ceptibly in relation to the model, simulating the effect of a live perfor-
mance. But while viewers are captivated by her image and her unfolding
narrative, they are also alienated from both. The gestures are slow and
stereotypic; the narration is spoken in stagy French accents; the pianist in
the background wears horns; and the chromo-keying technique denies a
naturalistic space and coloration, all of which accentuates the work’s arti-
fice, distancing the spectator from that sympathetic identification with the
image of naturalistic theater and TV broadcasting.19 Orthodox broadcast-
ing does not, moreover, sustain a lengthy and uninterrupted narration; it
cannot hold our attention span without constantly changing mood and
tempo; so that in front of So Different . . . and Yet the viewer is uncom-
fortably caught between fascination and repulsion.
The narrative itself is a potpourri of fictional clichés, in which a mot-
ley of “characters” surrounding a central “hero” switch sides and identi-
ties in functions reminiscent of those described by Propp for the folktale.20
The motor of the narrative and the real visual focus of the work is the
green dress worn by the narrator: an “heirloom” which is the object of de-
sire for the protagonists and whose transformation to a more fashionable
style initiates the plot. It is indeed a fetishistic, metonymical substitute for
desire, which in terms of psychoanalytic theory is the subject’s desire for
impossible unity, and for which the usual closure of mythic fiction is—at
least momentarily—a catharsis. So Different . . . and Yet does not, how-
Now & Then, 1981
Performed by Olwen Fouère, James
McHale, and Roger Doyle. Project Arts
Theater, Dublin, 1981

ever, provide such satisfaction. Iconographically it is circular—the dress,

initially outmoded, is again out of fashion by the “end” of the narration.
The narrative closes with a further enigma of character identity, which
sends it spiraling into another possible plane of interpretation.
Coleman’s dramatized narration is extended live in Now & Then (1981),
a work performed by two actors and a pianist before a collective audience.
Now & Then draws together themes inherent in earlier work: the interde-
pendent identities and nostalgia of Clara and Dario; and the conflict be-
tween private self and social mask of Box (which becomes translated into
the sociohistorical masquerade of style and fashion in So Different . . . and
Yet). Now & Then initially presents the audience with a tableau vivant,
which suggests that one is an onlooker at a shop-window display of fash-
ion mannequins. They are flamboyantly dressed: a male figure wears a yel-
low satin suit in the style of the 1950s, while a female model is dressed
in the post-punk style of the ’80s. Brightly colored spotlights accentuate
the atmosphere of artificiality. Through its evocative play of associations,
the performance gradually becomes the mirror to the spectator’s own

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman 29

30 Jean Fisher

constructed self-image. As the work evolves, patterns of choreographed

movements are interrelated with a partly sung narration, complemented
by the additional voice of the piano. The figures do not address each other
directly; each is situated in a private world of thoughts and reminiscences.
Gesture and narration move back and forth in time, so that as the female
character’s modernity encourages the male character to project forward,
he seduces her into nostalgia for the past. Gesture refers to the public, pro-
jected representations of the subject through fashion, as well as to private
images from childhood inflected through the memory or fantasy of the
adult. There is a complicity between nostalgia and desire. The child’s de-
sire to emulate the adult accompanies a vision of the past (“. . . peering
down into the grass stalks . . . folding and pleating . . .”), while the adult’s
nostalgia for moments of his or her youth is articulated with the desire to
imitate the style of the latest fashion (the self ’s identification with a social
ideal). The narrative thereby contrasts the child’s forward impulse into the
future with an adult desire to delay through nostalgia (repetition), dual
maneuvers which render the present ungraspable and the past idealized
and artificial, described at a moment in the narration as

Lovely afternoons in silence

In black and pink shadows.

Like So Different . . . and Yet, Now & Then does not conceal the codes
inherent in its use of language. As a performed recitation, it is a “presen-
tation,” not the “representation” of orthodox theater whose psycholo-
gized characters are signified through acting—the attempt to render
player and character as congruent. Coleman’s players perform not acting
but action, central to which is the ritualized gesture, a demonstrative sign
that we recognize not as an equivalent of “nature” but as a culturally de-
termined artifice, returning us to Brecht’s proposals for eliminating the
“fourth wall.” In this respect, as theater, the work possesses much in com-
mon with Japanese Nō and Bunraku. Neither the mannequin nor the
marionette is a representation of an individual with whom the spectator
may form a sympathetic identification; instead, they are formalized projec-
tions, or signifiers, of social status or human archetypes.
In Coleman’s work, the projected image is the visual motif around which
his dramatized recitation weaves a temporal web, reflecting back upon the
social and psychological implications of the image. This articulates both
one’s seeing and one’s listening, but sound is not necessarily located in the
image nor, with the exception of Slide Piece, does it always refer to it di-
rectly. Consequently the spectator is faced with two simultaneous texts
whose signifiers do not always coincide in the same signifieds. It is there-
fore the responsibility of the perceiver to insert himself or herself into this
perceptual space in order to draw meaning from it. We might say that the
work functions as a metaphor of the way one’s imaginary, symbolic, and
real relationships to the world are mutually articulated through represen-
tations, but that the work also structurally situates the viewer in the oscil-
lation between them. In their reference to the viewer’s direct perceptions,
the images of Slide Piece and Flash Piece place the spectator primarily in the
imaginary, functioning as the objectified other of the gaze; whereas the
dual images of Clara and Dario may be described as playing with the Oedi-
pal, setting up something that the spectator recognizes as a relationship
both within and outside of his or her self, and thus moving one into a con-
sideration of the effects of the symbolic order of society where the subject
is posed as a signifier of a relation rather than a fixed entity.
It is however in touching on the register of the real, an experience that
(as yet) eludes the signifying demands of discursive or symbolic formations,
that Coleman’s work has its greatest resonance. Despite the assumptions
we derive from discourse, language or representation in itself is not trans-
parent; its meaning is not readily available “at a glance” but carried by the
context of its use. There is, then, a paradoxical lack of coincidence be-
tween the image or work and the thing to which it refers that renders the
latter unknowable in its entirety. Coleman’s work exploits this aporia of
language.
Significantly, his images are not fixed, and in experiencing their nar-
rativity and repetition one’s perceptions become transformed into mem-
ory, enabling the building of a spatiotemporal, or “historical,” relation with
the work, but one nonetheless that does not lead to closure. It is at this
juncture that the verbal narration gains resonance, functioning as a relay
that extends the spectator’s relation to the image into a broader sociohis-
torical context. The audience’s role as listeners is central to the production
of meaning here. In speaking of how in reading we mentally identify a nar-
rated event, Roland Barthes mentions that, while “to read is to name, to
listen is not only to perceive a language, it is also to construct it.”21 Such is
the essential condition of the spectator’s relationship to Coleman’s narra-
tion, through whose multilayered signs and discontinuities the audience

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman 31

32 Jean Fisher

struggles to construct their meanings by connecting with their own past

and future, becoming themselves the subject of the text. As Brecht’s Ac-
tor says, the notion of “continually observing oneself and referring back
to one’s own experience can easily lead a man to alter the text.” To which
the Dramaturg responds, “alterations demand a great deal of art”; it is “not
the play but the performance that is the real purpose of all one’s efforts.”22
Likewise, in the case of Coleman’s work, priority lies not with the art ob-
ject as such, but with the dynamic of reception and the performative po-
tential of language, gesture, and image. Thus it is not outside but inside the
viewer-listener that the unity of Coleman’s “text” is constituted.
In its insistence on attentiveness and response and hence on the im-
mediacy of its experience, the work engages the viewer as a participant not
as an observer. This experience is not based in any prior knowledge,
which would imply a conscious speaking subject. On the contrary, in the
face of the work’s constant slippage away from any determinable referen-
tiality, the viewer experiences a suspension of knowledge, a rendering
“speechless,” a loss of boundaries between subject and object. In other
words, the work induces moments of desubjectivation, a state of uncer-
tainty that can be referred back neither to a subject nor to a psychological
state. Nor is it a return to some presubjective state, but it is instead an ex-
perience of the condition of our relation to the limits of language itself
where it fails to “speak for” us. The spectator is placed in the position of
continuously having, as Barthes says, to “construct language,” which is to
say, to invent meaning. Hence, in its play of indeterminacy, the “place of
the spectator” in Coleman’s work is the site where an encounter with the
real—the ineffable difference between perception and memory (repre-
sentation), between pure language and discourse—begins to unravel sym-
bolic certitude.
Through meanings established and perpetuated in its discursive sys-
tems, society tends to reinforce the imaginary; it emphasizes “sameness”
and “difference,” playing on the subject’s desire to unify itself with an ideal
other—these days most often derived from media personalities. When we
speak of our identity, we are speaking not of an independent entity, but of
something which is both relative and defined sociohistorically. In this way
society binds us to itself, guiding both our perceptions and the meanings
we extract from them in order to maintain its own coherence and “truth.”
It is this disparity between mediated reality and reality as individually lived
and perceived that Brecht sought to expose in his alienation effect. In
Brecht’s thaëter, this effect “consists in the reproduction of real-life inci-
dents on the stage in such a way as to underline their causality and bring
it to the spectator’s attention. This type of art also generates emotions;such
performances facilitate the mastering of reality.”23
Coleman’s project is not dissimilar in its aims, because one crucial
question asked by it is how we might creatively reinvent a world dominated
by “received” information which cripples any sense of subjective agency.
In revealing the mechanisms of discursive formations and the ways by
which we are inserted into them, Coleman’s work exposes the ideological
framework at the root of social discourse, drawing us out of our apathetic
unawareness of the meanings inherent in it. Thus, his work is “political”
not in the conventional sense (it is never “prescriptive,” nor does it present
a “position”), but in the fact that it challenges the very basis of ideology:
those relative, socially determined values projected and reinforced through
the representations of culture that ensnare the subject in a system of pre-
determined meanings and relationships which, because familiar, seem “nat-
ural” and unquestionable. If Coleman’s work plunges us as spectators into
equivocal territory, it is to remind us that even though we may be irrevo-
cably possessed by language, in testing its limits we are better able to un-
derstand the nature of this possession. Can one ask more of art than this?

Notes

This essay was written as a (perverse) response to an invitation to write on performance art
for a special issue of the Canadian journal Open Letter devoted to “Performance and Cul-
tural Politicization.”
1. Brecht’s gestus is a combination of gesture and attitude (a play, a person, a sentence can all
have a gestus); see Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. John Willett (London: Eyre
Methuen, 1965), translator’s note, p. 46.
2. By “dramatized recitation” in Coleman’s work, I mean a kind of dialogical monologue
allowing, as in Brecht’s thaëter, the “subject to be approached from several points of view”
(ibid., p. 106), and in which gesture and props combine to reveal the artifices of the per-
formance as distinct from theatrical naturalism.
3. Octavio Paz, “The Castle of Purity,” in Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, trans.
Donald Gardner (New York: Little, Brown, 1978), p. 87.
4. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 19.
5. See Jacques Lacan:“Fort! Da! It is precisely in his solitude that the desire of the little child
has already become the desire of another, of an alter ego who dominates him and whose ob-
ject of desire is henceforth his own affliction.” Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan
Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977), p. 104.

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman 33

34 Jean Fisher

6. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 45.
7. Ibid.
8. In Flash Piece, the viewer’s conventional experience of time is disrupted through the in-
termittent repetition of an event within a narrative structure: a consecutive series of fixed-
time cycles is defined by two yellow light flashes. Between these yellow pulses there occur
two blue flashes whose intervals vary from cycle to cycle, creating a provocative event,
which breaks the spectator’s anticipatory relationship to it.
9. Christian Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier,” trans. Ben Brewster, Screen 16, no. 2 (Sum-
mer 1975), p. 15.
10. [Editor’s note: This passage from the French version of Slide Piece has been left untrans-
lated, as the voice-over of each version of the work is slightly different. Thus an English
translation of the passage would not parallel the English version of the piece.]
11. Clara and Dario are discussing an impending train journey, which one of them is about
to make to a place they had known in the past. This projection into the future engenders a
train of reminiscences, which introduce “Elsa” and “Andrea.” Through the interweaving of
third- with second-person narration, which also moves between the preterite and the pres-
ent and future tenses, ambiguities arise that create uncertainties about the identities of Elsa
and Andrea and their relationship to Clara and Dario: Are they childhood playmates, or the
latter themselves as children? The piece recalls the film text of Last Year at Marienbad (Alain
Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1961), whose presentness contains a past of several alter-
native possibilities.
12. Box is a black-and-white Super 8 mm film in continuous cycle with synchronized sound-
track, situated somewhere that might evoke the public placement of a TV for watching
sports events—like above a bar. Edited footage of the original film of the fight appears in-
termittently; consequently, as with Slide Piece, viewers are made aware of themselves in re-
lation to the medium.
13. “Murphy” is both a common Irish name and the brand name of a beer.
14. Paul Willemen, “Cinematic Discourse: The Problem of Inner Speech,” Screen 22, no. 3
(1981), pp. 85 and 81.
15. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (London: Jonathan Cape,
1976), p. 66.
16. Parallels may be drawn with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, whose “sense” becomes
clearer when read aloud; and with passages of the later dramatic work of Samuel Beckett,
such as The Mouth’s disjointed monologue in Not I.
17. Of particular relevance is J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World [1907], reprinted in
W. A. Armstrong, ed., Classic Irish Drama (Harmondsworth:Penguin Books, 1964), pp. 69–
134.
18. So Different . . . and Yet presents the viewer with a video monitor mounted in a sparsely
furnished room (a TV showroom?) and spotlit to simulate the artificiality of a color TV
brochure. The “program” is a story narrated by two performers: a female model and a pi-
anist in the background who complements the narration with a repeated refrain inter-
spersed with quotations from Irish folk songs, popular and classical melodies. The performers
are the actress Olwen Fouère and the composer Roger Doyle, who also collaborated in the
production of Now & Then.
19. The pianist’s horned head refers specifically to a hero of Irish mythology; but it also sug-
gests the mythic structure of conventional fictional narrative.
20. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1968).
21. Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in Image, Mu-
sic, Text, essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977),
p. 102.
22. Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, p. 74.
23. Ibid., p. 102.

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman 35

Strongbow, 1978
Video installation. Resin cast, plaster
mold, Sony Art Couture monitor,
audio equipment, and speakers.
Installation at the Irish Museum of
Modern Art, Dublin, 2000.
 The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman

Jean Fisher

“Who are you?”

“Where did you come from?”

These questions, posed at the outset of Living and Presumed Dead (1983–
85), a slide and audio projection, have an “everyday” simplicity that masks
an immense dilemma. For how are we to answer such questions? We may
specify a name, a profession, a location—and yet these nominations are
wholly inadequate to describe the totality of experience and feelings that
constitute the being who answers “I.” Behind the drama enacted between
this “I” and its idea of itself stands the enigmatic figure of the hero, a cul-
tural icon whose significance to the fields of representation and identity
formation is explored in various ways in Coleman’s work, and is again un-
der investigation in the scenario of Living and Presumed Dead.
Living and Presumed Dead opens with an illustration of a group of
youthful “players” who are dressed in personalized interpretations of pe-
riod and contemporary fashions. They adopt poses complementing the
roles suggested by the costumes: that is, they form a cultural typology, not
a group of psychologized characters, signified through visual display. The
scene becomes animated when a female figure, Borras, emerges from the
group and brusquely accosts a flamboyantly dressed youth, demanding,
“Who are you? Where did you come from?”—clearly marking him as a
“stranger.” Borras’s first question establishes the issue central to Living and
Presumed Dead and, although expressed in different ways, to all Coleman’s
work since the photographic piece Suzi (1966–67)—namely, the problem
of what constitutes “individual” identity.1 The second question is already
38 Jean Fisher

Suzi, 1966–67
Selected image from project. Brera
Academy of Fine Arts, Milan, 1966.

installed in the first since an answer can be given only by reference to the
past life or “history” of that individual, who is, nevertheless, in part con-
stituted by it. What is self-evident, but of crucial importance to this dis-
course, is that these interrogative statements are made in language and can
only be understood and answered through language. In other words, the
“subject” must symbolize his or her identity within language as representa-
tion: as “I” in contradistinction to what is “not I.” Throughout Coleman’s
recent work, the manipulation of verbal language as representation, often
through montaged fragments of stock phrases, runs parallel to his use of
visual representation. The latter expresses the constitution of cultural iden-
tity through the visual codes that determine the outward appearance and
mannerisms of each of his “players” in relation to the set of circumstances
in which they find themselves, as well as through a variety of objects or
signs that signify some aspect of the self or its positioning in society.
Through Borras’s questions, the youth (whom we later learn is Chris
disguised as his father Capax) is presented as the first figure whose enig-
matic identity initiates and motivates a plot of violence, murder, and love.
Chris refuses to answer Borras, who believes he is her long-lost lover, Ca-
pax, whose image she keeps in a locket. Chris wishes to maintain his dis-
guise in order to create a scenario that will threaten and flush out his father’s
murderer. He is rescued by the intervention of the girl Abbas who, in the
ensuing struggle with Borras, receives an ear injury. When Chris inexpli-
cably attacks Abbas with an ornamental dagger, damaging an eye and leav-
ing her unconscious, both she and Borras have reasons to seek him out.
This primary narrative is articulated with a second story, the mysterious
disappearance or death of Capax. This is presented simultaneously as a
narration and as a dramatization—a “play” within the “play,” as it were—
which dislocates our sense of temporal continuity. The absent Capax is,
moreover, “present” as a recurrent image: as Chris’s disguise, as the por-
trait in Borras’s locket, and, finally, in the transference of the disguise to
Abbas during the reenactment that forces the murderer to repeat his crime.
Even in this brief plot synopsis it is possible to recognize the familiar
features of the classical narrative, from the mythic tale to modern crime
fiction: the quest to solve a mystery and its implementation by the hero.
In this work, the diegetic functions of the mythic hero are dispersed
amongst the various dramatis personae: Chris’s initial search for his father’s
murderer; the trials of Abbas, represented by her perceptual impairments;
Borras’s execution of the villain (Mr.) and her inevitable death.2 Like the
heroic role itself, the ornamental dagger also changes hands, functioning
as a talisman giving superhuman powers to the holder—it relays the power
of destiny. But it is the figure of Capax that undergoes repeated “resurrec-
tions,” both in the representation of the past through storytelling and the
dramatization (which suggests that Capax symbolizes an aspect of lan-
guage itself ), and as the identity which the other “characters” variously as-
sume and emulate. Capax, therefore, is the “immortalized” figure who
stands as cultural icon, role model, and supreme authority.

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman 39

40 Jean Fisher

In addition to its narrative content, Living and Presumed Dead presents

a cluster of metaphorical conundrums expressed through the roles played
by the objects: the costumes, the dagger, the portrait in the locket, and the
“insignia,” or ideogram, tattooed on Chris’s body by his father. The in-
signia is the true enigma of the tale for it holds the secret whose mainte-
nance is the motivation for Capax’s murder and whose interpretation is
the real object of the quest.
In its most literal sense, the mythic tale is a story of individual action.
A young male (seldom a female) of exceptional qualities is singled out by
the gods to resolve a problem that the social group is impotent to combat.
So it is that, in Living and Presumed Dead, Capax provides the disguise by
which Chris will disrupt and threaten the complacency of a social struc-
ture that has harbored a disharmonious element, the unsolved crime of
murder. The traditional tale, however, carries a moral, for while it de-
scribes the hero/individual’s beneficial role in society, it also warns of the
penalty should he transgress its Law. Or, put another way, transgressive en-
ergy becomes a threat once it has served its purpose and returned a social
system to harmony and stability. Thus, Oedipus is ostracized, while the
Irish Cuchulainn, Christ, and Borras are punished by death for acts which
finally overreach the bounds of social acceptability. Sacrifice, of course,
leads to legendary martyr status.
The potency of this mythic structure, sufficient to survive innumer-
able cultural and temporal transformations, suggests that the hero’s signif-
icance lies elsewhere than simply as literary entertainment. If we dig deeper,
we discover another level which suggests that the mythic hero functions as
a paradigm for the individual’s transition from the anarchy of childhood to
maturity and acceptance into the adult social order. Myth is a particular
narrativized form of language that allegorizes the socialization of the (male)
self according to a persistent and ambivalent ideal stereotype. Instrumen-
tal language is, however, a social institution that “comes from the dead”;
we are all born into preexisting linguistic codes embedded within which
are culture’s belief structures and collective fantasies, and it is through their
negotiation that we must find a place in the world as functional subjects.
Coleman speculates on how far one’s sense of reality is conditioned (and
stultified) by predetermined and commodified images of subjectivity (pro-
jected above all through television), in which the hermeneutic key to the
enigma of selfhood—the father’s “insignia” tattooed on Chris’s body—is
invariably held by a figure of the symbolic order. Chris’s search for the
meaning of the insignia can perhaps be read as a dual quest: the search for
origins and for destiny, in and against his stigmatized place within the so-
cial order.
How the individual negotiates a sense of self between private and col-
lective desires and social constraints appears to be one of the central themes
of an earlier work by Coleman, Box (ahhareturnabout) (1977). In contem-
porary popular culture, the male figure that most closely resembles the ar-
chaic hero is the athlete, and particularly the boxer, whose body, tuned to
the peak of physical performance, is capable of “superhuman” feats of
strength and endurance. It is through the spectacle of his ritual combat or
“trial” that the audience, predominantly the less privileged classes (from
which the boxer himself characteristically emerges), identifies by proxy
with triumph over adversity.
Box suggests some of the poignant internal conflicts endured by such
a hero, figured through the Irish boxer Gene Tunney. The artist presents
us with a continuous film loop of fragments from the original footage of
Tunney and Dempsey’s return fight in 1927 whose hung verdict remains
a legend of boxing folklore. As we catch glimpses of the boxers circling the
ring and each other between passages of black film leader, we hear a com-
mentary representing Tunney’s circling thoughts—an interior monologue
of fragmented, abbreviated phrases and nonverbal utterances—together
with a low pulse whose frequency is that of a slightly accelerated heart rate.
Through its rhythmic sensuality, it foregrounds the erotic physicality of
the fight, turning voluptuously on Tunney’s anxiety about death and mor-
tality, and oblique references to the present and the past—the immediate
struggle, Ireland’s (colonial) history and nationalist myths. Tunney’s an-
guish seems to stem not directly from the contest with Dempsey, but from
an internal conflict between his private sense of self and the heroic image
conferred on him by a public whose relationship to him is nonetheless
capricious. He knows that he possesses power as the heroic role model
only as long as he maintains his success as a boxer; should he “transgress,”
however, through a failure to fulfil this expectation, the public will then
exercise its power as the Law and punish him by depriving him of his
champion status. But is Tunney’s private self so imbricated with his public
image that to lose the sense of the one is to lose identity altogether? Tun-
ney fights, perhaps, not to win the bout per se but to ensure that the self
maintains its illusion of coherence. Suspended simultaneously as “champ
and not-champ,” his tragedy is that he must perpetually sustain this split in

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman 41

42 Jean Fisher

the self, for he is trapped in the endlessness of Box’s structural repetition

which echoes the fight’s real-life suspended verdict. There can be no re-
lease in “death” because the fight is never concluded.
No hero could be more unlike Tunney than Leopold Bloom, James
Joyce’s antihero of Ulysses: an unassuming man of inaction whose passivity
suggests a resignation to the unresolvable problems of life. Coleman’s com-
missioned work for the 1982 Joyce centenary was an homage to the author
which, rather than presuming to approach this literary hero directly, was
offered through the humble character of Bloom. The piece was intended
to provoke a contemplation on Joyce’s oeuvre without imposing its own
identity and thereby relegating the author’s achievement to secondary sta-
tus. The reflection centered on temporality and place. On the portal of
No. 7 Eccles Street in Dublin, Coleman hung a garland of xeranthemum
leaves, a plant whose symbolic meaning—“cheerfulness in adversity”—
perhaps sums up Bloom’s persona.3 A sterling silver replica of the garland
was hung in the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin: a lasting memento
which would symbolize the permanence of Joyce’s literature and the city
in contrast to the natural garland whose inevitable decay would stand for
the transience of life.4 Joyce’s own heroic literary status was inextricably
linked to the city of Dublin. There is a parallel here with Chris’s relation-
ship to Capax, since the status of Dublin in Joyce’s work has the authority
of a symbolic father:like the tattoo, the city donates to the son his language
and identity but in the end becomes the very factor that limits and frus-
trates him. As we know, Joyce dealt with the problem of his identity in ex-
ile and through the reinvention of language. But as Bloom the Jewish exile
makes his nomadic trips through the city streets, so Joyce searches the past
through the labyrinth of memory to find his own artistic selfhood.
Strongbow was an exile of a different order, but perhaps no less un-
certain of his identity than Chris, Tunney, or Joyce. During the twelfth
century, this Norman knight was invited into Ireland to settle a dispute be-
tween two Irish kings. Strongbow himself seems to have been beguiled by
Ireland and its people since he married and died there; so perhaps like Tun-
ney his private and public roles became confused. Strongbow (1978) shifts
the search for identity into a sociohistorical context through the displace-
ment of this heroic figure into a contemporary setting that questions our
relation to cultural mythologies. In Coleman’s installation a cast of the
knight’s effigy lies in silent repose in a darkened room;his united hands and
worn features are caught in a single shaft of light. Nearby, a video monitor
Ulysses Project, 1982
Eccles Street, Dublin, 1982.

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman 43

44 Jean Fisher

presents the image of another pair of hands, one red, the other green.
They begin to clap, slowly at first, then quickening to a crescendo suffi-
cient, we might say, to wake the dead. But Strongbow slumbers on, impas-
sive to the discordant drama enacted in his presence, or simply impotent to
intercede in the ongoing conflict between the present sons of Ulster. The
clapping hands in Strongbow remind us of the Uprising’s invocation of Ire-
land’s other slumbering heroes, Finn and the Fianna, who as role models
likewise failed to assist in the struggle to realize the dream of restoring a pre-
colonial Irish identity that would have any productive value for resolving
the problems of present reality. It is the one-time benign image of Strong-
bow that has undergone transformation into the rancorous emblem of
colonization: a father symbolic of an alien authority, dead but ever-present
in the memory of conquest.
However, as Coleman has recently intimated in Ignotum per Ignotius
(1982–84), “the sword is no antique”: mythic battles live on in their per-
petual recounting. But rattling the arms of heroic fiction produces a blind
spot. Myth is a universal fiction occupying a timeless space, and both
Strongbow and Ignotum per Ignotius seem to imply that to seek the gods and
heroes is only to find the implacable distance that separates them from
mortal space, from a workable reality. The supernatural hero embodies
collective aspirations and dreams of transcendence. Through his perpetual
resurrection in narrative, the hero defies time and in so doing provides the
social group with a cohesive sense of identity and continuity. And yet, to
misinterpret this metaphorical role of the hero, to dwell in an image of the
past, mythologized or historical, is nonetheless to risk a pathological view
of reality and to court a failure of the present.
It is this confusion between “reality” and “fiction” that Coleman
explored in Kojak and Zamora (1975–). Although this work remains un-
finished, it is an important reference point for the artist’s subsequent ex-
plorations of the complex relationships between cultural mythologies and
commodified identities, lived experience and subjective agency. As his
starting point, Coleman took the much-publicized murder trial of the
young Puerto Rican boy Romney Zamora. His defense based its case on
the psychiatric claim that the boy was so influenced by watching television
that he could no longer distinguish reality from fiction, proposing therefore
that the boy’s crime was the result of his “acting out” an identification with
his media heroes, Kojak and Superman (whom he nevertheless fantasized
he could outsmart). Kojak/Telly Savalas was called as a witness in the de-
fense’s attempt to establish that the representation of violent crime on TV
Kojak and Zamora, 1975–( )
Project documentation.

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman 45

46 Jean Fisher

perverted the young’s sense of values, a strategy that at the same time placed
the actor in a morally ambiguous position. Coleman explores Zamora’s
confusion of identity through the interrelationship of two plots represent-
ing “reality” and “fiction”: the making of a film with Kojak and the “real”
Zamora, and the film story itself of Kojak and Zamora-as-Superboy in a
crime investigation that includes the latter’s trial. The difference between
reality and fantasy becomes increasingly ambiguous as the two narratives
collapse into each other.
The work was intended as a video installation which cross-referenced
with the media’s intervention in the Zamora case. It was the first live TV
broadcast of a murder trial which, with the additional presence of Ko-
jak/Telly Savalas in his customary role as a crime investigator/witness, cre-
ated a fictionalized spectacle from a real-life tragedy (itself replicating the
problem of the TV crime series) and gave the mute and confused boy a
moment of “stardom.” Coleman’s fiction suggests that Zamora’s “other”
unspoken crime is his attempt to usurp the role of the hero-father, for
which Kojak as the embodiment of the Law punishes him. Zamora falls
victim to the discrepancy in culture between what is sanctioned in fiction,
as representation, and what is censored in real life, and where this positions
individual agency:one might argue that Zamora, in a sense, commits mur-
der “in good faith.” He is trapped in his fantasy of an idealized self just as
Kojak/Savalas is caught in the fiction of his own representation. As in
Strongbow, this hero finally emerges as the representation of a paternalistic
value structure which cannot accept the consequences of it own myth-
making machinery. The self ’s desire to identify with another who appears
more perfect than itself, and less subject to societal constraints, leads it to
nominate cultural figures which set the style for its behavior and sense of
selfhood. Unlike the heroes of mythic narratives, however, contemporary
celebrities like Kojak/Savalas are not models that confront the complexi-
ties of life but are reflections of the traditional role model distorted through
the desires of a materialist society whose values are based on the status of
glamour and wealth. Manufactured to the expediency of fashion and profit,
these are images of a technology of consumerism in which desire itself is
exploited, in which “reality” becomes increasingly a mediated and collec-
tive fantasy, and in which, indeed, “acting out” prescribed roles becomes
the only available form of agency.
At the end of Living and Presumed Dead, Chris has shed his disguise and
stands naked with his enigmatic tattoo. Unlike the mythic hero, he has not
Kojak and Zamora, 1975–( )
Project documentation.

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman 47

48 Jean Fisher

solved its mystery and must be resigned to the absence of meaning. Per-
haps now, like Bloom, he is more freely able to transform his fantasy of an
“absolute truth” into a workable reality. Coleman’s Tunney and Zamora,
on the other hand, cannot perform the suture that will reconcile the “real”
and “projected” selves and consequently must suffer a forlorn alienation.
Zamora and Chris remind us that one of the central features of fantasy and
the symbolic power of the hero is dramatization: an enactment in language,
a narration of the subject whereby it creates itself as a representation. If,
however, the moment it enters into preexisting social codes the subject is
directed to narrate itself only in the terms that culture has established for
it, can one imagine individual agency outside of such prescriptions?
The work so far discussed focuses on the question of identity forma-
tion through the singular figure of the hero; other works deal with the
more abstract socializing function of instrumental language through which
the subject is constituted into a collective order. Whereas Kojak and Zamora
reflects upon the limits of our inscription in language, Now & Then (1981)
perhaps can be described as a reverie on our formation in language.5 In
both So Different . . . and Yet (1980) and Living and Presumed Dead, style of
dress and gesture are signs which refer to the social role of the subject; they
create an image for public consumption, indicating the social territory
with which the desire of the self for an integrated identity is coerced or
otherwise encouraged to identify. In So Different . . . and Yet, the antique
green dress, like the dagger in Living and Presumed Dead, is a talisman which
changes hands and undergoes transformation, but which also functions as
the fetishized object of desire. In Now & Then the two figures narrate their
idea of themselves through interdependent temporal movements which
develop themes of earlier works, such as Clara and Dario (1975) and So
Different . . . and Yet.6 The first theme is the subject’s narration of the past
inflected through apparent memory of childhood images and role models;
the other is the subject’s present and fantasized reflections on its desire to
be like culture’s currently fashionable images, recalling Zamora’s confu-
sion between self and TV persona. Through this complex reverie the past
reveals itself as an idealized fiction, continually being retold (like the
retelling of the hero’s tale) through the private and collective fantasies of
the present. Perhaps we contain the anomalies and uncertainties of the
present only by reworking them (“folding and pleating,” as the narration
says) into the continuously transforming narrative of our own history. Per-
haps Zamora’s real tragedy was that he had no history to speak of. Is “real-
Ignotum per Ignotius, 1982–84
Performed work for theater. Performed
by Isabel Carlos, Rui Orfão. Music by
Roger Doyle. Theatro Estúdio Citac,
Coimbra, Portugal, 1983.

ity,” then, but a comic masquerade in which our heroic fantasies shadowbox
with that cluster of roles that culture deems appropriate for us to perform,
a mime play of shifting representations in which, trapped in our solitude,
we may be as mute as Strongbow and Zamora?
Language—which donates our sense of self but also limits that sense
of self within socialized boundaries—perhaps this is the key by which Ig-
notum per Ignotius, Coleman’s second performed work, invites us to unlock
some of the complexities of identity formation, and whose decoys and
metonymic substitutions lead us back again into the abstract enigma of the
mythic self. Although it is not a play—indeed it transgresses many of the
codes of Western naturalistic theater and performance and seems closer to
pantomime—it is nevertheless a drama of recitation, actions, and music
performed, as in Now & Then, by two players.
The simple setting, sculptural lighting, and prerecorded harmonium
music suggest a church or funeral parlor. While the first player confesses
a guilty secret, the second makes a sequence of moves indicative of a
coming-into-life, which is the coming-into-language of the drama itself:

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman 49

50 Jean Fisher

I’m only a newcomer.

Start the proceedings!
It’s a simple story . . .

Meaning, we are told, will not be revealed by applying logic: “Anyone

wearing binoculars is looking for trouble.” This discourse between the
drama as a representation and the performance as a performed reality con-
tinues through various narrative displacements:the deliberate operation of
the sound props; monologue with recitative and singing; ritualistic actions
and abrupt “twitches” seemingly out of context with the narrative flow,
indicating shifts in time or space, or connections between consciousness
and the unconscious processes. The plot dovetails a plane of “myth” with
one of “reality.” “Start the proceedings!” suggests a trial: the initiation of
the hero quest, as well as the investigation of a mysterious death in a crime
story. Various “characters” in the plot are symbolic of the social order—
the priest, the lawyer—while the plot itself follows many of the moves in
the heroic tale: a supper, a betrayal, a reference to crucifixion, and the
lament that closes the work:

Dreams a shadow
Lacrymosa
Infants scowl
Lacrymosa

What is being mourned perhaps is the death of “innocence,” the loss of the
Edenic undifferentiated and fantasized self before the symbolic order of
language trapped us in its socializing constraints. This sense of loss may be
what links Ignotum per Ignotius to Coleman’s enigmatic A-Koan (1978), an
installation whose continuous film loop presents an image of the Irish tri-
color flapping wildly above a cluster of large public address loudspeakers.
The accompanying soundtrack combines a low sonorous tone with a
child’s voice calling plaintively to its mother:

Mummy, I’m ready

I’ve done a poo
I’m calling you . . .

Several of the work’s signifiers suggest “speaking,” or language (the gaping

“mouths” of the loudspeakers projecting the voice of authority; the small
Ignotum per Ignotius, 1982–84
Performed work for theater. Performed
by Olwen Fouère and Roger Doyle.
Shaffy Theater, Amsterdam, 1982.

voice of the child); others suggest silence (the flag is soundless; the child’s
call is unanswered). Thus between image and sound there is an oscillation
between “utterance” and “muteness.” Between need and the unanswered
demand, the child speaks: but the sense of unutterable loss that pervades
A-Koan links coming-into-language to the longing for that loss by which
desire itself comes into being.
Like most of Coleman’s recent work, Ignotum per Ignotius has a narrative
structure (a “revelation” in time, although not one that one would com-
monly anticipate) expressed through a narrator—one who tells. What Igno-
tum per Ignotius “tells” is the enigma of death, the ultimate mystery, and the
phantasm which underlies mythic fiction and perhaps all representation.
For what is storytelling but a retelling of that which has already passed
away, a representation of that which is no longer present? From its begin-
ning, which must acknowledge an end, the conventional story narrates the
process of its own death, an entropic move that invites comparison with

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman 51

52 Jean Fisher

the story of the self whose entry into language (the inauguration of self-
dramatization) marks an acceptance of the limits to life. But this accep-
tance is not without resistance; like the body, language works to sustain
itself against dissolution in death. The returns and repetitions of the plot
of the mythic tale and its continual recounting—the epic journeys of
Cuchulainn, Gulliver, and Ulysses; Scheherazade’s 1001 nights of procras-
tination; the continuous cycle of Box—these are strategies of deferment
by which time is suspended and death is postponed. If in narrative we seek
knowledge of death without its finality, perhaps what we find comforting
in the hero is his continuous cycle of death and rebirth that conquers the
power of time and provides a sense of continuity to life.
But repetition serves another, related function. In Clara and Dario,
Now & Then, and Living and Presumed Dead, repetition is the continuous
restaging of memories: a renarration of the past in terms of the present,
which serves to bind the threads of life into a semblance of coherent mean-
ing, and through which the dissociated self manufactures the semblance of
a unified identity—it represents itself, it creates a history. In Ignotum per Ig-
notius there is also a mnemonic revision seeking the causes and the resolu-
tion of the self ’s present uncertainty:“I needed to reinvest.” But as in Living
and Presumed Dead and Strongbow, there is an ironic edge, for at the same
time a question arises whether or not this search for unified and coherent
meaning through a “knowledge” that obligates language to rules and in-
stitutions is predicated on an absurd contradiction: that what we seek we
nevertheless embody in a concept of all-knowingness—the supreme au-
thority or “cosmic father,” which is itself unnamed and unknowable (this
is the meaning of ignotum per ignotius). And the more we search for unity
and certitude, the more we seem, like Tunney and Chris, to encounter a
mute and abyssal nothingness.
What Coleman’s work makes clear is that cultural mythologies are rep-
resentations that enable us to utter and define a place within the symbolic
order, but at the same time, they present a fiction that not only masks the
anomalies of life but also tends to deprive us of belief in our own sensuous
relation to the world, and hence to cripple individual agency. Instrumen-
tal language, the Law and its institutions, are donations from the “cosmic
father,” the substance of culture which supports the myth of man’s divine
origin and heroic destiny. But the price paid for this disavowal of nature is
a rupture between the identificatory demands of society and the desire of
otherness of private dreams and fantasies. It is through this conflict that the
Living and Presumed Dead, 1983–85
Storyboard (detail).

group must establish a collective identity, and each “subject” within the
group find its own sense of reality. The child must sustain this conflict as
soon as he enters the symbolic realm, but while this enables him to articu-
late a subjectivity that guarantees his place within society, it simultaneously
confronts him with his separation from the “maternal body” (nature) and
the sense of wholeness with which this body endowed him.7 Living and
Presumed Dead articulates this split: for while it is Borras, the woman, who
holds the key to Chris’s imaginary identity (his inheritance, or physical
likeness to the father in the locket), it is Capax the father who provides the
son with his symbolic identity (the ideogram/tattoo). The “subject,” then,
eternally divided, henceforth is motivated by the desire for a coherent
identity—to “reinvest,” to find the meaning of the insignia—which can
only be realized in death. Life contains, therefore, both a resistance to and
a drive toward death: the dream of immortality and the fear of an endless
alienation.
At the end of Living and Presumed Dead, we find that neither Chris nor
Abbas is able to interpret the insignia; like the erased message in Ignotum
per Ignotius, perhaps it was never intended to be deciphered. At the end of
his quest Coleman’s hero finds only the impossibility of meaning:both ori-
gin and destiny remain ineffable. The enigma articulated by the hero is

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman 53

54 Jean Fisher

that the self occupies the space of an absence: at the very moment the self
comes into language, it “dies” and is simultaneously resurrected as an other
with which there can be no reconciliation. Coleman therefore inverts the
significance of the cultural hero. In his work there is no graspable center
to satisfy our desire for closure, or coherence, only a continuous decen-
tering that speaks of the impossibility of unified meaning, of not one ideal
self but a mask of relations, of not one reality but a play of many shifting
realities that is our constant negotiation between past and present, mem-
ory and desire. Through its complex layering of signs and narrative dis-
junctions, Coleman’s work undoes the sutures in instrumental language,
in those discursive codes which would present the world as a seamless
unity. In disengaging language from the inertia of its representations, what
is liberated is that voice of unreason through which language and the self
may renew their configurations in the world.8

Notes

This text was written around a version of Living and Presumed Dead which was to be pre-
sented as a strip story of commercial-type illustrations. The narration, read by Noel Pur-
cell, was a reminder of Ireland’s tradition of the storyteller. The images of the later, more
familiar version consist of a sequence of photographic stills of mannequins and stock “char-
acters” reminiscent of the masks of commedia dell’arte or medieval street theater, organized
in variable juxtapositions as if taking a curtain call. This motley throng recalls the cast of
narrated characters in So Different . . . and Yet and Ignotum per Ignotius, and, together with
Coleman’s references to genres of popular or mass culture, makes clearer the work’s rela-
tionship to the popular carnivalesque. What is important here is the political dimension of
the carnivalesque as a disarticulation of normative discursive language, whose effect is to
precipitate the viewer-participant into the uncertain, liminal territory of “becoming-other.”
1. For brief descriptions of this and other work, see James Coleman, exh. cat. (Dublin:Doug-
las Hyde Gallery, 1982).
2. For the classic analysis of such “diegetic functions,” see Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the
Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas, 1968), p. 25.
3. James Joyce used this address in Dublin as the home of the fictional Leopold and Molly
Bloom in Ulysses.
4. Ironically, this familiar and popular landmark on Eccles Street was itself bulldozed not
long after Coleman’s xeranthemum wreath had withered away.
5. Now & Then was Coleman’s first work to be performed live. It is a double narration per-
formed to music by two players posing as male and female mannequins dressed in the fash-
ionable styles of the fifties and eighties, respectively.
6. On Clara and Dario, see again the exhibition catalogue cited in note 1.
7. The reading of Coleman’s work presented in this essay makes general reference to Lacan’s
discourse on the self and language. See, for example, Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in
Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968);
and Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977).
8. Given that Coleman’s work centers on an interrogation of the language of art and our po-
sitioning in relation to it as viewers, the title Living and Presumed Dead may also be seen as a
sidelong reference to the interminable debate on the status of painting as an efficacious
medium for reflecting on contemporary reality since the advent of photography. The
“hero” in question might then be the author-artist, who is no longer—according to post-
modern critique—the modernist, unified, transcendental subject of knowledge.

