Osvaldo de La Torre - On Ronald Kay
Osvaldo de La Torre - On Ronald Kay
Osvaldo de La Torre - On Ronald Kay
Ronald Kays On photography Time split in two was originally published in Santiago, Chile, in Del espacio de ac (1980), a book that
emerged within the context of a dictatorial regime clandestinely contested by a combative literary and artistic avant-garde front. Del espacio
de ac is a theoretical-poetic text dealing with the temporal, phenomenological, and metaphysical aspects of photography as a mode of technological reproduction and its sociocultural specificity within Latin
America; it is also a sophisticated analysis of the visual practice of
Eugenio Dittborn as it relates to the aforementioned political context.1
A 1976 exhibition of Dittborns work in Santiagos Galera poca,
titled Delachilenapinturahistoria, set off a novel and unprecedented
critical praxis that saw theorists and artists working in conjunction
and publishing critical books or catalogues wherein text, visual
object, and formal arrangement remained at all times in dialogue and
functioned as each others ground or support. Out of Dittborns exhibition emerged the first of such collaborative projects (a book titled
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Eugenio Dittborn (b. 1943) is a visual artist who, since 1983, has dedicated himself primarily to his Airmail Paintings. Working with pliable, lightweight surfaces and varied
materials, his numerous Airmail Paintings travel the world in large envelopes and are
unfolded and displayed in different artistic venues. Dittborn often incorporates reproductions of old photographs on his surfaces, particularly those that patently embody an institutional practice of documentation and surveillance (ID photos and mug shots, for
example), thereby alluding to the Chilean dictatorial reality.
doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00062
Del espacio de ac is notoriously difficult to translate, in great part because of the inherent
ambiguity of Del (concerning, about, apropos, on, regarding, etc.) and ac (technically, here, but a here that is not necessarily deictic; rather, a here that reflexively
utters its own distance or farness with respect to another space or there; ac is therefore
closer to over here). Other options for rendering this title in English include: About This
Space, Regarding This Space, and On/Regarding/About/Apropos This Space over Here.
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Art). On the one hand, then, the text identifies itselfalbeit tentatively,
with the tentativeness afforded by the word sealesas descriptive,
even prescriptive, of a Latin American viewpoint, where viewpoint
can be read as a mark of cultural identity (a Latin American way of
looking at things, doing things, thinking); Kays text would provide (and itself also embody) the rough sketches, framework, signals, or
signs of a Latin American cultural specificity, which necessarily
defines itself in contrast to an opposing and culturally dominant
spacepredictably, Europe or the Near West. On the other hand, the
second subtitle reduces the texts critical scope to Chile and to the
visual production of one of its foremost contemporary artists; in this
modality, the text identifies itself as a commentary or gloss on a singular art project. By prefacing both of its analyses as articulations issuing
from the space over here, the text positions itself and its author in the
marginal site that Latin America occupies (by imposition or internalization) with respect to Europe. It does so, of course, with some irony
as with the jocular en Chile estaba la Grecia (There in Chile was
Greece) that prefaces Kays translation of Ezra Pounds Propertius,
which I briefly mention belowconjuring up, reaffirming, and at the
same time criticizing the notions of center and periphery, North and
South, Near West (Europe) and Far West (Latin America and Chile), the
transcendent and hegemonic space de all (over there) and the immanent and peripheral space de ac (over here).3
As my brief analysis of the title of his 1980 book shows, Kays philosophical and theoretical texts are purposefully polyvalent and multilayered, as well as highly lyrical, unorthodox, and unapologetically
nonacademic; his poetic writings, conversely, are intensely conceptual
and challenging. All in all (and to return, as Kay himself frequently
does, to the use of geological metaphors), Kays writing may be characterized as possessing multiple semantic and linguistic strata. As a poet,
Kay has published Variaciones ornamentales (1979), Deep Freeze (2000),
and Punto de fuga (2001). As a translator, he has rendered into Spanish
Ezra Pounds Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919), itself a translation of the Latin poets elegiac work. Kays editorial creativity shows in
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Along the same critical lines and as an obvious nod to Kays text, Eugenio Dittborn would
publish in 1983 a short text titled Nous les artistes des provinces lointaines (We the
Artists from Far-Away Provinces) in the September issue of the Parisian journal Artpress
62: 1415. Dittborns text is inspired by and a commentary on the participation in the
Paris Biennalea year earlier, in 1982of Chilean artists from the neovanguardia,
including Carlos Leppe, the group CADA, and Dittborn himself.