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman 55

Living and Presumed Dead, 1983–85
Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.
 The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead )

Raymond Bellour

translated by George Baker

Between the living and the dead. Between life and death. Between film
and photography, theater and painting: between all the forms of represen-
tation linked to these extremes of motion and stasis, there lies a perverse
and precise art, one dedicated to a future still partly unknown, and of
which James Coleman is the inhabitant.
There is a piece by Coleman that—through its title and the ambigu-
ous situation that it creates—can serve as an index of this fluid field, the
interstices and edges of which Coleman has filled with thirty years of work
in every genre and subgenre, in projects ranging from the most minimal
to the most expansive. Modest and not very well known (but recently re-
exhibited), the work was given the title Images (1975): seven almost iden-
tical paintings arranged as a horizontal series that can be followed by the
viewer in either direction. Lit violently, in fact in such a manner that the
flood of light seems to dissolve the little that one can make out, the seven
images display a metallic silver ground against which two lines trace a
single motif. The motif is recognizable but fleeting, transformed by each
movement of the viewer’s eye or body. In effect, it is just as possible to per-
ceive the work as presenting an abstract space or a vague shape pinioned
at the work’s center, as it is to see in it two faces that suddenly emerge from
either side to face each other with shifting expressions. Or yet again, be-
cause its recent appearance was in an exhibition on what is called the
“Cinema Effect,” it is even more tempting to see the paintings as giving
rise to the image of seven miniaturized movie screens, or seven immea-
surably enlarged still frames from a film.1
58 Raymond Bellour

Series of Images, 1975

Installation at Studio Marconi,
Milan, 1975.

Spectatorial displacement, perceptual ambiguity, an indeterminate

classification and apparatus: James Coleman’s art is wedded to such a suc-
cession of interference. And these obstacles only increased in number and
type as soon as his work opened itself—with a single-mindedness para-
doxically driven by a love of the heterogeneous—to all the major issues of
the day while still finding a part of its strength in the dimension of local
memory. Coleman achieved renown from the moment of his earliest
works, which broke with the conceptualist fallacies of an international art
scene in which he nevertheless quickly became one of the canniest mem-
bers. He was trained abroad, in France and in Italy, where he worked for
a long time before returning to Ireland. Coleman seems to owe the force
of his work to the contradiction that makes of him an internal exile in his
own country as well as a nomad who carries this country with him wher-
ever he exhibits and develops his art. The good fortune of Irish literature
has always been that it is a “minor” literature, divided in its language and
pushing the language of its colonizer, now its own, to points of rupture,
so that the occupier is displaced from his own territory to the extent that
it is reclaimed by the use of language as an act of sabotage.2 The good for-
tune of the Irish artist is perhaps to confront a similar situation with the
particularity proper to a culture constructed in opposition to a realism of
the image. Initially this opposition was due to the legacy of religion and
magic, but subsequently it became part of the historical destiny that has
forced Ireland for more than three centuries of terror and disaster to face
what we might call the unrepresentable.3 There is such a thing as an Irish
iconoclasm, an iconoclasm that finds a way to use words to the detriment
of images, even as it treats words as the images of words in order to extract
from them the symbolic weight of the local, archaic, and territorial at-
tachments that tempt all “minor” cultures. Here we can locate the force
specific to an iconoclasm that—while inspired by the analytical and illu-
sory gestures of contemporary art—finds the tools for a critical decon-
struction of figures and meanings just as much in the remains of its own
culture. It is for this reason that among Coleman’s works, and especially
among those that belong to his great reinvention—the slide projection
with voice-over—the piece Living and Presumed Dead seems to occupy a
privileged position: in this work, cultural and archetypal references be-
come an unprecedented means of inquiry into what the image can do,
what the image must do, and what new type of observer it constructs.

Like all of the numerous examples where Coleman foregrounds the textual
component of a piece through its sheer quantity and density of variation,
the challenge in dealing with this work is to know where to situate one-
self in relation to the information that comes or seems to come from the
text. The information given is excessive, elliptical, linked to a succession
of images whose meaning it inflects, but whose perceptual complexity dis-
allows in return the ability truly to linger over the words—words which
in any case never linger themselves, and from which, one suspects, some-
thing essential is constantly slipping away.4 There is thus a temptation: to
stop the text, to freeze it, or rather, to go no further than it, in an attempt
to understand what is accomplished among the images; and especially to
grasp, in an illusion of mastery, what is happening at any given moment
between the words and the images, in the room or the hall where we are.
This is a largely vain effort, one that can only lead to a delirium of inter-
pretation. For it is precisely interpretation that is being targeted here and
that before being destroyed—like the Carthage of our childhood Latin
primers—opens this condition to the possibility of another delirium, one
far more agonizing and seductive. Given the dangers of such interpreta-
tion, one understands better why Coleman has been so resistant to the idea

The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead) 59

60 Raymond Bellour

of allowing all or part of the texts of his installations to be published, why

he refuses even simply to distribute them or to respond to their meaning.
For their meaning—constructed from a scintillation of possible meanings,
endlessly torn down and recombined—does not, properly speaking, ex-
ist. Or it exists only in proportion to the parodic displacement—effected
through flashes, overly grand schemes, empty turns, and abrupt sensa-
tions—of which it has now become the object.
We should not then attempt to reconstruct the narrative, or rather the
fanning network of narratives, burgeoning forth from the carnivalesque
voice of the vaudeville actor Noel Purcell, who as the narrator plays all the
voices of the living and the dead in this work. It seems advisable to content
oneself instead with the state in which the narrative was initially presented
upon the first showing of Living and Presumed Dead in London in 1983. In
this preliminary version, the “projected narrative” consisted only of a series
of drawings that were meant to sketch the main characters in a schematic
way, close in spirit to the method of comic strips or early animated films:

Living and Presumed Dead concerns a cast of characters, Abbas, Borras,

Chris or Capax, and an unidentified man, whose past relationships are
confused and complex. Capax was an acrobat, performing with dag-
gers and fire, and dicing with death. He was “presumed dead” after
cutting his throat during a performance. However Borras, his lover,
has searched for him many years in the belief that he was still alive. Ab-
bas rescues Chris, who appears identical to the image of Capax, from
his past and discovers that he is disguising himself as his father to
avenge his father’s murder. . . .5

There is thus no shortage of murder, and of fathers, and of Hamlet’s ghost,

in a plot where the doublings include sexual ambiguities as well. But this
entire system of symbols is always already travestied, dilapidated, spent in
a series of stereotypes and of logics without issue. It is worth emphasizing
that Coleman has always pointed out that, in order to build his narrative
and to work out its permutations, he had recourse to Propp’s Morphology
of the Folktale and to the seven principal “functions” and the seven protag-
onists that Propp isolates within the finite number of possible situations
found in the Russian folktale. Of course. But it is just as clear that Propp’s
“functions” have no more real validity here than the subject positions
schematized by Freud or Lacan in the Oedipus complex and its theater.
One could even argue that in ascribing his work to them, the “functions”
that Coleman plays with come much closer to the logic of the “mytheme”
as analyzed by Lévi-Strauss. In his critique of Propp, Lévi-Strauss prevents
permutation from ever reaching arbitrariness; and above all, it is never on
the morphological level alone but on all the levels of language, taken as a
model, that the folktale, like the myth, must be grasped so as to establish
the structure of the world of which it is a part.6 If, following the inverse of
this logic, everything in Coleman’s work seems arbitrary—thanks to a kind
of teeming oversignification—that would be in keeping with the collapse
of the structure of a world in which memory, denuded and redistributed
as dislocated perceptible elements, is still able to transmit emotion and
warmth, but never meaning, due to the irreversible cleavage between affec-
tive potential and psychic distance.
An intense, almost joyous melancholy thus radiates from the flute of
the musician Brian Dunning, a music—seemingly half classical and half
based in folk traditions—that modulates the thousand-and-one accidents
of a tale that ends where it began. One is touched by various words and
phrases emitted during its course. They seem to turn around a secret:
around identity and belief, love and death. It is as if they were from a play
or a novel where the voices themselves so perfectly recapitulate those of
previous books that we believe the plots are actually happening to the
characters that the images parade before our eyes. And yet such is our dis-
sociation that nothing overcomes it; nothing can cross its barrier. The ab-
solute separation for Propp between characters and the functions that they
are expected to perform returns here in the impossibility truly to relate
what one hears to what one sees, without however ever being able to cease
attempting to do just that. (In this respect, Coleman’s work is ironically
Proppian.) On the wall that serves as a screen, there are twenty characters
arranged in a straight line, as if on stage the moment just before or after a
curtain call. They shift positions continuously, and more or less drastically,
dramatizing the full length of this fictive line, at the mercy of 157 pro-
jected images (not counting ten black ones) whose unequal rhythm can be
heard through the staccato punctuation of the computer-controlled slide
projector. Of course, everything is knowingly, even perversely calculated;
the changes in position as well as the gestures, the attitudes as well as the
affects put on by these strange frozen actors all seem intended to respond
to the utterances of the soundtrack. And this they certainly do. But as with
the “method” of Raymond Roussel so well described by Foucault—where
the simple change of a phoneme suffices to change the direction of the
whole story (“les bandes du vieux pillard”/“les bandes du vieux billard”)—

The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead) 61

62 Raymond Bellour

the visual arrangement of the characters in a single line and their contin-
ual permutation, feeding off the material disjunction between sound and
image, make it very difficult to follow this story even if it is obstinately
mimed by one after the other of them. Or better, try to follow the trajec-
tory of one or more of the characters trotted along the entire length of the
line, through all the dissolves and blanks that punctuate the passage from
image to image—a movement of whirls and eddies that, however much it
fulfills the minimum narrative contract, detaches from the fullness of the
text and initiates a genuinely hallucinatory, zigzag relationship between
image and sound. The viewer emerges conscious of this but defeated—or
worse, with a false sense of victory, if he or she places the desire for mastery
above that which the reality of the work permits. The only true recourse
is to abandon oneself to the intellection of that which the projection is and
can become during the twenty-five minutes that it lasts. Or longer. For, like
Finnegans Wake with its infamously circular last line, the projection takes off
immediately from the last image, rearranging the characters as they were
at the beginning—in an order that, of course, has already been forgotten.

Where are we during this time, in this empty space where we can wander,
seat ourselves upon the ground, rove along the line of permutations, get
close to the image, touch it without anything happening? Where are we
during this seemingly unfettered time during which each viewer must
find his or her own distance and imagine his or her own path through the
work? We are, first of all, placed squarely in a space of memory, the grand
memory of reference. While in costume, makeup, and sometimes even
masks—including among them a fairy, an elf, a goblin, and a skeleton—
these male and female characters from diverse epochs and places force im-
ages upon one’s memory in the same way as does the text: the Shakespeare
of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the comedies, as much as the theater of
Yeats or Synge; the Irish legends of the mythological cycles as much as the
nineteenth-century novel. ( Just look at the governess holding a book in
her hand, like something right out of Jane Eyre or The Turn of the Screw.)
However, even memory freezes in front of the image, getting nowhere
thanks to the particularities of the mise-en-scène. No one seems to have
asked Coleman if one of the inspirations for Living and Presumed Dead
might be the long, final short story in James Joyce’s The Dubliners, namely
“The Dead.” This would have to be considered with its supplement, John
Huston’s last film, made of course after Coleman’s installation (1987), but
today almost indissoluble from the text, so vividly does it—the last testa-
ment of an American director of Irish origin—capture the original story.
(As Duras once put it, in a tone of distraught complicity:“Before the mad-
ness of Huston, the cinematic madness of Huston.”)7 What is striking is
the same idea in “The Dead” of a procession, a parade of characters, the
occasion for which is the annual party given by the Misses Morkan. It is
as if their successive arrivals, their positions during the dance, their pres-
ence around the long table, their leaving singly or in groups, as if all this
represented mentally what Coleman initiates through the stubborn line of
his figures. In this story where “the most striking characters seem like each
other’s possibilities,”8 death fulfills a double role. It is figured first through
the characters dedicated like automatons to “paralysis,” circling around
themselves as much as around others for the duration of the long evening.
But death here also carries the force of a bygone desire, one that suddenly
focuses the current relationship of Gretta and Gabriel Conroy upon the
image of a dead man whom Gretta once loved. This dead man is thus more
alive than the living, but his memory merges with the snow that Gabriel
sees falling on Ireland and on the world—these are the last words of the
story—“like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
One can best understand the singular strategy deployed by Coleman
in Living and Presumed Dead by reconsidering the relationship between
these two types of death (which correspond to two moments in the short
story, to the fashionable display of the reception and to the visionary inti-
macy of the conclusion in the hotel room). Or one can think instead of
the film and the way it imparts to these two states the reality of living im-
ages produced through the use of depth, proportion, positioning in time
and space—in short, through types of shots. Among Coleman’s numerous
completed projections, from Seeing for Oneself to I N I T I A L S, from
Background to Lapsus Exposure, this is in fact the only time that he main-
tains the constraint of a single frame within which all the characters in-
volved in the dialogue—and the others of whom nothing is said—are
presented equally, despite the gap that one experiences in their roles. Re-
luctant to use the close-ups that sustain in cinema the flow of time and
create the sentimental identifications that he purges from his characters,
Coleman did however choose to frame the “heroine” of Lapsus Exposure
in just such a manner, going even so far as to produce an enigmatic com-
plicity with her that the dreaminess of the voice-over only echoes. Noth-
ing of the sort in Living and Presumed Dead. Progressing so to speak in the
distance and through simple changes of place—staged and restaged in the
same way one shuffles a deck of cards—these figures aligned with a sort of

The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead) 63

64 Raymond Bellour

Background, 1991–94
Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.

indifference give us the illusion that at each moment the entire story is laid
out, as if the full logic of the story’s development could be encapsulated
despite its ceaseless progression. One senses this in the actors’ voices and
stiff gestures, which correspond rather well to the functional immobility
of the work’s episodes, coded and recoded by a narrative art that seems to
find resolution only in our analytical and theoretical responses to it.
The result is a multiplication of the work’s photographic effect. It is
the singular and perhaps unique force of this installation to push the pho-
tographic effect to the extreme signaled in its title. For in itself, the pho-
tograph is already that object which displays as dead that which is living,
becoming itself presumed dead, immobilized forever and yet frozen alive.
The interspace of the still-image projection—between photography and
cinema—contradicts this destiny of photography, from the moment that
it dramatizes the photograph, concatenates it by a sort of quasi-movement.
Chris Marker’s La Jetée has become the crucial example of this within cin-
ema, transforming death and its moment—indeed the very image of this
moment—into the film’s subject, and working this to the full by the com-
bined forces of editing, music, and commentary. The commentary’s re-
flexive character increases, rather than suspends, the film’s pathos and
search for the sublime. This feature of coordination that the photograph
thus receives from cinema finds itself attenuated within the conditions of
a museum, where the projection becomes more material (if only because
of the physical presence of the slide projectors) and the spectator’s situa-
tion is transformed. Replacing the frozen vision of cinema, the aleatory
nature of the situation of a visitor-become-spectator materializes when
the decision is made to perceive an object through the angle of greatest
coherence—despite the fact that it is by definition open to any number of
approaches. But here again, potential solutions differ or diverge.
Consider, for example, Allen Street (1994), the beautiful series of pro-
jected photographs by Beat Streuli, taken with a zoom lens in a New York
courtyard among a group of African-American adolescents. There is no
voice-over, no music, no story—nothing but an immense wall covered
from floor to ceiling by a series of images, grouped in short sequences and
linked together by dissolves.9 These shots focus quite closely on the body,
and their motion is wedded to the rhythm and the relationships of the
frames that the dissolves link together, to the surprise that offers up one
spontaneous pose beneath another (a face seen head-on that had first been
seen in profile, a smile appearing where there had been none). The photo-
graphic interruption—that freezing of movement that lasts forever—here

Background, 1991–94
Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.

The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead) 65

66 Raymond Bellour

seems eminently variable (this is the intimacy of the work, its depthless
mystery);as each image is offered up only to fade into another, the moment
of stasis is never experienced as an interruption, or a sudden eruption of
the tragic. It only prepares a movement that will resume, an example of
the sweetness of what Lacan called the “moment of seeing,” as if for the
pure love of the body, experienced in the simplicity of anonymity. A ten-
der as well as carnal play on the advertising image—this is the charm par-
ticular to Beat Streuli’s work.
In Living and Presumed Dead, on the other hand, the horror of what
Lacan named the fascinum is unrelenting.10 It is the response of the image
to the text, to its coded truculence, to the role played ( jouée) by death in
this story, constantly foiled (déjouée). The impact of the image stems first—
one cannot repeat this enough—from the line of figures that we are asked
to take as living beings, although they are not only playing dead but in-
deed seem to be so. This is what is at stake. It is not insignificant that such
a project could initially do without actual bodies, contenting itself instead
with drawings, with body-signs. And they continue to remain signs, as al-
ways because of the stark uniformity of the line. Approaching this line in
order to increase the intimacy with a character solves nothing: the horror
proper to that which is indistinct is now added to that which is frozen.
There is but one point—variable but singular nonetheless—from which
a viewer can both see everything and experience the transformations un-
dergone by the line. For with each dissolve, the scene is reborn; after each
short-lived eternity, it is reinstalled. The fascination thus emerges from
each arrested movement through which an actor finds himself or herself
frozen, whatever the expressions or the gestures dictated by his or her role
(for example the string of gazes that one cannot pin down as being di-
rected either within or beyond the frame). In this, one finds oneself con-
fronted with a generalized freezing of the image; in place from the start, it
is subsequently diffracted in as many different ways as there are characters
through which to verify its effect. The turn of the screw in this subdued
horror lies in the realization that five of the characters are not actors at all
but mannequins, constantly rearranged, feeding off of this indecision be-
tween life and death. For they move only in their function as extras, like a
population in reserve, forming a type of chorus between the actors and the
viewers. To the extent, let me repeat, that such an obsessional choice be-
comes almost natural and dictated by the work’s design, one can choose
similarly to follow a specific character from image to image in order never
Living and Presumed Dead, 1983–85
Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.

to lose sight of him or her: a stubborn alternation of sameness and differ-

ence that in itself justifies a full screening. For example, take the governess
with her book—closed, open, half-open, closed again, open once more—
a book into which other characters seem to glance upon occasion, a book
that seems to follow the thread of the story as if to demonstrate the extent
to which the story is born from it. And this continues until the very last
image, where the young woman pulls herself up straight behind Borras,
who is kneeling in front of one of the three Capaxes cloaked in fire—the
false Capax, a puppet made by Abbas to fool the real one, according to one
of the most appealing summaries of this story11—and presses the closed
book against her chest, as if to indicate definitively that the story is over.
So, in short, what really happens to the viewer caught up endlessly in
these variations, in these micro-extenuations of an elaborate horror of sta-
sis? Curiously, this: in following like a panicked insect the transformations
affecting these always frozen bodies, an actual movement is born, like a
jagged cutout returned from the trick mirror of the scene. This movement
is attached to the jubilation that penetrates the body of the spectator thus
given over to the mad traversal of his or her own thought. Between cinema
and photography, theater and painting, this singular species of tableau vivant

The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead) 67

68 Raymond Bellour

forces the body into thought. It relentlessly produces the enigma of the per-
ception of an image in terms of both plot and story—simultaneously the
index, symptom, and symbol of memory—starting however from the fully
stopped events of which it is composed. And these full stops are individ-
uated by each odyssey of perception through all of these shots, through the
pieces (pans)12 and fragments of images, through their transitions, through
images in infinite regress, images of other images.13
Coleman did once push such an experience to its extreme limit, no
doubt to prove both that it was possible and that the majority of his works
put it in play. This project took him eleven years to perfect. It involved ap-
propriating at first thirteen and then ultimately nine frames from a track-
ing shot used in a film: James Whale’s The Invisible Man of 1933. We are not
informed about this source, as the context of the shot is impossible to pin
down, and yet Whale’s title is suggestive in terms of the goal of Coleman’s
process. The stills are projected in the form of slides according to a dual prin-
ciple of delay:the first concerns the forward thrust of the projection, which
opens onto an almost infinite duration because each full projection of the
slides takes four hours to complete, repeats in reverse, and then begins again;
the second concerns the lighting, which works so that the luminosity of the
two slide projectors used in the installation is regulated according to a prin-
ciple of inverse proportional variation. The latter results in a sort of discrep-
ancy, a long imperceptible gap between two images projected as one whose
figurative content is difficult to discern. But this gap does finally become
apparent, gradually doubling the contrasting black-and-white lines of the
original image with a pale shadow that ends up in part substituting itself for
them. To this experience, barely sustainable by the powers of perceptual at-
tention and the physical body, Coleman has given the name La Tache Aveugle
(the blind spot).14 Which is simply to say in another way what Deleuze has
said, echoing Leibniz: “I am forever unfolding between two folds, and if
to perceive means to unfold, then I am forever perceiving within the folds.
Every perception is hallucinatory because perception has no object.”15
From this perspective, the photographic effect is given a second life,
at the limits of that which can be articulated. It is like the utopia that drives
one of the propositions of Coleman’s Charon (MIT Project) (1989), a med-
itation or reverie on photography, where Zeno’s paradox is reformulated
from a temporal perspective. In it, a woman believes that the photograph
is living proof that death does not exist. Ironically, she believes that dying
itself lasts an eternity, because one’s life would flash before one’s eyes at the
moment of death in an uninterrupted succession of images. Of course, the
final moment of this series would have to have in turn its own succession
of memory images, and this without end, in infinite regress. No matter
how close one is to death, it could never be reached. Sensing the immi-
nent approach of death, the woman intends to prove her point by prepar-
ing herself to be photographed.
Living and Presumed Dead is then not just a title. It is the dime-novel
guise of a story that establishes itself only to be inverted in the mesmeriz-
ing life of the image, ceaselessly returning toward its viewer. In this, it
demonstrates an aesthetic principle that seeks to push the limits of the
conceivable into the register of intermediary states between motion and
stasis, in objects as well as in thought. It is doubtless also through this a po-
litical allegory: Ireland—so long taken for dead, carrying and touched by
death to its core—is perhaps also terribly alive.16

Notes

Translator’s note: A previous English translation of this text exists, completed by Michael
Cronin and published in the Irish magazine Circa, no. 79 (Spring 1997), pp. 24–29. While
I have consulted this text, it has proven largely unreliable, thus necessitating the work of re-
translation. The present translation has benefited from a thorough revision at the hands of
Rachel Haidu and from the suggestions of Raymond Bellour.
A note on the essay’s title: Bellour’s “Les morts vivants” retains in French an ambigu-
ity that the horror-movie connotations of my English translation somewhat foreclose. “The
Dead Alive” might be a closer, if less elegant, rendition of Bellour’s French, the ambiguity
of which is hopefully retained in the contradiction and the collision between Bellour’s “The
Living Dead” and Coleman’s “Living and Presumed Dead.”
1. The exhibition “L’Effet-cinéma: art contemporain et cinéma” ran in Paris at the Musée
du Luxembourg from 25 October to 22 December 1995.
2. On the notion of a “minor literature,” its capacities for deterritorialization, and its di-
rectly collective and political dimension, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: pour
une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975), especially pp. 29–35. Their analysis of the Ger-
man used by the Jews of Prague applies particularly well to the Irish example that they oth-
erwise evoke briefly through Joyce and Beckett: on the one hand, this impoverished
German can be pumped up artificially by “all the resources of a symbolism, an oneiricism,
an esoteric meaning,” as one witnesses in the Prague School (Gustav Meyrink, etc.); on the
other hand, it can be led to a point of exacerbated aridity that makes it vibrate with inten-
sity, as in the case of Kafka.
3. Luke Gibbons importantly suggests how the traumatic memory of Irish history, attached
particularly to the two great famines of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (during
which the country each time lost a large part of its population), has made a pictorial real-
ism impossible in Ireland, and more generally has made impossible a belief in the mimetic
force of the image, which has been driven toward a “disfiguration” more easily conferred
on language than on the visual arts. One sees this, for example, in the work of Edmund
Burke—too infrequently recognized as Irish—in his conception of the sublime. See Gib-

The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead) 69

70 Raymond Bellour

bons, “L’art et l’inimaginable: le verbe et l’image dans la culture irlandaise,” in Pascal

Bonafoux, ed., L’imaginaire irlandais (Paris: Hazan, 1996).
4. Of course, there is a notable difference in the level of understanding for English-speaking
viewers, especially Irish ones, and non-English-speaking viewers, no matter how well they
understand English—the idioms packed into the text are potentially overwhelming, never
mind the differences in pronunciation. But this also is not the main point. There might even
be a precise inversion between the understanding of the narrative and the process that re-
ally belongs to the work.
5. This is taken from a poster on the back of which appear the elliptically cut-out and trav-
estied figures of the four (or five) principal characters. Text written by Mark Francis.
6. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “La structure et la forme,” in Anthropologie structurale deux (Paris:
Plon, 1973). Lévi-Strauss sums up in the following way the opposition between formalism
and structuralism, from the perspective of the connections between form and content:“For
the first, the two domains must be absolutely separated, for only form is intelligible, and
content is but a residue bereft of signifying value. For structuralism, this opposition does not
exist: there is not on the one side the abstract and on the other the concrete. Form and con-
tent are of the same nature, susceptible to the same analysis. Content takes its reality from
its structure, and what one calls form is but the coordination, the structuring, of the local
structures that make up the content” (p. 158).
7. Marguerite Duras, Le monde extérieur (Paris: P.O.L, 1993), p. 222. This is from a tran-
scription of an intervention on the French-German TV channel Arte from 1992.
8. This is cited from Hélène Cixous’s analysis of the short story, published as the introduc-
tion to the bilingual French edition, James Joyce, Dublinois (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion,
1974), p. 49.
9. This, at least, was how the work was presented at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in
Geneva at the end of 1995. Other presentations of the work have been made using the form
of the triptych or even more numerous screens.
10. In the chapter “What Is a Picture?” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
(1973; New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), Jacques Lacan opposes the “identificatory haste”
proper to the “moment of seeing,” the initial time of the gaze, to the terminal time of the
“fascinatory effect” that “has the effect of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life”
(pp. 116–18).
[Translator’s note: The term fascinum comes from this passage as well, which it seems
useful in this context to cite in greater detail:

What I noticed . . . was the suture, the pseudo-identification, that exists between what
I called the time of terminal arrest of the gesture and what, in another dialectic that I
called the dialectic of identificatory haste, I put as the first time, namely, the moment
of seeing. The two overlap, but they are certainly not identical, since one is initial and
the other terminal. . . . The terminal time of the gaze, which completes the gesture, I
place strictly in relation to what I later say about the evil eye. The gaze in itself not
only terminates the movement, it freezes it. Take those dances I mentioned—they are
always punctuated by a series of times of arrest in which the actors pause in a frozen
attitude. What is that thrust, that time of arrest of the movement? It is simply the fas-
cinatory effect, in that it is a question of dispossessing the evil eye of the gaze, in or-
der to ward it off. The evil eye is the fascinum, it is that which has the effect of arresting
movement and, literally, of killing life. At the moment the subject stops, suspending
his gesture, he is mortified. The anti-life, anti-movement function of this terminal
 point is the fascinum, and it is precisely one of the dimensions in which the power of
the gaze is exercised directly. The moment of seeing can intervene here only as a su-
ture, a conjunction of the imaginary and the symbolic, and it is taken up again in a di-
alectic, that sort of temporal progress that is called haste, thrust, forward movement,
which is concluded in the fascinum. (pp. 117–18)]

11. See Jan Debbaut and Frank Lubbers, James Coleman (Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van
Abbemuseum, 1989). For a more complete but also confused summary, cluttered with el-
ements of interpretation, see Michael Newman, “Allegories of the Subject: The Theme of
Identity in the Work of James Coleman,” in James Coleman: Selected Works (Chicago and
London: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and ICA London, 1985),
pp. 36–39.
12. I use this word in the sense that Georges Didi-Huberman has given it:“In the detail, the
part can be isolated from the whole, while in the piece [le pan], the part swallows the whole.”
See Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image (Paris: Minuit, 1990), p. 314.
[Translator’s note: It has proven difficult to locate an English word—patch, facet, section,
segment—that encompasses the full range of meanings Didi-Huberman plays with in the
term pan. Seeking to locate an experience opposed to art history’s reliance upon the “de-
tail”—which shores up iconographic readings as a form of concentrated vision, a vision that
has become transparent to meaning—Didi-Huberman turns to a description of Vermeer’s
View of Delft by Marcel Proust, a description that itself turns around an infamous “petit pan
du mur jaune.” This is from the account of Bergotte’s death (upon setting eyes upon this
“petit pan”) in The Captive, the sixth section of Remembrance of Things Past, and the phrase
is given in the English translation as a “little patch of yellow wall.” Taking up Proust’s use of
the term, Didi-Huberman opposes the “detail” to the pan: a fragment that attempts to fo-
cus vision, meaning, and clarity, versus another where meaning evaporates, where trans-
parency gives way to effects of materiality and opacity. The pan, for Didi-Huberman, is the
“beyond” of “the detail principle” of art history; as a form of supreme contingency, it is
compared both to the “symptom” of Freud and the “punctum” of Roland Barthes. I have
chosen the inadequate translation “piece” for its connotations of sheer materiality and frag-
mentation, with none of the direction, focus, and completeness of a “detail.”]
13. Based on the idea of an impossibility of description and its extenuation within the works
that make up Coleman’s project, a convincing formulation of this process has been given by
Marie-Ange Brayer at the end of her essay “James Coleman: The Detective and the Secret,”
Art Press, no. 179 (April 1993), p. 34. She particularly focuses on his film Untitled (Philippe
VACHER):“The description winds around itself, multiplying possible identities and trans-
forming the gaze into a cluster of chronologies wherein each temporal thread is called an
‘image.’”
14. On La Tache Aveugle, see Lynne Cooke, “A Tempered Agnosia” (1992; reprinted in this
volume); as well as Arthur C. Danto, “James Coleman, Slide Artist,” The Nation (3 October
1994). Danto convincingly connects this work to Warhol’s experiment in Empire.
15. Gilles Deleuze, Le pli (Paris: Minuit, 1988), pp. 124–25. Italics in source.
16. This political reading would have to take into account other works: Box, Strongbow, So
Different . . . and Yet, Line of Faith, and above all the theater piece guaiRE, on which see the
eloquent account of Luke Gibbons, “Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE”
(1993; reprinted in this volume). Based on the life of a legendary Irish king, this play’s per-
formances took place in the castle that bears his name, his alleged fortress near Galway (Gal-
way which Joyce used in “The Dead” as the setting for Gretta’s teenage love for Michael
Furrey, and where Furrey dies).

The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead) 71

guaiRE: An Allegory, 1985
Performed work. Performed by Olwen
Fouère. Set design by Dan Graham.
Dun Guaire Castle, Kinvara, Ireland,
1985.
 Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE

Luke Gibbons

“In using what I considered traditional symbols,” W. B. Yeats observed

ruefully toward the end of his life, “I forgot that in Ireland they are not
symbols but realities.”1 Culture in these circumstances cannot be reduced
to an aesthetic pursuit at one remove from reality; it is a material force in
its own right, as its role in turn-of-the-century Irish nationalism attests.
Indeed, the later Yeats was tormented by the thought that some of his plays
might have contributed to the violence of the Irish War of Independence,
of 1916–22. He may have had in mind not just his incendiary Cathleen ni
Houlihan, of 1902, but his less-known The King’s Threshold, staged a year
later, which introduced hunger-striking into Irish politics as a form of
symbolic resistance.2
Drawing on Irish legend, The King’s Threshold describes a struggle be-
tween Guaire, a seventh-century king of Connaught renowned for his gen-
erous banquets, and Seanchan, his chief bard. Guaire accuses the poet of an
excess of words that is inimical to orderly statecraft, the practical obligation
to attend to material needs and get things done. Seanchan responds with
a hunger strike, which he sees as a way of releasing the imagination: “For
when the heavy body has grown weak,/ There’s nothing that can tether the
wild mind.”3 In early versions of the play the king yields, but in 1922, prob-
ably as a result of the death on hunger strike of Terence McSwiney, the na-
tionalist mayor of Cork, Yeats gave the play a new, tragic conclusion. What
is interesting here is the notion of narrative as an event informed by its his-
torical moment:the “original” version of 1902 was no longer possible given
the events of the War of Independence. The question is not just one of re-
vision but of a story structured by the circumstances of its telling.
74 Luke Gibbons

James Coleman too has dealt with the Guaire legend, in guaiRE: An
Allegory (1985), a complex reenactment of the myth using video, gesture,
text, and music. And though his work is usually discussed in terms of a Eu-
ropean and American tradition of conceptual art, guaiRE reveals it as
deeply informed by its Irish context and situation. The Guaire of Irish leg-
end would not have approved of exposing the legacy of the past to the vi-
cissitudes of narration. In popular tradition, he was fighting with Seanchan
because the poet could remember only fragments of the Táin Bó Cuailgne,
a key repository of Irish mythology. Guaire asked Seanchan’s son to re-
cover the original, as if the power of the state depended on preserving the
continuity between past and present. It was precisely such narratives of re-
turn that Coleman countered in guaiRE.
Narrative in this staged allegory did not just take the form of a story:
it took place, the place in question being Dunguaire Castle in County Gal-
way, supposedly Guaire’s stronghold. The initial act of restoration that
Coleman contested by working here was the Irish heritage industry’s ver-
sion of history: the “authentic” banquets laid out for tourists at castles like
Dunguaire, to give the illusion of communion with the medieval past.4 In-
deed, on the way into the “throne room” in which guaiRE was performed,
the audience was shown the backstage of such illusions—a painter at work
on the set, costumes being prepared.
From the performance’s opening words, it was clear that Coleman’s
Guaire too is obsessed with continuity—with lineage and pedigree, the
foundations of his legitimacy as king. A prophecy has foretold that he will
be overthrown by the son of his rival Ceallach, whom he has disposed of to
assert his claim to the throne:“My will be done . . . a formula to dissect . . .
thwart the course of destiny . . . the prophecy . . . Yet it can be employed
to extend life . . . Nobody can rob me of my formulae . . . Buried deep
inside.” “Will” here signifies not just volition but inheritance, which is in
turn secured by the “formula,” an elixir of life (or death), but also the
source of repetition and continuity in oral culture.5
In the legend, when Guaire has Ceallach murdered, the body is stuffed
in a hollow tree.6 In Coleman’s work, however, an obstetrician rather than
a coroner appears on the scene. It is as if Ceallach had been returned to the
womb—as if Guaire had sought to remove his rival from affairs of state by
inserting him into a maternal narrative. For Coleman, though, this inser-
tion becomes a form of empowerment. The maternal gestures toward an
alternative public sphere that jams the machinery of patrilineal power.
 Though the voices of guaiRE’s “characters” are mainly male, they are
articulated through a masked female actress (Olwen Fouère), the only on-
stage presence. At one point in the text her body is explicitly linked to
Ceallach’s tree. Is the female body merely a hollow vehicle for a male line
of transmission? Is it devoid of its own narratives? Marina Warner points
out that the allegorical use of the female form to embody abstract ideas such
as “Justice” and “Liberty” does not mean that these virtues are actually ex-
tended to women. Indeed, it often implies the opposite: the materiality of
women’s bodies is emptied out to carry what are essentially masculine ideas.
Hence the reduction of woman’s body to a shell in icons such as the Statue
of Liberty: “The statue’s hollowness, which we occupy literally when we
make the ascent to Liberty’s empty head, is a prerequisite of symbols with
infinite powers of endurance and adaptability. She is given meaning by us,
and it can change, according to what we see or want.”7
Yet an allegory that insists on the corporeality of the sign would
seem to obstruct such instrumental uses of the female form. In guaiRE,
the maternal body is such a figure. As the performance opens, the ac-
tress’s body comes alive, tentatively discovering itself from the inside.
Her left leg twitches, but she grabs her right leg by mistake. She pinches
her nipple and is startled by the pain. Her throne is a plaster head, on
which is projected a face; it is as if she were giving birth. It may be, of
course, that the mother remains a “relay” or extension of patriarchy, on
the assumption that behind every maternal body lies a great man. This is
no doubt as the king would like it to be. But guaiRE throws such notions
into question; it is less allegory than a reflexive commentary on allegory’s
workings.
For Freud, every family romance contains the underlying anxiety that
whereas “paternity is always uncertain, maternity is most certain.”8 James
Joyce, writing within the colonial frame of turn-of-the-century Ireland,
spells out the political implications of this anxiety when he has Stephen
Dedalus exclaim in Ulysses that “paternity may be a legal fiction,” and is
only as secure as the power of state and law to back it up.9 (Hence Guaire’s
“my will be done.”) The anomaly posed by colonial Ireland to an equation
of nation and fatherland was that Irish men lacked the control of the public
sphere that paternal authority required. As Elizabeth Butler-Cullingford
writes of the representation of Ireland in eighteenth-century aisling po-
etry, a genre in which the male poet would personify Ireland as a
woman, “She is still a sexual object, for the poet lovingly describes her

Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE 75

76 Luke Gibbons

physical charms, and occasionally she is shown as ravished by the in-

vader. Colonization, however, has destroyed native masculinity along
with political independence, and no true Irishman remains to mate
with her.”10
Hence the colonial construction of the Irish body politic as female,
with its corollary that without “manly” British rule, government was im-
possible in Ireland. (In 1898, Sir George Baden-Powell contrasted the pa-
triarchal benefits of Ireland’s union with Britain to the “emasculated”
self-government that would result from Home Rule, the latter resembling
the dependency of a “southern señora on her father confessor.”)11 It may
be, then, that these female personifications of the nation in some sense do
mask patriarchal power on the part of the colonial administration, but it is
not at all clear that this instrumental use of allegorical forms extends to the
colonized culture itself. As Anne Owens Weekes writes, Gaelic Ireland’s
distance from power meant that the entire population, both male and fe-
male, shared the condition of women in the metropolitan center: “Colo-
nization, then, makes female both country and people. . . . ‘Excluded from
landed wealth, from political life, from the “official” church . . . the Irish
erected a counter-culture, not so much rebellious as evasive,’ also a strat-
egy, like women’s, decreed by their similar repression, and one whose end
was survival.”12 In these circumstances, the recourse to female imagery in
poetry and popular protest turns the colonial stereotype against itself,
positing an alternative “feminized” public sphere (imagined as the nation)
against the official patriarchal order of the state.
In guaiRE, this refiguration of female allegory finds expression through
location, the ruins of Dunguaire Castle. (For Walter Benjamin, the ruin is
the most evocative allegorical emblem, its fragments testifying to an un-
restorable origin.) At one point the king’s anxiety requires that he “sponges
his perspiration,” an action accompanied by the line “Sponging over a will.”
The reference is to Lady Christabel Russell, who lived in Dunguaire in the
1920s. Becoming pregnant soon after her marriage, Russell was sued for
divorce by her husband in 1924 on the grounds that since their marriage
was unconsummated, she must have committed adultery. Yet examination
by two gynecologists showed that she was a virgin. It followed that her son
was the rightful heir, even if paternity could not be established. (Coleman’s
sponge remark—a sponge which she shared with her husband was found
in Russell’s bathroom—adverts to one lurid explanation of how she be-
came pregnant.)13 It was as though the maternal body had ceased to be a
vehicle for the male line—as though the female had usurped the “mean-
ing” it was patriarchally intended to carry.
In one of Coleman’s recent works, Charon (MIT Project) (1989), a se-
ries of fourteen photographic vignettes, a baby gazes intently at the cam-
era, and hence, as Lynne Cooke suggests, at “the photographer, who
seems to be both father of the child and allegorical father of the image.”14
In guaiRE, allegory’s temporal lapse in the image, the delay between the
sign and what it signifies, displaces the sovereignty of the eye. In Dan
Graham’s set, a curved two-way mirror acts as a video screen behind the
“throne,” providing the audience with a panning shot of the room from
the point of view of the king. (For Michel Foucault, analyzing the birth
of “classical representation” in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, the individual sub-
ject/spectator is constituted by an identification with the king.)15 At the
end of the performance, this pan dissolves into an image of the throne/
head on which the performer sits, with its lifelike face. The masked per-
former turns her back on the audience, and reveals her face—which turns
out to be the face projected on the plaster head—but her reflection in the
real time of the mirror is mediated by a time-delay video, which super-
imposes on the mirror/screen a flashback of her removing the mask. It is
as if the mirror possesses memory. The “mirror stage” on which the per-
formance literally takes place is not a medium of representation so much
as a pretext for the uncanny, a reminder, in the phrase Jo Anna Isaak adapts
from Joyce, of “the ineluctable temporality of the visible.”16
A conventional critique of allegorical idealizations of the female is
that they privilege the relation of the image to other images rather than to
women in the real world. This spiriting away of the physical body is ad-
dressed in Paul Muldoon’s “Aisling,” a parody of the eighteenth-century
Irish visionary poems:

Was she Aurora, or the goddess Flora,

Artimedora, or Venus bright,
or Anorexia, who left
a lemon stain on my flannel sheet?
. . . In Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital
a kidney machine
supports the latest hunger-striker
to have called off his fast, a saline
drip into his bag of brine.17

Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE 77

78 Luke Gibbons

guaiRE: An Allegory, 1985

Performed work. Performed by Olwen
Fouère. Set design by Dan Graham.
Dun Guaire Castle, Kinvara, Ireland,
1985.
Here the aisling figure is linked to the harlot (“the lemon stain”) and the
hunger-striker, the anorexic bodies of all three sharing the rarefaction of
the flesh.
This image of decomposition assumes a different valency, however, if
we recall Benjamin’s reclamation of the prostitute’s sensuality through the
image of the ruin.18 The fragmentation of the ruin is an allegory of desire
as well as of death, its incompletion finding expression in a ceaseless quest
that acknowledges rather than reverses the passage of time. In guaiRE’s
enigmatic maternal narratives, the denial of the body that is implicit in vir-
ginity is recuperated through the desire of the harlot. So, in the Russell
case, the absence of an identifiable father was read as evidence not of
parthenogenesis but of promiscuity—the likelihood of many fathers in her
mansion. Outside the family structure, the maternal becomes a figure of
erotic abandon.
While Coleman was preparing guaiRE, such anxieties returned to
haunt the Irish state in the forms of a divisive abortion referendum in 1983
and of the Kerry babies controversy shortly after. Two babies were found
dead in County Kerry, at locations fifty miles apart. A young woman, Joanne
Hayes, confessed under police questioning to the killing of the first baby,
then withdrew her confession, admitting to the killing only of her own,
different, child. The state insisted that she had carried, and killed, both ba-
bies—an implausible charge, for it was shown that the blood group of her
own baby’s father was incompatible with that of the other infant. The
prosecution then suggested that she had carried babies by two fathers at
the same time—a legal fiction that even the power of the state could not
uphold, even against a vulnerable single mother. Paternity had to be es-
tablished at all costs, as if the inability to name the father called the legiti-
macy of the state itself into question.19
Clearly, allegory in guaiRE derives its impact not from a suppression
of the real but from an anchorage in events, in narratives of time and place.
Its engagement with questions of narrative, representation, and sexuality
paradoxically depends on the contingency that, set in another time and
place, it would be a different story. Erich Auerbach has noted the links be-
tween allegory and prophecy in scripture, both of which look through signs
for other meanings; for Auerbach, though, prophecy differs from allegory
in its insistence on grounding its interpretations in “literal truth” (for the
early Church Fathers “refused to consider the Old Testament as mere al-
legory,” insisting that “it had real, literal meaning throughout”).20 Cole-
man’s guaiRE also retrieves allegory for history, except, unlike prophecy, it

Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE 79

80 Luke Gibbons

denies that the real is the sole preserve of the literal. This version of alle-
gory opens rather than closes narratives, establishing a gap between the
present and a past that awaits completion.

Notes

1. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 416.

2. See W. B.Yeats, Plays in Prose and Verse (London: Macmillan, 1931), p. 423.
3. Ibid., p. 72.
4. “At Dunguaire Castle, the past is relived again and again . . . when guests from all over
the world assemble at the nightly banquets set out by the Shannon Free Airport Develop-
ment Company whose property the castle now is.” James Patrick Hynes, White-Shrouded
Fort: A History of Guaire, the Hospitable, King of Connaught, and His Descendents (Mold: Stu-
dio 365, 1980), p. 61.
5. See B. A. Stolz and R. S. Shannon, eds., Oral Literature and the Formula (Ann Arbor: Cen-
ter for the Coordination of Ancient and Modern Studies, 1976).
6. See Lady Ferguson, The Story of the Irish before the Conquest, 2d ed. (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers
and Walker, 1889), p. 15.
7. Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Pica-
dor, 1987), p. 11.
8. Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 7 (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1977), p. 223. Freud is quoting an old legal tag, in Latin:“Pater semper incertus est,” while
the mother is “certissima.”
9. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York:Modern Library, 1946), p. 205. See also Karen Lawrence,
“Paternity, the Legal Fiction,” in Robert D. Newman and Weldon Thornton, eds., Joyce’s
Ulysses: The Larger Perspective (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), pp. 89–97.
10. Elizabeth Butler-Cullingford, “‘Thinking of Her . . . as . . . Ireland’: Yeats, Pearse and
Heaney,” Textual Practice 4, no. 1 (1990), p. 6. Butler-Cullingford observes that such per-
sonifications may project “male anxieties . . . of the need to control and subordinate the fe-
male sex,” anxieties introducing a fault line in the native patriarchal order—the weakness
induced by colonization.
11. Sir George Baden-Powell, The Saving of Ireland: Industrial, Financial, Political (Edinburgh
and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1898), p. 291. See also chapter 3 of David
Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manches-
ter: Manchester University Press, 1988).
12. Anne Owens Weekes, Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition (Lexington: Univer-
sity Press of Kentucky, 1990), pp. 15–16.
13. See Eileen Hunter, Christabel: The Russell Case and After (London: Andre Deutsch,
1973). The controversy was reactivated after Russell’s death, in 1976, with litigation be-
tween her first son and her husband’s next son.
14. Lynne Cooke, “A Tempered Agnosia” (1992), reprinted in this volume, p. 115.
15. See Michael Newman, “Allegories of the Subject: The Theme of Identity in the Work
of James Coleman,” in James Coleman: Selected Works (Chicago and London: Renaissance
Society at the University of Chicago and ICA London, 1985), p. 44. Foucault’s argument
recalls F. W. Maitland’s famous dictum, “For the first time, the Absolute State faced the Ab-
solute Individual,” quoted in Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1970), p. 63.
16. Jo Anna Isaak, The Ruin of Representation in Modernist Art and Texts (Ann Arbor: U.M.I.
Research Press, 1986), p. 23.
17. Paul Muldoon, Quoof (London:Faber and Faber, 1983), p. 39. See also Clair Wills, “The
Lie of the Land: Language, Imperialism and Trade in Paul Muldoon’s Meeting the British,” in
Neil Corcoran, ed., The Chosen Ground: Essays on Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland
(Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1992), pp. 136–49.
18. See Christine Buci-Glucksmann, “Catastrophic Utopia: The Feminine as Allegory in
the Modern,” in Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laquer, eds., The Making of the Modern
Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley:University of California Press,
1987), pp. 220–29.
19. See Nell McCafferty, A Woman to Blame: The Kerry Babies Case (Dublin: Attic Press,
1985). Joanne Hayes’s own book, My Story (Dingle: Brandon Books, 1985), was withdrawn
from circulation due to a legal action following the state tribunal into her case.
20. Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 30.

Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE 81

Now & Then, 1981
Performed by Olwen Fouère and James
McHale. Music by Roger Doyle. Project
Arts Theater, Dublin, 1981.
 Memory Lessons and History Tableaux:
James Coleman’s Archaeology of Spectacle

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

I have already remarked that memory is the great criterion of art; art
is a mnemotechny of the beautiful.
Charles Baudelaire, Salon of 1846

Baudelaire’s remark seems to have sprung from an intuition of imminent

loss, articulating the insight that his (and Manet’s) was the last moment of
modernity when the aesthetic could still be related to the mnemonic. The
statement’s normative emphasis clearly went unheeded in the subsequent
unfolding of modern visuality, since the exact opposite of Baudelaire’s de-
sire became the founding principle of modernism in the twentieth century:
the triumphant annihilation of cultural memory. The orders to eradicate
all remnants of the past, the imperatives to make it “new” and to be ab-
solutely “modern,” remained strident from the inception of the avant-
garde up to the late 1960s. Already a contemporary of Baudelaire, the
politically reactionary Maxime Du Camp, would voice the first proto-
futurist proclamations for the need to assimilate artistic practice into the
structure of science and industry, and would suggest that the imagery of
the myths of antiquity should be effaced by modernity’s myths of techni-
cal progress:

Everything advances, expands and increases around us. . . . Science

produces marvels, industry accomplishes miracles, and we remain im-
passive, insensitive, disdainful, scratching the false cords of our lyres,
closing our eyes in order not to see, or persisting in looking towards a
84 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

past that nothing ought to make us regret. Steam is discovered, and

we sing to Venus, daughter of the briny main; electricity is discovered
and we sing to Bacchus, friend of the rosy grape. It’s absurd.1

If modernism did not try to assimilate the governing techno-scientific

paradigms, resulting in nonrepresentational painting and construction, it
engaged in the mimicry of the commodity image, approximating con-
gruence with the actual object in the collage and the readymade. If in 1912
the tabula rasa of abstraction promised liberation from the fetters of Beaux-
Arts culture in favor of the new social and cultural hygiene of industrial
society, it was with the same vehement conviction that minimalist ab-
straction in 1960 pronounced the shift from a purely self-reflexive em-
piricism to a phenomenologically defined perception, by assimilating the
morphology and materials of technological and corporate design. Simi-
larly, a prohibitionist tradition in literature was established and maintained,
from the emphatic declaration of a structural linguistic foundation of po-
etry in the phonetic revolution of 1912 to Theodor W. Adorno’s final in-
terdiction of all possibilities of lyric poetry after the Holocaust.
While each generational account argued in different terms against the
mnemonic dimension of culture, the declared enemies were identical and
remained the same throughout the twentieth century: historical narrative,
figural representation, theatrical enactment—in other words, all the con-
ventions of depiction and figuration that painting had once shared with
the other arts, theater and literature in particular.
In contrast to visual modernity, however, literature, theater, and the
cinema retained in all but the most radical instances (such as structural cin-
ema and so-called experimental poetry) a complex network of interrela-
tionships with the representational conventions that modernist aesthetics
had set out to displace. Yet, even in structural cinema, the authors who had
most systematically dismantled narrative and representation in 1960s ex-
perimental film reconsidered these conventions barely a decade later (e.g.,
Michael Snow’s Rameau’s Nephew and Yvonne Rainer’s Christina Talking
Pictures) without forgoing their originary criticism of the ideological im-
plications and effects of cinematic narrativity.
Structural film could never claim to be the authoritative and exclu-
sively valid voice of cinematic modernity in the manner that its static visual
counterparts always insisted on being definitive on a constantly changing
stage (this was even truer in literature, where nobody would even have
thought of doubting, for example, the validity of Paul Celan’s work, in spite
of its manifest deviation from the historical prognosis issued by Adorno).
Perhaps, more importantly, theater and literature maintained a conscious-
ness of their own discursive status as representation and fiction, an aware-
ness of their origin in complex traditions of rhetoric and dramaturgy
that—while displaced—were nevertheless sublated in the new forms (the
way dialogue with Aristotelian theatrical conventions permeates Brecht’s
epic theater throughout).
By contrast, visual modernity of the twentieth century—at least in its
most relevant moments—insisted not only on its absolute break with tra-
dition, but furthermore on its proximity to, if not congruity with, the
“real,” emphasizing its characteristic of immediate intervention within its
parameters. The visual avant-garde claimed effects for these interventions
that varied as widely as the positions from which it departed, ranging from
the positivist ideal of empirical verifiability, forced to the extreme of the tau-
tological (“the black square is a black square”), to another moment when
the repressive force of abstraction as cognitive and perceptual purification
promised a heightened degree of transparency, both in the construction of
the object and in its modes of experience. Later yet, that very tradition—
as, for example, in the conceptual art practices of the late 1960s—prom-
ised that a rigorous elimination of all remnants of symbolic space and
rhetorical figuration could purge representation altogether, engendering
a language of “mere” information, a photographic imagery of “pure” doc-
umentation and performative interventions, allowing for an unmediated
presence and egalitarian exchange between performer and spectator.
And inasmuch as modernist representational strategies insisted on be-
ing coextensive with, rather than fundamentally different from, the objects
of the “real,” they also insisted on the aesthetic object’s almost miraculous
inversion of object experience within the spaces of the “real”: to the extent
that all object relations were increasingly controlled and had acquired the
condition of the fetish, the aesthetic object had to inscribe itself mimeti-
cally within these conditions to generate at least the illusion—if not actual
instances—of a critical negation of the principles of instrumentalizing ra-
tionality and fetishization. The aesthetic object claimed to situate itself in
a manifest opposition against false consciousness constituted in ideology.
One could argue, then, that one of the most crucial preconditions of
visual modernity had been not only to disavow art’s mnemonic functions,
but equally to annihilate the memory of its proper discursivity as visual fic-
tion (e.g., its status within a long and complex system of representational
traditions) as well as its conventionality (in the linguistic sense). This meant

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux 85

86 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

concretely that visual modernism had to deny its functions of figuration and its
rhetorical dimension. A critical departure from this positivist/empiricist fal-
lacy of modernism in the field of literature is described by Wlad Godzich:

The realm of the apparent holds the truth hidden away, so that its only
means of access are the figures of the apparent;yet these figures are not
known to be figures for they are the only mode of being that lends it-
self to knowledge. . . . In the (deluded) possibility of methodological
absolutism, truth is meant to be visible in unmediated form, in and of
itself, and especially free of figuration. In the realm that is ours, where
we have shed any belief in the ineffable and know the impossibility of
unmediated truth, we are indeed back in the figural; but more specif-
ically, in a relation to the figural where the figural is known as figural.
In other words, we are in the rhetorical, as Paul de Man has been
showing us all along.2

While the beginnings of James Coleman’s work can be situated in the

final chapter of modernism in the late 1960s, the formation of his inde-
pendent work from the mid 1970s onward illuminates the degree to which
the definition of his artistic project no longer depended on the modernist
paradigm of a radical dismantling of traditions. Its intense critical dialogue
with the—primarily American—context of postminimal and conceptual
art opened the apparatus of the historical repressions constitutive of this
last phase of high modernist and literalist art, precisely in order to recon-
sider the disavowal of rhetoric and figuration in these practices—ques-
tions already posed by postminimalism’s Italian counterpart, Arte Povera,3
and certainly articulated theoretically in Paul de Man’s simultaneously
emerging reconsideration of modernist literary studies.4
The first works that Coleman installed in gallery spaces in Milan in
the early seventies, such as Flash Piece (1970), shared all the features of the
most advanced practices of that historical moment.5 While following a
complex set of instructions from experimental-psychology textbooks and
philosophical introductions to the principles of phenomenology, Cole-
man’s work suggested the radical dissolution of the aesthetic object, the
deployment of quasi-scientific means and technical tools to engage the
viewer at the highest level of a critically self-conscious participation, and
the decision to focus increasingly, if not exclusively, on the available and
constitutive conditions of perception.
Flash Piece, 1970
Programmed electronic flash.
Installation view.

These are the premises that link Coleman’s early practice directly with
the work of artists such as Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham (who would
become a close friend of Coleman at that time). Both Nauman and Gra-
ham had attempted to radicalize the implications of minimal sculpture,
which in their view had remained implicated with the pictorial and the
sculptural in spite of the minimalists’ claims to have literally incorporated
a new spectator. Michael Newman situates Coleman’s work accurately in
this historical context:

While much conceptual art appeared in the form of a proposition or

commentary, Coleman’s “pieces” of 1972–1974 involved the viewer in
a process of investigation or problem solving (without necessarily pre-
supposing a definitive solution) which his works continue to do to this
day. . . . Through all these works, time, memory and causality are in
question:How do different interpretations come about? What part do
inference and memory play? Does this imply a continuity or discon-
tinuity of the subject through time? . . . Coleman is concerned with
the relationship between the identities of the subject and image as
they are mutually “conditioned” or caused through time: Is it the

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux 87

88 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

subject who “projects” a different interpretation or the aspects of duck

and rabbit which cause a change in the subject by inserting him or her
in the field of representation? Does the continuation of the “absent”
figure in the memory of the viewer “anticipate” its reappearance?6

The accuracy of the critic’s description, however, reveals also the scien-
tistic literalism which Coleman’s work of the early 1970s shares with that of
many of his contemporaries, a literalism embodied emblematically in his de-
ployment of schemata from standard works of theories of perception (such
as the “duck/rabbit” schema of perceptual ambivalence). But typically, in
an effort at critical distancing from that aesthetic, Coleman has commented
that the deployment of these schemata was addressed at undoing rather than
enforcing the traditionally convenient scientific concept of ambiguity:

I would never use the word “ambiguity,” I dislike it intensely. The

“Duck/Rabbit” piece exemplifies that there is no ambiguity—but
those are clearly two images, ambiguities are the result of the percep-
tion that insists on a resolution of those images.7

Conflicting definitions of spectatorship seem to determine the spe-

cific dialectic of Coleman’s works from the early seventies: on the one
hand Flash Piece, in its functional and experimental deployment of colored
electric lights, demarcates a polemical departure from the still primarily
painterly and pictorial concerns of the work of Dan Flavin, who had re-
cently electrified abstraction but who had repositioned the viewer in a
space- and object-experience of traditionally passive and contemplative
reception. On the other hand, the activation of spectatorship in Coleman’s
installation (as in many works by Dan Graham from that time), with its
emphatic disregard for any convention of pictoriality or plasticity, reduced
the viewer to the dubiously emancipated role of the participant in an ele-
mentary scientific experiment on the phenomenological relation between
memory and perception.
This dilemma, constitutive of the radicality of postminimal work in
general, resulted from an unresolvable historical contradiction:namely, that
the work’s phenomenological and theoretical ambition could no longer
acknowledge its specific status as an aesthetic object, nor admit its linguis-
tic conventionality within traditions of artistic and, therefore, rhetorical
figuration. At the same time, the work’s dependence on institutional and
discursive legitimation prevented it both from actually abandoning its sta-
tus as a traditional aesthetic object and from claiming the status of a scien-
tific or political intervention.
This reductivist dilemma applies even more to Memory Piece (1971),
which literally eliminated all traces of perceptual plasticity in favor of a pro-
grammatic foregrounding of the viewers’ public enactment of mnemonic
processes. The work took the participatory dimension within a simply de-
fined structure to its logical conclusion: with a vengeance typical of early
seventies deconstructions of notions of authorship, the work effaced its
artistic “original” textual definition only to have it replaced by a potentially
infinite contingency of viewers’ memory projections. These recorded re-
sponses were superimposed on the artistic “urtext” as so many accumu-
lated palimpsests which eventually made up the work in its entirety. As a
result of its exclusion of visuality and its focus on speech and the subject’s
enunciation, the work indicated another important shift: Memory Piece
leads not only from the death of the author to the birth of the viewer but
also from the dissolution of the primacy of the visual to the instantiation
of the subject in linguistic articulation. Anne Rorimer’s minute and elo-
quent description of Memory Piece clearly indicates that the work gener-
ates a precariously circular viewing condition:

Memory Piece . . . reflects on the role of memory with regard to per-

ception. . . . Coleman replicates the mnemonic process. He accom-
plishes this by means of two tape recorders. The first tape recorder
supplies a text of about three to five minutes in length. The partici-
pant in the work may hear the original text just once and, having at-
tempted to memorize it, must record it on the second machine. This
text, in turn, must be recorded once again as remembered. The ac-
tivity may be repeated, theoretically, ad infinitum, or until the nearly
inexhaustible supply of tapes runs out. Previously recorded texts are
not accessible, and as completed, are kept in a provided storage unit.8

Spectators/participants are suspended within the sudden and radical eman-

cipation from their status as mere viewers, only to find themselves restricted
to the experience of the deconstruction of their traditional aesthetic
expectations.
What seems to have become evident to Coleman, then, was a dilemma
similar to the one recently identified by Jürgen Habermas concerning the
function of philosophy once it has become apparent that the philosopher
can no longer pretend to provide privileged access to truth: namely, the

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux 89

90 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

question of how aesthetic objects can claim a specific truth value and how
this claim can be legitimized. For Coleman, this problem posed itself first
of all with regard to an artistic activity that demanded the absolute disso-
lution of the author’s privileged position and of the object’s special status,
and secondly with regard to the condition that artistic practice had in-
creasingly insisted on the necessity of abolishing the specific forms of ex-
perience it had traditionally generated. The contradictory nature of such
a claim would become all the more evident once the aesthetic object had
assimilated itself in its entirety to the condition of the scientific experi-
ment, yet continued to operate exclusively within an institutional and dis-
cursive framework that provided definitions which were exclusively valid
within the sphere of aesthetic experience.9
In order to resolve this dilemma in a complex process of critical dif-
ferentiations, Coleman’s work had to engage with several problems simul-
taneously. The first one was the legacy of the neo-Kantian aesthetic of
(American) modernism, with its emphasis on perceptual empiricism, self-
reflexivity, and medium-specificity and its prescription of an essential and
exclusive visuality as the sole legitimate modus of the experience of high art
objects. The fallacies of this position had been brilliantly (and inadvertently)
articulated in 1967 in the swan song of late modernist criticism, Michael
Fried’s essay “Art and Objecthood.” In an almost desperate attempt to shore
up the territory of American modernism at the moment of its definitive
disappearance, Fried had uncannily singled out theater, precisely the do-
main of modernism’s utmost historical repression, as its primary enemy. In
a statement sounding off its attack on minimalism with a peculiar hybrid of
nineteenth-century phraseological and terminological borrowings from
Walter Pater’s normative aestheticism and Max Nordau’s theory of degener-
acy, Fried had pronounced a highly phobic prohibition against theatricality:

Theater and theatricality are at war today, not simply with modernist
painting (or modernist painting and sculpture), but with art as such. . . .
The success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly
to depend on their ability to defeat theater. Art degenerates as it ap-
proaches the condition of theater. Theater is the common denomi-
nator that binds a large and seemingly disparate variety of activities to
one another, and that distinguishes those activities from the radically
different enterprises of the modernist arts. . . .
The concepts of quality and value—and to the extent that these
are central to art, the concept of art itself—are meaningful, or wholly
 meaningful, only within the individual arts. What lies between the
arts is theater.10

It is certainly against this doxa of modernist visuality that Coleman di-

rected his—at first gradual, and then almost programmatic—embrace of
the conventions of theatricality and narrativity in his work after 1973. At
the same time, he would have wanted to reposition himself in relation to
postminimalism and conceptual art, work which had in fact already initi-
ated a critical analysis of that modernist legacy, yet which had remained
ultimately within the orbit of modernism’s parameters. It was precisely this
work that had become the actual target of Fried’s polemical (and erro-
neous) association of the phenomenological dimensions of minimal art
with the conditions of theatricality.
Evidently, this duality of a simultaneous differentiation and critical
negation of both the modernist as well as the minimal and conceptual aes-
thetic would have situated Coleman in a complicated dialogic relationship
with the practices of his contemporaries.11
The key objection against the theatrical implications of minimal
sculpture in Fried’s argument had addressed the fact that the presence of
the beholder was programmatically foregrounded, in manifest opposition
to modernist work that had been defined as autonomous and complete.
Fried’s argument had actually claimed that a medium-specific object could
be envisaged without considering either the spectator or the discursive
and institutional framework constitutive of the specificity of aesthetic ex-
perience. With hindsight, the argument appears as a last attempt to main-
tain the traditionally defined and regulated place of the spectator and to
prohibit the emerging comprehension of the necessary syntagmatic char-
acter of structurally produced (visual) meaning:

Literalist sensibility is theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned

with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters lit-
eralist work. [Robert] Morris makes this explicit. Whereas in previ-
ous art “what is to be had from the work is located strictly within (it),”
the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation—one that,
virtually by definition, includes the beholder.12

Coleman’s critical departure from this position, as for example in Slide Piece
(1972–73), would therefore not just redeem perceptual phenomenology
in explicit opposition to late modernist claims, but would radicalize the

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux 91

92 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

phenomenological as the reappearance of the theatrical. This all the more

so since he would explicitly historicize the theatrical within its proper dis-
cursive conventions (speech and rhetoric, enunciation and performance),
positioning it against the minimalists’ and postminimalists’ claims for a
universal legibility of the phenomenological object or performance: after
all, the performances of Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, and Bruce Nauman
had reincorporated the theatrical in both speech and gesture, but they did
so precisely in total opposition to traditional definitions of theatricality.
They had enacted theatricality as manifestly outside of the conventions of
rhetoric, enunciation, and dramaturgy.
In Coleman’s Slide Piece, a projected photographic image of an appar-
ently banal urban site becomes the subject of numerous (between three
and five) oral descriptions, recorded in the language of the country in
which the piece happens to be installed. Each of these descriptions—in a
Rashomon-like effect of diverse perceptions and narrative recountings of
a singular incident—isolates utterly different aspects of the photograph.
Each speaker/observer seems to follow a different perceptual logic, while
the viewer follows the continuous sequence of the reiterative projection
of identical slides. Slide Piece thus withholds perceptual information (or
rather reduces it to the threshold of the most minute differences of an ex-
tremely slow, gradual perception) and emphasizes that perceptual objects
are unthinkable outside or independently of the linguistic activation and
consciousness of the viewer. Thus the work reverts attention utterly onto
the level of reception. In fact, it is constituted exclusively in the polypho-
nous acts of reading, since the “work” itself provides nothing but an empty
iconic point of reference for the activation of the speakers’ (and the view-
ers’) responses. “Theatricality” for Coleman meant at this early moment
to displace the traditional concept of the visual object as the integrated and
privileged locus of aesthetic knowledge or experience, and to dismantle it
as the site of a supposedly autonomous visual specificity.
Yet the interaction between Coleman’s work and the work of his im-
mediate peers of the 1970s is even more complex than his critical differen-
tiation from the modernist legacies of the 1960s. Within the very moment
of conceptual art in which his work originated, Coleman reformulated his
approach to language in distinct opposition to the preoccupations of con-
ceptual artists whose work originated primarily from principles of analyt-
ical philosophy or structural linguistics. Whereas they had articulated a
purely textual aesthetic in critical response to minimalism, and had offered
up language as a matrix for artistic practice by defining it either according
to the philosophical model of the analytic proposition or that of the lin-
guistic performative, Coleman’s work would now expand the range of
linguistic conventions eligible for artistic practice to include rhetoric
and dramaturgy, and—perhaps most important—the register that Roland
Barthes would call the “grain of the voice”:the phonetic definition of sub-
jectivity within the acts of enunciation.
Coleman’s work would insist—once again in distinct opposition to
conceptual art—on the necessity of sustaining the dialectic between the
linguistic dimension and the dimension of visual and theatrical represen-
tation. Since the mid 1970s, his work has juxtaposed these extended reg-
isters of linguistic competence with an equally expanded conception of
visuality, incorporating all those practices of theatrical and performative
figuration that modernist visuality had excluded. Even though some con-
ceptualists, such as Robert Barry or Lawrence Weiner, had already situ-
ated their work within an emphatic and often unfathomably ambiguous
relation to both the language of theory with its instrumental logic and po-
etry with its seemingly random and arbitrary conditions, Coleman would
now construct a manifest hybrid of linguistic functions, operating simul-
taneously within each of his projects: the performative, the rhetorical, and
the dialogical/theatrical.
It is certainly not accidental that the slide projection would become
one of Coleman’s typical formats, a technology and presentational device
first introduced into the visual arts in the context of conceptual practices
of the late 1960s. For example, Robert Barry’s projections of typewritten
or typeset slides (showing word lists to be read as accumulations of perfor-
mative statements) opened the limited definitions of language functions
given in the conceptual model of the analytic proposition, as did Lawrence
Weiner’s Statements in 1968. By introducing the decisively temporal di-
mension of the linguistic structure, they displaced both the static visuality
of modernist pictoriality as well as the problematic compromises with the
visual in more recent photographic works that conceived the visual as
“pure” documentary records.
From the first installation of Slide Piece in 1973, Coleman would con-
struct the visuality of the projection within the traditions of static pictorial-
ity and the linguistic and performative dimensions of the projection within the
hybrid conventions of linguistic temporality, theatricality, and narrative.
As much as the photographic aesthetic of conceptual art is at the center of
Coleman’s strategies from the mid seventies onward, his work never ac-
quired the mythical status of conceptual photography as purely functional

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux 93

94 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

documentation. On the contrary, the photographic image itself is con-

stantly suspended in juxtapositions with language and pictoriality. Thus,
the presentational format of the slide projection emerges as an ideal device
to sustain the dialectics between the pictorial and the photographic, be-
tween narrativity and stasis, between language in its performative and the-
atrical modes.
To the avant-gardiste triumphalism of certain forms of conceptual art,
which prides itself on having shed the last fetters of visuality and advanced
to a realm of pure linguistic performativity, Coleman’s work responds with
skeptical contemplation and a countermemory of the forms of experience
still embedded in the representational and linguistic conventions from
which conceptualism had proudly divested itself. Similar to Marcel Brood-
thaers’s insistently posed—yet highly rhetorical—questions about the in-
compatibility between the language models underlying conceptual art and
those originating in late nineteenth-century literary modernity, Coleman
poses questions concerning the apparent incompatibility between the rad-
ically emancipatory forms of a linguistic and photographic critique of tra-
ditional models of visuality and the differentiated forms of linguistic and
specular experience embedded in the traditions of figuration, rhetoric, and
dramaturgy. Yet at no moment in Coleman’s work does countermemory
as resistance against avant-gardiste triumphalism make the profoundly reac-
tionary claim to have the privilege of historical continuity, or worse yet,
to have renewed the forms of experience that the avant-gardiste enterprise
had publicly and exemplarily declared as annihilated.
Seeing, through Coleman’s work, Fried’s blindness concerning the
phenomenologically refigured spectator, however, reveals that spectator-
ship was not the sole, perhaps not even the primary question that motivated
Coleman’s critical contribution to the demise of modernist positions.
Rather, his aesthetic of “theatricality” seems to have corresponded as well
to the problematic implications of theories of subjectivity and signification
that had been implicit since Duchamp’s declaration of the death of the au-
thor in the aesthetic of the readymade, and that had become theoretically
explicit in the influence of poststructuralist theories of subjectivity on artis-
tic practice of the 1970s. Most important, however, was the realization that
Duchamp himself had already articulated a polemical revision of the uni-
versally accepted aesthetic of the readymade when engaging in the clan-
destine project of Etant donnés as an allegory staging the desire of figuration.
The tableau vivant as a hybrid model between pictoriality and theater,
between an aesthetic of randomness and one of extremely studied preci-
sion, had already attracted artists like Yvonne Rainer and Robert Morris
in the mid 1960s. That genre’s innate dialectic corresponded to their de-
sire to deconstruct the traditions of virtuoso (dance) performance and si-
multaneously to adopt the antihierarchical logic of Duchamp and Cage
(without ending up with a static object conception or the atrophy of or-
thodox minimalism).13
As a genre redeemed from obscurity and as the most outmoded and
unlikely convention of prototheatrical display, the tableau vivant suited
Coleman’s investigation of the phenomenological boundaries of minimal-
ism and its followers: its fusion of choreographed movement and pictorial
stasis, its synthesis of present immediacy and arrested temporality (making
the present appear to be verging incessantly on the past), its aleatory choices
from an infinity of possible moments fused with a decisive specificity—
all of these were features of considerable interest in the elaboration of
Coleman’s subsequent projects. Once again, though, his systematic en-
gagement with the model of the tableau vivant in his work since the early
1980s—in performances such as Now & Then (1981), or his exceptional
video work So Different . . . and Yet (1980)—not only seems to voice
doubts about the restrictive and literalist interpretations of the modernist
and Duchampian legacies in postminimal and conceptual work but, more
important, seems to question the restrictive and orthodox applications of
poststructuralist concepts of subjectivity. What emerges from a contem-
plation of Coleman’s work is neither a literal enactment of poststructural-
ist concepts of subjectivity (as many of his best interpreters have argued)14
nor the extension of Duchampian concepts of authorship and objecthood,
but rather a critical complication of these concepts in a manner similar to
Duchamp’s own critical revision of his readymade doxa and the prema-
turely proclaimed death of the artistic author in the return to the figura-
tion of the Etant donnés. Arguments developed by Maurice Blanchot in
response to the legacies of Foucault and the prematurely proclaimed death
of the subject seem to articulate a position that parallels the critical com-
plexity of Coleman’s dialogue with these legacies:

For example, it is accepted as a certainty that Foucault, adhering in

this to a certain conception of literary production, got rid of, purely
and simply, the notion of the subject: no more oeuvre, no more au-
thor, no more creative unity. But things are not that simple. The sub-
ject does not disappear; rather, its excessively determined unity is put
in question. What arouses interest and inquiry is its disappearance

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux 95

96 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

(that is, the new manner of being which disappearance is), or rather
its dispersal, which does not annihilate it but offers us, out of it, no
more than a plurality of positions and a discontinuity of functions (and
here we reencounter the system of discontinuities, which, rightly or
wrongly, seemed at one time to be a characteristic of serial music).15

Such a “system of discontinuities” is certainly apparent as one of the

structuring principles of Coleman’s work from the late seventies onward,
and it is precisely in the emphatic juxtaposition of methodological frag-
ments—in the work’s deliberately constructed incompatibility of visual
and textual conventions—that its profoundly allegorical character mani-
fests and mourns the inability of contemporary visual practices to con-
template subjectivity, construct narratives, and represent the process of
historical experience. Yet it is evident that Coleman’s “system of disconti-
nuities” resists at the same time even the slightest thought of a simple
return to a centered humanist subject conception or a pre-Duchampian
aesthetic.
Coleman’s Box (ahhareturnabout) (1977) is almost programmatic in its
reinscription of both figural representation and literary narrative into the
traditional, perceptually determined object. A loop of found film footage
is combined with alternating insertions of short units of black film leader
and a soundtrack of an internal monologue scripted by the artist. Jean
Fisher has observed with great clarity how the text operates in the struc-
ture of the work:

Coleman’s dramatized recitation addresses itself to listening, not to

reading. This is due in part to its use of phonetic puns . . . ; but it is
also the result of the way that the voice produces meaning, relying as
much on what Roland Barthes described as the “grain of the voice”
(enunciation) as on those expressive qualities which are signifiers of
character in theater. Insofar as it is a performed recitation, Box may be
said to be “theatrical,” but in presenting an associative rather than syn-
tagmatic narrative, it is not typical of conventional theater.16

One could understand Box’s subtitle, ahhareturnabout, not just as a reference

to a strategy in the prize fighter’s arsenal of aggressive and defensive move-
ments, but also as an announcement of a radical reversal of the paradigmatic
features governing postminimal and postconceptual artistic production in
the mid 1970s. As Coleman’s film loop follows mimetically an exchange
Box (ahhareturnabout), 1977
Projected 16 mm black-and-white film.
Continuous cycle. Installation at Julian
Pretto Gallery, New York, 1977.

of punches in rapidly alternating sequences of blackouts and image-sound

flashes, it literalizes the optical beat that Rosalind Krauss has brilliantly de-
scribed as the moment of departure from disembodied modernist optical-
ity toward a phenomenological inscription, toward the grounding of visual
experience in the range of the optical unconscious and its bodily founda-
tions.17 Yet to the same degree that Box reiterates the experience of the per-
ceptual pulse in the spectator, pushing it almost literally across the threshold
of physical discomfort, this pulse alternates with an iconic sign of two
fighters exchanging actual punches. Not only does this correspondence
generate an effect of the doubling of the semiotic as the physical (border-
ing on a pun), but it also situates the image of bodily performance within
a very specific historical event and within the confrontation of two his-
torically identifiable protagonists.
Box (ahhareturnabout) signals a major departure from American post-
minimalist aesthetics, since the bodies of Coleman’s performers no longer
appear as neutral and naturalized transhistorical givens within a universally
valid field of potential phenomenological inscriptions—as the body was
still being presented in the work of Graham or Nauman in order to oppose
the techno-scientific orthodoxy and morphology of minimalist literalism,

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux 97

98 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

while ultimately still participating in its very logic. Jean Fisher succinctly
describes the refiguration of the body in Coleman’s work in a more theo-
retical perspective, stating that “if the ‘body’ returns here, it is not as ‘na-
ture’ but as a referent to the conflictual sociopolitical narratives that
constitute the real conditions of experience.”18
In comparison to Flash Piece, which deployed the device of flashing
lights as a phenomenological critique of opticality, Box reveals the degree
to which Coleman’s approach was changing by the mid 1970s. In its man-
ifest theatricalization of the performing body, this work weaves the reap-
pearance of figuration instantly into a complex set of historical references
and of immediate experiences and dialogic responses. Integrated within
the perceptual pulse we now encounter both an acoustic as well as a rep-
resentational and a narrative dimension, even though the seriality of the
loop as well as the internal repetition still recall the structuring principles
of sculptural work and structural film of the seventies. The stark graphic
and grainy loop of found footage evokes the persistence of the iconic di-
mension in the images of Warhol’s paintings, and their incessant reminder
of the inescapable condition of referentiality, even in the most rigorously
serial structural order of pure repetition.19
Rather than simply initiating a return to a cinematic mode of repre-
sentation, unleashing a false plenitude of narrative upon the spectator, Box
operates clearly within the demarcations that the critiques of modernist
practice themselves had articulated, since these restrictions of representa-
tion are the focal points of Coleman’s analytical approach as much as his
resuscitations of figuration and narrativity emerge as the subversive strat-
egy aiming to dismantle these restrictions.
This dialectic of Coleman’s complex allegorical operations since the
mid 1970s, in its attempt to criticize the inability of visual practice to en-
gage in narrativity and figuration and at the same time to probe the pos-
sibilities of their redemption as fragments, is articulated in the continuous
reworkings of these paradigmatic restrictions, in the opposition between
the emphatic recovery of the mnemonic dimension and the rupture of the
governing conventions of visuality. Thus, the viewer of Box is suspended
in a continuous alternation—in a manner similar to the condition of un-
decidability in the “Duck/Rabbit” work titled Playback of a Daydream from
a few years earlier: on the one hand, the visual pulse of phenomenologi-
cal inscription and the indexical registration of the light-emitting projec-
tor; and, on the other, the historically specific event of the boxing match
and its iconic representation.
 It is in the light of this programmatic declaration of the return to a his-
torical subject that Coleman’s subtitle itself—ahhareturnabout—almost
reads as an indication of a strategic move by the artist within the field of
given artistic operations. Moreover, one could argue that within the gen-
eral project of reconstituting a historically specific body to the universal-
ist abstraction of phenomenology, Coleman insists on a sociopolitically
specific body, structured by the discourse on national identity (in this case
by presenting the Irish fighter Gene Tunney as the struggling protagonist
who tries to save his boxing championship as much as his sociopolitical
identity as an Irishman).
The emphasis on this geopolitical specificity opens the way for yet
another critical dimension in Coleman’s work: rather than claim a space of
phenomenological neutrality or aesthetic exemption from the apparatus
of spectacle culture, Coleman positions his work instantly within the spec-
tacle’s own parameters by invoking the archaic imagery of the boxing
match as one of the most charged metaphors of social conduct within cap-
italism and as one of the key topoi of modernity and its spectacular forms
of mass entertainment.20
Precisely in his insistence on the historical specificity of the incident
and its ramifications for the conception of a national identity constituted
by means of the cultural construct, Coleman also opposes the totalizing
claims of spectacle, for only in the extreme emphasis on the particularity of
historical experience can the last vestige or the first index of unalienated
subjectivity be found. Paradoxically, this specificity and concreteness can
only assert itself with the allegorical hindsight of the cultural construct,
because any insistence on a realization of that specificity of identity within
the very sociopolitical reality that has totally obliterated it would instantly
turn into the most reactionary conviction of nationalism and ethnicism
currently played out on the stages of the disintegrated nation-states.
A position similar in complexity to Coleman’s approach to the prob-
lematic intertwinement between cultural production and sociopolitical
identity has been described by Seamus Deane with regard to Irish litera-
ture and its reception:

To combat some fetishized version of Irishness on the political and so-

cial level often has, as a consequence, the acceptance of an equally
fetishized notion of Art. If the Art is Literature, and if the Irish are
agreed to be quite gifted in this area, then there is, inevitably, a re-
smuggled version of Irishness operating within the economy of the

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux 99

100 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

debate. Literature, art, poetry, the province formerly assigned to the

19th-century colonial version of the Celt, has now become part of a
late-20th-century repossession of Irishness by those who would, in all
other respects, reject the existence of such an essentialized quality. . . .
The politics of such countries not only become less interesting than
their literature, they are effectively erased by it. The inflation of the
esthetic always leaves a political deficit. The recruitment of postcolo-
nial literature to post-Modernity dooms the politics of postcolonial
societies to pre-Modernity. . . . Postcolonial theory conspires at times
with the very essentialisms that it aspires to rebuke;it permits the rein-
troduction of the “feminized” construct that it took so much trouble
to expel, and it is persuaded to do so in the name of “Art.” In a simi-
lar, but also different way, feminism confronts this issue, wishing to
assert for itself a radical independence that is over and over again
rearticulated in the residually essentialist discourse it wishes to erase.
Perhaps Irigaray’s way of going through it in order to come out the
other side, or on the side of the Other, is the only recourse. A stereo-
type should not perhaps be demolished until it has been reinhabited.21

This dialectic seems to assume a central importance in the subsequent

development of Coleman’s work, since in all instances the abstract univer-
sality of specular conventions and spectacular display is juxtaposed with an
interrogation of the possibilities of temporally and geopolitically deter-
mined forms of experience. The conception of identity through aesthetic
practice now seems to be constituted within unresolvable contradictions:
the necessary cultural production of sites of subject articulation and struc-
tures of memory conflicts with the simultaneous, inevitably ideological
enforcement of a mythical identity; and the same schism exists between
cultural production as the most complex form of spectacularization and
cultural practices as the last resistances against the global homogenization
generated by spectacle.
This becomes evident if one considers, for example, Coleman’s excep-
tional (and singular) tribute to the conventions of static sculpture in his work
The Ploughman’s Party (1979–80).22 Conceived as an “Irish” contribution to
an exhibition of Irish art in England in 1981, The Ploughman’s Party inten-
sifies the confrontation between artistic constructions of identity and their
immediate falsification within the process of spectacularization that cultural
consumption now inevitably enforces. One of the rare static and nonpho-
tographic works by Coleman, it consists of a forged-iron relief in the shape
The Ploughman’s Party, 1979–80
Projected slide image with audio
narration. Blue neon, forged iron,
and gold and silver paint.

of a plow (reminiscent of both the stellar constellation and the political em-
blem of Sinn Féin, the historical protagonist and name of the political party
for an independent and united Ireland). Its surfaces covered with gold leaf,
the “relief ” was installed in a room entirely lined with white felt and was lit
from behind with bright blue neon light. As though the already insuffer-
able association of a symbol of radical identity politics with a luxurious cul-
tural construct of dubious pedigree did not suffice, the relief ostentatiously
positioned itself within a derivative and hybrid aesthetic, fusing David
Smith and Dan Flavin via an excursion through the legacy of Yves Klein.
Played continuously, the audio component of The Ploughman’s Party
reiterated the slippage from the symbol of a radical political cause to the
luxurious pomp of yet another variation of installation art: an actor’s voice
on a tape loop recited a textual montage written by Coleman that made the
listeners slide through similar turns and inversions of language modes. In
a perpetual phonetic and lexical glissando, the speaker articulated all the de-
marcations of class that can be revealed through enunciation and vocabu-
lary. Ranging from a statement of peasant rules to the promises of perfume
and jewelry advertisements, the recitation alternated in sudden switches