Most of Kays books can now be legally accessed and downloaded through the website of
the Centro de Documentacin de las Artes Visuales (http://centrodedocumentaciondelas
artes.cl/g2/cgi-bin/library.cgi). The CeDoc, as it is most commonly called, is an archive
that aims to catalogue and preserve the record of artistic production (and related documents) of post-1970s Chile.
For a provocative reading of the military coup as an avant-garde event, with particular
emphasis on the image of the Moneda Palace ablaze, see Willy Thayer, El golpe como
consumacin de la vanguardia, in El fragmento repetido: Escritos en estado de excepcin
(Santiago: Metales Pesados, 2006), 1547.
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Justo Pastor Mellado, Revista Manuscritos y la coyuntura catalogal de 1975, Justo Pastor
Mellado (blog), July 2003, http://www.justopastormellado.cl/gabinete_de_trabajo/articu
los/2003/20030714.html. Justo Pastor Mellado is a highly respected voice in post-1970s
Chilean cultural (particularly artistic) debates, belonging to the same constellation as
Kay, Nelly Richard, and others. Pastor Mellado regularly publishes essays and reflections
on his blog.
Robert Neudstadt, CADA da: La creacin de un arte social (Santiago: Cuarto Propio,
2001), 23.
Within the Latin American context, Chile is known for possessing an enduringly
strong avant-garde literary tradition, to which Kay in many respects is a contemporary
heir. Since the beginning of the literary avant-gardes in the first part of the 20th century
and up to today, Chile has never found itself without a powerful, and eventually institutionalized, avant-garde voice (Huidobro, Neruda, Parra, and Zurita would comprise a
potential unbroken genealogy). An initial avant-garde wave may be said to have comprised the work of creacionista poet Vicente Huidobro (18931948), the early facet of
Pablo Nerudas (190473) work, most notably his Residencia en la tierra (1933), and
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As Kay himself thoughtfully points out, the original and unorthodox marriage of lyricism and theory that characterizes his writings can
be described as the deployment of strategies of language.9 Rather
than hiding behind or founding his truths on a solid theoretical
apparatus, on robust concepts that ultimately hinder what he may want
to say, Kays writingby which I mean each contingent textembodies a singular theoretical utterance, one that cannot be easily appropriated, iterated, or translated. The distinct, exemplary rhetoric generated
in each text thereby charges language with the responsibility of what it
says. The fluctuations between fotografa and instantanea (the latter term rendered, perhaps infelicitously, as the take in this translation) to alternate between the technical, mechanical connotations of
the photographic medium, on the one hand, and its temporal implications, on the other; the use of the word detenimiento (arrest) to
describe the photographs effect on timea word that also denotes the
action of apprehending or detaining in the juridical sense, such that
the photographic act could be read as a kind of policing of time; the
use of parallel structures to convince the reader by means of the
incantation of formal repetition as much as by argument and content
(as in the paragraphs that begin with It is terrifying, It is fascinating, It is agonizing): These represent only a few instances by which
Kay charges his own language with extreme weight and responsibility.
The text translated below, On photography Time split in two, is
the first chapter of Del espacio de ac, where it appears under the title
El tiempo que se divide.10 In its present form, however, this text constitutes a coherent, autonomous piece that offers dense and provocative
reflections on photographys relation to temporality.11 Yet Kays interest
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11
documentary depicts a groups indefatigable search for the remains of relatives tortured,
killed, and disposed of in the desert by the dictatorial police. This story is combined with
a separate yet analogous astronomic narrative, which includes footage of the cosmos
and interviews with astronomers explaining their own careful search and research on
interstellar phenomena that, due to the immense distances that light must necessarily
travel to reach Earth, can approach them only as pastas ancient, potentially extinct
events. As the place with the clearest atmosphere in the world, Atacama is for astronomers the perfect site from which to gaze at the stars. As the driest place in the world,
Atacama, too, is the ideal site for the material preservation of organic remains (humidity
decomposes bodies, a fact that probably escaped a dictatorial police otherwise careful to
destroy the traces of its destruction). What ties archeology, astronomy, and paleontology
to the postdictatorial experience is the act of searching for and exploring a difficult and at
times inscrutable past. In the heart of the driest place on the globe, astronomers, archeologists, paleontologists, mothers, fathers, relatives, and partners tirelessly search for possible answers to and remnants of those things that propel their passion: a star, an artifact,
a bone, a constellation, a corpse. Anything buried and preserved under the deserts surface; anything, too, encountered in the transparent, nocturnal sky, is a kind of fossilan
object mute yet imbued with a dense narrative and history. Long before Nostalgia for the
Light, Kay had proposed the fossil as a different name for, or concrete figuration of, the
remnant, that stubborn trace that resists destruction and that is then unearthed,
exposed, and regarded, in all its enigmatic inscrutability, by a stunned witness (be that
witness an artist, critic, reader, or viewer). Criticism, but perhaps more specifically writing, is for Kay an archeological task. Thus, in the brief note that opens Del espacio de ac,
he equates writing with the fossil by stating that his texts [m]erely signal the vestiges of
some cataclysm. As with fossils, texts, for Kay, are simultaneously condensed multiple,
distant moments on which, coming to the surface and bursting out of them, one discovers and distinguishes part of what was submerged (19). In On photography Time split in
two, he describes photography as fossilized writing and as [p]etrified cinema, and
the beings captured therein as traces of antediluvian animals on fossil rocks.
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n o t e I would like to thank Ronald Kay for his invaluable input in preparing this
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translation, which would be all the poorer had it not benefited from his unmatched
attention to syntactic and semantic minutiae. On many occasions I felt as though we
were co-writing a text rather than translating an original piece (a case in point being
the title of the piece, which after much discussion changed from El tiempo que se divide
to On photography Time split in two).
DOCUMENT
doi:10.1162/ArtM_a_00063
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The lens drains all noise, subtracts the ear from the photographed;
hearing at the same time loses its contact with the voicethe living
organ, the internal caressinvented and articulated by language, and
which, being the most complex and differentiated code, the most visceral and abstract code, was and is the common and shocking entrance
into humanity. Through it, man, ephemeral and fragile, listens and
speaks its sense.
The photographwith the vast layers of silence that its surface
extends over the materiality of things and the aura of personscreates
that internal distance, the void that in those same retained fractions of
time attracts the echo of future events, that is, the intercalation of a
k ay
The take makes the moment dmod 2 even before it happens; as a technical procedure, the take, among other things, makes the moment contemporaneous to the first photographs. Outward appearance is
photographically demolished. The arrested gestures fall into the camera like prostheses that have long and imperceptibly supplanted the
body. Appearance becomes the costume of itself: its paralysis and abandonment resounds in a dernier cri. In the focus of the objective lens, the
mechanical anatomy, the skeleton of the surfaces, become apparent. In
the mirror of photographywritten by lightclassical narcissism suffers a fundamental retouch; being reflected in it means, sub specie
aeternitatis, to experience ones own absence, to look face to face at
death in the fascinating duplicate of ones own likeness. Photography
that displaces the blinded human figure onto the marvelous, onto the
glamour of silver bromide (who does not want to see himself photographed?), is the makeup, the Elizabeth Arden product from Thanatos
by means of which forms are cast with the appearance of lifecivilizations death masks. Photography is a supplementary, second (isnt it
also the first?) skin framed by bordering another space, another time,
the permanent transition zone toward an order withdrawn from us.
What survives is the lens and its sightless eye. Living flesh is reduced
to the inorganic function of giving purpose and action to the photographic apparatus and, simultaneously, of setting up the multiple tableaux vivants for an absent order undermining all limits.
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All the forms of auxiliary apparatus which we have invented for the
improvement or intensification of our sensory functions are built on
the same model as the sense organs themselves or portions of them:
for instance, spectacles, photographic cameras, ear-trumpets.