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux 101

102 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

between the grainy voice of a subjectivity seemingly in its “natural” state

uttering obscenities and the histrionics of a commercial using all the pho-
netic registers of seduction. This sculptural and phonetic grotesque—cer-
tainly Coleman’s most comical work—deploys the allegorical strategy of
a simultaneous devalorization of all accepted linguistic and artistic con-
ventions to induce the experience of a semiotic field run amok, and the
travesty necessary for a cathartic emancipation from the aspirations to cul-
turally or politically constructed identity in the present.
Three years after Box, Coleman produced So Different . . . and Yet, his
first and—for the time being—only work employing video imagery. As
though he were constructing an archaeology of the genres and techniques
of the specular and of spectacularization, Coleman moved from film and the
mass-cultural athletic ritual in Box through the display of the fashion show
in his performance Now & Then; from the phonetics of alienation in the jux-
taposition of advertisement languages and the foundational discourses on
identity in The Ploughman’s Party to his critical analysis of video/television
conventions in So Different . . . and Yet; and from all of this to a culmina-
tion in the elegiac and declamatory embrace of the theater in Living and
Presumed Dead (1983–85). Coleman’s archaeology of figuration appears to
be engaged in the investigation of the intricate interrelationships between
the history of scopic desire from its earlier embodiments in pictorial con-
ventions to their subsequent desublimation and dissipation in mass-cultural
forms. His archaeology of narrative traces the transformations of language
experience from the poetic and communicative dimensions of theatrical
dialogue and dramaturgy to their subsequent dilapidation in contempo-
rary film and television and in the narrative structures of pulp fiction and
the photonovel.23
In So Different . . . and Yet, a single color monitor is displayed in a large
white architectural frame, generating a sense of an unusual sculptural for-
mality while at the same time clearly opposing the televisual medium’s
standard self-presentation as a “casual” universal presence, as a “natural”
contingency of everyday life. Corresponding to the emphatic recognition
of the continuous infliction of the electronic image on spatial and visual ex-
perience, a single fifty-minute take of the camera forces the viewer/listener
to confront a continuous dialogue between a female and a male protago-
nist.24 They assume in rapid succession the roles of a number of increasingly
intertwined and disparate characters within a trivial melodrama, unravel-
ing for the patient viewer/listener the almost painfully unusual experience
of a visual continuity and temporal duration that the medium’s mass-cultural
So Different . . . and Yet, 1980
Performed by Olwen Fouère and
Roger Doyle. Rehearsal.

conventions strictly prohibit. Thus the work’s dialectic unfolds in the ten-
sion between the singularized image, its quasi-architectural presentation,
the extremely attenuated dialogue, and its perpetual intertwining of seem-
ingly incoherent, manifold narrative strands.
The two voices alternate in an unpredictable slipping and sliding be-
tween French and English accents, a slippage reminiscent of that which had
taken place earlier in the class-bound discourse of The Ploughman’s Party.
Enunciations range from the “grain of the voice” of affected arrogance and
pretense to the vilest language of hypocrisy and abuse. The narrative plots,
recited in the most vapid French or haughty English pronunciation of
platitudes, are jumbled and compressed, repetitive, fragmented and futile,
and they generate an almost grotesque effect of a continuous cancellation
of the listener’s desire for closure, resulting in the total suspension of any
narrative logic or function.
The conventions of visual representation appear on Coleman’s ar-
chaeological stage in the classical scopic trope of the reclining female
figure, the very figuration and staging of patriarchal desire. Originally a
pictorial and photographic topos, the female odalisque or gîsante emerges
here as an allegorical device of the desire to “figure,” strangely displaced
into a pseudo-theatrical performance on the video/television screen.25 A

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux 103

104 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

most peculiar detail of the actress’s costume (a strangely outmoded green

evening gown continually referred to in the accompanying narrative)—a
spiraling red garland ornamenting her right leg from foot to thigh—seems
to enforce in the manner of an abstract synecdoche the very mechanism
of scopic desire that the figure embodies at large. In the same manner, the
desire for narrative as an archaic mythical structure, deeply imbedded in
the construction of subjectivity, now appears to have become itself the
subject on display, with the female protagonist accompanying the narra-
tive’s every twist and turn with a literal repositioning of her body and an
adjustment within her repertoire of poses.
The male actor, placed further in the distance, seems to generate the
piano music accompanying the dialogue with the alternatingly haunting
and sentimental or naively mimetic dramatic tunes that were once integral
to silent film. This peculiar reenactment confronts us—as do the body lan-
guage and costume of the actress—with an enigmatic sense of temporal
dislocation, an outlived form of experience that suddenly acquires an
uncanny sense of presence and reality in the evident contrast with the elec-
tronic equipment from which it emanates. After a period of careful obser-
vation, the viewer recognizes that the male protagonist, dressed in a white
tuxedo, wears a pair of horns on his forehead that are no less astounding
than the spiraling red bandages on the female protagonist’s leg.
Clearly, this signals a return to the realm of mythical experience. Yet
the mythical structure is to be found not by identifying the ethno-cultural
sources of the horned male figure, but rather by recognizing that it is the
technological image of television itself and the types of narrative produc-
tion it enforces which have inflicted myth with a vengeance onto the as-
pirations for an emancipation from the cult value of images through their
technological reproduction.26
Coleman’s allegorical operation reconstitutes the by now all but un-
imaginable experience of temporal duration to the viewer of the electronic
image.27 Yet within the same approach, in an apparently complete rever-
sal of the principles of real time and duration, the uninterrupted imagery
confronts the viewer with a persistently fragmented and decentered nar-
rative. It generates a radical negation of the viewer’s restless anticipation of
narrative closure and provides, once again, the fundamental counterexpe-
rience to the governing principles of electronic image production.
In the last of Coleman’s early works to concern us here, the slide pro-
jection Living and Presumed Dead (1983–85), theater itself seems to have
taken the center of Coleman’s archaeology. Yet theater as the historical
matrix of spectacle arises here once again only to disintegrate in the very
moment of its reconstitution into a series of pointlessly and perpetually
shifting, projected photographic images. These images show a large troupe
of actors in the masks and costumes of what appears to have been a pop-
ular play (one can, after a while, identify some of the figures as a fishwife,
skeletons, goblins, acrobats and other garishly dressed theatrical perform-
ers, along with the strangely discomforting presence of shop-window
mannequins dressed in street costumes). The large horizontal line-up of
the figures suggests that we are, in fact, witnessing a final curtain call. Thus,
from the very beginning of the slide sequence, the sense of the end of the
play is present. It is only the voice of the narrator, Noel Purcell (an older
popular actor from Dublin who performs the role of the narrator with
a sublime differentiation of phonetic registers and dramatic tempi), that
makes us anticipate an unfolding rather than a closure. As the narrator is
threading through the complicated story of a number of invented charac-
ters, most of whom bear names in an unidentifiable language (Abbas, Bor-
ras, Capax), the spectator realizes that each individual projected slide alters
the line-up of characters or their positions ever so slightly, even though the
overall structure of the panoramic display of disappearing actors remains
identical throughout the entire projection. The highly dramatic yet stark
and graphic plot—an archetypal, Oedipal story of murder, mayhem, and
love, with its convoluted and confusing traps and trackings—is related by
the narrator with a vivacity that recalls both a first theatrical experience at
the Grand Guignol and a first encounter with Greek tragedy.
Thus the work generates almost an etiology of the desire for narrativ-
ity and spectacle by recovering those structures of individual and collective
experience in which the desire for theatrical figuration still corresponded
to a function in the formation of subjectivity. Roland Barthes identifies
the fusion of oedipality and narrativity with extraordinary clarity; his de-
scription seems to account for almost every structural aspect of Coleman’s
Living and Presumed Dead:

The Oedipus complex is a narrative, but this narrative is never made

known except through the subject’s discourse, where it is presented
not as a unitary, monological narrative (even if it is a monologue) but
as a form broken into fragments, repetitions, infinite metonymies. In
its current effort, contemporary literature is at the level of that same
expression of an apparently obscured narrative, one which has no
other place (no other referent), however, than its own utterance.28

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux 105

106 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Living and Presumed Dead, 1983–85

Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.

We must recall, however, that Coleman’s work deliberately situates itself

in the discursive and institutional frameworks of visual culture, not those
of literature. His work is inextricably bound up, as we have seen, with the
domination of spectacle over visuality. But we still have to account for the
tension that holds Coleman’s elegiac recovery of the origins of theatrical
and narrative desire, and their allegorical staging in Living and Presumed
Dead, to the peculiar photographic presentation of a series of continu-
ously, if minutely, altered static images.
Contrary to expectations, the photographic image in Coleman’s work
does not provide access to a representational plenitude of which mod-
ernism supposedly deprived its spectators. Neither abolishing its semiotic
radicality as a continuously fragmented allegorical image nor accepting
that a new figuration—a representation of historical memory embodied
in the conventions of cultural production and representation—was now
impossible to attain, Coleman’s work engenders a peculiar dialectic. If the
former function establishes the work’s critical opposition to spectacle, the
latter positions it in critical distance from the limitations of the discursive
practices of the sixties, their antirepresentational and countermnemonic
identification with techno-scientific epistemes or with the paradigm of
the commodity image. Each attempt to reconstitute narrative continuity
and closure, as with any effort to reconstruct mimetic representation, falls
instant prey to the very mechanisms that aesthetic practice at this moment
negates if it wants to constitute itself at all in the face of a continuous and
totalizing demand of spectacle to demolish particularity and difference.
This is all the more obvious in instances of contemporary artistic practice
with which Coleman’s work could be falsely associated, practices that
naively reclaim the realm of representation in the guise of an inscription
within the contemporary “realism” of advertising imagery, or that aspire
to constitute historical memory by claiming a possible continuity with the
last instance of the mnemonic in painting in the art of Manet.
What remains to be understood then is the necessity for Coleman to
refigure—literally and semiotically—the status of the aesthetic object. Or,
put differently, one might ask what determined Coleman in the late 1970s
to fuse linguistic performativity, indexical visuality, and the rhetorical con-
ventions of narrativity and of theatrical figuration, and to synthesize these
seemingly irreconcilable elements into one of the most complex aesthetic
projects of postmodernity? Denis Hollier has recently clarified in a bril-
liant essay the historical shift from the symbolic/iconic axis of traditional
literary realism to what he identifies as the performative realism of index-
icality. Overcoming the traditionally symbolic and literary dimensions of
narrative fiction, Hollier’s definition of a “performative realism” seems as-
tonishingly apt also for the semiotic changes brought about in Coleman’s
continuous citations of theatrical and narrative conventions in his work
since the late 1970s:

Thus the heart of the matter is not a change in the referent, a passage
from imaginary to real characters as one would do by leaving the
novel for historiography; rather it is a change in the mode of enunci-
ation; the passage to the real must be inferred not by a change of the
object as much as by the entry onto the stage of the subject and its in-
dex. . . . The real function of photography is not so much allowing
the narrator to dispense with the tiresome naturalistic ritual of the de-
scription of settings. It begins by indexing the tale. It makes it pass
from a descriptive realism to a performative one.29

Notes

1. Maxime Du Camp, Les chants modernes (1858), as quoted by Robert Herbert in Impres-
sionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 4.

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux 107

108 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Raymond Williams gives us a more recent critical description of this “naturalized” pre-
condition of avant-garde attitudes toward the historical:“What we now know as modernism,
and certainly as the avantgarde, has changed all this. Creativity is all in new making, new con-
struction: all traditional, academic, even learned models are actually or potentially hostile to
it, and must be swept away.” See Raymond Williams, “The Politics of the Avantgarde,” in-
troduction to Peter Timms and Edward Collier, eds., Visions and Blueprints (Manchester,
U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 5.
2. Wlad Godzich, introduction to Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. xxvii.
3. It is perhaps noteworthy not only that Coleman spent the late sixties and early seventies
in Italy, being acquainted with most and befriending some of the artists of Arte Povera, but
also that he actually co-curated an exhibition of Italian Arte Povera in Dublin in 1973. See
Franco Toselli, ed., An Exhibition of New Italian Art (Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ire-
land; Dublin: David Hendricks Gallery, 1973).
4. Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight was first published in 1972. (See note 2.)
5. As happens so often, we owe the most precise, differentiated, and legible description of
Flash Piece to Anne Rorimer: “Two blue flashes appeared between two yellow in repeated
three minute cycles. During each cycle, the time between the flashes differed, although
spectators remembered them as being the same. Thus time as measured and time as expe-
rienced did not coincide. In this way, Coleman succeeded in introducing a subjective aspect
of viewing—namely that of memory—into the subject matter of the resulting work.” See
Rorimer, “Michael Asher and James Coleman at Artists Space,” in Michael Asher/James Cole-
man (New York: Artists Space, 1988), p. 7.
6. Michael Newman, “Allegories of the Subject: The Theme of Identity in the Work of
James Coleman,” in James Coleman: Selected Works (Chicago and London: Renaissance So-
ciety at the University of Chicago and ICA London, 1985), pp. 26–27.
7. Author’s conversation with the artist, Dublin, May 1994.
8. Anne Rorimer, “James Coleman 1970–1985” (1985), reprinted in this volume,
pp. 2–3.
9. Coleman’s critical response to this dilemma parallels that of other artists, such as Marcel
Broodthaers and Gerhard Richter, but shares aspects of the positions developed within Ital-
ian Arte Povera that were temporarily and perhaps erroneously associated with postmini-
mal and conceptual art.
10. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5 ( June 1967); reprinted in Gregory
Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), pp. 139–42.
11. In the early 1970s—resonating with Fried’s condemnation—nothing would have ap-
peared more disqualified as a point of departure than a programmatic reconsideration of the
conventions of theatricality. Coleman’s decision to engage precisely with those conventions
seems to have alienated audiences both in Europe and the United States, keeping his work
in relative historical illegibility and delaying its recognition.
Not surprisingly, audiences of the seventies were oblivious to artistic strategies from
the origins of nineteenth-century modernism, obscured by their proper orthodoxies: when
Manet needed to reposition himself with regard to the doxa of Realism, he drew upon the
dialectic of historical memory and oblivion, in the same manner that the surrealists had re-
deemed figuration, sensing that only the contemplation of obsolescence could recognize
the falseness of an orthodoxy of modernist instrumentalist concepts of truth.
12. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” p. 125.
13. More intuitively, perhaps, than programmatically, Morris had already attempted to
reestablish this tradition within the context of a minimalist performance in his peculiar
piece Site (1964), which featured Carolee Schneeman reclining in the pose of Manet’s
Olympia (1863). This intervention, however, just as much as Yvonne Rainer’s, would re-
main obscure and inconsequential in a larger theorization of the aesthetics of the sixties; yet
both could now be recognized as precursors to Coleman’s systematic deployment of the
tableau vivant.
14. One of the clearest and most convincing arguments positioning Coleman’s work in a
poststructuralist perspective is Lynne Cooke’s excellent essay on the artist, “A Tempered
Agnosia” (1992; reprinted in this volume, p. 127):

In these recent works Coleman engages more closely with the medium in which rep-
resentation occurs, and through that with the ways that media construct the subject—
as much as the object—of perception. Because they are indexical, reproductive media
of the kind that he employs necessarily refer beyond the realm of aesthetics. If all forms
of picturing are intrinsically discursive, if all images require being read, and read in
ways that involve and engage psychic, social, and institutional “texts,” Coleman in this
and related ways is able to bypass the self-referential restrictions underpinning the high
modernist concept of visuality which Rosalind Krauss [“Antivision,” October 36
(Spring 1986), p. 147] has aptly termed an engagement with “the intransitive verbs of
vision.” Such an engagement “excludes the domain of knowledge, both moral and sci-
entific, to revise the visual in the realm of a reflexive relation to the modality of vision
rather than to its contents, to savor in and for itself qualities like immmediacy, vi-
brancy, simultaneity, effulgence and to experience these as qualities without objects.”

15. Maurice Blanchot, “Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him,” in Foucault/Blanchot (New

York: Zone Books, 1987), pp. 76–77.
16. Jean Fisher, “The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman” (1983),
reprinted in this volume, p. 27.
17. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993), passim.
18. Jean Fisher, “Inexorable Dissolve: James Coleman Blindsides Art,” Artforum (December
1993), p. 97.
19. Coleman has emphasized in conversations with the author that Warhol was one of the
crucial figures in his own artistic development.
20. The image of boxers fighting calls up historical references to that topos, from Thomas
Eakins to George Bellows and August Sander, from Bertolt Brecht to Ernest Hemingway.
21. Seamus Deane, “Critical Reflections,” Artforum (December 1993), p. 105.
22. Jean Fisher gives us the best description of this piece:

The air of sorrow that gently murmurs through [some of Coleman’s] works finds its
counterpoints in a subtle irony, which in its quiet debunking of myths, questions our
understanding of the past. This duality emerges in the play of associations poetically
woven into the commentary of The Ploughman’s Party (1979–1980). Coleman uses a
central image, the plough, to reveal how, among other things, this powerful archetypal
symbol oscillates through a number of significations: from an earthly myth and peace-

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux 109

110 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

ful utility, to the historic militancy of the Sinn Féin, to its corruption into mere dec-
oration by a frivolous culture. The visual focus of the piece is a gilded Rococo-style
translation of the constellation, which hangs shimmering in an evanescent blue light;
an Ultimate Object.

Jean Fisher, “James Coleman,” in James Coleman, exh. cat. (Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery,
1982), p. 20.
23. Coleman has emphasized the extent to which his late-1960s encounters with the Ital-
ian model of the fotoromanzo influenced his selection of photographic display formats as
much as the construction of his narratives (for example, his work Seeing for Oneself, which
is entirely structured in the manner of a fotoromanzo). Narratological studies of pulp fiction
(such as those of Janis Radway, or Tania Modleski’s study of the Harlequin romance novel)
have been instrumental both in the development of Coleman’s selection of popular culture
material and in his deconstructionist interest in the functions of fiction.
24. While the work is perceived as being the result of a single take, it actually incorporated
two edits, which were performed for technical reasons.
25. Once again, Manet’s classically modernist figure of Olympia comes to mind in the pe-
culiar display of Coleman’s protagonist, as in the tableau vivant by Robert Morris mentioned
earlier. Frédéric Migayrou makes this historical association in his essay “James Coleman: le
cas des figures,” without, however, coming to similar conclusions. See James Coleman (Paris:
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1989).
26. Michael Newman has suggested that the horns refer to “Cernunnos, the god with the
horns of a stag, ram or bull, a symbol of fertility who was assimilated to Satan during the
early Christian period.” As fascinating as the idea might be to trace Irishness and pagan
sources in Coleman’s work as part of a broader investigation of the problematic condition
of Irish national identity, the exactitude of the identification in this case seems to generate
in fact very little in the reading of the work. See Newman, “Allegories of the Subject,” p. 35.
27. It seems appropriate at this point to recall the filmic work of Andy Warhol, who also re-
cuperated a subversive antinarrative dimension by reconstituting an experience of actual
time in his films of the sixties, most notably in Chelsea Girls.
28. Roland Barthes, “On the Fashion System,” interview with Raymond Bellour, in The
Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), p. 53.
29. Denis Hollier, “Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows,” October 69 (Sum-
mer 1994), p. 126.
Untitled: Philippe VACHER, 1990
35 mm color film, silent.
 A Tempered Agnosia

Lynne Cooke

We do not explain pictures: we explain remarks about pictures—or

rather, we explain pictures only in so far as we have considered them
under some verbal description or specification. . . . The nature of
language or serial conceptualization means that the description [of a
picture] is less a representation of the picture, or even a representation
of seeing the picture, than a representation of thinking about having
seen the picture.
Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical
Explanation of Pictures

“My work is not about true or false realities, it’s about consciousness of
shifting realities,” argued James Coleman in a rare interview in 1983.1
“From the start Coleman has been concerned with disclosing the appara-
tus of perception and how reality is filtered through the mind,” Anne Ror-
imer recently wrote. One of Coleman’s most astute critics, she concluded
her introduction to his work with the assertion, “he has succeeded in re-
defining the tradition of picture making usually associated with easel paint-
ing.”2 “Coleman is concerned with the relationship between the identities
of subject and image as they are mutually conditioned or caused through
time,” wrote Michael Newman in 1985 in a penetrating analysis of the
construction of identity in Coleman’s work.3
Realities, perception, representation, picture making, and identity are
all issues that have concerned James Coleman over the past twenty years.
They variously weave through a complex oeuvre which—as Rorimer
argues, perhaps following the artist himself—may be related to the tradi-
114 Lynne Cooke

tion of (easel) painting but has been couched to date in media tangential
to it: video, film, slide tape, theater, and performance.4 If the terrain Cole-
man has mapped during this period is at once broad and yet cohesive,
within it emphasis has fallen differently at different moments.
In his work of the past few years, questions concerning the material-
ity of the medium together with its codes and conventions seem to have
become the principal subject under review, though not, of course, to the
exclusion of all other concerns. Coleman’s earliest works, from the begin-
ning of the seventies, had involved reflexive examinations of the medium
in phenomenological terms, or the invocation of narrative as the inevitable
product of dealing with any medium like film in which time and sequence
were integral components. Subsequently narrative became a central issue
in itself, not merely as the product of the process but as a genre in its own
right, as istoria, the telling of significant events in ways that presuppose
rhetorical tropes and standardized fictional modes.
In his works from the end of the eighties, by contrast, questions relat-
ing to visuality are now identified as transitive in that they directly invoke
the sociocultural context that shapes and frames them. The type of reflex-
ivity that results may warrant distinguishing Charon (MIT Project) (1989),
La Tache Aveugle (1978–90), Untitled: Philippe VACHER (1990), and Line
of Faith (1991) as a new subgroup within Coleman’s oeuvre as a whole.
With this recent veering of attention to other modalities, not least
to the technologically and historically conditioned character of the re-
productive media, Coleman has relinquished the use of visual clichés and
canonical aesthetic models he employed previously in favor of material
with a particular specificity. At the same time his erstwhile privileging of
language has given way to a framing of visual imagery by its own traditions
and histories. In confining himself to the art gallery or museum for most
of his output, Coleman has made evident his continuing dialogue not only
with the tradition of painting, but with its current debates. Painting con-
tinues to act as a repressed leitmotif, a correlative to whichever of the off-
spring of the mechanical image—photography, film, video, slide—he is
employing on that occasion.
If, given the importance it accords verbal narrative, Charon (MIT Proj-
ect) (1989) is in certain respects a transitional piece, it foreshadows Cole-
man’s work of the nineties in significant ways. It is composed of fourteen
episodes whose subject is always, despite great internal differences, pho-
tography.5 Visually and episodically discrete, these vignettes are linked au-
rally by the use of a single voice for the key protagonist (who ranges from
Charon (MIT Project), 1989
Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.

male to female, old to young, white to black) and theoretically by the

overriding theme of representation. Each section begins with a descrip-
tion of an image and an account of the circumstances of its genesis. The
narrative functions analogously to printed captions accompanying still
photographs, providing the frame through which the imagery is compre-
hended. Normative and ubiquitous uses of photographs in the contem-
porary world, uses far removed from the artificially controlled parameters
of so-called art photography, take center stage here: reportage, journalism,
fashion, advertising, snapshots, surveillance, and investigation. Nonethe-
less, many issues that have recently formed the central debates within the
discourse of photography surface, though never programmatically; it is
part of Coleman’s achievement in this piece that they do so with such wit
and aplomb. In one episode, the subject muses that if a photograph is a
trace of an exclusive and irrecoverable moment, then photography could
serve as the means of defying, or at least endlessly stalling, that closure
which death inevitably brings. In another, a baby looks steadfastly toward
the camera and hence possibly at the photographer, who seems to be both
father of the child and allegorical father of the image: what are thought to
be the baby’s thoughts must remain as open to conjecture as the meaning
of any other photograph before it is captioned or otherwise contextual-

A Tempered Agnosia 115

116 Lynne Cooke

ized. The brevity of each vignette, the circular or paradoxical nature of its
content, plus the suggestiveness of the juxtapositions of one segment with
another, together counter any danger of didacticism: the result is a kind of
fleet-footed, fast-paced somersaulting from one aspect or facet to another.
Photography was the first medium to seriously challenge painting as
the quintessential mode of visual representation. It is, however, a com-
posite entity, and one which, from its beginning, has taken diverse forms.
Coleman’s fascination with certain of these aspects surfaces in multifarious
and unexpected ways in his most recent art. Yet this work has simulta-
neously proved to be more pared, and less seductive to view, than anything
he produced in the 1980s. La Tache Aveugle (1978–90) takes as its point of
departure that moment in The Invisible Man when the protagonist, cor-
nered by his pursuers in a barn, is shot and hence forfeits his immunity. His
life had become dependent on his disembodiment: only in death does his
visibility return. Not only the literal but the material source for Coleman’s
work is a clip from the film made by James Whale in 1933, itself based on
a novella published by H. G. Wells in 1897. In its play between visibility
and invisibility, opacity and transparency, light and dark, the actual and the
residual image, this tale contains a latent discourse on the character of film
itself, as well as an examination of the nature of identity.6
In its first version, La Tache Aveugle was composed from thirteen con-
secutive images corresponding to actual frames which formerly would
have taken approximately half a second of real time to roll. But here, trans-
ferred to the size of a cinema screen, these close-toned black-and-white
images assume a monumental grandeur reminiscent of history painting.
Denied the pleasure of a comfortable cinema seat and, along with it, that
comforting illusion—normally integral to the viewing of a film—of en-
tering into the depicted reality, the observer was left somewhat awkwardly
footloose in the cavernous spaces of the galleries in which it has been
shown to date. The transfer of film stock to the humble medium of 35 mm
slide, the principal tool of art-historical pedagogy, which is then through
the use of sophisticated technology given motion, permits Coleman to
comment on the character of film, suspended as it is between stasis and
motion, between painting and photography.
Two computer-driven projectors monitor the images in such a way that
one marginally different shot very gradually overlays another. This process
of shifting from one image to the next is barely perceptible: if the degree
of change is slight, the fact of it is nonetheless incontrovertible. The image,
however, stubbornly remains blurred throughout, the scene illegible, the
La Tache Aveugle, 1978–90
Projected slide images. Continuous
cycle.

subject virtually indecipherable. Where transparency and clarity are the

canonical norms, opacity and indecipherability have been substituted, and
whereas cinema aficionados typically suspend their (physical) embodiment
to lose themselves in the phantasmagoric illusion of the actor’s presence,
in this work the disembodiment of the actor becomes a vehicle to counter-
point the decenteredness of the viewers, who by having their normal
modes of behavior disrupted are left with little choice but to review the
modalities and practice integral to this art form. More than close scrutiny,
something verging on strained attention is therefore needed to discern
what it is that is under observation. By teasing and frustrating normal per-
ceptual habits, Coleman is able to problematize the act of perception.
In Untitled: Philippe VACHER (1990), his next work, he takes this in-
vestigation one stage further by using actual motion film, not a stilled ex-
tract, but then subjecting it to freeze framing. Once again he exacerbates
the specularity of the situation, and once again, he allows the protagonist
to make heuristic use of his own exhibitionism. One of Coleman’s most
disarmingly simple works in recent years, this piece swings away from the
subject, the agent effecting the construction, to the act of reception, the

A Tempered Agnosia 117

118 Lynne Cooke

reciprocation integral to perception. A seventeen-and-a-half-minute film,

Untitled: Philippe VACHER opens with a close-up view of a man—a sur-
geon—seated in front of an anesthetist’s table. Suddenly, he slumps forward,
overturning in the process several containers and operating instruments,
including a large red bottle. But after only a momentary lapse he regains
“consciousness” and re-rights himself, turning as he does so to face the
camera/viewer. By this action he seems not only to acknowledge that he is
aware of having been observed but to challenge the subject by returning
his or her gaze. Distance is shattered. But whereas in Box (ahhareturnabout)
(1977) Coleman had permitted this (inevitable) voyeurism to become
transformed into a privileged if painful identification between the specta-
tor and the protagonist, here, at the end confrontation supervenes. If the
prominent spectacles—literally, optical frames—that the surgeon peers
through enhance awareness of the barriers that have to be penetrated, they
do so paradoxically at the very moment when his body, frozen in the final
frame, threatens to evaporate and disappear.
The whole unfolds not, however, as a seamless illusionistic depiction
but in staccato jumps. The camera is held throughout in a fixed position;
its static framing of the situation eventually begins to be felt as intrusive,
for the duration of the film is sufficient for the viewer to become con-
scious of this as a somehow stilted, if not strained, effect. Even more dis-
ruptively, the film continually halts, momentarily freezing the frame, and
then abruptly resumes: suspending the image against the machinations of
time as a trace in the timeless present. Throughout its intermittent forward
motion it is simultaneously bled of color until the final image resembles
an early photograph, a mid-nineteenth-century black-and-white print to
which some hand-tinting seems to have been added—the slash of red that
clings staunchly to the bottle. Thus as the film unfolds in real time, the
visual language seems to go backward in historical time. If projected at
greater speed, it might rebind the multiple static images which, when pro-
jected in rapid sequence, would compose an illusionistic motion reality; if
projected in reverse, it might replay the technological history of the de-
velopment of film. This piece is consequently replete with echoes of the
work of both Eadweard Muybridge and Eugène Marey.
In 1962, Chris Marker made a memorable film, and filmic history, by
composing La Jetée entirely from stills. While partially sharing this com-
mitment to the shot at the expense of the sequence, and to montage over
rhythmic unfurling, Coleman here seems to reverse Marker’s cumulative
aggregate and so to bring motion film back to its origins in the static im-
age, pointing to its roots in black-and-white photography. An even closer
parallel, however, might be drawn with certain works by Jean-Luc Godard
whose analytic cast of mind, fascination with the normative genres—the
conventions and devices of mass media and the popular arts—and preoc-
cupation with the camera-in-presence over the invisible camera, have sig-
nificant affinities with Coleman.
In Passion (1982) especially, Godard explores the way that film seems
to be positioned between stasis and motion, and between painting and
photography. He constructs a number of tableaux vivants in which the ac-
tors mime the disposition of figures in famous masterpieces. At the same
time he breaks the seamless illusion of conventional filmic reality in man-
ifold ways, not least by the decomposition of movement and the employ-
ment of still(ed) imagery. In addition, the key protagonist of this film, Jerzy,
a cinéaste and theoretician, is beset by difficulties stemming in part from
his backers who are upset by what they perceive to be a lack of plot in the
film. Coleman’s protagonist, like Godard’s, also seems to mime the consti-
tutive elements of his role (at least in the terms that Walter Benjamin an-
alyzed the figure of the film actor, as will be argued below); and in each
case the actor at the center of the (semi-) illusionistic world provides an
analogue for the action/activity of the maker. And each work also func-
tions to effect a concealed comparison between painting and film.
Coleman’s work stresses the dematerialization inherent in the filmic
image, in contrast to the actuality integral to the painted image, by in-
scribing the indexical image of the film in the actualities of time, space,
and place. Time is thus revealed as not part of an uninterrupted contin-
uum, a seamless flow, but as something structured and constructed, and
therefore subject to rearrangement. The literal time taken to view this
work is foregrounded by means of the segmenting and fracturing of the
temporality of the film on the screen; the actual space in which the work
is apprehended is privileged over the depicted context; and the particular-
ities of place are emphasized, not least by the physical behavior of the
viewer in the experiencing of the work. Untitled: Philippe VACHER had
its debut in a large gallery space in Lyons where the image was screened
cinema-scale and directly onto one wall. As is customary with Coleman,
the apparatus, a projector, was positioned so that it stood freely in the
space. The mechanical whir filled the room as the spectators, bereft of seats
and hence of any fixed viewing points, wandered casually through the
space, almost unconsciously trying out different angles, different vantage
positions. Coleman invokes that ritual attendant on the act of going to the

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120 Lynne Cooke

cinema yet paradoxically strips it of all transparence. In introducing a cor-

respondence between perception and projection, he posits a mechanistic
yet anthropomorphic metaphor for the way that meaning is constructed
from what is seen: the eye as an optical apparatus rooted in the body.
Coleman forgoes any resurrection of the various possibilities of paint-
ing within the realm of film of the kind that Godard seeks while never-
theless revealing the setting, the staging, the mechanics of the camera, and
so forth. Instead, Coleman counterpoints painting and film as binaries,
as interdependent modalities. However differently achieved, the result in
both instances is a self-reflexivity in the film, plus a transitive notion of per-
ception, and, for the artist, a new level of abstraction and self-consciousness
within the fictive world itself. In their different ways both Godard and Cole-
man are thus involved with the means by which film and its representa-
tional apparatus (the projector and/or camera) construct the subject, with
the specific form of subjectivity constructed, and hence with the structure
of voyeurism in film as well as with an interrogation of the modalities of
filmic representation.
Coleman here engineers the act of perception so that the subject ob-
serves himself or herself shift roles from voyeur to object of the gaze; and
therefore from one who bestows meaning to one who causes that activity
to be brought under examination. Significantly, he now attempts this
effect within the purlieus of film itself, forcing the observer to pay due
attention to the particularities of the medium, and hence to consider the
ways in which perception is organized by that medium. Yet he is never
caught within the solipsisms of self-reflexivity that prevailed in much of
the art of the sixties, for he always uses reproductive media, drawing on
their rootedness in already existing and highly conventionalized imagery.
Because his are indexical as well as iconic images, they draw the represented
world into the artwork so that it no longer inhabits a separate sphere of ex-
istence. At the same time the viewer is never permitted to operate through
idealist, disembodied sensory modalities: it is always on, in, and through
the body of the receiver that visuality functions.
Walter Benjamin argues, in what may well be the essay in contempo-
rary art writing most quoted in the 1980s, that one of the key distinctions
between film actors and stage actors is that the performance of the former
need not be whole and unitary.7 Typically, the film actor’s performance is
split into a number of mountable episodes which the editing adjusts and
synthesizes. Furthermore film actors do not address an actual audience—as
do their counterparts in the theater—but the camera. This, Benjamin con-
tends, permits the audience to take on the position of the camera, and
hence to adopt the role of critic. Moreover, instead of representing some-
one else—the surrogate personalities whom they are playing—the actors
present themselves. In this way, for Benjamin, art for the first time leaves
the realm of the “beautiful semblance” which, so far, had been taken to be
the only sphere where it could thrive, and the contrivances and devices by
which this seamless fiction normally operates are made inescapably evident.
Benjamin then goes on, in a celebrated comparison of the painter
with the cameraman, to draw an analogy to a surgical operation:“The sur-
geon represents the polar opposite of the magician,” he claims. “The ma-
gician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into
the patient’s body. . . . [In so doing] the surgeon . . . greatly diminishes the
distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s
body. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the
cameraman penetrates deeply into its web.”8 While the painter attains “a
total picture, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which
are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the repre-
sentation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that
of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of this thoroughgoing
permeation of reality with the mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality
which is free of all equipment.” And that, Benjamin concludes, “is what
one is entitled to ask from a work of art.”9 Contrarily, Coleman employs
the circularity in this surgeon/cameraman analogy to unmask that very
permeation of reality, to materialize the medium and make its codes in-
escapably evident.
The footage for Untitled: Philippe VACHER was shot in a hospital us-
ing an actor who works principally for television. Coleman has likened the
event that befalls the surgeon to the transformation from a “lived-body”
to an “object-body,” terms he derived from a book by Howard Brody
called Stories of Sickness. Examining the relationships between narrative
and healing, Brody argues that “the practice of medicine can be seen in
part as a story telling enterprise, and . . . the telling of stories can be seen
as a social activity that can serve a healing function.”10 Certain sorts of
events, he argues, can only be understood fully as portions of an ongoing
narrative and not as disconnected events occurring in isolation. Too much
medicine is “rule”- and “decision”-oriented, suggesting that an ahistori-
cal, nonnarrative form of analysis is optimal: explanation is couched in
general laws and statistical descriptions. Storytelling, by contrast, heals by
restoring a disrupted connectedness, such that a diagnosis becomes indeed

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122 Lynne Cooke

a gnosis, a mode of self-knowledge that creates a cosmos in its image.

Coleman concurs only to demur. To the extent that he constructs narra-
tives, he does so in ways that make it impossible to ignore the fact that they
are contingent, hypothetical, and partial; notions of wholeness and unity
as they pertain to the self are fictional constructs. Thus there is a threat to
both the viewer’s subjecthood as he or she becomes an object of the sur-
geon’s gaze, and to the actor’s, since, in losing consciousness, he momen-
tarily becomes the reified object of perception. Not only is the foreclosure
of meaning impossible, but the work becomes a modern allegory of see-
ing in which the relations of power and control implicit in the idea of
scrutiny, and embodied in the notion of a “point of view,” are revealed
through the apparatus of representation. For the piece seems to pivot on
the dual character of the gaze—the gaze as a look that penetrates, cuts, or
slices open the body, and as a look that petrifies and hence reifies. This du-
ality operates both at the level of metaphorical imagery and in the very pro-
cess of filmmaking itself: the surgeon takes the place of the anesthetist, the
red slash is a kind of wound in the picture, the spectacles imply objectified
perception. The footage is literally sliced and is dislocated into segments
each of which in turn is immobilized, frozen. While filmic parallels may be
most apposite, the tradition of paintings of the surgeon at work—which
includes Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp and Thomas Eakins’s The
Gross Clinic—provides some instructive contrasts. Perhaps the most telling
of these centers on the conflation of the patient’s body with the viewer’s
body, and the dual role actively played by the surgeon as agent and object
in Coleman’s version of this subject.
In Line of Faith, Coleman betrays once more his abiding preoccupa-
tion with unmasking the notion of transcendental subjectivity that privi-
leges an ahistorical, disinterested, disembodied subject. However, unlike
the previous two pieces, it takes a subject from the past and refers to con-
temporaneous optical devices in order to reconsider the ways in which
perception and visuality are historically governed and framed. Stereogra-
phy, which prefigures and has telling affinities with cinema, is the princi-
pal allegorical tool on this occasion.11
Line of Faith was made for an exhibition of site-specific works entitled
“Places with a Past” held in Charleston, South Carolina, in mid-1991; its
raison d’être was provided by the history and sociocultural context of the
city. Coleman’s point of departure was a famous Currier and Ives print of
the Battle of Bull Run (also known as the First Battle of Manassas), which
took place during the opening moments of the American Civil War. The
Line of Faith, 1991
Projected slide images. Continuous
cycle.

artist reconstructed the scene with the aid of local reenactors (lay people
who simulate specific Civil War battles). Far from using the occasion to
correct errors in this notorious case of historical misreportage, Coleman
staged his tableau vivant to mirror precisely the nineteenth-century compo-
sition. On one level his action speaks to the continuing manipulation of
information by the press today—a subject with considerable topicality in
the wake of the Gulf War, a war that is infamous in part due to the Amer-
ican press’s wholesale connivance with and submission to government
mandates on how to cover it. Disengaging the historical moment from its
literal transcription, embracing its potency as a metaphorical omen, Cole-
man confronts the present in which the specter of a totalizing mediation
seems an increasingly real threat. Yet while his choice of theme grounded
the work in the immediate contemporary culture, the larger issues derived
more from the mode of staging and presentation than from the subject
matter per se.
Coleman took two shots of his reenactment from slightly different
angles, then elided them by projecting them as slides in two carrousels
stacked one atop the other, to simulate a simultaneous deconstruction of
the nineteenth-century visual mode of stereography. Yet unlike the orig-
inal stereopticon which claimed that it would reveal real objects both more

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124 Lynne Cooke

accurately and more tangibly—especially those in close focus—Coleman’s

projected images eschew any claims to truthfulness. The backgrounds are
aligned, but the foregrounds never come into precise registration:efforts to
forge left and right into a single image are doomed, but nonetheless irre-
sistible. The work manages to involve the spectator in a way not altogether
dissimilar in its techniques of ensnarement from those used by Hans Hol-
bein in his celebrated painting of The Ambassadors, at least as analyzed by
Jacques Lacan:“The singular object floating in the foreground . . . is there
to be looked at, in order to catch, I would almost say, to catch in its trap,
the observer, that is to say, us. It is, in short, an obvious way . . . and one
due to some moment of reflection on the part of the painter, of showing
us that, as subjects, we are literally called into the picture and represented
there as caught.”12 Anamorphosis plays on the very relationships which are
assumed by perspective to be axiomatic, to be rationally ordained—those
between the spectator and the single static viewing point, and those un-
derpinning such conventions of recognition—in order to call into ques-
tion received habits of visuality. In its conjunction of a war subject with a
dislocation of standardized perspective, Line of Faith has a signal forebear
in Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano. Uccello’s singular use of perspec-
tive has been interpreted as an attempt to synthesize the new lessons of
artificial perspective and pictorial illusionism with the observations of the
detailed appearances of reality made by the ranging eye of the observer.
The result is an effect which “carefully acknowledges the phenomena that
accompany the turning of the head and eyes of the artist and the onlooker
alike.”13 Typically in Uccello’s work, this quest to monitor the conventions
of what was perceived as a more realistic representation than that formerly
employed results in an idiosyncratic and far from seamless image. Finally,
Coleman’s title, too, points to the subversion of what were long consid-
ered normative perspectival modes of representation. Ligne de foi is an id-
iomatic expression in French for a good or true aim along the barrel of the
gun, an aim which is here neutered and rendered ineffectual.
The difficulty in bringing into registration these elusive foreground
images draws attention to the interface between image and gaze in the
illusory projection, and involves precedents in the history of representation
at the level of high culture as well as in their more recent counterpoints in
popular culture. On one level this serves to bring into play questions relat-
ing to historical objectivity and accuracy. But there is more to Line of Faith
than that. The nicety in the matching of the (simulated) optical technology
with the (recreated) subject attests to the subtlety of Coleman’s thought:
these are neither merely arcane nor merely idle references. In his study of
vision and visuality entitled “Techniques of the Observer,” Jonathan Crary
argues that the stereopticon may stand as a paradigm for broad questions
of representation, subjectivity, and cognition in that it offers a sovereign
metaphor for describing the status of the observer. He writes:

From the beginning of the nineteenth-century, a science of vision will

tend to mean increasingly an interrogation of the makeup of the hu-
man subject, rather than of the mechanics of light and optical trans-
mission. It is a moment when the visible escapes from the tireless
incorporeal order of the camera obscura and becomes lodged in an-
other apparatus, within the unstable physiology and temporality of
the human body. . . . [Henceforth] vision is always an irreducible com-
plex of elements belonging to the observer’s body and of external
data. Thus the kind of separation between interior representation and
exterior reality implicit in the camera obscura [is replaced by] . . . a
single surface of affect on which interior and exterior have few of
their former meanings and positions.14

This articulation of subjective vision in the early nineteenth century is part

of a major shift which for Michel Foucault marks the threshold of moder-
nity. From this moment physiological optics comes to dominate the study
of vision:observation is now posed as the play and interaction of forces and
relations rather than as the orderly continuity of discrete, stable sensations
as formerly conceived. Perception comes into being on the threshold be-
tween the physiological and the psychological. In this modifying of no-
tions of the nature of vision, certain of the optical devices that spawned a
new mass visual culture became inseparable from the new normative sci-
ence of the observer, and the seeing body also came to the fore. Such op-
tical devices as the stereoscope, the kaleidoscope, the phenakistiscope, and
even the diorama were utilized both for purposes of scientific observation
and as forms of popular entertainment. For Crary, the forms with which
a new public consumed images of an illusory “reality” are isomorphic to
the apparatus used to assimilate knowledge about an observer.
What is most pertinent about the stereoscope for Coleman’s work is
the fact that the effect it produced was not simply likeness but immediate,
apparent tangibility. This vividness had to do with proximity, for its sup-
posed superiority to painting lay in the fact that unlike painting, which
treated distant views with more convincing illusion than proximate mat-

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126 Lynne Cooke

ter, the stereoscope focused on the near and insistent. Nor was it grounded
in tangible matter as was painting; indeed, in radically restricting vision by
blocking out the actual surroundings, the stereoscope focused all attention
on the illusory. No other form of representation in the nineteenth century
so conflated the real with the optical, an object with its image. The his-
torical significance of the stereoscope lies in part in the fact that it radically
repositioned the observer’s relation to visual representation, for it replaced
a static monocular perspectival positioning with a decentered observer.
Crary contends,

The stereoscope signals an eradication of “the point of view” around

which, for several centuries, meanings had been assigned reciprocally
to an observer and the object of his or her vision. Perspective is not
even a possibility under the terms of this technique of beholding. An
observer no longer sees an image that has an intelligible or quantifi-
able location in space, but rather a hallucinatory composite of two dis-
similar images whose positions refer to the anatomical structure of the
observer’s body.15

With the stereoscope the viewer is no longer looking at something “out

there”: the experience is a hallucinatory and fabricated one. The observer,
coupled with the apparatus, becomes the agent of synthesis and fusion. In
making a stronger claim of access to the “real” than other contemporary
modes of representation, the stereoscope, tellingly, makes no claim that the
real is anything other than a mechanical production. It thus encapsulates
what has been hailed as a fundamental change in the scopic regime, a
change that involved the shift from the paradigm of the camera obscura,
and of a veridical vision between a bipolar subject and object, to the model
of the body as a producer of nonveridical vision relatively indifferent to
worldly reference.
Locating the machinery of the projector within the gallery space,
Coleman sets up a provocative analogy between this technology and the
mechanisms by which stereography works, and draws attention to the in-
terplay between the mechanics that produce the image and the cognitive
apprehension that processes it. By presenting the work, initially at least, in
a site that itself has historical resonance, and by staging it so that once again
the perceiver witnesses it in ways that prevent any forgetting of the fact that
perception is rooted in the body—is enmeshed in the flesh of the world,
as Maurice Merleau-Ponty puts it—Coleman maps contemporary no-
tions in which the subjectivity and the decenteredness of the spectator and
the phantasmagoric all come into play for the first time.16 The psycholog-
ical, social, and historically conditioned character of perception is thereby
vividly manifested in ways that reveal it as inseparable from the filtering
and conditioning of all media when conjuring or (re-)creating not only
the past but reality itself. If the particular circumstances of this exhibition
provided the opportunity for addressing questions pertaining to history—
its portrayals and betrayals—at an allegorical level the work confirms once
again the necessity of being weaned from any notion of a “true” vision.
In these recent works Coleman engages more closely with the medium
in which representation occurs, and through that with the ways that me-
dia construct the subject—as much as the object—of perception. Because
they are indexical, reproductive media of the kind that he employs neces-
sarily refer beyond the realm of aesthetics. If all forms of picturing are in-
trinsically discursive, if all images require being read, and read in ways that
involve and engage psychic, social, and institutional “texts,” Coleman in
this and related ways is able to bypass the self-referential restrictions under-
pinning the high modernist concept of visuality which Rosalind Krauss
has aptly termed an engagement with “the intransitive verbs of vision.”
Such an engagement “excludes the domain of knowledge, both moral
and scientific, to revise the visual in the realm of a reflexive relation to
the modality of vision rather than to its contents, to savor in and for itself
qualities like immediacy, vibrancy, simultaneity, effulgence and to experi-
ence these as qualities without objects.”17 By contrast, many of Coleman’s
works of the early seventies which took perception as their subject drew
on the interrelationship between perception and cognition, and on the
ways in which perception is grounded in the realities of time and place in
a self-reflexive manner. Others, like Fly (1970) and Pump (1972), treated
narrative as the logical outcome of the sequential unfolding of imagery in
time. (In the latter, for example, the filling of a bucket of water from a
pump ended with an image of a full container virtually indistinguishable
from the starting shot when the bucket was empty: equally important, the
whole event occupied one reel of film, and the transference from one reel
to the other replicated the act of filling the container.) Because they oper-
ated in ways that meant the apparent subject bore directly upon the pro-
cesses of construction, they effectively remained within the purlieus of
“intransitive verbs of vision.” Only in his middle years did Coleman turn
to the object of perception as embodied in fictional narrative, and hence
to the subject, as psychologically, historically, and socially constructed. In

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128 Lynne Cooke

Pump, 1972
Projected 16 mm black-and-white film,
silent. Continuous cycle.
so doing, he effected a transition from an intransitive to a transitive con-
ception of vision.
The earliest of Coleman’s mature works is a series from the beginning
of the seventies that contends in diverse ways with issues of perception, its
relation to duration and memory, its contingency, and its rootedness in
subjectivity. Very much of their era, these works involve phenomenolog-
ical experiments that incorporate the viewer’s heightened apprehension of
the specific conditions of the site itself.18 In Stereo (1972), for example, two
concealed speakers emit sounds from opposite ends of an otherwise empty
room. Their alternation creates a kind of conversation that the spectator-
turned-listener is challenged to assimilate when drawn backward and
forward across the room as if in response to competing voices, or tales, ap-
parently issuing from different parts of the mind, and thereby rooting con-
sciousness in actual space and time. A second, seminal early work, Slide
Piece (1972–73), shifts the focus to the relation between the eye and the
mind, counterposing visual perception and verbal description to highlight
the interface between cognition and vision as they mutually condition each
other. This work consists of a single projector showing an image taken by
the artist of a quotidian street scene in Milan. Each change of slide to what
is in fact an identical image is accompanied by a different analysis of that
image in the voice-over. Since choosing between the multiple meanings
is neither appropriate nor valid, the subjectivity of any viewpoint in its
competing claims to render reality is affirmed.
Playback of a Daydream (1974) encapsulates the manifold and inner-
directed character of vision. A film that alternates drawn images of a duck
and rabbit, it hinges on the viewer’s recognition that acts of cognition are
acts of interpretation and, at least in many cases, that interpretations are se-
lective and partial, and not a matter of discerning an absolute and immu-
table truth. By implication, what is seen first—rabbit or duck—or what
is accorded priority depends on the individual spectator and can no more
be predetermined than it can be presupposed. Just as the identity of the
image depends on the interpretative act (of naming) by the observer, so
the observer is mutually constructed by the image, by how he or she ap-
prehends the world. That this is a textbook example suits Coleman’s ob-
jective well in that its very ordinariness and familiarity ensure that attention
is directed analytically to the act under review.
Subsequently, however, Coleman has extended the almost skeletal
character of these pieces, on the one hand by probing the social, psycho-
logical, historical, and philosophical character of his subject or thematics,

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130 Lynne Cooke

on the other by expanding the potential content of this ostensible subject

matter, imbuing it with metaphorical and allegorical meaning.
Box (ahhareturnabout) (1977) marks a highpoint in Coleman’s work
from the later part of that decade in its wedding of economy with elo-
quence. In this work the densely impacted layering of footage and text
introduces issues that bear on the psychology of the beholder in more
complex ways than hitherto, by permitting an (at least partial) identifica-
tion between the viewing subject and the object of scrutiny. A brief ex-
tract from the renowned Gene Tunney–Jack Dempsey return fight of 1927
is projected as a film loop spliced with black leaders. Punctuating these
momentary blackouts, syncopated to evoke the beat of a heart and/or the
jabs of a punching glove, the soundtrack mercilessly reveals Tunney’s an-
guished thoughts and feelings as he struggles to overwhelm (once again)
his opponent, and to demonstrate (once again) his worthiness to hold the
title. Box is generally exhibited in a closely confined space whose walls have
been painted black. Compressed into a claustrophobic chamber, straining
to decipher an image that constantly fractures, and yet driven on by the
desperation of the embattled hero’s inner monologue, viewers come to
feel as if they inhabit the skull of the boxer, and so surrender their role as
detached witnesses. This particular trial, or ritual combat, turns hypnoti-
cally on Tunney’s anxiety about death and immortality, and on what is
necessarily an endless fantasy of mastery over the other. Since this Irish
boxer’s private self and public self are so closely imbricated, the question
arises whether losing the latter will entail the loss of his identity altogether,
as Jean Fisher points out in her astute analysis of the work. The heroes of
myth, history, or legend offer far richer models than those vouchsafed by
their modern counterparts, soap opera stars. But while, at best, they em-
body models “of the self ’s ideal identity in the social group,” this identifi-
cation is not to be enacted in actuality.19 To do so implies a fatal confusion
of fantasy and reality, as Coleman’s unfinished piece Kojak and Zamora
(1975–) attests, based as it is on the true story of a Puerto Rican teenager
who committed murder as a consequence of “television intoxication” with
a media star.20
Tunney is but one of a number of figures whose roles have been closely
scrutinized by Fisher in her penetrating study of the heroes in Coleman’s
art. Others include James Joyce and Strongbow, an Anglo-Irish conqueror.
Of these it is arguably with Tunney that the viewer becomes most closely
embroiled, to the point of temporarily relinquishing a sense of self. Mostly,
however, Coleman has discouraged this kind of identification. In order to
direct attention to the social meaning of the ritualized gesture in place of
what risks being vicariously perceived as motivations of “character,” Cole-
man henceforth has action imitate reality without reproducing it.
That this work has a unique place in Coleman’s art depends in part on
the nature of its specific content. Boxing has been the subject of study by
a number of celebrated male writers from Ernest Hemingway to Norman
Mailer, but it is Joyce Carol Oates’s encomium that is most relevant to
Coleman’s treatment, not least for the way she characterizes the social role
of the sport, the psychological charge it carries for its supporters and for
the contenders themselves: “Boxers are there to establish an absolute ex-
perience,” she asserts;“they will know, as few of us can know of ourselves,
what physical and psychic power they possess—of how much, or how
little, they are capable.”21 Boxing is for her a ceremonial set to the author-
ity of Time:

When a boxer is “knocked out” it does not mean, as it’s commonly

thought, that he has been knocked unconscious, or even incapaci-
tated; it means rather more poetically that he has been knocked out of
Time. (The referee’s dramatic count of ten constitutes a metaphysical
parenthesis of a kind through which the fallen boxer must penetrate
if he hopes to continue in Time.) There are in a sense two dimensions
of Time abruptly operant: while the standing boxer is in time the
fallen boxer is out of time. Counted out, he is counted “dead.”22

Just as the sport is governed by time so is it subject to codes concerning

space. Oates defines the ring as “an altar of sorts, one of those legendary
spaces where the laws of a nation are suspended . . . [where] a man may be
killed at his opponent’s hands but he cannot be legally murdered.”23 Her
conclusion that boxing inhabits a sacred space predating civilization de-
rives from the fact that boxing’s image cannot be assimilated into what is
desired of civilized man. Its display of direct, unmitigated, and seemingly
natural aggression is almost too explicit to be tolerated: it is “enormously
disturbing because it violates a taboo of our civilization. . . . As a public
spectacle [it] is akin to pornography; in each case the spectator is made a
voyeur, distanced yet presumably intimately involved in an event that is
not supposed to be happening as it is happening. . . . Violation of taboo
against violence . . . is open, explicit, ritualized, and, as I’ve said, rou-

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132 Lynne Cooke

tine—which gives boxing its uncanny air.”24 Finally, but equally impor-
tantly, “in boxing, the individual is so very alone, or seems so. Like the
saint he gives the impression of having arrived at his redemption by un-
flagging solitary effort.”25 This elemental condition is in turn reinforced
by the additional fact that “the Opponent is always male, the Opponent is
the rival for one’s own masculinity, most fully and combatively realized.”26
It is this conjunction of the atavistic and the prescribed informing what
can be read as an elemental but eternal struggle for life itself, a struggle be-
set by doubt, anxiety, and pain, that Coleman draws on so effectively in
giving his work its allegorical meaning.
The choice of a widely known piece of footage of a famous episode—
that is, of an already existing element—is unusual for Coleman from this
moment onward in his career. Although during most of the eighties he
employed vernacular and stereotypical genres—gothic horror, thriller, ro-
mantic melodrama, TV serial—with increasing frequency, synthesizing
or otherwise hybridizing their standardized structures, he always fleshed
them out with raw material of his own devising, his intention being to
frame the notion of narrative by employing something like a collage sys-
tem of narrativity, reconstructing it from diverse elements and radically
different sorts of fragments. Notwithstanding these heteroclite materials
and means, his approach, however, remained quite consistent. Narrative
was always undercut, its conventions and forms continually frayed, unrav-
eled, parodied, and undermined in ways that at once deconstructed it and
made manifest his great gifts in the notable Irish tradition of storytelling.
So Different . . . and Yet (1980) epitomizes Coleman’s skill in this re-
spect in its compelling yet deliberately confusing conflation of two seem-
ingly separate but interlinked tales. The installation features a video in
which a vamp/odalisque reclines in a chaise longue in a setting reduced to
a sea of enveloping blue space save for the background figure of a horned
pianist, who plays an accompaniment to the unfolding saga. Speaking with
patently false French accents, the two protagonists unleash a twisted, in-
tricate narrative fusing seduction and intrigue, sexual rivalry and deceit,
robbery and terrorism. Replete with all the trappings of a dime-store ro-
mance crossed with a thriller, the story at once enthralls and teases as its
tangled threads knot into an unresolved (and unresolvable) denouement.
The tale functions on several levels, ranging across the more overt issues
of gendering, sexual stereotyping, and role playing to the level of allegory,
for it addresses—albeit obliquely—the sociopolitical travails of Ireland by
drawing together literary, historical, mythical, and psychoanalytical refer-
ences in what becomes an almost Joycean overload.27 Gesture, costumes,
and even the performers themselves have become the agents of the nar-
rative, for the adroitly meandering and compelling linguistic innuendoes
not only propel the plot(s) but are the subject of the piece. Narrative tra-
ditionally meant the representation of “significant action,” the istoria, the
aim of which was the edification of the mind rather than the pleasure of
the eye; Coleman turns this around by teasing the mind in ways that at
once entertain and hence give pleasure but simultaneously cause viewers
to consider their own role in the drama of decipherment, and hence in at-
tributing significance to the metanarrative over metaphysics. By his man-
neristic treatment of the habitual tropes of such routine stories, Coleman
renders the viewer hyperconscious of the rhetoric and maneuvers integral
to narrative. He exploits narrative’s capacity to generate significant objects
and hence to generate and engender a significant problematic of receiver-
ship while he simultaneously forces narrative to uncover the machinations
of its own formations.
Seeing for Oneself is an apt title for the work made in 1987–88 in which
this focus on narrative as istoria seems to have been brought to at least a
temporary halt. In those of his works that involve an elaborate narrative,
Coleman constantly brings fiction and artifice to the fore: while never
treated as transparent, the medium is never itself the primary object of
study. By contrast, in the works of the last few years the materiality of the
medium together with its codes and conventions have taken precedent
over narrative tropes in the examination of perception and of issues con-
cerning identity and representation.
Critiques of the traditional paradigms of visuality, of notions of rep-
resentation, of conditions of receivership, and of the role of the spectator
have gained increasing currency at a time when new technologies are re-
locating vision to a plane severed from that of a human observer. As
Jonathan Crary warns:

The radical development in little more than a decade of a vast array of

computer graphics techniques is part of a sweeping reconfiguration of
relations between an observing subject and modes of representation
that effectively nullifies most of the culturally established meanings of
the terms observer and representation. The formalization and diffusion
of computer-generated imagery heralds the ubiquitous implantation
of fabricated visual “spaces” radically different from the mimetic ca-
pacities of film, photography, and television. These latter three, at least

A Tempered Agnosia 133

134 Lynne Cooke

until the mid-1970s, were generally forms of analog media that still
corresponded to the optical wavelengths of the spectrum and to a point
of view, static or mobile, located in real space. . . . Most of the histor-
ically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by
practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the
position of an observer in a “real,” optically perceived world.28

Crary’s prophecy of a future in which “increasingly, visuality will be situ-

ated on a cybernetic and electromagnetic terrain where abstract visual and
linguistic elements coincide and are consumed, circulated, and exchanged
globally”29 needs to be set against the growing preoccupation over the past
three decades with the theorizing of issues of representation, vision, and
visuality by artists and writers inside as well as beyond the world of high
culture. The basis for these debates was laid largely by Michel Foucault. In
the postwar years Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty had re-
grounded theories of perception in the “lived-body.” Sartre argued that
reciprocation is integral to the gaze, linking the gaze with questions of
identity, authenticity, and engagement, while dismantling its position or
standpoint at the center of the world. Merleau-Ponty stressed a meaning-
laden imbrication of the viewer and the viewed in the particularities of
real time and space, and the crucial function of actual, empirical observa-
tion. Foucault turned instead to the modalities of seeing, its embodiment
in language, in thought structures, in power, and in the formative para-
digms of any discourse of a particular era. His analyses have been accom-
panied and expanded by theories which contend with the construction of
the self, with identity, and with reception, by such thinkers as Jacques La-
can and Jacques Derrida. Coleman’s work is clearly informed by these un-
folding debates. His achievement depends, however, on the ways in which
he is able to instantiate them in works that are neither didactic nor illustra-
tive but replete with an elusive richness and a stringent eloquence of a kind
that might be desired, but cannot be demanded, from a fellow country-
man of James Joyce.

Notes

1. James Coleman, quoted in Richard Kearney, “Interview with James Coleman,” The
Crane Bag 6, no. 2 (1982), p. 128.
2. Anne Rorimer, James Coleman (New York: Marian Goodman Gallery, 1991), n.p.
3. Michael Newman, “Allegories of the Subject: The Theme of Identity in the Work of
James Coleman,” in James Coleman: Selected Works (Chicago and London: Renaissance So-
ciety at the University of Chicago and ICA London, 1985), pp. 26–27.
4. “You know, I never did feel I did abandon painting,” Coleman averred in 1983. See Kear-
ney, “Interview with James Coleman,” p. 127.
5. Titles are very telling for Coleman and always carefully chosen. Charon refers to the
boatman who ferries the dead to Hades. In Lucian’s satire, Charon or the Inspectors, the boat-
man, accompanied by Hermes, comes to the earth for the day to observe the daily life of
mankind. Lucian utilizes him as the vehicle for a satire on human values and aspirations, on
inflated hopes, unfounded dreams, fears, and vanities. Much of what the Greek author de-
rides or disdains falls within the compass of roles to which photography is bent, the beliefs
and values it subtends, inflates, and conjures.
6. The title La Tache Aveugle refers to the way Georges Bataille used the phrase. Coleman’s
reference to Denis Hollier’s discussion of this suggests the way in which his own piece can
be read in terms of the structuring of identity, as the following intimates. After stating that
for Bataille the mind has a blind spot like that of the eye, Hollier goes on to argue,

In the area of “notions” this point is occupied by the notion de dépense, the notion of
unthinking expenditure, the blind spot of rationalist, utilitarian economy, the whole
where the edifice of thought is spent, swallowed up, ruined. . . . To have a sense
[meaning], for Bataille, is to be constituted by that which negates one. Nothing is
meaningful, nothing makes sense, until confronted by its negation. A thing’s sense is
the rupture of its identity, that which exceeds it, that by means of which it exceeds and
is not itself but that which is beyond it, or its absence.

Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1989), pp. 96–97.
7. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illu-
minations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969),
pp. 217–52.
8. Ibid., pp. 233–34.
9. Ibid., p. 234.
10. Howard Brody, Stories of Sickness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. xii. The
link between narrative and healing connects to the larger analogy of medicine and film,
which runs through Coleman’s oeuvre in various guises. In Seeing For Oneself, for example,
this analogy centers on the alchemical/scientific experiments which Neville performs in his
laboratory, and which generate the elixir, the pivot and emblem around which the whole
turns. In guaiRE: An Allegory the obstetrician speaks of his desire to perform a postmortem
on the body of the previous king, “Cutting the body into parts—hoping to see what . . .
the spirit?” For Michael Newman, within the investigative structure common to Coleman’s
works, the character is both obstetrician and murderer “because he assists at the birth of the
modern subject as an assignment of position” (Newman, “Allegories of the Subject,” p. 48).
This recalls, as pointed out by several critics, that for the Enlightenment the operating the-
ater no less than the popular theater was a place where the body as spectacle was laid out for
the public gaze. A sustained relationship with Foucault’s thought could be articulated here,
for Foucault argued that clinical medicine “was probably the first attempt to order a science
on the exercise and decisions of the gaze.” In The Birth of the Clinic (New York: Vintage
Books, 1975), Foucault countered the notion of a stabilized reality, contending that there

A Tempered Agnosia 135

136 Lynne Cooke

are only projections of ourselves and our relations to others, projections which operate
through the mediations of our social constructs, and he tried to determine the deep con-
ceptual organization which gathered these seeings together into a form of “visibility,” a
scopic regime, different from others.
11. This relationship with cinema which it foreshadows has been analyzed by Rosalind
Krauss:

The phenomenology of the stereoscope produces a situation that is not unlike that of
looking at cinema. Both involve the isolation of the viewer with an image from which
surrounding interference is masked out. In both, the image transports the viewer op-
tically, while his body remains mobile. In both, the pleasure derives from the experi-
ence of the simulacrum: the appearance of reality from which any testing of the
real-effect by actually, physically moving through the scene is denied. And in both, the
real-effect of the simulacrum is heightened by temporal dilation. What has been called
the apparatus of cinematic process had, then, a certain proto-history in the institution
of stereography, just as stereography’s own proto-history is to be found in the similarly
darkened and isolating but spectacularly illusionistic space of the diorama. And in the
case of the stereograph, as would later be the case for film, the specific pleasures that
seem to be released by that apparatus—the desires that it seems to gratify—led to the
instantly wild popularity of the instrument. . . . The diffusion of stereography as a
truly mass medium was made possible by mechanized printing techniques.

Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” Art Journal 42 (Win-

ter 1982), p. 31.
12. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton, 1978), p. 92.
13. John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, 3d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1987), p. 205. While White’s concept of observations of actual reality might
now be questioned, the sense he gives of a subtle and astute balancing and harmonizing of
different conventions and codes for reality remains valid.
14. Jonathan Crary, “Techniques of the Observer,” October 45 (Summer 1988), pp. 5–6. As
Crary points out (pp. 28–29),

Even as sophisticated a student of vision as [Hermann von] Helmholtz could write, in

the 1850s:“These stereoscopic photographs are so true to nature and so life-like in their
portrayal of material things, that after viewing such a picture and recognizing in it
some object like a house, for instance, we get the impression, when we actually do see
the object, that we have already seen it before and are more or less familiar with it.
In cases of this kind, the actual view of the thing does not add anything new or more
accurate to the previous apperception we got from the picture, so far at least as mere
form relations are concerned.”

15. Ibid., p. 30.

16. In 1990 Coleman completed a piece based even more directly on the model of the stere-
opticon. The image(s) reconstructed a photograph of a postcard which W. B. Yeats had
taken of his study in his castle at Thoor Ballylee. Alongside the craze for photographic views
which the stereopticon promoted, there was a rapid growth in the proliferation of postcards
in the early twentieth century. Postcards confirm presence and absence simultaneously in
that they involve the recipient, attesting to the sender’s former location at the site, and
through that make evident both the absence of the sender and the absence to which all pho-
tography bears witness.
17. Rosalind Krauss, “Antivision,” October 36 (Spring 1986), p. 147.
18. In his history of conceptual art, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh traces the ways in which the
linguistic and perceptual spheres were mapped onto each other back to Sol LeWitt’s Struc-
tures of 1961–62, where the artist forced the inherent contradiction between the two spheres
into the highest possible relief. And he instances Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its
Own Making of 1961 as a seminal example of counteracting the visual with an auditory ex-
perience of equal if not higher importance. The minimalists were among the first to inscribe
a phenomenological model of experience onto the traditional model of purely visual spec-
ularity. See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1968: From the Aesthetic of
Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990), pp. 106–43.
Certain video installations by Bruce Nauman, Peter Campus, and Dan Graham at the
end of the sixties not only required the spectator’s presence to become activated, but as
Douglas Crimp writes, “were fundamentally concerned with the registration of presence as
a means towards establishing meaning.” Telling similarities, and differences, may be drawn
between Coleman’s work and that of a number of American artists whose work Crimp an-
alyzed as the product of a new sensibility emerging at the onset of the 1980s; these artists
included Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Cindy Sher-
man. See Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979), pp. 75–88; reprinted in Brian
Wallis, ed., Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: New Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1984), p. 177.
19. Jean Fisher, “The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman” (1983), reprinted
in this volume.
20. For a fuller account, see ibid., pp. 44–49; for a bizarre addendum to this story, see Trip
Gabriel, “The Psychiatrist Who Pleaded Insanity,” New York Times Magazine, 12 May 1991,
p. 36 and following.
21. Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing (Garden City: Dolphin/Doubleday, 1987), p. 8.
22. Ibid., p. 15.
23. Ibid., p. 19.
24. Ibid., pp. 105–06.
25. Ibid., p. 110.
26. Ibid., p. 72.
27. Joyce was the subject of homage in a work entitled Ulysses Project that Coleman made
in 1982 in response to a commission for an exhibition marking the centennial of the writer’s
birth.
28. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Cen-
tury (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 1–2.
29. Ibid., p. 2.

A Tempered Agnosia 137

Lapsus Exposure, 1992–94
Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.
 Live Vocals

Kaja Silverman

James Coleman’s Lapsus Exposure (1992–94) is an allegorical work, both in

its formal articulation and its thematic concerns. In this respect, it re-
sembles Background (1991–94), its immediate predecessor, which not only
proceeds in an insistently allegorical fashion, but also constitutes a study of
the affect specific to allegory: melancholy.1 Like the work it follows, Lap-
sus Exposure is also in implicit dialogue with an earlier allegory—this time
Plato’s Parable of the Cave,2 rather than Dürer’s Melancholia 1.
Like the urtext of Western philosophy, Coleman’s 1992 “projection”
juxtaposes a domain of darkness with a domain of light. It situates its hu-
man characters within the first of these spaces, but holds open the possi-
bility for them to enter the second, and even dramatizes one such foray.
Coleman’s cave-dwellers spend their time straining to make out stimuli
which derive from a reproductive apparatus, much as Plato’s do. Like the
Parable of the Cave, Lapsus Exposure also constitutes an allegory about hu-
man perception. Finally, Coleman’s text—like its Platonic counterpart—
points the way toward a kind of perceptual redemption.
Here, however, the similarities end. The Parable of the Cave opposes
truth to representation, and depicts as exemplary the movement from the
latter to the former. Lapsus Exposure undoes this opposition, defining rep-
resentation as our pathway to the real. Plato’s text also offers a metaphys-
ical account of Being. Coleman’s, on the other hand, accepts as absolute
the limits of the physical world.
Everything earthly, Plato tells us in his famous allegory, constitutes a
copy of a spiritual prototype or Idea.3 When we create what we generally
140 Kaja Silverman

call a “representation,” we make a copy of this copy.4 A copy constitutes a

degraded imitation of an incorruptible original, and with each subsequent
level of mimesis the degradation increases. For the most part, we mistake
the simulacrum or—worse yet—the simulacrum of the simulacrum, for
what it replaces. Like the prisoners in the allegorical cave, we are then sunk
in the darkness of deception, shadow-gazing. Plato calls upon us to move
backward from these representations of representations to the representa-
tions for which they stand, and from there to the forms from which the
latter derive. If we do so, he tells us, the shadows on the walls of our meta-
phoric cave will give way to a radiant illumination, whose privileged ce-
lestial signifier is the sun.
Lapsus Exposure also contains a cave of sorts, as well as a site of illumi-
nation. Coleman shot the work in a studio for the production of sounds
and images, which was partitioned into a stagelike area and an area more
closely approximating a backstage. He sets its story in a studio as well, and
organizes its space in the same way. He also ups the binary ante by paint-
ing the walls of the backstage area black, and those of the stage area white.
Coleman heightens the contrast between these two spaces further in
the process of defining them. He locates a wardrobe rack and related tools
of the audiovisual production trade in the space with black walls, along
with a number of technicians and musicians. He also dresses these charac-
ters—some of whom are the members of a 1950s band, and some of
whom belong to a group of 1990s post-punkers—in bright and variegated
colors. In the white-walled space, on the other hand, which is for the most
part without human inhabitants, he situates a light-reflecting screen and
two high-voltage lamps on tripods. He also works with a very limited
palette. This palette is primarily blue, black, and white. At times, Coleman
restricts the color scheme even more drastically by filtering out the blue.
But the author of Lapsus Exposure seems as determined to undo this
spatial opposition as he is to establish it; indeed, he appears to delineate it
only in order to erase it. There is little to satisfy the eye accustomed to tra-
ditional kinds of spectacle in the area set up for shooting images. Virtually
nothing happens there, and the lamps and screen illuminate only them-
selves. The sequences which take place behind the scenes, on the other
hand, are full of striking tableaux of characters engaged in the activities of
looking and listening. Coleman also turns his camera on these tableaux
much more often than on those involving the lamps and screen. Finally,
the post-punk characters themselves make it difficult to distinguish be-
tween the two areas of the production studio.
 Like Lapsus Exposure, punk works hard to deconstruct the opposition
of art and life. It does so in part through its theatricalization of the quotid-
ian, and in part through its enshrinement of ugliness as the supreme form of
beauty. Together, these two gestures create a kind of “in your face” aesthetic,
which leaps out of the everyday. The musicians and production crew in this
work represent an amelioration of the second of punk’s principles; even the
most conservative eye could not fail to respond positively to the saturated
colors of their clothing and makeup, or the elegance of their stance. How-
ever, these characters are still faithful to the notion that life itself is inher-
ently aesthetic. Coleman can consequently use them to demonstrate that
one can solicit the camera without looking at it, pose without stepping out
of the most quotidian of bodily postures, and paint without lifting a brush.
The two spaces in Lapsus Exposure’s studio interpenetrate in a num-
ber of other ways as well. The band’s drum is red, a color that figures cen-
trally in the backstage sequences. Nevertheless, it intrudes into some of the
onstage sequences, as—near the end—do several backstage props. When
the band assembles as if for a performance, they do so within the room lit
by the studio lamps, and they are joined by a female sound technician, who,
although framed by the white floor and walls, is dressed entirely in black.
If this were the limit of Coleman’s rewriting of the Parable of the
Cave, he could already be said to have played havoc with its categories. By
situating both the domain of shadows and the domain of illumination in a
production studio, and then blurring the distinction between them, he
abolishes the notion that there are two “worlds,” rigorously separated from
each other.5 But he does not stop here. The lamps and light reflector have
been set up in the white room for a photographic or cinematic shoot. Cole-
man thus also links light to human image-making, rather than to the Good.
To make certain that we do not miss this inversion of metaphysical prior-
ities, he digitally works over some of the analog images of the studio lamps
and screen, thereby associating illumination not just with representation,
but also with the representation of a representation, i.e., with that which
Plato places at the furthest possible remove from his metaphoric sun.

But we have not yet reached the heart of Lapsus Exposure. Even more than
a deconstruction of visual binaries, it is an allegory about voice. Coleman
begins the work with a series of photographic images, linked by way of
dissolves, of a studio lamp on a tall tripod facing a screen, onto which it
shines its light. At various moments in this sequence, we also glimpse a
second studio lamp on the other side of the screen, and a wall beyond.

Live Vocals 141

142 Kaja Silverman

Lapsus Exposure, 1992–94

Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.

However, we don’t know whether this wall also constitutes a screen, or

whether the lamps are instruments of a photographic or a cinematic shoot.
At first we are too baffled by these images to pay attention to anything
else. It is consequently some time before we realize that a woman is speak-
ing. What this woman says is as difficult to understand as the images at which
we are looking. She does not so much assemble as disassemble her sen-
tences, separating individual words from each other through long pauses,
and never completing a thought. In Lapsus Exposure, the diachronic di-
mension of language almost entirely defeats the synchronic. Insofar as we
are able to make sense of the woman’s laconic half-statements, moreover,
our confusion increases, since she seems to be talking about sound, rather
than the production of images.
We never completely regain our bearing, but by the end of Lapsus Ex-
posure we are in possession of a few “facts.” We know, first of all, that the
studio in which it takes place has audio as well as visual facilities, and that
the post-punk characters have assembled there for the purpose of record-
ing a song. They are unable to do so, because the amplifier isn’t working
and the singer’s voice cannot be heard. Someone points out that the vocal
track has already been recorded; perhaps the musicians can coordinate the
sound of their instruments with the playback. But Seiko, one of the mu-
sicians, objects that he does not play to the accompaniment of “numbers.”
The word numbers is a metaphor for a preexisting paradigm, much as it is
in the expression “to paint by numbers.” With it, Seiko expresses his un-
willingness to conform to what already exists. In order to make certain
that no limits are placed upon how or what he plays, he wants the play-
back erased. The others demur, and the rest of the work is devoted to an
exploration of what it would mean for the band to play to the accompa-
niment of an already-recorded voice.
But this is only one dimension of the story. The prerecorded vocal
track derives not from an earlier recording session with the same musicians,
but—apparently—from one with another group, the 1950s band. It is not
clear whether we are to regard this band as actually inhabiting a different
historical moment than the post-punkers, or as being a retro group from
the present moment, but either way they signify the “past.” Lapsus Expo-
sure thus becomes an interrogation not merely of what it would mean to
play along with a prerecorded voice, but also of what it would mean to
align a voice from the 1950s with instrumentalization from the 1990s.
After the musician demands that the recorded vocal track be erased,
the female voice says “listen to the playback.” In so doing, she reminds us
that the voice which functions as an unwanted model is itself a copy—and
an electronic one at that. “Numbers” now becomes a signifier for “digi-
tality,” as well as “rules.” Seiko refuses to accompany the recorded voice
because it lacks the presence and originality he imputes to his own music-
making, as well as because of an unwillingness to be bound by an already
existing model.
But although the word playback seems at first to refer only to the pre-
recorded vocal track, its semantic range keeps increasing. First, it becomes
evident that if the 1990s musicians were to perform in tandem with the
recorded voice, they would play “back” in time. And even if their own
singer’s voice could be heard, they would be reprising former perfor-
mances and adhering at least to some degree to a prearranged score. Al-
though playing in the present moment, they would produce music that
would also itself immediately pass over into the category of a recording.
Before long, the term “playback” also seems to encompass the voice
in some larger sense. Do not all utterances depend both for their form and
their meaning upon previous utterances? And do we not necessarily draw
when speaking upon a language system which precedes us and will ante-

Live Vocals 143

144 Kaja Silverman

Lapsus Exposure, 1992–94

Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.

date us, and which limits what we can say?6 Is not all discourse, then, the
playing back of something that came before, a copy in a mise-en-abîme of
copies?
A number of elements in Lapsus Exposure seem to demand this final
generalization. One character complains that to use a prerecorded vocal
track would be to submit to a “pre-diction.” Another says that it would be
a “re-call.” Like Coleman’s Background, this work also features an unusual
kind of narrating voice: one which, although it is not synchronized with
the images, nevertheless issues from within them. Again, this voice moves
around a lot, speaking on behalf of a range of characters. This time, how-
ever, it is female and devoid of the characteristics which would permit us
to link it more to one of the characters than to the others.7
Coleman also makes it difficult for us to know for whom this female
voice is speaking at any given moment in time. It hovers above the human
figures, like the speech balloon in a cartoon, producing a kind of generic
discourse. Through it, Coleman suggests that the subject’s words are never
entirely her own. When we speak, it is as though we lay momentary claim
to something that does not belong to us.
 Much of what the voice says points to the same conclusion. The first
sounds it emits are “ah” and “ahemm,” which are more phatic than com-
municative; they foreground a feature of the voice that is in excess of sig-
nification. A moment later, though, the speaker makes clear that she has
produced the “ah” and “ahemm” on behalf of the singer, who is testing
the sound equipment. When the sound equipment proves recalcitrant, she
also complains that she cannot hear herself speak. She now seems to be
offering a general commentary on language. No one, after all, can really
hear what she says; it is only from the place of the Other that our words
become fully intelligible.8 We are also frequently at a loss to recognize our-
selves in what we say. What speaks is not us, but rather language itself.
However, Lapsus Exposure ultimately resists our attempts to subsume
“discourse” entirely to “playback.” The concept of “liveness” also enjoys
a surprising longevity. Coleman’s project is finally not to eliminate the dis-
tinction between “playback” and “liveness,” but rather to subject each term
to a radical resemanticization. Over the course of the work, the first comes
to designate all vocal production which slavishly conforms to a preexist-
ing model, irrespective of whether it is unfolding in the present or derives
from an audiotape or disc. Coleman reserves the adjective “live” for a very
different kind of vocal production—one that transcends the oppositions
between the past and the present, the original and the copy, and represen-
tation and the real.
At the moment that the musicians discover that the amplifier is not
working, the female speaker first says that there are “no live vocals,” then
proposes that the playback tape be used instead, and finally—on Seiko’s
behalf—asserts the incommensurability of the two. At this juncture, “live”
signifies “happening in the ‘here and now,’” as is usually the case when one
is speaking about sound. Later in Lapsus Exposure, though, it comes to
mean something closer to “alive.” When this happens, it moves over ad-
jectivally to the side of the recorded voice.