Freud, A Note upo n the Mystic Writi ng- Pad
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From Freud, we can infer that the camera is not only the materialized
extension of our perceptive apparatus, but also the exteriorization of
certain motional functions. Beyond pure vision, photography is also the
amplification and restructuration of our tactile faculties, the objectification of certain actions, that is, their extension and automatization. The
cameras shutter release intervenes in external movement, detains, and
fixes it on the negative. The photographic apparatus pierces into the
density of things, uproots beings from space, withdraws them from the
perishable, exposing them onto the sensitive surface and draining
them of their excessive spatiality so as to hold, shelter, and locate them
virtually3 as pure visible footprints. This intervention without molecular destruction, this cut that the apparatus exerts on the flux of appearances is simultaneously the transposition of these appearances onto
another medium. Transfigured, the runner keeps on running, graphically petrified in the take. Such an immobility is imposed on him that
the runners appearance in the image is kept in suspense and breathless, akin to the long disquieting wait that follows certain decisive
eventsgun shots, rapes, homicides.
The mechanism of the shutter release exteriorizes and materializes a tic; it is the mechanical metaphor of a repetition compulsion. With
the shutter release, this amplified, independent, and objectified automatism is inscribed again in the new photogenic exterior of our body. By
applying onto our somatic presence the now external meter of the automatic, this meter captures and formalizes the very unconscious automatisms of our presence, transcribing them on the visual plane.
The detour of this transcription exposes the automatism, the laws,
and the uniformity inherent in the expressivity of the human organ-
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Divesting things of their spatiality entails the restitution of their inherent virtuality.
This is also implied in the colloquial use of the verb to perpetuate. Visible permanence
can be produced only on the basis of this originary virtualitythe virtuality of things
in language.
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ism; it makes visible the automatic writing of gestures, whose inaccessible code keeps us imprisoned. Their hieroglyphic characters are
embedded in the silver bromide crystals, much like the buried tremors
of antediluvian animals on fossil rocks. Petrified cinema.
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k ay
To know oneself in the photograph is, among other things, to recognize oneself as the effect of the machine, as the fabrication of its
work. To penetrate the foreign body generated by the mechanical likeness demands that we overcome a dialectic obstacle: the fact that each
one of our senses and movements has been virtually impounded by the
mechanisms of technical reproduction. Already our body is always, virtually, a photograph. From this point of view, the possibility of presence
appears as something terrifyingly energetic and perturbing, as a stillactive, movable element within an immobilized expression.
The material translation, transfer, and transport of the photographically-registered occur at the instant of the take. In this doubling,
the sudden scission of a temporal fission takes place; this splitting
introduces a decisive alteration within the structuration of time. An
action that we may call x is, from a specific chronic point, distributed
into two differentiated temporal orders that are nonetheless mutually
connected (specifically, the link is the photograph). The moment of
division and distribution constitutes an interchronic moment. By
means of the lapse of passage from one time to the other, x action
simultaneously occurs in two forms: as the transitory form of an event,
and as the invariable version of its photographic documentation. The
sudden, actual scission of times nucleus during its photographic transfer produces and establishes a synchronicity. By means of this synchronicity two temporal ordersthe one unique, perishable, and
contingent, and the other unending, conserved and eternalized in the
photographshare the same plane, deferring their effects and
impacts. Through the instruments physical penetration into the fraction of time, out of the interval of time and by means of contact, duration, solidified as visibility, is violently extracted. Within the
photograph, both orders enter into a reciprocal relation of citation and
become, on the basis of this relation, generally quotable: the transitory,
which having produced and producing as footprint the constant of the
take, is included and in-cited in it as inscriptive energy; and the permanent, which, because of its emancipated persistence (the purported
final product of transcription) becomes technically reproducible and
thus quotable, subject to be combined at will. In this mechanism of
reciprocal citation inherent in the photograph, dwells the latent documentary virtue of the optical footprint.
Clearly, the constitution of the photograph is not the effect of a
mere reflection, but rather a translation that achieves the constructive
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separation of organic sight from the mechanical eye, the visible dissociation between the optically-conscious and the optically-unconscious,
formalizing them in differentiated sign systems; it achieves the possibility, therefore, of being at the same time within sight and outside of it,
without abandoning the visible. In this way, photographic sight appears
as the critical instance of the physical eye: herein resides its revolutionary force.
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