It might seem impossible for a voice which is neither temporally nor spa-
tially present to be alive. However, Coleman gives this last word a very
unconventional meaning. Something is not alive, we learn late in Lapsus
Exposure, by simple virtue of having been born. Nor is it necessarily dead
because it has died. Rather, an a/live voice is one that has been resurrected
through “song.” The word song emerges fairly early in this work, shortly
before the speaker utters the word “pre-diction.” It comes in the form of

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a negation—as the invocation of what does not yet exist. “No, not song,”
says the female voice, apparently for Seiko. There is no song at this point
in the work because the characters are still seeing the recorded voice as si-
multaneously unreal and a coercive model to which they must conform.
Later, however, they begin to accompany it by humming the tune out loud.
In the sequence where these harmonizing activities occur, the speaker ut-
ters the word “song” again, now in the guise of an affirmation: “Listen to
the playback—do you recognize a melody? . . . In my head:voice, sounds,
song . . .”
“Song” refers in the first instance to the new musical composition
which takes shape within Seiko’s head as a result of the mental alignment
of his own voice with the one on the recorded tape. However, with it
Coleman also clearly alludes to the transtemporal and transformal duets
which figure so centrally within contemporary musical experimentation.
The duets to which I refer can take an artisanal form like “scratching,”
in which manual activity still has a part to play, and in which there is still
a palpable “instrument.” Here a DJ isolates “beats” from the records in
which they have been embedded by moving a needle back and forth across
their vinyl surfaces, generating in the process new sounds and rhythms. At
other times they take an entirely digital form. A musician feeds temporally
distinct “samples” of preexisting sounds into a computer and creates a lit-
eral song out of them. There are also musicians—like Moby—who bring
together digitized sounds with their own voice and/or instrumentation,
enacting at the level of “actuality” what Seiko does in his head.
As we look for the last time at the room with white walls and light re-
flectors, we hear the female speaker say:“A figure buried in numbers, wait-
ing for a time to arrive when all that is said and imaged will be turned into
beats and chords, so that the eye can hear, too—or take it and love it, when
it is gone.” The word “figure” clearly has an allegorical significance, but of
a rather special kind. It is a voice which anticipates a later one, but with-
out determining what that voice will be, or the moment at which it will
arrive. It assumes its allegorical status only retroactively, from the vantage
point of the voice or voices which, by corresponding with it, constitute it
as a figure.
Like the figure described by Erich Auerbach in his important essay
“Figura,” Coleman’s figure is also simultaneously real and metaphoric.9 It is
better instantiated by Joshua in the Old Testament, who was a historical per-
sonage as well a “forerunner” of Christ, than by Wallace Stevens’s emperor
of ice cream,10 whose existence is purely fictive. Both in its dependence for
its figural status upon a later voice, and in its bringing together of repre-
sentation and the real, Coleman’s figure is the opposite of a Platonic form.
But “figure” also signifies “image” in Lapsus Exposure, and we cannot
arrive at a full understanding either of it or of the notion of “song” with-
out taking this additional meaning into account. In an important sequence,
two post-punk women stand beside each other looking at the photographs.
“If cropped . . . hmm . . . and joined together . . . runs . . . runs . . . sud-
denly still.” This remark clearly reflects upon Coleman’s photographic
practice, which halts physical movement, but then—through the align-
ment of series of slides—creates what might be called perceptual “runs.”
But it also plays a part within Lapsus Exposure’s meditation on vocal har-
mony. In order for a discursive duet to occur, two voices must be joined
together. Each must also be “trimmed” a bit.
It might seem odd that Coleman would use such a visually oriented
scene to theorize an auditory transaction, but this is not an isolated occur-
rence. From shortly after the utterance of the word song until the end of Lap-
sus Exposure, the female speaker makes as many references to seeing as she
does to hearing or speaking. She invokes colors (“purple” and “green”), dis-
tinctions specific to the field of vision (“midground” and “background”),
the binary “light” and “dark,” as well as uttering the words “Polaroids,”“im-
ages,” and “looking.” Coleman characterizes the kind of language that is
capable of harmonizing the past with the present through visual metaphors
because it requires words to behave like images.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud distinguishes between two kind of

signifying processes—the “primary” and the “secondary.” Both of these
processes operate at the behest of the pleasure principle, which is the driv-
ing force behind all of psychic life. For reasons which will become clear in
a moment, however, the primary process is far more amenable to the de-
mands of the pleasure principle than is the secondary process. Its “role” is
to make pleasure possible by bringing about the repetition of experiences
which have yielded that sensation in the past. At the beginning of life, the
primary process achieves this goal in the simplest way imaginable: it reac-
tivates previous perceptions in the form of a hallucination. It is in a posi-
tion to do so because the memories at its disposal are indistinguishable
from what they represent; they have the sensory values of perceptions. Hal-
lucinations, however, are unsustainable; the pleasure they provide quickly

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fades. Before long, the pleasure principle must “instruct” the primary pro-
cess to start searching in the perceptual present for stimuli capable of reac-
tualizing the past, rather than relying upon memory alone.11
After repression takes place, certain perceptual memories become
taboo, and the subject can no longer openly pursue the pleasure they rep-
resent. By virtue of being forbidden, however, these memories assume a
greater importance; the pleasure they promise takes priority over all oth-
ers. The primary process now has a more difficult task to perform; it must
bring about the repetition of the forbidden gratification, but in a form that
does not arouse the ire of the psychic censor. It classically does so either by
transferring onto “innocent” memories or perceptual stimuli the psychic
value which properly attaches to the repressed memories, or by combin-
ing them with elements drawn from unrepressed memories or perceptual
stimuli. Freud calls the first of these psychic processes “displacement,” and
the second “condensation.”
The only memories or perceptual stimuli which can be used for ei-
ther purpose are those with associative links to the taboo memories. The
primary process is consequently constantly “on the lookout” for similar
and contiguous material. When it puts a present or previous perception in
place of a repressed memory, it treats the substitutory term as if it were
what it replaces, even if there is only a weak link between the two. The
primary process does not recognize difference, cannot negate, and is indif-
ferent to inconsistencies or logical contradictions.
I used the word “lookout” a moment ago as a way of anticipating the
next point I want to make. The primary process “speaks” a predominantly
visual language; the memories and perceptual stimuli that we marshal in
order to gain pleasure are generally imagistic in consistency. This makes
the primary process more amenable than the secondary process to the de-
mands of the pleasure principle.12 Freud accounts for the affinities between
seeing and the pleasure principle in primarily strategic terms: mnemonic
images are more capable of passing themselves off as the desired reality
than are words. But the activity of seeing is not only the means to a libid-
inal end; it is itself, as I have argued elsewhere, the goal. So central is vi-
sion to the operations of the pleasure principle that it could be defined as
the urge to see again what we have seen before.13
The secondary process has the upper hand at the level of conscious-
ness and the preconscious. It attaches linguistic signifiers to our perceptual
memories, thereby making “thought” possible. When worked over in this
way, a memory undergoes a number of changes. It loses most of its sen-
sory intensity and becomes a concept or signified, i.e., a differential ele-
ment within a larger system, which can be joined together discursively
with many others without losing its integrity. A perceptual memory’s ca-
pacity for generating pleasure or pain is also radically diminished when a
linguistic signifier is attached to it.14
Once we have verbally “processed” our perceptual memories, we are
in a position to discriminate one from another, and to establish logical,
temporal, spatial, and other relations between them. We no longer mis-
take them for things, nor are we overwhelmed by negative or positive feel-
ings when we approach one of them. However, so long as we remain
strictly within the sphere of the linguistic signifier, we inhabit a domain
whose defining attribute is closure. With the word “closure,” I do not
mean to invoke the Saussurean notion of language as a closed field of
meaning—the idea that the word “mother” derives its significance from
its opposition to the words “father” or “daughter,” rather than from its re-
lation to an actual mother.15 I am concerned, rather, with what might be
called “libidinal stagnation.” Language acts as a powerful curb on displace-
ment; after it has been linked to a linguistic signifier, a memory hoards the
small libidinal charge which it still retains. Once a visual recollection of
one’s mother has been turned into a word, then, it ceases to function as a
possible “donor” in relation to new perceptual stimuli or other memories.
Things are at least potentially very different with the look. At its most
exemplary, the latter represents a “meeting” of memory and an external
stimulus, i.e., of representation and the real. It also provides the occasion
for a transfer of libido from the former to the latter. When such a dis-
placement occurs, there is what Nietzsche calls a “transvaluation” of “val-
ues”;16 what we see in the present shines with the luminousness of what
we have seen in the past. This is not a borrowed light; we are not giving to
one thing what “belongs” to another. Rather, what we have long dreamt
of seeing undergoes a miraculous transformation; it is reborn in the shape
of what stands before us. As a result of this transformation, what stands be-
fore us also becomes more real than it was before; it assumes its “essence”
or “Being.”
But the opposition between seeing and speaking is obviously not as ab-
solute as I have made it out to be. Since language is based in some ultimate
way upon visual perception, it can never exclude it completely. The pri-
mary and secondary processes also always work at least to some degree in
tandem. As a result, looking can assume some of the properties of language.
The memory or visual stimulus which it puts in place of another then be-

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150 Kaja Silverman

come visible as a signifier, permitting us to apprehend the representational

bases of our perceptions. But language can also assume some of the prop-
erties of looking. Affinity then overrides difference, “opening” words to
each other, and making possible libidinal transfers between them. It is to
an examination of this kind of language that Lapsus Exposure is devoted.
Colemanian song, however, exceeds the psychoanalytic model I have
just sketched in several important ways. First of all, Freud elaborates an in-
trapsychic account of signification; he explores the signifying relationships
linking the subject’s present to her own past. The signifying transaction to
which Lapsus Exposure is devoted, on the other hand, is intersubjective in
nature; it shifts libido from one psyche to another. When the post-punk
musicians hum, they provide the receptacle for someone else’s affect.
Second, Freud attributes only a symptomatic value to the words that
make up a short story, or the images that comprise a dream; they exist in
order to be decoded.17 For Coleman, on the other hand, aesthetic form is
all-important. Only through its agency can affect be transferred from one
subject to another. The affect in question is also inflected in all kinds of
ways by the kind of form through which it is transmitted. Cinema, for in-
stance, imputes a different temporality to the “more-than-reality” that it
makes possible than does still photography; it encourages us to love “what
is,” rather than “what was.”18 Finally, intersubjective displacement as Cole-
man conceptualizes it requires not just one, but rather two forms.

Because its production depends upon the physical presence of what it de-
picts, the still photograph attests with unusual force to the latter’s “having-
been-ness.”19 It is consequently often seen as having a more intimate
relation to the world than earlier forms of representation had.20 The dig-
ital image has no such requirement; it can spring forth ex nihilo from the
computer, and even figure forth things that have never existed. For this
reason, we tend to think of it as “simulacral”—as breaking photography’s
contract with the real.
This account of the analog image seems at first to be light years away
from Plato’s account of representation. What functions in the earlier text
as a debased copy here shifts over to the side of the “original”; rather than
being defined as an imperfect replica of the Realm of Ideas, our world it-
self becomes the model upon which image-making is based. Indexicality
also replaces mimesis as the agency of reproduction, securing for the copy
an authenticity which is nowhere to be found in the Republic. However,
reality is still assumed both to preexist representation and to make it pos-
sible. And although representation can be more or less faithful to reality, it
nevertheless remains forever confined to the category of a “fiction.”
In the final sequence of Lapsus Exposure, Coleman breaks as emphat-
ically with the second account of representation as he does with the first.
Like the opening sequence, this one takes place in the white-walled area.
At first, the image is dominated by the screen and the two studio lamps.
As time goes by, though, it becomes more and more cluttered with back-
stage objects, including ladders and the wardrobe rack. Coleman also
sometimes splits space into zones of light and zones of darkness. Repre-
sentation and the real thus do more than interpenetrate; they inhabit the
same field of vision.
As a result of the presence of the ladders and wardrobe, space is much
more articulated than it was in the previous screen and lamp sequences,
where there is little depth-of-field. Then the opposite happens. The ana-
log images give way to ones that have been digitally manipulated, and space
becomes emphatically two-dimensional. It is at this moment that Cole-
man has the female speaker articulate his definition of sound. Let us listen
to this definition again, along with the sentence that follows: “A figure
buried in numbers, waiting for a time to arrive when all that is said and
imaged will be turned into beats and chords, so that the eye can hear,
too—or take it and love it, when it is gone. Lens cover . . . has the secret.”
The phrase “lens cover” constitutes an obvious reference to the digi-
tal image, which can be produced without ever taking the camera out of
its case. By attributing the “secret” of figuration to it, though, Coleman
claims digitization for a very different project than that embarked upon by
George Lucas or Steven Spielberg—one closely related to what he earlier
calls “live vocals.” He also invites us to think in entirely new ways about
aesthetic realism.
If an analog image succeeds in putting us in touch with the world,
Coleman suggests, it is not because of its indexical or iconic relation to its
model. It is, rather, because the scopic encounter which remains latent
within it has been reactualized in us; because it has succeeded in transmit-
ting to us the affect specific to another subject’s perceptual experience.
Once again, moreover, this affect has a realizing effect upon the real; it al-
lows what we see to Be.
Since realism is in the final instance an affective rather than a formal
affair, there are no restrictions on the kinds of texts which can serve under
its banner. The fact that an image constitutes a copy of a copy does not
make it any less “realistic” than one drawn by the “pencil of Nature.”21

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152 Kaja Silverman

Lapsus Exposure, 1992–94

Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.

What does make one work more responsive to the real than another is its
amenability to the libidinal transfers by means of which the latter becomes
“itself.”
The degree to which a work is able to transmit affect from author to
reader or viewer is initially determined, as we have seen, by the degree of
its “primarization.” This libidinal transfer classically takes place within the
parameters of a form, though, and every form eventually closes in upon
itself. The affect which once coursed through its textual representatives
then becomes inert, a kind of “standing pool.” It will remain sealed off
both from us and from the world unless we succeed in putting the form in
question into communication with another form—one which still has the
power to move us.22
Photography retained this power for an unusually lengthy period. Its
“time,” however, is drawing to a close.23 Already in Barthes’s Camera Lu-
cida, a text from 1980, we can sense the diminishing capacity of the cam-
era to convey affect from one psyche to another. Its author speaks proudly
at one point in the book about his refusal to “inherit” anything from an-
other eye, but he is clearly making a virtue out of necessity.24 The photo-
graphs at which he looks are in fact incapable of effecting this transmission.
Since for Barthes, as for Coleman, affect is finally “everything,” he does
not accept this state of affairs. Instead, he searches within himself for
visual representations capable of corresponding with the photographs at
which he looks. Because Barthes alone is privy to the resulting “duets,” we
do not know exactly how they “sound.” However, the author of Camera
Lucida leaves us in no doubt about their enabling force. By harmonizing
his memories with the photographs in his collection, he is able to get the
libido which stagnates within them flowing once again.
Coleman documents a much later moment in the “demise” of the
photographic image than does Barthes. Not only is the technology of this
form now virtually obsolete, but its transferential capacity is also almost
completely exhausted. “Private solutions” like the one developed in Cam-
era Lucida are no longer adequate to the affective crisis in which we find
ourselves; we need aesthetic ones as well. In the final sequence of Lapsus
Exposure, Coleman uses the computer to devise some.
The images that result from the digitization of the analog images of the
white room closely resemble the analog images. They, too, depict a room
with lamps, ladders, a screen, and a number of other tools of the production
trade. Because of their many similarities to the analog images, the digitized
images are able to “stand in” libidinally for them, much as a dream image
can for a repressed memory. This permits them to bridge the affective dis-
tance between us and the analog images, and so to recover what would
otherwise be lost: the world as it shone in the sun of another person’s eyes.
We find ourselves beginning to “care” about the white room.
Unlike the analog images that precede them, however, the digitized
images are two-dimensional, and their colors have a paintlike thickness;
they insist in an almost modernist way upon their “flatness.” By using
the computer to foreground their representational status, Coleman secon-
darizes them—he makes them “behave” a bit like words. In so doing, he
might be said to “expose” the time lapse which separates a photograph
from its referent.
But this is not the end of the libidinal story. The digitized images re-
late to the analog images much as the analog images relate to what they
depict. They both depend upon the latter for their physical existence, and
refer insistently back to it. The analog and digitized images also commu-
nicate as much through the anteriority of their semiotic as they do through
what they show. Through the formal modulation with which Coleman
ends Lapsus Exposure, he therefore makes it possible for us to take and love

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154 Kaja Silverman

not only a particular moment in the past, and the unique convergence of
world and eye which that moment made possible, but also photography
itself, both as a medium and as a form of memorialization.

Notes

1. See my “Melancholia 2,” in James Coleman (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2002). “Melancholia
2” is a companion essay to the current text; it focuses on Coleman’s Background. Also pub-
lished in this same catalog (for an exhibition at the Lenbachhaus Munich, 20 April to 21
July 2002) were two further essays, “Growing Still” (on the projection I N I T I A L S
[1993–94]) and “Girl Love” (on the projection Photograph [1998–99]).
2. The Parable of the Cave appears in book 7 of the Republic, which is to be found in Plato,
Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), pp. 1132–55.
3. I draw here on book 6 of the Republic, p. 1128.
4. Plato makes this claim in book 10 of the Republic, pp. 1201–02.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche repeatedly refers to Platonism as a “two-world” theory in Will to
Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1978).
6. These are, of course, two of the founding assumptions of poststructuralist theory. Their
ur-formulation can be found in Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans.
Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).
7. This voice warrants an essay of its own. Like the voices in two later works, I N I T I A L S
and Photograph, it exceeds not only categories like “voice-off ” and “voice-over,” but also the
larger system through which cinema—the form which gives those categories meaning—
enforces sexual difference. For a discussion of this system, see my The Acoustic Mirror: The
Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
8. For an extended discussion of this claim, see my World Spectators (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2000), pp. 51–74.
9. See Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
10. I refer here to Stevens’s poem “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.”
11. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psy-
chological Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), vol. 5, pp. 535–609.
12. I elaborate this argument in World Spectators, pp. 75–125.
13. Again I am referencing issues here which I develop at much greater length in World Spec-
tators.
14. See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 598–605, and Appendix C to “The Uncon-
scious,” in The Standard Edition, vol. 14, pp. 209–15.
15. For an elaboration of this principle of difference, see Saussure, Course in General Lin-
guistics, pp. 115–17.
16. Nietzsche, Will to Power, p. 426.
17. In Interpretation of Dreams, Freud attributes to dream images the status of a “rebus.” He ac-
counts for fiction in a similar way in “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (The Standard
Edition, vol. 9, pp. 143–53): fiction provides a disguised version of the author’s fantasies.
18. Roland Barthes makes this temporal distinction between photography and cinema in
“The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1977).
19. See, for instance, Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 115.
20. For the most extreme version of this argument to date, see André Bazin, “The Ontol-
ogy of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1967), pp. 9–16.
21. This is the title of William Henry Fox Talbot’s early study of photography.
22. I take the notion of a “communication of forms” from Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit,
who have theorized it in a number of important books, including Arts of Impoverishment:
Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), and Caravaggio’s Se-
crets (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). See also Bersani’s The Culture of Redemption (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 47–101. Bersani and Dutoit use this concept
to theorize a nonpsychic form of relationality—one which is inherent within the universe
prior to any action on our part. We spend most of our lives in utter forgetfulness of this
“universal connectedness” (110n). The ego and what generally passes for “human relation-
ships” are the two primary vehicles of our forgetfulness.
Bersani and Dutoit’s account of the communication of forms has enabled mine in all
kinds of ways. I also share their larger concern with the world and our relationship to it. My
deployment of this concept nevertheless differs from theirs in several respects. I am using it,
first of all, to conceptualize something profoundly psychoanalytic: libidinal transfer. I am
also narrowly concerned here with aesthetic forms and their capacity to create affective
bridges between one subject and another, and the psyche and the world. Finally, the com-
munication of forms represents for me a way out of a specifically formal closure, albeit one
with profound psychic and ontological ramifications.
23. For a very compelling—albeit different—account of the obsolescence of photography,
as well as a rich meditation upon the notion of a “medium,” see Rosalind Krauss’s essay on
Coleman’s Photograph, “Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph” (1999),
reprinted in this volume.
24. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 51.

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Seeing for Oneself, 1987–88
Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.
 “. . . And Then Turn Away?”

Rosalind Krauss

December 15, 1996—Arriving in Paris on Air France, we are slipped un-

ceremoniously into the reception hall, like so many letters slid under the
door. I find myself missing the ritual of entry at the first Roissy termi-
nal, where, somewhat dazed, one would stand on the moving walkways
snaking downward and then up again, a long, slow passage toward Cus-
toms punctuated by a series of hanging white globes from within which a
changing sequence of projections winked their greetings from the City of
Light: Cartier, Absolut, Galeries Lafayette, Chanel No.5.
Later in the week, when I mentioned this to Coleman, he told me
that the globes have recently been taken away, probably an acknowledg-
ment that even for advertising, the slide tape is obsolete. But the slide tape,
a form of promotion in the 1960s and ’70s, must have been born obsolete,
already under pressure from film and video, with only its cheapness to rec-
ommend it. Which is another consideration to take into account in this
matter of “inventing a medium.”
Artists do not, of course, invent mediums. Carving, painting, drawing
were all in full flower before there was any socially distinguishable group to
call itself artists. But mediums then individualize their practice; they in-
tensify the skills associated with them; and, importantly, they acquire his-
tories. For centuries it was only within and against the tradition encoded
by a medium that innovation could be measured, just as it was in relation
to its reservoir of meanings that new ranges of feeling could be tested.
Was it Duchamp and the readymade who did away with all that? Was it
“you-push-the-button-we-do-the-rest” photography? Whatever the cause,
the late twentieth century finds itself in the postmedium age. Surrounded
158 Rosalind Krauss

everywhere by media, which is to say by the technologically relayed

image, the aesthetic option of the medium has been declared outmoded,
cashiered, washed-up, finished. Painting is a possibility we can barely
remember; sculpture is so far in the past that it seems indifferent whether
we weld in steel or cast in bronze; drawing seems obviously best left to
computers.
The Jeremiahs of this situation were Michael Fried in the 1960s and
Thierry de Duve in the 1980s. Fried saw the individual mediums im-
ploding into a single continuum which he chose to call “theater,” his name
not only for a technical mixing of mediums, but also for what he saw as an
activation of the work’s audience by means of the forms of pandering we
commonly call entertainment, but which he called “presence” (as in stage
presence).1 De Duve contrasted the specificity that belongs to a medium
with the generality that hovers over the collective term art.2 It was one of
the ironies of critical discourse, he pointed out, that the term “specific”—
as in Donald Judd’s nomenclature “Specific Objects”—should have been
applied to the very operation that dissolved the individual mediums of
painting on the one hand and sculpture on the other, by funneling them
into the general condition of a hybrid object which, like the readymade,
directly invokes the privilege of “art” without recourse to the intermedi-
ary of a medium. If it was minimalism that set this operation in motion,
de Duve argued, it was conceptual art that fully theorized it. The linguis-
tic definitions conceptualism was concerted to formulate were of art as a
category that, mediumless, was generic: art as such.
The “return to painting” that convulsed the 1980s was the shudder of
reaction that greeted this situation, as though it were possible simply to re-
cathect what had so slowly and laboriously been cast aside and take up the
medium again. Taking it up not exactly where one had left off, since that
would have been at the point where the support for the medium—the
canvas—had been, in its monochromed nudity, or its objectlike shaping,
or its bannerlike flaccidity, right on the verge of leaving the specific to turn
into the generic; rather, taking it up at some point earlier in its modernist
past, where painterly values were more apparent, and the painterly per-
sona more present. The other response that was also gathering was less ap-
parent, because more disparate and interstitial. It is probably only with
about a decade’s hindsight that we can see it as anything like a coherent
phenomenon, even with all its gaps and unevennesses. This was an at-
tempt, or rather several quite individual and different ones, to “invent” a
medium: not to resuscitate a dying tradition, but, most improbably, to cre-
ate a new one.
Inventing a medium is like inventing a language, since it is the business
of a medium to have not only something like a grammar, a syntax, and a
rhetoric, but a way of deciding what counts as competence in its use. Not
only does this parallel suggest the extreme difficulty involved in such an in-
vention, but it also means that questions we might ask about such a language
would apply a fortiori to a medium, just one of which might be: Would it be
(logically) possible for someone to “speak” a language if he or she only ever
uttered a single sentence in it? This question has a particular force if we think
about certain ruptures within a known medium, which, however power-
fully evocative, never have a sequel. A case in point would be Chris Marker’s
La Jetée (1962), which as a film made entirely of stills (with one exception),
seems to break with the cinematic medium, perhaps to found a new one.
Is the fact that Marker never repeated this formula what makes us so
clear about the fact that, however unprecedented, the work did not con-
stitute a new medium for him? And does his refusal to acknowledge it thus
as a “medium”—like a language he could develop and continue to speak—
make us reevaluate the very condition of the still within the filmic unreeling

Chris Marker, still from La Jetée, 1962

Courtesy of Chris Marker.

“. . . And Then Turn Away?” 159

160 Rosalind Krauss

of La Jetée, suggesting that Marker’s recourse to motionless images was

never intended as a rupture with cinematic grammar as we know it, but
rather as a way, precisely, of filming the “final” image we would see at the
moment of our own deaths, an image whose approach we can narrate cin-
ematically but whose occurrence we can only produce as an explosively
static “still”? La Jetée begins with this barely intelligible image of the hero’s
collapse, seen on the outdoor concourse at Orly Airport. In what turns
out to be an extended flashback, the rest of the film preserves and even
intensifies the trauma of this final, convulsive, retinal impression, by being
told through the form of memory images, each of them understood as
grasped from the flow of time and slowed to a stop. In this sense La Jetée is
not a break with cinema so much as it is a special case: a cinematic work
in which the filmed still has been used to orchestrate that framing moment
in every movie where “The End” hangs as an extended mark of motion-
less punctuation against a blackened screen.
In contrast, Coleman’s slide tapes—the term he prefers for them is
“projected images”—which he has been developing for over two decades
(although with special intensity since the early 1980s), do constitute an ex-
ample of “inventing a medium.” As I said before, he is not alone in the post-
conceptualist period in having embarked on such a task. It could be said
that the entire cohort of video artists, in their determination to separate
video from film by finding its specificity as a medium, has been involved
in something of a similar project. But technologically speaking, video just
is an independently available medium, and the problem of finding its speci-
ficity—while chronologically continuous with the period I am address-
ing—is not exactly the same as “inventing” the support itself. Rather, the
artist who offers something of a parallel with Coleman in this matter
would be Jeff Wall, who since the late 1970s has been formulating his work
in relation to his “own” medium, the back-lit photographic transparency.
Of course neither Coleman nor Wall invented their supports, any more
than Bruce Nauman or Dan Graham or Bill Viola invented the portapak.
In both cases, the medium—slide tape or illuminated photo panel—was
taken from the commercial world of advertising or promotion and im-
ported into an aesthetic context. The difference between their cases and
that of video is that on the one hand video’s apparent connection to film
gives it something like an aesthetic tradition from which to evolve, and on
the other, this very condition makes it accessible simultaneously for explo-
ration by a range of artists. Whereas the slide tape and the photo panel have
no aesthetic lineage and each is so singular as a support that to adopt it as a
medium is immediately to put a kind of aesthetic patent on it. Each thus
functions as the paradox of a “medium” that can only be practiced by one.

December 20, 1996—Coleman is in Paris for the dismantling of his exhi-

bition at the Centre Pompidou, where both Living and Presumed Dead and
I N I T I A L S were installed. We have lunch upstairs at the Café Beau-
bourg where from our window perch we can see the ugly billboard-like
panel affixed to the Centre’s facade, on which all the exhibitions for 1996
have been listed, black letters on white. As these shows have closed, the
title of each has been crossed off by a series of colored tapes that strike
through each letter. “L’Informe,” the exhibition Yve-Alain Bois and I
mounted last spring, which had included Coleman’s Box (ahhareturnabout),
has long since met its colored death and is lost high up on the panel be-
tween a crossed-off “Cinéma Turc” and a canceled “Frederick Kiesler.”
Now it is Coleman’s turn to see himself gaily sous rature, his submerged
name riding just above the still monochrome “Luciano Fabro.”
We talk briefly about the essay I am in the midst of drafting for his ex-
hibition at the Vienna Secession, since I have questions for him before he
leaves. As well, I have been telling him that I have decided not to go down
the road of the Irish Question in writing about his work.3 It’s not just that I
feel incompetent (which I do) to speak with any authority or subtlety about
Irish history and culture or the Literary Revival, mounted by Synge and
Yeats, to all of which there are obvious references in his work. It’s rather that
the issue of the “medium” as I’ve begun to think it in relation to his art is
not a matter restricted to one country or another, but is generalizable across
the whole field of the avant-garde. It may indeed be that the attempt to re-
turn to a medium, not by regression but by invention, is, in its own search
for specificity, not just a rejection of the generic forms of conceptual art
but the manifestation of a certain distrust in the internationalist scope of
conceptualism’s practice. But the idea that postconceptualism chimes di-
rectly with postcolonialism—an assumption made with increasing fre-
quency now in the critical literature—is something I think one should be
wary of. The blanket condemnation of the avant-garde’s belief in trans-
nationalism as just another cover for the imperialist ambitions of interna-
tional capital, and the idea that the only source for unalienated, authentic
meaning is to be found in the specificity of national tradition, seem a dan-
gerous embrace of the archaic to me.4 In turning its back on the long his-
tory of modernism, it shrugs off the very thing it supposedly wants to save:
the idea of a tradition against which to test the meaningfulness of forms.

“. . . And Then Turn Away?” 161

162 Rosalind Krauss

Besides—I think—one of the sources for Coleman’s “medium” is the

photo-novel, which for Coleman will always be pronounced fotoromanzo,
since his crucial encounter with the object was in Milan, where he lived for
ten years before his return to Ireland in the early 1980s. The photo-novel,
which doesn’t have much of a presence in the States, is an international
phenomenon throughout Europe, where one sees grown men and women
engrossed in these comic-books-for-adults on the Metro or the Under-
ground. The two major ingredients for Coleman’s medium—the slide tape
and the fotoromanzo—have nothing particularly Irish about them. Indeed,
they point directly to an internationalist commercialization of culture in
advertising on the one hand and a degraded form of literacy on the other.
To say “degraded” will unleash, I know, the antimodernist zeal of the
postcolonial theorist who accuses the media-driven globalization of expe-
rience of spreading a homogenized cultural pap through which to alienate
its recipients from their local traditions and to automate their behavior to-
ward mass-market consumption. In this view the slide tape and the photo-
novel are commodified forms of support for the image which the work
itself must attack and demystify. This is the position routinely taken toward
Jeff Wall’s use of the illuminated advertising panel, for example. As de
Duve has put it, “Whenever they talk about photography, the majority of
Wall’s commentators discuss the transparency and its light box installation,
to make the point that this has been borrowed from the society of the spec-
tacle and in a reflexive and critical manner turned back against it.”5
But the question is, can one “invent a medium” without believing in
the redemptive possibilities of the newly adopted support itself ? Can some-
thing function as a medium, if it is not a vehicle of expressiveness but only
a target of attack? De Duve obviously doesn’t feel this way and, in his own
advocacy of Wall’s seriousness, he argues for the rehabilitation of the com-
mercialized panel by means of its recoding as a specifically modernist con-
veyor of value. Insofar as it recalls, de Duve says, “a new pact sought [by
Cézanne] between the painting and its viewer, one founded upon the im-
mersion of the painter’s eye—and his canvas—in the light bath emanating
from the motif,” Wall’s illuminated panel blocks the automatic transparency
of photography, realigning it with the opacity of the modernist surface.6
While this account of Wall seems extremely dubious to me, and in-
deed, the whole phenomenon of Wall’s work is something to which I will
have to return, the need to make a positive claim for Wall’s support seems
entirely logical once one wants to argue for his commitment to a medium.
 Thus, for Coleman, the vehicle cannot just be a vile substance to be
derided. It has, instead, to be understood as a positive source, the way Beck-
ett’s clowns with their hat-passing tricks and vaudeville pratfalls have to be
taken seriously as a basis for a linguistic value mined from seriality and rep-
etition . . . not that I want to travel up the road of Irishness in literature.

December 22, 1996—We go to see two rare films by Henri Cartier-Bresson,

Victoire de la vie, shot during the Spanish Civil War, and Le retour, made in
1945 about the mass of people and soldiers flooding in all directions across
Europe in a dense wave of repatriation. The films are being introduced
by the filmmaker Teri Wehn-Damisch, who, when she called to invite us,
mentioned the remark Gisèle Freund would often make about the relation
of still images to moving ones: “It’s always the still image and not the one
in motion that stays etched in our minds, becoming ever after part of our
collective memory.” I assumed she was quoting this as a general inference
regarding the relative importance of Cartier-Bresson as photographer or
filmmaker. But it was, indeed, far more specific.
Le retour contains a scene in a DP camp in Dessau with American sol-
diers behind a desk examining the papers of long lines of people seeking
visas to return to their respective homes. We snap to attention as we rec-
ognize the stolid-looking blond woman who is now standing before the
desk, and we immediately scan the circle of bystanders for the furious vis-
age of the woman we already know will denounce her with a slap that will
count as an unmasking of the hated collaborator. This after all is the scene
that yielded one of the most famous photographs of the war’s end: retri-
bution with a human face. You don’t have to know Cartier-Bresson’s work
to know this image; it has joined a kind of communal memory bank along
with the burning Vietnamese girl running down the road and the little boy
from the Warsaw Ghetto. But the scene is over in the movie before we can
even figure out what it’s about. The slap has no resonance. Something’s off
about the drama. I imagine that Cartier-Bresson, standing next to his cam-
eraman, looking at the scene unfold, but through his own Leica, has framed
the whole thing differently in some essential way, producing for us the
choreography and the tonal balance that yields the image’s violence, its
memorableness.7
When I look up the still the next day, I see that this difference is illu-
sory; it’s the same angle, the same distance. The difference is only that, in
being motionless, the image gives us the time to notice the motley of

“. . . And Then Turn Away?” 163

164 Rosalind Krauss

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dessau, 1945

© Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum
Photos.

onlookers—the young man, still in the striped pajamas of his POW uni-
form and the strange jauntiness with which he holds a battle-stick; the
partisan in a beret, directly behind the denunciating woman, grasping his
belt in a way that makes his wedding band incongruously prominent; the
woman just behind the seated officer’s head who is the only one to look
not at the drama itself but at the camera capturing it. In the sensation this
gives that these viewers are merely curious (rather than engaged), we sud-
denly seem to be looking at a mirror of ourselves looking at this event.
And the effect of this mirroring is twofold. It isolates the two women
within the paroxysm of denunciation—a gesture that carries its meaning,
literally, on its sleeve;and it fissures the image from within, breaking it into
details that have nothing to do with Cartier-Bresson’s famously eloquent
“decisive moment,” and thus no relation to the image’s meaning: details
such as the tangle of metallic zipper appearing and disappearing along the
side of the denunciating woman’s dress.
It is in discussing a detail such as this, one that has slipped out of the
grasp of narrative and of communication, that Barthes had introduced the
term “obtuse meaning” or, alternatively, “third meaning.”8 He is analyzing
stills from a film by Eisenstein. After addressing everything in them that
contributes to the horizontal dimension of the story, of its various themes
and their development, of the historical background against which the
narrative plays itself out, he arrives at a set of details that strike him as
“counternarrative,” details that set reversibility against the forward drive
of diegesis, that produce the effect of dissemination against the interweav-
ing of narrative form, that give off a sense of permutability against the fo-
calization of the story.
This counternarrative, which opens up a different sense of time, one
not hurried along by the twenty-four-frame-a-second mechanics of veri-
similitude, is where Barthes feels he must look for what he calls “the
specifically filmic.” And to locate this, which he is certain will not lie in
movement “but in an inarticulable third meaning,” he holds onto the still.
This, he explains, is not the same as looking at a photograph or a painting,
neither of which unfold their contents against what he calls the “diegetic
horizon” of the rest of the story. Rather, the still, which is not a sample of
the story, not a “specimen extracted from the substance of the film,” is the
fragment of a second text which itself must be read vertically. This reading,
open to the signifier’s permutational play, institutes what Barthes calls “that
false order which permits the turning of the pure series, the aleatory com-
bination . . . and the attainment of a structuration which slips away from the
inside.”9 And it is this permutational play, he says, that must be theorized.10
Within cultural experience there are other phenomena that produce
this sense of the signifier at luxuriant play against, but not in service to, the
background of narrative. These can collectively be spoken as pictograms—
“‘anecdotalized’ images, obtuse meaning placed in a diegetic space”—
some examples of which, Barthes says, would be stained-glass windows,
Carpaccio’s Legend of Saint Ursula, images d’Epinal, comic books, and photo-
novels. In a footnote where he speaks of his own taste for the fotoromanzo,
he speculates that “these ‘arts,’ born in the lower depths of high culture,
possess theoretical qualifications and present a new signifier (related to the
obtuse meaning). This is acknowledged as regards the comic-strip but I
myself experience this slight trauma of signifiance faced with certain photo-
novels: ‘their stupidity touches me’ (which could be a certain definition of
obtuse meaning).”11
Is “a new signifier” the same as a new medium? And when Coleman
isolated the fotoromanzo as a form, was he saying along with Barthes that
“there may thus be a future—or a very ancient past—truth in these de-
risory, vulgar, foolish, dialogical forms of consumer subculture”?12

“. . . And Then Turn Away?” 165

166 Rosalind Krauss

In any event the medium Coleman “invented” sprang fully into being
with the 1987–88 Seeing for Oneself, although this work had been preceded
by four others, through which the medium evolved: Slide Piece (1972–73),
Clara and Dario (1975), La Tache Aveugle (1978–90), and Living and Pre-
sumed Dead (1983–85). But it is Seeing for Oneself that most overtly and
adamantly marries the mechanics of the slide tape to the histrionics of
what is unmistakably the photo-novel, thus not only erecting but reflex-
ively acknowledging the “diegetic horizon” against which each still will
be projected.

December 23, 1996—Coming out of the subway, on my way to the library,

I have the usual problem of there being no trash cans anywhere in Paris
these days in which to throw the used Metro ticket. Or rather, they are
everywhere, but all are welded shut as an antiterrorist measure. I find my-
self thinking about the curious piece of filmstrip Coleman had showed me
in Dublin, which as a boy he had fished out of a trash can when leaving
the movies. Since it is in 35 mm, the image is fairly easy to make out, al-
though, because the three riders are very far away, it is hard to identify their
uniforms. Frontiersmen? Canadian Mounties? Riding toward the camera
beneath a thick canopy of evergreens, their advance is imperceptible in the
few feet of film. Coleman had taken the strip home with him and had
rigged his Brownie camera with a light in such a way as to be able to pro-
ject the film onto the ceiling of his bedroom, winding the images through
the apparatus faster and then slower.
Hearing this story, I find it impossible not to think of the opening of
Swann’s Way and the magic lantern images with which Marcel would try to
amuse himself before dinner at Combray—slides through which the crimes
of Golo and the misfortunes of Geneviève de Brabant would project them-
selves on doorknob or window curtains. Using this scene to set the stage
for Marcel’s later glimpse of the Duchesse de Guermantes kneeling below
the stained-glass windows of Combray church, Proust compares the effect
of the slide projection to the colored glass: “In the manner of the master-
builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness
of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many
colors, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory
window.”13 The parallel between the two scenes with the child fascinated
by the story dancing over his bedroom walls—here Geneviève de Brabant,
there Canadian Mounties—underscores the primitiveness of the narrative
drive, storybook yielding to the dreaminess of the projected image.
 Coleman’s earliest relation to “projected images,” however, was not by
means of a story and thus a diegetic structure, but rather in terms of a per-
ceptual problem. Slide Piece, which initiates the use of the slide tape, is con-
temporary with other works (the film-projection Playback of a Daydream and
the wall paintings Series of Images [Goblet]) that focus on “what happens,”
temporally speaking, when we see something—the same thing—differ-
ently. Wittgenstein’s philosophical interrogation of this kind of perceptual
refocusing and thus of what it means to perceive different “aspects” of a
visual datum—“And I must distinguish between the ‘continuous seeing’
of an aspect and the ‘dawning’ of an aspect”—had taken the duck/rabbit,
the psychologist’s standard-issue “ambiguous figure,” as his example.14
Coleman’s filmed projection of this same diagram in Playback of a Daydream
had worked on the irony between the filmed image that continues, un-
changing, through time, and the viewer’s own perceptual flipping that
causes two “different” images to come and go, now a “duck,” now a “rab-
bit.” Wittgenstein had worried about the linguistic trap laid by the am-
biguous figure, the one that leads us to say “Now I see it as a . . . ,” since
seeing as implies that we have a mental image of something against which
to test our perceptions, to ask ourselves whether we see this tangle of lines
or that array of shapes as the thing in our minds, and thus to add interpre-
tation to perception. Coleman might have started from this philosophical
basis, or something like it, but he ends up with the fourfold permutation
of two different forms of projection: the mechanical instrument’s steady
stare versus the psychological “projection” as the array changes within the
viewer’s perceptual experience; and two different temporal registers: the
ongoing present of the unchanging film versus the “now!” of the percep-
tual flip, or renewal.
In Slide Piece a similar investigation now employs a slide tape instead of
a silent, projected loop of film. Here the slide of an achingly banal urban
scene—a car and a van parked near four gas pumps with apartment build-
ings visible across the street, their ground floors housing various shops—
holds steady while a voice of unctuous plausibility describes the array, only
to “change” to exactly the same slide but now described, by the same voice,
in different terms, and so on through many such “changes” of aspect.
We could say here again that Wittgenstein had programmed Slide Piece,
when in his interrogation of the problem of “aspects” he had written:

I look at the landscape, my gaze ranges over it, I see all sorts of distinct
and indistinct movement; this impresses itself sharply on me, that is

“. . . And Then Turn Away?” 167

168 Rosalind Krauss

quite hazy. After all, how completely ragged what we see can appear!
And now look at all that can be meant by “description of what is
seen.”—But this just is what is called description of what is seen.
There is no one genuine proper case of such description—the rest be-
ing just vague, something which awaits clarification, or which must
just be swept aside as rubbish.15

But again, the full-scale enactment of the perceptual puzzle produces

a different experience from the one Wittgenstein was interrogating. For
what we are aware of, staring at the dowdy slide and listening to the in-
gratiating tones of the image’s cicerone, is the temporal dilation of the
present in which we are trapped, caught in a narrative that is not only go-
ing nowhere, but obdurately, and through many changes, continuing to go
nowhere. Michael Newman, one of Coleman’s early critics, has compared
this effect to that of the nouveau roman;16 and, indeed, there is a quality of
narrative perversity that takes over these painstaking descriptions, like the
elaborate setting of a scene for a story that never takes place. What Slide
Piece adds to the philosophico-perceptual problem, then, is the dawning of
Barthes’s “diegetic horizon,” although here its dawning is felt through a will-
ful suppression:the deadpan description precisely squeezing out, stymieing,
repressing, the diegetic drive.
By basing La Tache Aveugle (1978–90) on nine frames taken from a
narrative film, Coleman goes on to acknowledge the diegetic dimension
that seems to be built into the medium of the slide tape by the simple fact
that sequence implies development. Even the selection of these frames
seems to yield to the desire for narrative, since they come from the mo-
ment when the hero of The Invisible Man, trapped inside a barn, is about
to lose his condition of invulnerability and to become visible to his pur-
suers.17 And yet the achingly slow dissolve—produced by the coordination
between multiple slide projectors that henceforth will serve as the techni-
cal basis for Coleman’s medium—that seems to dilate the movement from
one frame to the next into a paralyzing kind of infinity (the progression of
the nine slides takes about eight hours) delivers this “change” as, indeed,
a blind spot, and so, once more, a suppression of the very narrative ex-
pectations the work had seemed to provoke. La Tache Aveugle in this sense
is obedient to the prohibitions against narrative so deeply ingrained in
the whole history of modernism, and so recently reinforced by conceptual
art’s thematizing of immobility via an aesthetics of tautology,18 but at the
same time, by embedding its very notion of the medium within the pro-
cess of an unfolding, it covertly traffics with the diegetic.
It is with Living and Presumed Dead (1983–85) that Coleman finally
permits the diegetic horizon to stand forth, even making the visual field
of the work appear as a constant renewal of this horizon, as each change
of slide ever so slightly permutes the arrangement of the twenty charac-
ters ranged across its stage. And yet, since at any moment within their ap-
pearance these elaborately costumed characters appear to be arranged for
a curtain call and thus posed to take their final bow, the visual field itself is
as resolutely immobile as that of Slide Piece. Rather, the diegetic dimen-
sion is now given to the work by the soundtrack’s story, delivered in a rich
Irish brogue, and recounting the adventures of the hero in a rolling mix-
ture of narrative and dialogue. On the one hand, this strict separation of
the two dimensions of the work—the visual/static from the audio/tem-
poral—is reinforced by the production of visual effects that have nothing
to do with the diegesis—effects such as dissolves that cause parts of the vi-
sual array to blur while other sections retain their uncanny brilliance and
clarity—while on the other hand, the even wash of the narrative creates
the enveloping resonance specific to acoustical space, even while produc-
ing a burgeoning sense of confusion.19
Indeed, on a structural level, Living and Presumed Dead could be said to
involve a coordination between two dimensions of permutation: a visual
one, as slide changes displace the characters in the lineup with a sly im-
perceptibility; and a narrato-temporal one, as the taped story disgorges its
own set of permutations, from the very introduction of the characters who
grow along the serial logic of the alphabet—Abbas, Borras, Capax—to
the tale’s account of Capax’s multiple appearances and multiple deaths (as
in Synge’s Playboy of the Western World), producing a logic of dissemination
rather than of closure.20 The locus of coordination of these two permuta-
tional chains is to be found in the triple appearance of Capax in the line
of twenty characters and in the whir and clicking of the three projectors
as they set the apparatus of the projection forth within acoustical space.
The drag against the grain of diegesis in Living and Presumed Dead is
double, then. On the one hand there is the fixity of the single lineup, whose
internal changes defy immediate detection; on the other there is what
Barthes called the “verticality” of permutation unfolding within the hor-
izontality of the story and opening it up to a subversion of narrative’s
single-mindedness and drive.

“. . . And Then Turn Away?” 169

170 Rosalind Krauss

December 25, 1996—We go to Beaubourg in the afternoon, in the bright

cold of Christmas Day. We are intending both to see and not to see “Face
à l’histoire,” an exhibition of dizzying thematic excess, whose interest for
us lies not in the paintings but in the long corridor of documentation, with
posters, magazines, broadsides, articulating each of the wars, revolutions,
or assassinations to which the exhibition is dedicated. I am arrested by the
famously sardonic poster for the Internationale situationniste magazine (I.S.,
no. 11, October 1967) which takes the form of a comic strip. The top reg-
ister shows an urban street scene unfurling behind the figure of a young
woman in close-up gazing seductively at the reader over her shoulder.
While the caption begins, “On the set of spectacle culture within which
the gaze encounters nothing but objects and their prices . . . ,” the speech
balloon for the girl interjects, “Nothing is missing from the comfort of
boredom,” and the caption finishes “. . . the astute use of one’s choice be-
gins with the refusal to pay”; after which, the next register cuts away to a
close-up of two young people exchanging remarks on how many sweaters
they’ve managed to steal.
The contempt for the comic book that radiates off this sheet is almost
palpable, as the medium is displayed as a perfect mirror for the society that
produced it. Which is not at all the case for Seeing for Oneself, Coleman’s
first fusion of the slide tape with a full-blown version of the photo-novel.
For in Seeing for Oneself there is no lapse in the careful seriousness with
which the histrionic intensity of the story is treated, in all its platitudinous
inevitability.
A variation on Sleeping Beauty, the story treats a young girl poisoned
by her jealous, evil stepmother and “awakened” by the young doctor called
in to perform an autopsy on the presumably dead body. The other drama-
tis personae of the piece include the girl’s wealthy father, lost in alchemical
experiments and hypochondria; the stepmother’s lover, who first encour-
ages the poisoning of the father and then, out of the same greed, begins to
pursue the young heiress; and the young girl’s nurse. It is from the latter’s
point of view that much of the first half of the story is told, although the
narrator not only advances the plot in the third person—“meanwhile,” “a
long time passed in silence”—but also “does” the voices of the characters
in their various first persons. In the second half, after the girl has awak-
ened not only to the criminality of her stepmother but to the love of the
doctor—as well as to the strange master plan of her father—the narrator
seems more to engage with her point of view, although continuing to pro-
nounce the dialogue of the individual characters. This voice, produced by
Seeing for Oneself, 1987–88
Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.

the veteran radio actress Daphne Carroll, resonates in its pitch and pacing
with the kind of narrative thrill that associates itself with storytelling,
whether in the almost vanished tradition of radio or in the kind of chil-
dren’s story hour that librarians valiantly continue to conduct.
In the visual plane, it’s the staginess of the poses, their numbing sense
of stasis beyond even the requirements of the slide tape medium, and the
awkwardness of costumes that read more as disguises than as period gar-
ments (the father’s wig, the wrinkles in the stepmother’s dress, the heroine’s
badly plucked eyebrows) that deliver the experience of the photo-novel:
its combination of stock shots harshly etched in black and white and its
sense of cheap production. And for Coleman’s audience, needless to say,
this effect is immensely off-putting.
But it is out of this very grammar of the photo-novel that something
else begins to emerge. This is a concentration in scene after scene on a par-
ticular shot, which is also shared by comic books, which we could call the
double face-out. It occurs when two of the characters are in an exchange to
which one is having a strong reaction. In a film this would be handled by

“. . . And Then Turn Away?” 171

172 Rosalind Krauss

the strategy of cross-cutting, with the camera looking away from one of
the interlocutors to get a reaction shot of the other’s face. But since, in a
book of stills, cross-cutting would endlessly dilate the progress of the story,
the “reaction shot” is conflated with the image of its instigation and both
characters appear together, the instigator somewhat in the background
looking at the reactor, who tends to fill the foreground, but, back turned
to the other, is also facing forward out of the frame. The advantage of this
conflation for the efficiency of both the photo-novel and the comic strip
is that both shot and reaction shot are now projected within a single frame.
Consequently, in passages of greatest emotional intensity, one confronts
the mannered unlikeliness of the “double face-out,” in which one of the
two protagonists is not looking at the other.
But if the double face-out strains dramatic credulity, for Coleman it
has distinct structural advantages. For one thing, it manifestly subverts “su-
ture.” In film, the binding of the viewer into the weft of the narrative space
is itself a function of cross-cutting, since it is when the camera no longer
looks head-on at an object but turns away to look at something else, that
we as viewers leave our externalized positions outside the image to iden-
tify with the turning camera, thereby being visually and psychologically
woven—or sutured—into the fabric of the film.21
And in this refusal of suture, Coleman confronts and underscores the
disembodied planarity of the visual half of his medium, the fact that being
film-based, it has no other recourse than to unroll the density of life onto
a flat plane. In just this sense, the double face-out’s own flatness takes on
a compensatory gravity as it becomes the emblem of this reflexive ac-
knowledgment of the impossibility of the visual field to deliver its prom-
ise of either lifelikeness or authenticity.22
It is not only the frequency with which Coleman uses the double face-
out, both in Seeing for Oneself and even more relentlessly in I N I T I A L S
(1993–94), that secures it as both the resource Coleman is mining from the
photo-novel and a major grammatical component of his new “medium.”
It is also the way this resource is doubled at the level of the soundtrack in
I N I T I A L S that gives it added gravity, since in the latter work the nar-
rator repeats a question several times that serves as the poetic description
of just this convention:“Why do you gaze, one on the other . . . and then
turn away . . . and then turn away?”
The lines are taken from Yeats, from his 1917 dance drama called The
Dreaming of the Bones.23 The work was itself based on the Nō play Nishikigi,
which Yeats admired, and like its model presents souls of the dead who are
unable to depart this earth because of an unabsolved crime. In Yeats the
souls are the lovers Dermot and Dervorgilla, whose passion summoned
the Norman conqueror to defeat Dervorgilla’s husband, thus initiating
Ireland’s eight centuries of servitude to England. Set in 1916 in the after-
math of the Easter Rising, Yeats’s drama is about a young patriot who is
aided by the ghosts in his escape over the Galway hills only, when they ask
his pardon, to refuse them, leaving them dancing in their ring of unre-
quited despair.

January 2, 1997—We go to the Comédie Française to see Marivaux’s Les

fausses confidences.24 It’s a play of unsavory if comic subterfuge, in which the
heroine is manipulated into falling for the hero because she is “let in” on
the secret that he’s in love with her. But the sense of an emotional drama—
let alone an erotic truth—floating just one inch above the most conven-
tionalized artificiality takes up in the plot what Marivaux acknowledges in
the players, in which the stock figures from the commedia dell’arte are never
very far from the surface of this eighteenth-century farce.
In the strange disjunction between the knowingness of the way desire
breeds desire and the avoidance of verisimilitude at every other level, Mari-
vaux is content to make a theater fissured by internal contradictions. This
is as far away as possible from Yeats’s desire for a dramatic space of seamless
unity between language, movement, atmosphere, music, color—a desire
he embraced from Wagner’s drive toward the theatrical implosion of the
Gesamtkunstwerk and which he later funneled through his conception of
the Nō play.25
Coleman may honor The Dreaming of the Bones in the vocal dimension
of I N I T I A L S. But in the visual dimension, by acting on the Marivaux-
like position of a shattered unity, he once more reinforces the unbridgeable
gap between the two dimensions of his “medium.” Indeed, I N I T I A L S
splits the visual field between the voluptuous beauty of its color, its achingly
sharp delivery of perceptual information, the elegance of the framing of each
image, the physical beauty of the actors—all of this brilliantly developed in
its prologue of a pile-up of metallic hospital beds—and the kind of hope-
less staginess already experienced in Seeing for Oneself (and developed fur-
ther in the interim in Background [1991–94] and Lapsus Exposure [1992–94]).
The drive never to loose the grip of the photo-novel’s banality on
the characters—no matter how elegant their presence—is part of the di-
rection Coleman provides his actors. The storyboards for each scene in
I N I T I A L S (set in a derelict former tuberculosis hospital outside of

“. . . And Then Turn Away?” 173

174 Rosalind Krauss

I N I T I A L S, 1993–94
Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.
Dublin) are a collage of recipe gamuts from TV hospital serials like Saint
Elsewhere and nurse romance novels (from Mills and Boon, the “Harlequin
Romances” of Ireland). Thus behind a scene of one of the characters (the
man in eighteenth-century dress, identified on the storyboards as Dandy
and generally in the role of the “patient”) being made up by another
(strangely enough not the actress who functions as either “technician” or
“nurse”) is the following extract:

His eyes darkened and met hers so deliberately that she lowered her
gaze as she said “Nevertheless there are periods of stability even in
the most turbulent relationships. Some people manage to achieve
harmony for a lifetime.” A touch of bitterness sharpened his voice.
“They’re singularly fortunate.” Then, as though he had no intention
of continuing the conversation, he added, “Now I must get back to
work; thank you for putting me in the picture and for handling the
case so well.”

And for the same scene, somewhat lower on the storyboard:“Dandy (heart
racing waiting gathering strength to resist the shaft of agony): ‘I swear . . .
you look (a smile) I feel (happy?)’”

I N I T I A L S, 1993–94
Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.

“. . . And Then Turn Away?” 175

176 Rosalind Krauss

If its visual field is fissured, the audiotrack of I N I T I A L S also re-

fuses the unified poetic dimension envisaged by Yeats, even while quot-
ing his lines for over half of the script. The most obvious technique for this
refusal is the spelling out of many of the words in the short text, a vocal se-
quence of interruptions that imitates the medium’s own disjunctiveness as it
awkwardly passes from slide to slide. This dispersal of unity is further dram-
atized by the piping voice of the child who delivers the text, frequently in-
terspersed with the hyperventilated breathing of childish concentration.
The control of fissuring within each dimension and the rigorous sep-
aration of the visual/static from the audio/temporal, which is the fissured
condition of the “medium” itself, allow Coleman to produce a reflexive
acknowledgment of how his medium is constructed—the double face-out’s
insistence on flatness; the articulation of the temporality of the slide tape’s
static seriality in lines like “Unfolding in a time, now; to having been pres-
ent in a past, now.” In the pre-“postmedium” days of modernism, such an
acknowledgment would have carried the assumption that laying the con-
ditions of the medium bare produces a kind of transparent self-evidence—
the unassailable truth on which unity (material, ontological) and autonomy
are based—and that such self-evidence as a function of the viewer’s pow-
ers of analysis is reflexive, reempowering the viewer’s own autonomy. But
insofar as Coleman’s “medium” is, in its very nature, shattered from within,
so that, as in Marivaux’s plays, we always come to any of its givens only to
discover that it lies at an unmanageably skewed angle to the others, this
transparency is denied. Coleman’s own word for this is “anamorphosis.”

January 6, 1997—For the last time before I leave, I go to Beaubourg, to

consult material for this essay in the “doc”—the Documentation du
Musée, or curators’ library. On my way in I have to pass the mezzanine
gallery from the glass front of which the huge back-lit transparency of Jeff
Wall’s contribution to “Face à l’histoire” signals outward, in all its lumi-
nous seduction. Called Dead Troops Talk (A Vision after an Ambush of a Red
Army Patrol, near Mogor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986) (1991–92), it uses digi-
talized photography to put together a macabre image of aggressive realism,
which its admirers compare to works by Baron Gros or Géricault’s Raft of
the Medusa.26 But to me it looks like nothing so much as a work by the
famously academic, pompier realist Ernest Meissonier, his Memory of Civil
War (The Barricades) (1849), for example.
I am astonished all over again by the position taken by his supporters
when they argue that Wall simply returns to the moment when painting
was internally riven by modernism—whether that moment be the Salon
des Refusés or some earlier one, represented, say, by Courbet—when the
drive for a reflexive visual unity which proscribes narrative abruptly split
itself off from history painting.27 This is the point after which the portrayal
of modernity (the painting of modern life) comes into unbreachable
conflict with the aesthetic ambitions of modernism. Going back to this
moment, yet traveling over this same road now as a photographer, Wall’s
restagings of Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère or Courbet’s Source of the Loue
(or even more bizarrely, Poussin’s Landscape with Diogenes) are seen as gain-
ing access to a narrative (and figurative) tradition that modernism simply,
perversely, interrupted. And his supporters argue not only that Wall has
reforged a kind of historical continuity, but that he has reconstituted the
kind of pictorial unity of the Old Master tableau, a unity in which com-
position is able to weld a variety of elements seamlessly together. Thus does
Wall gaily vault over the unhappy choice modernism gave itself of either
gaining access to pictorial unity at the cost of narrative, three-dimensional
space (unity therefore lodged in the material conditions of the surface) or
admitting that such unity was irrevocably incompatible with the texture
of real experience by means of the strategies of figurative disunity vested
in collage and photomontage.
One of the things that strikes me in all of this is the confusion on the
subject of the medium. Although Wall is described as having a “signature
format,” 28 this is not analyzed or even named as a distinct medium. Par-
tially this is because Wall, though working self-evidently as a photogra-
pher, is depicted as rehabilitating the medium of painting. De Duve, the
only critic to take Wall’s classification as photographer seriously, produces
another deflection in this case by focusing on the subcategory of genre as
a way of effortlessly moving back and forth between photography and
painting, as though photography itself had not developed (over the same
historical period as that of modernism) its own, specific genres, all of them
inflected by the condition of documentary: news photo, portrait, fashion
or advertising shot.
But the nonspecificity of the medium in the eyes of his critics is
echoed in Wall’s own assumption that the unassailable now of the photo-
graph can be dilated endlessly by the chatter of narrative, which not only
suffuses Wall’s images insofar as they produce themselves as “history paint-
ings” but is repeatedly thematized by the works themselves: the soldiers
telephoning in Dead Troops Talk, the conversation of the two women in
Diatribe, the concluding handshake in The Agreement, and so on. I find my-

“. . . And Then Turn Away?” 177

178 Rosalind Krauss

self wondering what Coleman, unreachable in the west of Ireland, might

think of this, since although Wall may have “invented a medium” he has,
by producing “talking pictures,” failed to engage that medium’s specificity.
It is this failure, I think, that consigns his reworkings of Old Master art to
nothing more ambitious than pastiche.29
Charon (MIT Project) (1989) is Coleman’s most severely reflexive work,
not only staging the conditions of his own medium but producing the al-
legory of the photographer/author’s paradoxical condition of a simulta-
neous alienation and absorption within that medium. “Charon,” the first
of the fourteen “tales” into which the work is divided, shows the image of
a crashed truck, while the narrator tells the story of the photographer of
the image. Never changing point of view but growing smokier and smok-
ier through a series of dissolves, the image stakes its banality on the fact
that it is staged to duplicate a crash picture from one of the fotoromanzi in
Coleman’s stock. This kind of banality is sought after in other segments,
through the snapshot-type baby picture of “Baby,” or the recognizable
mug shot of “I.D.,” or, in an exercise in “appropriation,” the glossily frozen
interior-decor photography of “Showrooms,” and the “soft drops” (mail-
order backdrops employed by commercial photographers) used in both
“Oudeis” and “Silent Dress.”
But the story told in “Charon” is of the photographer’s sense of un-
canny identification with the accident, since he stages it to duplicate one
he was actually in. This uncanny sense of a threat continually returning
then proceeds through many of the other “tales,” such as that of “Baby”
which is about the photographer—kidnapped as an infant and obsessed
ever since by strangers in an effort to reencounter his abductor—who now,
taking pictures of his own baby, “notices” that the child seems continually
to be scrutinizing his face.
The mythical Charon, ferryman of the dead over the River Styx to
Hades, demanded payment, and for this reason the Greeks placed coins on
the eyes of their deceased. It is most frequently through the eyes that Cole-
man elaborates the photographic uncanniness allegorized in this work. At
the level of the narratives this occurs, for instance, through the request of
a model impersonating a photographer to be blindfolded (“Oudeis”) or
through the fantasy that a grotesque image seen in a mirror has entered the
photographer’s being through the blind spot of his vision (“Frankenstein”).
But at the level of the static image this is repeatedly staged through
references to the traumatic moment of the pose, when the subject, at-
Charon (MIT Project), 1989
Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.

tacked by the glare of the strobe lights, or even just by the rigidifying pro-
cess of standing still, feels him- or herself pass from a living being to a dead
image: becoming one with, as Barthes had put it, “the mortiferous layer of
the pose.” Thus in “Baby,” the red glare of the lights in the wide-open
baby’s eyes, a glare that is strangely immobile through the various dissolves
that slightly change the point of view on the subject, creates this experi-
ence of the blow of the shutter/strobe, an experience that is immediately
intensified in “I.D.”
It is, of course, precisely this click of the shutter that Coleman’s
“medium” reproduces over and over, as the slide tape relentlessly cycles
dead images of the living through the apparatus of the projector, in a kind
of technical repetition compulsion. But if Coleman’s medium is perfectly
fashioned to “stage” photography’s testimony in the present to a vanished
past—“Unfolding in a time, now;to having been present in a past, now”—
and thus its commitment to death, that same medium, insofar as it is based
as well on projection, is also fitted to stage fantasy.
And so the final tale of Charon is “Showrooms,” in which the photog-
rapher, setting up, shooting, and dismantling interior decors for “Dream
Homes,” takes unused elements for the pictures and places them in the

“. . . And Then Turn Away?” 179

180 Rosalind Krauss

Charon (MIT Project), 1989

Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.

“spare” room. This room, furnished for us piece by piece by the narrator
as he describes the elements in the glossy photo we are now looking at,
which, the same but different, have been removed, exists as an imaginary
projection of our own. But also of the photographer’s, who, after a long
day’s work, “withdraws to the spare room to rest. Here, the photographer
can feel free to move about the room, unobserved, or perhaps rearrange
the furniture. Stretching out on one of the sofas to relax, the photogra-
pher imagines the next day’s pictures of Dream Homes.”
This imaginative projection, permuted off the static image against the
“diegetic horizon” of a narration that is never allowed to reach its destina-
tion, involves that “permutational play” of a signifier which, both real and
imaginary, appears and disappears on the order of Barthes’s third term. But
it also appears and disappears to the rhythm of the apparatus of Coleman’s
medium. A medium which he has “invented,” and which, in continually
investigating its terms, he continually reinvents, both as a disruption of
modernism’s certainties and as a continuation of its hopes.

Notes

1. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5 ( June 1967), pp. 12–23.
2. Thierry de Duve, “The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas” [1986], in Kant after
Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
3. That Coleman’s work is to be discussed through the matrix of Irish cultural and histori-
cal references and placed in the service of Irish cultural identity has been the assumption of
many of Coleman’s exegetes: for example, Jean Fisher, “The Enigma of the Hero in the
Work of James Coleman” (1983; reprinted in this volume); Anne Rorimer, “James Cole-
man 1970–1985” (1985; reprinted in this volume); Michael Newman, “Allegories of the
Subject: The Theme of Identity in the Work of James Coleman,” in James Coleman: Selected
Works (Chicago and London: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and Insti-
tute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1985); and Luke Gibbons, “Narratives of No Return:
James Coleman’s guaiRE,” (1993; reprinted in this volume).
4. A similar point is made in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s “Memory Lessons and History
Tableaux: James Coleman’s Archaeology of Spectacle” (1995; reprinted in this volume), a
searching presentation of Coleman’s work in relation to modernism’s obliteration of histor-
ical memory and the questions raised by any attempt to reconstruct such memory within
the domain of specific cultural traditions. To this end he quotes the Irish literary scholar
Seamus Deane: “The recruitment of postcolonial literature to post-Modernity dooms the
politics of postcolonial societies to pre-Modernity” (p. 100 in this volume).
5. Thierry de Duve, Arielle Pelenc, and Boris Groys, Jeff Wall (London: Phaidon Press,
1996), p. 28.
6. Ibid., p. 50.
7. See Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment (Paris and New York: Verve and Simon
and Schuster, 1952), plate 34.
8. Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1977).
9. Ibid., p. 64.
10. Barthes writes, “If the specifically filmic lies not in movement, but in an inarticulable
third meaning that neither the simple photograph nor figurative painting can assume since
they lack the diegetic horizon, then the ‘movement’ regarded as the essence of film is not
animation, flux, mobility, ‘life’, copy, but simply the framework of a permutational unfold-
ing and a theory of the still becomes necessary” (ibid., p. 67).
11. Ibid., p. 66. Taking up Julia Kristeva’s term signifiance, Barthes is using it to signal the
play of the signifier as it eludes meaning (the signified) and registers instead the rhythms and
the materiality of the body’s opening onto pleasure.
12. Ibid.
13. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Random House,
1928), p. 7.
14. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York:
Macmillan, 1953), p. 194.
15. Ibid., p. 200.
16. Newman, “Allegories of the Subject,” p. 27.
17. The Invisible Man, based on an 1897 novella by H. G. Wells, was made into a film by
James Whale in 1933.
18. In “Memory Lessons and History Tableaux,” Buchloh analyzes Coleman’s development
within and rejection of conceptual art in relation to just this violation of conceptualism’s
taboo on the rhetorical dimensions of language.

“. . . And Then Turn Away?” 181

182 Rosalind Krauss

19. Raymond Bellour has written a particularly elegant analysis of this work; see “Les morts
vivants (Living and Presumed Dead)” (1996; translated in this volume as “The Living Dead
(Living and Presumed Dead )”).
20. Coleman has stated that in inventing the story for Living and Presumed Dead he thought
about Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale and his analysis of how an extremely reduced num-
ber of narrative “functions” is elaborated into an ever-burgeoning cast of characters in ever-
changing permutations of basic plots. See Michael Newman’s development of this aspect of
the work, “Allegories of the Subject,” pp. 36–37. Stressing the liminal nature of Coleman’s
medium, in a manner that follows the theoretical tenor of his L’Entre-Images (Paris: La
Différence, 1990)—which would imply a mixed medium or possibly a “postmedium” view
of the matter—Bellour nonetheless opens his text on Living and Presumed Dead with a com-
ment highly suggestive of the direction toward which the present essay is leading, namely
the “invention” of a new medium:“Between the living and the dead. Between life and death.
Between film and photography, theater and painting: between all the forms of representa-
tion linked to these extremes of motion and stasis, there lies a perverse and precise art, one
dedicated to a future still partly unknown, and of which James Coleman is the inhabitant”
(“The Living Dead,” p. 57 in this volume).
21. The classic text on point-of-view editing and suture is Jean-Pierre Oudart’s “Cinema
and Suture,” Screen 18 (Winter 1977–78).
22. This schematic flatness onto which life is impressed is thematized in the script’s refer-
ences to the fact that the château in which the plot is set has been based on a diagram itself
patterned on the diagram of a human skeleton, to a “formula” which produces not the fa-
ther’s death but his disappearance, to the daughter’s own substitution of photographic plates
for her absent body in her own coffin, etc.
23. Coleman has edited Yeats’s actual lines, which read:“Why do you gaze, and with so pas-
sionate eyes,/ One on the other; and then turn away,/ Covering your eyes, and weave it in
a dance?”
24. Even the most casual reader of this text will have noticed that my time in France, though
accompanied—at its entry into Paris, at the movies, at the theater, at exhibitions—was not
spent in the company of Coleman, whom I saw once for lunch and who left immediately
afterward for Dublin. Since my use of “we” seems, nonetheless, to cause confusion on this
matter for some, it might seem perverse of me to have retained it and not have removed
whatever lingering ambiguity there might be (?) by bending the truth and writing “I.” But
as the reader might gather, I had a rather joyous time in Paris, even including the compo-
sition of this essay, and I prefer to document that mood by marking the plurality of its cause.
25. Yeats spoke of the Nō drama as “a playing upon a single metaphor, as deliberate as the
echoing rhythm of line in Chinese and Japanese painting,” and he quotes Fenollosa on the
Nō: “The beauty and power of Nō lie in the concentration. All elements—costume, mo-
tion, verse, and music—unite to produce a single clarified impression. Each drama em-
bodies some primary human relation or emotion.” See Richard Taylor, The Drama of W. B.
Yeats: Irish Myth and the Japanese Nō (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
26. See, for example, Thomas Crow, “Profane Illuminations: Social History and the Art of
Jeff Wall,” Artforum (February 1993), p. 68.
27. This position is taken not only by Crow (ibid.) and de Duve ( Jeff Wall) but by Wall him-
self, as well as by his interlocutors T. J. Clark, Serge Guilbaut, and Anne Wagner in their in-
terview published in Jeff Wall. It must be said that, in the latter interview, Clark expresses
some concern over Wall’s technique. For insofar as Wall tightly manipulates the relation be-
tween his images and their art-historical sources, the viewer of this work becomes a subject
rigidly controlled by Wall (as the single subject/author). Thus, even though Wall may be
thematizing that subject in his works as fragmented, it still appears to Clark as the monadic
subject (no matter how dispersed) of capital’s basis in private property (ibid., pp. 114–15).
28. Crow, “Profane Illuminations,” p. 65.
29. The role of pastiche within postmodernism has long been an issue of particular theo-
retical concern, not only of mine but of many critics, starting with Fredric Jameson and his
1984 essay “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” characterizing postmodernist art as
inherently infected by pastiche (see Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
[Durham: Duke University Press, 1991], pp. 1–54). Ever since my first encounter with
Wall’s Picture for Women (1979), a restaging of Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère, I have been
interested in accounting structurally for this condition in his work. It should go without say-
ing (but I will say it anyway) that my views on Wall, which are offered here in an effort to
clarify the notion of “inventing a medium,” have never been discussed with Coleman and,
as far as I know, do not reflect his own.

“. . . And Then Turn Away?” 183

Photograph, 1998–99
Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.
 Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph

Rosalind Krauss

1. James Coleman’s technical apparatus has very few parameters. There are
the slides in their carrousel trays. There are the projectors equipped with
their zoom lenses. There is the recorded soundtrack. There is the timer
that synchronizes the slide changes with the track. There is the screen.
That’s it.
One can play with these parameters more or less. The static image
may fill the wall-sized screen edge to edge or it may be centered within it.
When there is more than one projector such that several individual beams
are focused on the same spot, these might move in or out of synch with
one another. The zoom lenses might pull the image, or parts of it, out of
focus or they might implement the effect of a dissolve, either between two
different images or between an image and black (thus imitating the filmic
device of a fade-in or -out). The track might be a third-person narrative
or, saying “I,” it might evoke the quality of inner monologue, or through
successive “I”s, that of dialogue, but only by implication since the mouths
of the projected actors never move.
The collective title Coleman uses for the works that employ this appa-
ratus is “projected images.” And in each such work, a facet of what could be
called its content (or its field of representation) is doubled over so that, mir-
rorlike, it reflects a certain aspect of the apparatus itself. In I N I T I A L S
(1993–94) this is the very fact of the slide changes, their punctuality, the
click that occurs as the carrousel advances a notch and each slide falls into
place. Imitating this material given, the soundtrack thematizes this noise
as a regression from the signified to the signifier, from word to phoneme:
186 Rosalind Krauss

Photograph, 1998–99
Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.

“A,” calls the child’s voice. Pause. “R,” it raps out with the same emphatic
sharpness (pronouncing this with a West Irish accent, “or”). Then, “D.”
With the same slow, processional pace, the letters continue to come, each
distinct: “D R [or] Y.” Then “B O N E S.” Then “DRY BONES.”
In another age (not so long ago) this reflexive operation would have
been called “specificity.” By consolidating the content of the work of art
around the specific givens of its technical support, the artist would with-
draw the work’s connections from the space around it—from anything that
could be called its hors-texte or its context—to focus them, analytically, on
the constitutive characteristics of the work itself. The rewards of this re-
duction would be the enormous gain in the self-evidence of a given work’s
unity or, to use the appropriate modernist term, its autonomy. Photogra-
phy is, however, the serpent that entered this Eden. For the photograph is
not only unable to cut its ties with the external world of which it is in-
evitably a trace, it is unable to center the moment of one’s experience of
it in an absolute present, since the record it smuggles into the “now” of
that exchange is ineluctably of something past.
The specificity of the “projected image” is always partially suspended,
then, by the resistance of that one component of the support that can
never be wholly summoned into the physical presence of the viewer: the
photographic referent, which is the ground of the slides themselves. Every-
thing that signals that the slide projection occurs in the spectator’s present,
everything that consolidates both the work’s unity and that of its viewing
subject, is opened out from the rear, as it were. A dispersal occurs, an
abeyance; to which we will return.
Although Coleman’s newest work, Photograph (1998–99), signals this
abeyance with its title, other aspects of the piece are concerted to map the
terrain of the work’s specificity. These are now made to focus on the na-
ture of the slide tray as support, which is to say on the carrousel’s circular-
ity: not simply on the fact that it finishes only to start again, the fact of its
repetition;but on the circle’s closure, its exclusiveness, its refusal to let any-
thing extraneous in, or out.
Most immediately, this experience of the circle is produced by the
soundtrack and, as we pick out coupled line endings—smile/while; hue/true;
light/might—by the fact that this textual accompaniment is constructed as
rhymed verse. This, plus the manifestly Romantic nature of that verse—
its simultaneous attention to subjective states (“in the springs of affection,
deep as bright”) and conditions of nature (“all green with life again”)—
produce in the viewer/listener of this work an experience of the totaliza-
tion toward which lyric poetry aspires, a symbolic circularity in which self
and other, beginning and end, origin and destiny, are presented as mani-
festations of a unified design, each mirroring and repeating the other in
an impossibly dilated present.1 Indeed, by allowing the mind to skip back-
ward over the verse as it unfolds, the structure of rhyme, producing a sense
of the synchronous against the grain of diachrony, asserts the poetic form’s
claim to circularity.
This is a claim that Coleman’s soundtrack underscores not only by lit-
erally doubling up a group of lines from the opening—“There felt a mo-
ment’s silence round/ a breathless pause/ the hush of hearts that beat”—to
repeat them at the work’s end, but by evoking circularity through the text’s
individual figures:“over and about, around,” for example, or “circled with
joy,” or “girth me round.” The encirclement thus named is, furthermore,
made visually present to the spectator as he or she encounters the school-
girl who seems to be the work’s central character in an extremely arrest-
ing image in which she is surrounded by a fellowship of dancers but is
nonetheless coiled around on herself. Having mentioned the freedom of
clouds racing through the sky, the soundtrack now says of—or perhaps on
the part of—this visually trapped figure: “but I, I had yet to fly to a secret
spot.” Somewhat later, the viewer finds her again circled, but now by

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188 Rosalind Krauss

schoolyard walls on which a thick, whitewashed band is inscribed with

graffiti which she is trying to clean off (“Would’st thou through following
through these lines/ lay bare an innermost scroll”). And then there is the
work’s final image, in which the dancers can be seen massing themselves
so as to form—as the visual climax of the piece—a circle.

2. It is not a new impulse within Coleman’s work to acknowledge the cir-

cularity built into his apparatus through the form of the slide carrousel. In-
deed, Clara and Dario (1975), one of the first of the “projected images”
(preceded only by the earlier Slide Piece [1972–73]), not only initiates the
dramatic situation that so many subsequent works will exploit—the strange
abbreviation of the filmic shot-reverse-shot syntax that unfolds the pre-
sumed “dialogue” between these two heads in a repeated pose that I have
elsewhere called the double face-out (on which more later)2 —but structures
the piece around the circularity of the trays, as the two carrousels (that of
Clara and that of Dario) begin in synch, only for the Clara tray to reverse
itself halfway through and propel its cycle backward. Similarly the alternat-
ing soundtracks give the impression of sliding past one another, the enun-
ciations timed with the Dario field continuing to cycle forward, while
those associated with the Clara field move backward in reverse order.
A key work in Coleman’s oeuvre, Clara and Dario also puts in place a
feature that would characterize many of the subsequent slide tapes:namely
that the soundtrack is a congeries of citations, in this case lifted from
newspaper stories and fotoromanzo dialogue, these readymade verbal strings
made nonetheless to coalesce with the image of the projected face(s) in a
strong evocation of subjectivity. For Clara and Dario sets up a subjective
field in which the two are “remembering” their adolescence and a scene
where either their romance, or that of others, began.
To hear in this “memory” the echo of that forming the center of
Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape (the younger Krapp remembering
himself lying in a boat with his head burrowed in the breasts of the mis-
tress from whom he is separating:“We lay there without moving. But un-
der us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to
side”) is of course to feel the importance of Beckett for Coleman. This
proximity is apparent not only in Beckett’s interest in low forms, such
as music hall routines, which Coleman translates into his own concern
for romantic pulp fiction. It is also there in the exploitation of forms of
recording, such as audiotapes, so that the past moment testified to by the
tape can enter the immediacy of the staged present with a dazzling tem-
Clara and Dario, 1975
Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.
Installation at Studio Marconi,
Milan, 1975.

poral ambivalence. And insofar as these audio interventions are often the
character’s memories, the fact of recording underscores a relation to mem-
ory as a simultaneous experience of self-identity and self-alienation: the
older Krapp listening to his youthful recording has to look in the diction-
ary for the meanings of words used by his younger self (“viduity”);the older
Krapp, sneering in unison with the younger one sneering at the aspirations
expressed in a tape made when he was even younger, is, however, utterly
unconcerned with his earlier self ’s triumphant announcement of spiritual
breakthrough—“The vision at last”—but is mesmerized by the tape’s
record of that relationship broken and tossed away:“but under us all moved,
and moved us, gently, up and down . . .”
Does the old Krapp actually remember this? Or is he struck by it,
comforted by it? Placated as if by a fairy tale: “We drifted in among the
flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem!” Is it
the hope contained in Romantic lyric and encoded in bedtime stories that
urges him to play this one part of the tape over and over—the thought of
a harmony between nature and self, the possibility of producing a circle,
of inhabiting a larger, divine plan?

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190 Rosalind Krauss

This question of whether and to what extent our memories are actu-
ally our “own,” of how, that is, we as psychological subjects coincide with
them, has been a longstanding concern of Coleman’s. At the same time
that he was completing Photograph, he contributed a work devised in 1984
to a group exhibition of photographic and film-related work that included
artists such as Chantal Akerman and Jeff Wall.3 Coleman’s piece, however,
was neither photograph nor slide nor film. Figuring nowhere in the exhi-
bition except in the show’s checklist, it follows the alphabetic appearance
of his name and consists of a story about a man who often tells his friends
about his hallucinations, one of which is a detailed account of watching
a cardsharp at a country fair. Upon finding, however, a photograph of
the very scene, the man is faced with the dilemma of whether this was a
memory or a fantasy and, even more perplexing, whether in describing this
scene in the future he will be referring to the memory of a memory of a
hallucination or the memory of a hallucination of a memory.4
But between the two prongs of this dilemma—hallucination or
memory?—there rides a third element, namely the photograph. And this,
precisely as an independent third term, could be the basis for a range of
subjective projections, from the material one “hallucinates” to the expe-
rience one “remembers.”

3. That subjectivity is a kind of collage, a concatenation of readymade ma-

terial and the endless mental traffic between layers of this material, and that
“authentic” experience is, like the shadows in Plato’s cave, always mediated,
is a concern that threads its way through all of Coleman’s work. In Photo-
graph this is registered on one level by the soundtrack’s poem, which though
unlocatable (is it Robert Browning? is it Longfellow? is it Elizabeth Barrett
Browning?) rings with the tones of verse learned in high school, so that it is
both terribly familiar—part of everyone’s identikit, indeed part of the inte-
rior monologue that accompanies children’s play as they enact fantasy parts
in both the first person (“I stood beloved”) and the third (“She turned, she
knew”)—and depressingly uninhabitable from our vantage as adults.
This citational effect impresses itself on much of the work’s visual
texture as well. This is because the social fabric into which its youthful
characters are woven is not only the physical building of the school—its
classrooms, its auditorium, its exterior facade—but consists as well of the
activity in which that school’s community is engrossed, which in this case is
the preparation and rehearsal for the kind of intramural dance contests that
take place in Ireland, and result in an annual carnival-like pageant in Dublin.
Far from summoning up ideas of classical ballet, however, this involves a
type of dancing which is much closer to MTV, with moves based on the
Spice Girls or Madonna and costumes that unleash a whole gamut of fan-
tasy roles into which these adolescents are projecting themselves. Rang-
ing from the martial—Wonder Woman, drum majorettes, Star Trek—to
the erotic—cancan, flamenco—to the athletic, the roles both allow for
the trying out of a variety of identities and form a fixed repertory, itself the
product of a commercialized global culture. In the latter sense, the cos-
tumes, with the readymade parts they flag, function like a vise within which
the adolescents are gripped; the outfits are something like the precipitates
of a Lacanian Symbolic, an inventory that forms a circle that hems the chil-
dren in—the circle also understood as the Law.
Indeed, in developing the piece, Coleman himself was focused on the
story of The Chalk Circle, the thirteenth-century Chinese drama that forms
the basis for Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, both of these plays driv-
ing toward the moment when a child’s fate is suspended within the circle of
the law, literalized by a ring chalked onto a courtroom floor. The “truth”
this law assumes itself capable of producing is, then, both a function of the
circle and the circle’s self-justification so that, in its self-perpetuation, the
circle is absolute. And yet in both plays the child is ultimately liberated from
the circle into the arms of its true parent (in the one because she is its bi-
ological mother and in the other because she is the one who really cares
for it), a liberation which is also coded into the development of Photograph.
Struck by the declaration of one of the members of this high school
troupe that dancing was a way of breaking free of the strictures of their
shabby suburban life (the district on the outskirts of Dublin called Cabra),
Coleman was haunted by the performers’ conviction that they could “dance
their way out of Cabra.” The circle as the liberation from the circle is, then,
the paradox the work takes up as childhood is unfolded as a process of free-
ing oneself from the dyadic hold of the mirror—“traversed by the coils of
memory’s chain, of magic mirrors that waft images, silent as a dream”—
in order to be able to join the circle of a social whole—“and, through a
life e’er twined with other lives, cast aside a lime-encrusted spell.”
Indeed, in the narrative buried deep within the generation of the work,
the central character is seen as breaking out of one circle—the graffiti-
covered band of whitewash (otherwise known as chalk or quicklime)—in
order freely to join another—the round of dancers. Yet, though this narra-
tive is encoded in the soundtrack of the piece (“cast aside a lime-encrusted
spell, and, in an echo of a crowded hall, sounds of how all things shall speak

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192 Rosalind Krauss

and quicken”), its message is muffled at every turn by the consciously for-
mulaic quality of the elements of the work—the recipe-like verse, the
kitsch clothing—implying that the circle cannot be broken, that there is
no outside of the Law.

4. The two, superimposed circles of Photograph—that of the social order

in which the protagonists are caught and that of the slide carrousel through
which they are projected—could be thought of as relating to each other
as content to form, or as signified to signifier: the first a function of all
those associations to the construction of subjectivity and identity within
the circularity of the Symbolic order, the problematic that has largely been
taken to be the import of Coleman’s work;5 the second a mechanical sys-
tem that the work signals as the ground of its “specificity.” In that one
circle could be thought to be allegorizing the other, it is the assumption
of contemporary criticism that if the carrousel has any interest, if it is to be
noticed at all, this is because it stands for or redoubles the thematic center
of the work, which is focused on issues of identity and its formation.6 That
the allegory might go the other way is, within the present conditions of
discourse, almost unthinkable.
Many strands have braided together to contrive the situation within
which this notion of specificity to a medium should now be “unthinkable.”
The first is the historical fact of photography itself, which entered the field
of art only to deconstruct its unity, with photography’s own dispersal—its
existence as multiple, its dependence on the textual field of the caption,
its erosion of the “aura” of the aesthetic original—now infecting the fields
of the other mediums, like painting or sculpture. From Walter Benjamin’s
“to an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work
of art designed for reproducibility,” to Jean Baudrillard’s theorization of
photography as the model for “sign exchange value,” photography has thus
emerged as a theoretical object that allows one to unthink the presumed
unity or autonomy of the aesthetic fields. So whether it was as the prime
example of Roland Barthes’s mythology or of Jean Baudrillard’s simu-
lacrum, by the 1960s at least photography had left behind its identity as a
historical or an aesthetic object, to become a theoretical object instead.
The perfect instance of a multiple-without-an-original, the photograph—
in its structural status as copy—marked the site of so many ontological
cave-ins. The burgeoning of the copy not only facilitated the quotation of
the original but splintered the supposed unity of the original “itself ” into
nothing but a series of quotations. And, as the second strand of this braid,
in the place of what was formerly an author, the operator of these quota-
tions—in being redefined as pasticheur —was repositioned on the other
side of the copybook to join, schizophrenically, the mass of its readers.
Barthes, in particular, was further interested in the structural irony that
would allow photography, this wrecker of unitary being, to perform the
semiological sleight-of-hand whereby in the seamlessness of its physical
surface the photograph seemed to summon forth the great guarantor of
unity—raw nature, in all its presumed wholeness and continuity—to cover
the tracks of photography’s own citational operations. Its participation in
the structure of the trace, the index, and the stencil made photography
thus the theoretical object through which to explore the reinvention of
nature as “myth,” the cultural production of it as a mask behind which the
operations of history and of politics could be kept out of sight.7
In Baudrillard’s hands this mask became the model of a final disappear-
ance through which the object-conditions of a material world of produc-
tion would be replaced by the simulacral network of their reproductions,
so many images peeled off the surfaces of things to enter the circuit of
commodities in their own right. If in an earlier version of commodity cul-
ture the mobility of exchange value relentlessly replaces the embeddedness
of use value, in its latest manifestation, then, both of these yield to the
phantasmagoria of Spectacle in which the commodity has become image
only, thus instituting the imperious reign of pure sign exchange.8
But photography’s emergence as a theoretical object had already oc-
curred at the hands of Walter Benjamin in the years that elapsed between
his “A Small History of Photography” in 1931 and his more famous text
of 1936, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”9 In
1931 Benjamin is still interested in the history of photography, which is to
say in photography as a medium with its own traditions and its own fate.
He believes the genius of the medium to be the rendering of the human
subject woven into the network of its social relations. Stamped on the
photographic portraits made during the first decade of the medium’s ex-
istence was the aura both of a human nature settling into its own speci-
ficity due to the length of the pose and of a social nexus exposed in terms
of the intimacy of its relationships due to the amateur status of these early
practitioners (Hill, Cameron, Hugo) making portrait pictures for their
circle of friends. Even in the early stages of photography’s commodifica-
tion, after the spread of the commercialized carte de visite, the celebration of

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194 Rosalind Krauss

photography’s inherent technical possibilities meant that precision lenses

would marry the confidence of a rising bourgeois class to the technolog-
ical prowess of a new medium.
The decadence that was soon to engulf this medium was thus due not
just to its having yielded to the commodity but to that commodity’s hav-
ing been swallowed by kitsch, the fraudulent mask of art.10 It is “artiness”
that erodes both the aura of this humanity and its possessor’s authority, as
the gum-bichromate print and the accompanying penumbral lighting be-
tray a social class under siege. Atget’s response to this “artiness” was to pull
the plug on the portrait altogether and to produce the urban setting voided
of human presence, thereby substituting, for the turn-of-the-century por-
trait’s unconscious mise-en-scène of class murder, an eerily emptied “scene
of the crime.”
The point of Benjamin’s “Small History” is, then, to welcome a con-
temporary return to the authenticity of photography’s relation to the hu-
man subject.11 This he sees occurring either in Soviet cinema’s curiously
intimate rendering of the anonymous subjects of a social collective or in
August Sander’s submission of the individual portrait to the archival pres-
sures of serialization.12 If he also deplores the photographer’s benighted
struggle to acquire aesthetic credentials “before the very tribunal he was
in the process of overturning,”13 this does not assume the radically decon-
structive position Benjamin would take five years later, in which photog-
raphy not only claims the specificity of its own (technologically inflected)
medium but, in denying the values of the aesthetic itself, will cashier the
very idea of the independent medium, including that of photography.
And so another strand of this braid is the fact that in becoming a the-
oretical object, photography loses its own specificity as a medium. Thus
in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin
charts a historical path from the shock effects courted by futurism and
dada collage, to the shocks delivered by the unconscious optics revealed
by photography, to the shock specific to the montage procedures of film
editing, a path that is now indifferent to the givens of a particular medium.
It is as a theoretical object that photography assumes the revelatory power
to set forth the reasons for a wholesale transformation of art that will in-
clude itself in that same transformation.
“A Small History of Photography” had pictured the decay of the aura
as a tendency within photography’s own history; “The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” will now see the photographic—
which is to say mechanical reproduction in all its modern, technological
guises—as both source and symptom of a full-scale demise of this aura
across all of culture, so that art itself, as celebrator of the unique and the
authentic, will empty out completely. Its transformation will be absolute:
“To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work
of art designed for reproducibility,” Benjamin states.14
The change that the theoretical object makes clear to Benjamin has
two faces. One is in the field of the object where, through the structure of
reproduction, serialized units are rendered equivalent—much as in the op-
erations of statistics—with the result that things are now made more avail-
able, in the sense of being both more proximate and more understandable,
to the masses. But the other is in the field of the subject, for whom a new
type of perception operates, “a perception whose ‘sense of the universal
equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even
from a unique object by means of reproduction.”15 This extraction Ben-
jamin also describes as prying objects from their shells.
In an unpublished variant of one of the sections of his essay, Benjamin
comments on the recent appearance of a theory of art focused precisely on
this perceptual act of prying objects from their contexts, which in and of
itself can now be reinvested with aesthetic force. Referring to the position
Marcel Duchamp elaborates in the Green Box, Benjamin summarizes it as
follows: “Once an object is looked at by us as a work of art, it absolutely
ceases its objective function. This is why contemporary man would prefer
to feel the specific effect of the work of art in the experience of objects dis-
engaged from their functional contexts [crossed out: torn from this context
or thrown away] . . . rather than with works nominated to play this role.”16
Thus acknowledging the intersection between his own theoretical po-
sition and that of Duchamp, Benjamin’s “work of art designed for repro-
ducibility” is seen to have already been projected as the readymade;and the
perceptual act that extracts “the sense of the universal equality of things”
even from a unique object is understood as that of the photographer fram-
ing pieces of the world through the camera’s lens whether he or she takes
the picture or not. That this act alone is aesthetic means that an entire
world of artistic technique and tradition drops away, including not only
the skill required to make the older forms of “works nominated to play this
role”—painting, say, or sculpture—but also the technical skills of expo-
sure, developing, and printing requisite to photography itself.
The condition mapped by Benjamin would only be exacerbated in the
history of postwar art—another strand in our braid—that absorbed the les-
sons of the readymade, which, in short-circuiting the stage of production

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196 Rosalind Krauss

altogether, so that an object could now achieve its art status merely by be-
ing chosen, manages to skip over the specificity of the various forms of
making—the mediums—to jump directly to the level of art-in-general. It
was conceptual art that unequivocally theorized this relationship between
a generalized condition of art and the Duchampian intervention, inter-
preting the import of the readymade as a transformation of art-as-object
into art-as-enunciative statement, as in Robert Rauschenberg’s “This is a
portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.” Thus interjecting the textual into the field
of the visual, conceptual art could repeatedly assert the nonspecificity of the
aesthetic.17 Whatever the politics of this assertion—whether it was meant
to rescue art from the commodification that increasingly adhered to no
matter what material object, or whether it was understood as opacifying
the seemingly endlessly absorptive and seductive screen of late twentieth-
century spectacle culture—the assertion itself is now thought to inoculate
all the work made in its name, which is to say the global fashion for in-
stallation art, against the forms of late capitalist consumption and enter-
tainment; it wears its self-righteousness, so to speak, on its sleeve.
If then conceptual art articulated this nonspecifity most overtly ( Joseph
Kosuth:“Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is
questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of
art. . . . That’s because the word art is general and the word painting is spe-
cific. Painting is a kind of art.”)18 and if one branch of its practice restricted
the exploration of “the nature of art [in general]” to language—thus
avoiding the visual because it would be too specific—most of conceptual
art had recourse to photography. There were, perhaps, two reasons for this.
The first is that the art which conceptual art was interrogating remained
visual, rather than, say, literary or musical; and photography was a way of
adhering to the realm of visuality. But, second, its beauty was precisely that
its way of remaining within this realm was itself nonspecific. Photography
was understood (and Benjamin once again was the first to pronounce it so)
as deeply inimical to the idea of autonomy or specificity because of its own
structural dependence upon a caption. Thus as heterogeneous from the
outset—an always potential mixture of image and text—photography be-
came the major tool for conducting an inquiry on the nature of art that
never descends into specificity. Indeed, Jeff Wall writes of the importance
of photoconceptualism that “many of Conceptual art’s essential achieve-
ments are either created in the form of photographs or are otherwise me-
diated by them.”19
 It is this inherently hybrid structure of photography that is recognized
in one of the major gambits of photoconceptual practice when Dan
Graham’s Homes for America (1966) or Robert Smithson’s “A Tour of the
Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” (1967) assumes the guise of photojour-
nalism, marrying written text to documentary-photographic illustration.
This would become the model for many other types of photoconceptual
work—from the self-imposed shooting assignments of Douglas Huebler
or Bernd and Hilla Becher to the landscape reportages of Richard Long
or the documentary pieces of Allan Sekula—as it would also be genera-
tive of a variety of narrative photoessays, from those by Victor Burgin or
Martha Rosler to younger artists like Sophie Calle. Its historical origins,
as Wall points out, are to be found in the avant-garde’s original embrace
of photojournalism in the 1920s and ’30s as a way not only of opening fire
on the idea of aesthetic autonomy so carefully preserved by “art photog-
raphy” but of mobilizing the unexpected formal resources in the look of
“non-art” contained in the haphazard spontaneity of the documentary
photograph.
Indeed photography’s mimetic capacity opens it effortlessly onto the
general avant-garde practice of mimicry, of assuming the guise of whole
ranges of non- or anti-art experience in order to critique the unexamined
pretensions of high art. From Seurat’s emulation of art nouveau posters to
pop art’s travesty of cheap advertising, a range of modernist practice has
mined the possibilities of turning imitation to its own use. And as the
whole cohort of appropriation artists demonstrated in the 1980s, nothing
is so inherently equipped for this strategy of impersonation as the “mirror
with a memory” that is photography.
If photoconceptualism chose, as its second strategic dimension, the
mimicry not of photojournalism alone but of brutishly amateur photog-
raphy, this was because, Wall further argues, the look of the utterly dumb,
hapless picture, the image divested of any social or formal significance—
indeed, stripped of any significance at all—and thus the photograph in
which there is “nothing to look at,” comes as close as photography can to
the reflexive condition of a photograph about nothing but its maker’s own
persistence in continuing to produce something that, in its resistance to
instrumentalization, its purposive purposelessness, must be called art. A
reflection thus on the concept of art itself, which as Duchamp had once
put it can be seen as nothing more than the impossibilité du fer—his pun on
the impossibility of making 20 —Ruscha’s pointless gas stations or Los An-

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198 Rosalind Krauss

geles apartment buildings or Huebler’s utterly artless duration pieces ex-

ploit the amateur’s zero point of style to move photography to the center
of conceptual art.
Photography’s apotheosis as a medium—its commercial, academic,
and museological success, the explosion in the market for photography
“itself,” the turn of art professionals to the specifically photographic ob-
ject—came ironically just at the moment of its capacity to eclipse the very
notion of a medium and to emerge as a theoretical because heterogeneous
object. And this emergence parallels a last tress in our story, also a theo-
retical one, composed of the dispossession of the centered subject of the
Enlightenment at the hands of all those poststructuralist discourses that
developed from the 1960s on to argue against the prerogatives of author-
ship or against the assumptions of universalist or essentialist values. The
reciprocity between this dispersed subject and the scattered field of its ob-
jects, their mirrored acknowledgment of lack as their very ground and
thus of the possibility of autonomy forever eclipsed, was theorized by the
most powerful voices of the last three decades. And this, again, threw up
a seemingly unbreachable taboo against the thought of specificity.
If the grip of this argument has somewhat loosened in recent years,
however, it is because of the way the purported radicality of the post-
structuralist position has been compromised by the effect of what has been
called the Cultural Revolution, the term given for the ultimate cunning
with which advanced capitalism exploits radical practice, whether theo-
retical or artistic, by allowing it to prospect within the cultural Imaginary
and thereby to open up new spaces within a subject now programmed to
participate in—and thereby be colonized by—the next stage of capital.21
In no matter how minor a way, the two services the avant-garde has
rendered the Cultural Revolution involve spectacle on the one hand and
globalization on the other. Accordingly, most of the installation practices
that are the logical heirs of conceptualism and are by now the universal
language of multidisciplinarity have been incapable of resisting their own
absorption into the transformative system of spectacle in which every-
thing, now distanced as imaginary display, is repackaged as entertainment.
And similarly, the very reconfiguring of all material objects into the con-
dition of the image has turned the physical into the virtual, thereby not
only making the experience of the work of art more and more porous to
cybernetic transcoding, but programming the (decentered) subject of that
experience as a form of dispersal along an endlessly proliferating informa-
tion network.
 It is at this historical juncture that the taboo against specificity comes
to seem less and less radical and a desire to rethink the idea of the medium
as a form of resistance to late capitalism’s utter generalization of the aes-
thetic—so that anything from shopping to watching wars on television
takes on an aestheticized glow—seems less and less impossible. And whether
some or all of this has gone into the thinking of those artists who are now
imagining their way back into medium specificity, it is nonetheless the
case that some of the strongest work in the last decade has come from the
hands of practitioners determined to invoke the concept of the medium,
not by returning to the compromised forms of the traditional mediums
but by “inventing” new ones.
James Coleman is one of these artists. For almost twenty years he has
been pursuing a single medium, based on the lowly commercial slide tape
as its technical support but wrought into a complexly dense aesthetic form
that he now calls “projected images.” He is by no means the first artist to
project slides inside the space of a gallery. Conceptual artists, from Marcel
Broodthaers to Robert Barry, all exploited slide projections, as did film-
makers such as Michael Snow. But if the term invention needs to be applied
to Coleman, it is because of the way in his hands a technical possibility be-
gan to be densely layered into something one could call a recursive struc-
ture such that some of the elements within that layering could be seen to
produce the rules that generate the structure itself. This is a structure cer-
tain aspects of which need to be characterized as circular.

5. One of the rules that Coleman took as axiomatic for his “medium” is
that his images are static and thus bereft of narrative. Like the silence mod-
ernist painting sought to make more and more absolute within the pure
spatiality of its frame, these are to be images that banish speech. They are
to be the antithesis of history painting; they are not talking pictures. Pro-
jected one by one, each image is held stable on the screen for many sec-
onds, before fading to black and then yielding to another.22 That they will,
however, yield to another, that they are in sequence, that the carrousel is
round, and that the sequence itself will imply some kind of story, is an-
other rule of this medium, one that is in seeming contradiction with the
first, which had decreed stasis.
The convention that Coleman both mines from this “contradiction”
and uses to acknowledge it is what I alluded to earlier as the double face-out.
A form of narrative improbability, it involves two characters locked in
what seems to be dramatic confrontation or intense exchange who, how-

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200 Rosalind Krauss

ever, do not look at one another but both face outward, toward the viewer.
In this sense they have stepped outside the diegetic horizon, the forward
drive of the story—like actors at the end of a play making their bows to
the audience, another trope Coleman often exploits—and yet they are still
invoking that story. It is this very ambivalence that Barthes explored as he
sought the logic of the movie still, which, counterintuitively, he saw as
containing the principle of the filmic. Arguing that “the ‘movement’ re-
garded as the essence of film is not animation, flux, mobility, ‘life,’ copy,
but simply the framework of a permutational unfolding,” Barthes releases
what he calls an “inarticulable third meaning” from the photographic still’s
privilege of being both static and anecdotalized.23 This is a meaning “that
neither the simple photograph nor figurative painting can assume,” he ar-
gues, “since they lack the diegetic horizon,” but by being both harbored
within the story and secured from it, it is a meaning released from the bur-
dens of the Symbolic and is instead at luxuriant play against the back-
ground of signification: “a luxury, an expenditure with no exchange.”24
Counternarrative, the third or obtuse meaning, is instead “disseminated,
reversible, set to its own temporality.”
The double face-out as the counternarrative device, the permutational
element playing, vertically, against the horizontal thrust of the slide se-
quence, is not unique to Coleman’s medium. It is in fact adapted from those
kinds of anecdotalized images—comic books and photo-novels—that use
it as a stylized contraction of the cinematic grammar of shot-reverse-shot
necessary to film two characters in a face-to-face exchange, but which,
unable to string out the series of individual shots needed to present each
interlocutor as separately situated, for reasons of space, collapse the two
“reaction shots” in a single frame. That such sources are resonant for his
own analysis of the “third meaning” is indeed acknowledged by Barthes:

There are other “arts” which combine still (or at least drawing) and
story, diegesis—namely the photo-novel and the comic-strip. I am
convinced that these “arts,” born in the lower depths of high culture,
possess theoretical qualifications and present a new signifier (related
to the obtuse meaning). This is acknowledged as regards the comic-
strip but I myself experience this slight trauma of signifiance faced with
certain photo-novels: “their stupidity touches me” (which could be a
certain definition of obtuse meaning). There may thus be a future—
or a very ancient past—truth in these derisory, vulgar, foolish, dia-
logical forms of consumer subculture.25
Photograph, 1998–99
Projected slide images with
synchronized audio narration.

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph 201

202 Rosalind Krauss

It can be said, then, that Coleman did not “invent” the double face-out
anymore than he “invented” the slide tape; rather, I am claiming, his in-
vention is the medium within which such a thing emerges as a necessary
convention, illuminating the logic of the support at the same time that it
exfoliates a whole field of possible meanings. Which is to say that the slide
tape only becomes a medium once it has been able to generate a set of con-
ventions that will be recursive within it.
Is it necessary to interject here that the idea of a recursive structure,
which operates on the idea that a medium is always composite—techni-
cal support plus conventions—is not incompatible with the idea of “speci-
ficity”? Which is to say that the literalization of “medium-specificity” to
mean nothing more than a physical characteristic to which the medium is
thought to have been reduced (such as “flatness”) is a strange aberration in
the history of criticism, which though it has had very real fallout (Donald
Judd’s idea of “specific objects,” Joseph Kosuth’s arguments for conceptual
art) is not philosophically serious.26 In their desire for specificity, various
modernist mediums might have jettisoned conventions deemed inessential
or superfluous, but this does not mean they rid themselves of all conven-
tions. Thus even the two “constitutive conventions or norms—flatness
and the delimitation of flatness,” to which Clement Greenberg saw paint-
ing so stripped down that any length of canvas could be experienced as a
picture, still left room for the second norm to be understood as the
grounds for what he would call “the optical third dimension,” a conven-
tion generative of a whole run of pictorial production to which Green-
berg gave the name “color field.” And in that case color, layered onto the
plane of canvas, even though stained into it, became the means of pro-
ducing the specificity of this optical field.

6. Like I N I T I A L S, Photograph opens with a prelude, the material for

which, in a departure from the earlier work, then recurs twice more as in-
terludes between sections of the piece. Visually distinct from the texture
and pace of the rest of the work, this appears as an amorphous blur, a lu-
minous, dissolving cloudiness that for a long time is experienced as being
in black and white. The continuity with which the images shift, in their
near abstractness, brings the experience of these passages up against the
threshold of film; and except for the audibility of the slide changes and the
whirring of the zoom lenses—the palpable presence, that is, of the appa-
ratus—one would imagine oneself confronted with cinema.
 As the framing device for a work called Photograph, this is a peculiar
choice indeed;and in order to be able to read it we need to do a little back-
tracking, both into the evolution of Coleman’s work in general and into
the development of this piece in particular.
The idea of a regression back to black and white as an experience of
denaturing, of moving through the living present of the photographic
support back into its archaic past, had been explored by Coleman in a
work called Untitled: Philippe VACHER (1990). A peculiar hybrid of his
“medium,” the work is on 35 mm film, although with each consecutive
frame of the original action multiplied some 300 times, each segment of
the action is held on the screen for about thirteen seconds, reproducing in
a certain sense the effect of a slide tape.27 The action itself is that of a
doctor who slumps onto a medical cart containing bottles and equipment
which his collapse scatters in the same agonizing slow motion that charac-
terizes his gesture. Made to repeat again and again over the course of about
seventeen minutes, the circularity of this fall-only-to-rise-once-more is
contradicted by a different movement which is relentless, progressive, and
one-way only. This is the very gradual substitution of an A negative, shot
in color, by a B negative which is in black and white. And, as color is
drained from the image in imperceptible degrees, so are the intermediary
tonalities registered in the layer of color stripped away, with the resultant
field a strangely mortiferous scatter of shape and grain. This is thus a move-
ment that seems to be going back into the indecipherability of very early
photographic experiments (one thinks of the nearly unintelligible images
made by Niépce in the 1820s) in which what one seems to encounter
in the print is nothing but a field of chemicals, the silver-salt crystals
themselves.
If Untitled: Philippe VACHER operates from the past of Coleman’s work
as a support for the interest in the black-and-white near-unintelligibility
that frames Photograph, the “first cut” of the images selected for the new
work had originally placed a peculiar slide at the start of this succession of
brilliantly colored images. A shot of the outside of the school building,
taken from what seems like an interior courtyard, the image is of a strangely
faceless blockhouse, its windows boarded up, its walls streaked and filthy.
These, made of a menacingly rough stucco, are resolutely gray, as is the
gravel in the small patch of desolate yard. In fact, within the play of gray
geometries that make up this image, the only clue to the fact that it is not
in black and white is the tiny line of hapless weeds that scatter a faint green

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph 203

204 Rosalind Krauss

Photograph, 1998–99
Location (outtake).

accent along the building’s base. It was this “black-and-white” image that
was eventually removed from the work and replaced by the far less locat-
able blur of the “prelude.”
And that blur itself is also a transmutation of something with which
Coleman was working in the early stages of the piece. Standing next to the
tripod on which his slide camera was placed, Coleman would occasion-
ally experiment with shooting with a digital camera. This camera—from
an early generation of these instruments and thus relatively slow—would
sometimes produce a strange kind of blurring in which a given shot would
contain a halation that was like the retention of the immediate past of the
image held over within it like a strange cybernetic “memory.” Aware that
this effect was the function of a technological phase now already rendered
obsolete because of the drive of digital equipment toward higher and higher
resolution, Coleman was greatly interested in these blurred images with
their incredibly voluptuous color. Incapable of being integrated into the
close-grained visual texture of the rest of the slides, however, these images
also dropped from the work only eventually to be transcoded into the so-
called prelude’s blur.
Precipitated into the “prelude” then, in the form of a strange tempo-
ral dilation, is a meditation on the life cycles of technologies: the hopes
with which they are born and the ignominious fates to which they are
consigned at the moment of their obsolescence, moments which come
with increasing speed as the pace of technology grows exponentially. The
cinematic technology which had supplanted the photographic image is
now itself threatened with obsolescence by a digital encoding which is
every day updating and thus outmoding its earlier incarnations.
With a “blur” that can, then, refer simultaneously to the early practice
of photography in its monochromatic phase—Julia Margaret Cameron’s
vaporous portrait of Thomas Carlyle, for instance—and to that medium’s
own overthrow at the hands of a new technical resource whose own be-
ginnings have by now been swallowed up by its further advance, Coleman
suspends Photography within a reflection on obsolescence. It is a reflection
Walter Benjamin had long ago broached in his own consideration of pho-
tography as he wondered whether photography had, like other technol-
ogies before it, released a fleeting image of the utopian promise it might
contain at the moment when it was still an amateur pastime, the moment,
that is, before it became commercialized and hardened into a commodity.
Further, it was Benjamin’s thought that at the moment when a technology
is suddenly eclipsed by its own obsolescence, its armoring breaks down
and it releases the memory of this promise. And here, he thought, through
the outmoded’s creation of a chink in the armor, one could glimpse an
outside to the totality of technologized space.28
Coleman’s own “medium” has been developed within this interstitial
space, the very slide tape that forms its technical support a victim of all
those newer devices like the video or computer presentation that have
placed it, as a viable commercial vehicle, on life support. But with this same
logic articulated by Benjamin in his thoughts on the outmoded—inas-
much as it may be photography’s very passage from mass use to obsoles-
cence that allows its use in the “reinvention” of a medium—the slide tape’s
demise within the world of high-powered advertising allows one to imag-
ine an outside of spectacle culture itself, which is to say an earlier form in
which spectacle released and supported imaginative life, supporting ama-
teur presentations of the tableaux vivants signaled by Coleman’s staged,
static actors, or fueling the magic lantern show to which the very idea of
his “projected images” consistently refers.
The argument has been made that for Benjamin, too, the magic
lantern show was endowed with a complex power. For not only could it
be said to be the very embodiment of phantasmagoria as ideological pro-
jection, but it could also be thought to produce the inverse image of

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph 205

206 Rosalind Krauss

ideology: phantasmagoria as constructive rather than merely reflective;

the magic lantern as the medium of the child’s permutational powers at
play against the diegetic horizon, as in the opening pages of Proust’s novel
Swann’s Way where we witness the young Marcel’s enchantment with the
projections of the magic lantern slides on his bedroom walls as a realiza-
tion of the way that childhood’s endless capacities for narrative invention
can be married to the dreaminess of the luminous image.29 Indeed the
magic lantern functions in Benjamin’s thought as one of those outmoded
optical devices, like the stereopticon slide (Benjamin’s model for the di-
alectical image), which can brush the phantasmagorical against its own
grain, to produce the outside to the totality of technologized space that
Benjamin sought.
It is this resource of the magic lantern show, lodged within the com-
mercial slide tape as a kind of genetic marker, that is central to Coleman’s
project. It tells of an imaginative capacity stored within this technical sup-
port and made suddenly retrievable at the moment when the armoring of
technology breaks down under the force of its obsolescence. To “reinvent”
the slide tape as a medium is to release this cognitive capacity, thereby dis-
covering the redemptive possibilities within the technological support itself.
Benjamin’s “A Small History of Photography” had already described
certain photographic practices of his own day performing a retrieval of the
“amateur” condition of photography’s first decade, although he was not
using amateur in the sense given it by a postwar avant-garde to mean in-
competent. Rather it conveyed what Benjamin thought of as the ideal of
a relation to art that was nonprofessional in the sense of nonspecialized.
Benjamin had spelled out such an ideal in a text he wrote one year after
“The Work of Art” essay, his “Second Paris Letter: On Painting and Pho-
tography,” undertaken for the Moscow edition of Das Wort but refused for
publication. There he connects the amateur status of early photography to
the pre-impressionist situation in which both the theory and practice of
art arose from the continuous discursive field maintained by the acade-
mies. Claiming that Courbet was the last painter to operate within this
continuity, Benjamin pictures impressionism as the first of the modernist
movements to have courted a studio-based esoterica with the result that
the artists’ professional jargon both gave rise to and depended upon the
critics’ specialized discourse.30 Once again, then, this first decade of pho-
tography’s history operates as a kind of promise folded within its medium
of the possibilities of an openness and invention before the rigidification
of the image as commodity.
 In 1935 Benjamin had articulated his idea of the onset of obsolescence
as a possible if momentary revelation of the utopian dreams encoded within
the various forms of technology at the points of their inception. If he had
steadily claimed a political future for photography, that was not how he de-
scribed its birth in the two essays straddling “The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction” (in 1931 and late 1936). There we get a
glimpse of photography’s both hooking into the cognitive powers of child-
hood and opening up the promise of becoming a medium. At the moment,
now, of its obsolescence, photography can remind us of this promise: not
as a revival of itself or indeed of any of the former mediums of art, but of
what Benjamin had earlier spoken of as the necessary plurality of the arts
(represented by the plurality of the Muses), a plural condition that stands
apart from any philosophically unified idea of Art. This is another way of
stating the need for the idea of the medium as such to reclaim the specific
from the deadening embrace of the general.31
All of this is in the haze that dilates Photograph’s beginning and makes
its reappearance as if to mark the separation between the work’s three suc-
cessive acts. The classical quality of this form of articulation reinforces the
sense in which the piece gathers itself together around the terms of its cir-
cularity and its closure.
But as was noted at the outset, the circularity of the carrousel is double-
valenced. It can be construed as the assertion of completeness, unity,
autonomy: the exclusiveness of the circle. But it also comes to closure only
to start again in an endless production of repetition which is like the mul-
tiplicity of photography itself. This is the abeyance in which photography
holds the self-sufficiency of modernism. This is the gap that Photograph
wants to open within the grip of all those circles that the Law maintains.

Notes

1. Paul de Man speaks of this totalizing drive of the Romantic lyric and its use of the symbol:

In the world of the symbol it would be possible for the image to coincide with the
substance, since the substance and its representation do not differ in their being but
only in their extension: they are part and whole of the same set of categories. Their
relationship is one of simultaneity, which, in truth, is spatial in kind and in which the
intervention of time is merely a matter of contingency, whereas, in the world of alle-
gory, time is the originary constitutive category.

Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 207.

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph 207

208 Rosalind Krauss

2. See my “. . . And Then Turn Away?” (1997), reprinted in this volume, pp. 171–72.
3. See the catalog So Faraway So Close (Brussels: Espace Méridien, 1999). Coleman charac-
terizes his contribution as a “stretched title work.”
4. The text reads in its entirety:

There was this open-shirted man who was subject to frequent hallucinations. His
friends were always eager to hear him describe his visions which he would do with as-
tonishing attention to detail. One such account was about the day he believed himself
present at a Gymkhana near Doonbeg. There, he became involved in gambling with
his powers of observation on the Three Card Trick. Always he would provide spell-
binding characterizations of the small group gathered around a man who wore a
checked cap—the performer. However, some years after the experience the man in
the open shirt discovered an old photograph which was identical in every detail to the
scene of the Doonbeg hallucination. The photograph could not show everything of
course but its exposure forced the man to take to his bed to contemplate his dilemma:
was the card-trick an hallucinatory vision, or was it a memory of his actual presence
and experience at Doonbeg. Worse, how was he going to describe the experience in
future. One thing was sure, he believed himself to be hallucinating at the time of the
experience.

5. See for example, Jean Fisher, “The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman”
(1983;reprinted in this volume), and “Concerning James Coleman’s Recent Work,” in James
Coleman: Projected Images, 1972–1994 (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1995); and
Michael Newman, “Allegories of the Subject: The Theme of Identity in the Work of James
Coleman,” in James Coleman: Selected Works (Chicago and London: Renaissance Society at
the University of Chicago and ICA London, 1985).
6. See Lynne Cooke, “A Tempered Agnosia” (1992; reprinted in this volume), for a read-
ing that is attentive to issues of specificity with regard to Coleman’s use of his different
forms—photography, film, etc. But in the end she, too, addresses these media as operating
in Coleman’s hands to articulate the construction of the subject and of subjectivity.
The essay on Coleman that departs from the general poststructuralist model to track
the artist’s relation to specific forms within the history of modernism, particularly the issues
that pertain to theater, is Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s “Memory Lessons and History Tableaux:
James Coleman’s Archaeology of Spectacle” (1995; reprinted in this volume).
7. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957). Barthes’s theorizations of photography
include “The Photographic Message,” “Rhetoric of the Image,” and “The Third Meaning,”
in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 15–31,
32–51, 52–68; and Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
8. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin
(Saint Louis: Telos Press, 1981).
9. “A Small History of Photography” was published in Literarische Welt in the September and
October issues of 1931. See Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” in “One
Way Street” and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (New York:
New Left Books, 1979). Benjamin wrote a first draft of “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction” in the fall of 1935 (completing it in December). He began to
revise it in January 1936 for publication in the French edition of the Zeitschrift für Sozial-
forschung (trans. Pierre Klossowski, under the title “L’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa repro-
duction mécanisée,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5 [1936], pp. 40–68). Because the French
version imposed various cuts in his text, Benjamin reworked the essay again in German, this
ultimate version to be published only in 1955. See Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeital-
ter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in Schriften, ed. Theodor Adorno and Gretel
Adorno, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955), vol. 1, pp. 366–405. I have
used the translation by Harry Zohn, under the title “The Work of Art in the Age of Me-
chanical Reproduction,” in Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah
Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969).
10. Benjamin speaks of the decadence and the “sharp decline of taste” that overwhelms
photography by the 1880s (Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” p. 246).
11. Benjamin, writing after the 1929 crash, comments: “It would not be surprising if the
photographic methods which today, for the first time, are harking back to the preindustrial
heyday of photography had an underground connection with the crisis of capitalist indus-
try” (ibid., pp. 241–42).
12. On the relation between Benjamin’s analysis of Sander and the debates about photogra-
phy engaged in by the Soviet avant-garde, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Residual Re-
semblance: Three Notes on the Ends of Portraiture,” in Melissa E. Feldman, ed., Face-Off:
The Portrait in Recent Art (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1994).
13. Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” p. 241.
14. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p. 224.
15. Ibid., p. 223.
16. Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomènes et variantes de la version définitive,” trans. Françoise
Eggers, in Benjamin, Écrits français, ed. Jean-Maurice Monnoyer (Paris: Gallimard, 1991),
pp. 179–80.
17. The theorization of the move from the specific to the generic that dominates artistic
practice of the 1960s, although ultimately deriving from Duchamp, has occupied Thierry
de Duve in essays such as “The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas,” in Serge Guilbaut,
ed., Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945–1964 (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1990), pp. 244–310; and “Echoes of the Readymade: Critique of Pure Mod-
ernism,” October 70 (Fall 1994), pp. 61–97.
18. Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” Studio International 178 (October 1969), reprinted
as “Art after Philosophy, I and II,” in Gregory Battcock, ed., Idea Art: A Critical Anthology
(New York: Dutton, 1973), pp. 70–101.
19. Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,”
in Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–1975 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art,
1995), p. 253.
20. Denis de Rougemont, “Marcel Duchamp, mine de rien,” interview with Marcel
Duchamp (1945), Preuves 204 (February 1968), p. 45; quoted in Thierry de Duve, Kant af-
ter Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), p. 166.
21. Fredric Jameson defines the concept of “cultural revolution” in The Political Unconscious
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 95–98; he analyzes its operations within
the cultural field of the late twentieth century in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
22. This is true of the four most recent of Coleman’s works: Background (1991–94), Lapsus
Exposure (1992–94), I N I T I A L S (1993–94), and Photograph (1998–99). Living and Pre-
sumed Dead (1983–85) generates the effect of one single tableau vivant, held for twenty-five

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph 209

210 Rosalind Krauss

minutes, the changes within this lineup of actors as if for a curtain call masked by the slow
dissolves between nearly identical images and the pulling of parts of the image in and out
of focus.
23. Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” pp. 66–67.
24. Ibid., p. 62.
25. Ibid., p. 66.
26. For a development of this issue, see my essay “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” in Kirk
Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel, eds., Jackson Pollock: New Approaches (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1999); and my “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium
Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999).
27. Not only is the slide tape composed of a sequence of static frames, but these are them-
selves shot in a 35 mm format.
28. The relevant texts are Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography”; and Ben-
jamin, “Lettre parisienne (no. 2): Peinture et photographie,” in Benjamin, Sur l’art et la pho-
tographie, ed. Christophe Jouanlanne (Paris: Carré, 1997), p. 79.
29. See Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Rev-
olution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 229 and following.
30. See Benjamin, “Lettre parisienne (no. 2),” p. 79.
31. Walter Benjamin, “The Theory of Criticism,” in Selected Writings: 1913–1926, ed. Mar-
cus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 218.
The relationship (and opposition) between “the plurality of the Muses,” with each Muse the
genius of a specific medium—visual art, music, dance, and so on—and the general, philo-
sophical concept of Art is explored by Jean-Luc Nancy in “Why Are There Several Muses
and Not Just One?,” in The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1996), pp. 1–39.
 Index of Names

Acconci, Vito, 20, 92 Cage, John, 95

Adorno, Theodor W., 84, 85 Calle, Sophie, 197
Akerman, Chantal, 190 Cameron, Julia Margaret, 205
A-Koan, 10, 11, 50–51 Carlos, Isabel, 49
Atget, Eugène, 194 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 163–164
Auerbach, Erich, 79, 146 Celan, Paul, 84
Charon (MIT Project), 68, 77, 114–116,
Background, 63, 64, 65, 139, 144, 173 178–180
Baden-Powell, George, 76 Clara and Dario, 8–9, 13, 25, 29, 31, 48,
Barry, Robert, 93, 199 52, 166, 188, 189
Barthes, Roland, 27, 31, 32, 93, 105, 152– “Contemporanea,” 6
153, 164–165, 168, 169, 179, 180, 192, Cooke, Lynne, 77
193, 200 Courbet, Gustave, 177, 206
Bataille, Georges, 135n6 Crary, Jonathan, 125, 126, 133–134,
Baudelaire, Charles, 83 136n14
Baudrillard, Jean, 192, 193
Baxandall, Michael, 113 Deane, Seamus, 99–100
Becher, Bernd and Hilla, 197 Deleuze, Gilles, 68
Beckett, Samuel, 163, 188–189 De Man, Paul, 86, 207n1
Benjamin, Walter, 76, 79, 119, 120–121, Derrida, Jacques, 134
192, 193–195, 196, 205–207 Doyle, Roger, 29, 49, 51, 82, 103
Bersani, Leo, 155n22 Du Camp, Maxime, 83–84
Beuys, Joseph, 20 Duchamp, Marcel, 19–20, 94, 95, 157,
Blanchot, Maurice, 95–96 195, 196, 197
Box (ahhareturnabout), 9–10, 13, 25–27, Dunning, Brian, 61
29, 41–42, 52, 96–99, 102, 118, 130, Duras, Marguerite, 63
161 Dürer, Albrecht, 139
Brecht, Bertolt, 19, 30, 32–33, 85, 191 Dutoit, Ulysse, 155n22
Brody, Howard, 121 Duve, Thierry de, 158, 162, 177
Broodthaers, Marcel, 94, 199
Burgin, Victor, 197 Eakins, Thomas, 122
Butler-Cullingford, Elizabeth, 75–76 Eisenstein, Sergei, 164
212 Index

Fisher, Jean, 13, 96, 98, 130 Line of Faith, 114, 122–124
Flash Piece, 1–2, 23, 31, 86, 87, 88, 98 Living and Presumed Dead, 14, 15–16, 37–
Flavin, Dan, 88, 101 40, 46, 48, 52, 53, 56, 59–69, 102, 104–
Fly, 127 106, 161, 166, 169
Foucault, Michel, 61, 77, 95, 125, 134, Long, Richard, 197
135n10
Fouère, Olwen, 29, 51, 72, 75, 78, 82, 103 Manet, Edouard, 83, 107, 108n11
Freud, Sigmund, 21, 60, 75, 147–150 Marey, Eugène, 118
Freund, Gisèle, 163 Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de,
Fried, Michael, 90–91, 94, 158 173, 176
Marker, Chris, 64, 118, 159–160
Galway Arts Festival, 11 McHale, James, 29, 82
Godard, Jean-Luc, 119, 120 Meissonier, Ernest, 176
Godzich, Wlad, 86 Memory Piece, 2–3, 89
Graham, Dan, 72, 77, 78, 87, 88, 92, 97, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 127, 134
160, 197 Metz, Christian, 23
Greenberg, Clement, 202 Morris, Robert, 95, 137n18
guaiRE: An Allegory, 72, 74–80, 135n10 Muldoon, Paul, 77
Muybridge, Eadweard, 118
Habermas, Jürgen, 89
Holbein, Hans, 124 Nauman, Bruce, 87, 92, 97, 160
Hollier, Denis, 107 Newman, Michael, 87–88, 113, 168
Huebler, Douglas, 197, 198 Niépce, Nicéphore, 203
Huston, John, 62–63 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 149
Nordau, Max, 90
Ignotum per Ignotius, 14–15, 44, 49–50, 51– Now & Then, 13, 29–30, 48, 52, 82, 95,
52, 53 102
Images, 6–7
I Matti, 22–23, 25 Oates, Joyce Carol, 131–132
I N I T I A L S, 63, 161, 172, 173–176, Orf ão, Rui, 49
185–186, 202
Installation Made for Location, 6 Pater, Walter, 90
Internationale situationniste, 170 Photograph, 184, 186, 187–188, 190–192,
Isaak, Jo Anna, 77 201, 202–207
“Places with a Past,” 122
Joyce, James, 42, 62, 75, 77, 130, 134 Plato, 139–140, 147, 150, 190
Judd, Donald, 158, 202 Playback of a Daydream, 6–7, 98, 129, 167
Ploughman’s Party, The, 10, 11–12, 100–
Klein, Yves, 101 102, 103
Kojak and Zamora, 44–49, 130 Projections, xii, 2
Kosuth, Joseph, 196, 202 Propp, Vladimir, 28, 60, 61
Krauss, Rosalind, 97, 127, 136n11 Proust, Marcel, 166, 206
Pump, 4, 127, 128
Lacan, Jacques, 21, 23, 60, 66, 124, 134 Purcell, Noel, 60, 105
Lapsus Exposure, 63, 138–147, 150–154,
173 Rainer, Yvonne, 84, 95
La Tache Aveugle, 68, 114, 116–117, 166, Rauschenberg, Robert, 196
168 Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, 122
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 68 Rorimer, Anne, 89, 113
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 61 Rosler, Martha, 197
Rotterdam Arts Foundation, 6 Williams, Raymond, 108n1
Roussel, Raymond, 61 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 167–168
Ruscha, Ed, 197
Russell, Christabel, 76, 79 Yeats, William Butler, 62, 73, 136n16,
161, 172–173, 176
Sander, August, 194
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 134
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 149
Seagull, 5–6
Seeing for Oneself, 63, 133, 135n10, 156,
166, 170–172, 173
Sekula, Allan, 197
Series of Images, 57, 58, 167
Seurat, Georges, 197
Shakespeare, William, 62
Slide Piece, 4–5, 16, 23–24, 31, 91–92, 93,
129, 166, 167–168, 169, 188
Smith, David, 101
Smithson, Robert, 197
Snow, Michael, 84, 199
So Different . . . and Yet, 12–13, 18, 28–29,
30, 48, 95, 102–104, 132–133
Stereo, 3–4, 129
Stevens, Wallace, 146
Streuli, Beat, 65
Strongbow, 10–11, 36, 42, 44, 46, 52
Studio Marconi, 1
Suzi, 37, 38
Synge, J. M., 27, 62, 161, 169

Uccello, Paolo, 124

Ulster Museum, 6
Ulysses Project, 42, 43
Untitled: Philippe VACHER, 112, 114,
117–122, 203

Velázquez, Diego, 77
Viola, Bill, 160
Vygotsky, L. S., 27

Wall, Jeff, 160, 162, 176–178, 190, 196,

197
Warhol, Andy, 98
Warner, Marina, 75
Weekes, Anne Owens, 76
Wehn-Damisch, Teri, 163
Weiner, Lawrence, 93
Wells, H. G., 116
Whale, James, 68, 116, 168(n17)
Willemen, Paul, 27

Index 213