Back in the Saddle: Roundup for November 20

I’m finally on the mend from an illness I picked up in Paris a few weeks ago. Lots to catch up on not least the first stirrings of co-ordinated action against the baleful Coalition government hear in the UK. I suspect that there will be much more to report in future weeks. In the meanwhile:

1) I have just finished a text for Manifesta 8, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art which is being held in Murcia, Spain. I was commissioned to produce a piece of written work for Fay Nicolson’s Newspaper Project. A major remit of the project was to engage with some facet of the local environment and I took the opportunity to write a speculative essay on place and memory with a particular focus on local Jewish history. The essay has been translated into Spanish and will appear in the regional daily La Verdad on Sunday.

2) I’m finally catching up with a host of excellent shows and openings here in Nottingham. I attended the opening of “Revolution on Paper: Mexican Prints, 1910-1960″ at the Djanogly Gallery yesterday evening. The exhibition (a touring show from the British Museum) features a remarkable collection of prints produced in the wake of  the 1910 Mexican Revolution. It highlights the work of three of the most important Mexican artists to emerge during that period:  Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The show is a telling reminder of the power of various vernacular modernisms during the early half of the 20th century and speaks to the enduring capacity of art to produce an ‘image-politics’ in its own name. The Nottingham Sideshow also continues its successful run. There are lots of exciting events to look forward to in coming weeks including the LAB launch on November 25th and YH 485′s Conversational Library on the 28th of November. YH 485′s bookmobile blog is worth checking out as well.

3) I’ve just discovered the Backdoor Broadcasting Company website which is mobile audio webcasting service. They host an excellent archive of academic broadcasts. All the papers from the recent Birkbeck “Why Humanities” conference can be downloaded here. There is also an interesting paper by Antonia Birnbaum on “The Invention of Communism in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts.”

4) I will be posting a separate entry on some recent squatting news including the 20th anniversary of the violent eviction of the Mainzer Strasse squatters in Berlin.

Polaroid Landscapes… again

One eye sees, the other feels.

-Paul Klee

 

I’ve been finding it hard getting the Tarkovsky polaroids out of my mind over the past few days. Quiet moments between writing sessions find me flipping through them. I spent most of the afternoon sitting in Lee Rosy’s trying to put pen to paper…

My point of departure is an interview published at the back of Bright, Bright Days with the art historian Boris Groys. He describes the effect of the polaroids as one of “documentary romanticism.” For Groys, these are images that speak to the romanticism of a Caspar David Friedrich painting while attending to the documentary impulse of the photographic medium. Here’s Groys’s gloss: “It’s like a combination of Chekhov and Caspar David Friedrich – a kind of cottage-life with a bit of the decadent Russian aristocracy. These images are nostalgic, but not for the Soviet culture of the Russia that he left. Rather, they’re nostalgia for Russia before the Revolution” (2008: 124).

While there is something to recommend in these views, I don’t think they get the full measure of the signficant aesthetic claims at stake in the polaroids. That they ‘imagine’ a kind of intimate utopian refuge amidst the “collective space” of the Soviet Union is hardly remarkable. They were, after all, intended for private consumption. I would like to pursue another line of flight, however, and read them alongside the recent work of the philosopher Jay Bernstein. 

Bernstein has written extensively on German philosophy and Critical Theory in its various incarnations and afterlives (see especially his magnificent Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics) and his first sustained foray into modernist art, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting, tracks these concerns as they find concrete form across the range of modernist artistic production. The argument draws on a now familiar story involving “the disenchantment of nature” (Santner, 2009: 286) under the sign of an advancing modernity. As Eric Santner has recently noted in a re-reading of Bernstein:

“‘Disenchantment’ signifies here a process that delegitimates our experience of ourselves and our being-in-the-world as vulnerable and dependent beings, disqualifies the dimension of emphatic experience in which sentient embodiment, the felt-fact of aliveness, still bears a normative significance in relation to the object world and other human subjects” (2009: 286). 

Santner also seizes on a passage in Bernstein where he focuses on “what has been excised from the everyday” which is to say “the emotional significance of sensory encounter, sensory experience as constitutive of conviction and connection to the world of things” (Bernstein, 2006: 3). These are, I realize, dense opaque passages. What Santner is, I think, interested in working through are the affordances that Bernstein makes for reclaiming “lost forms of human vitality and animation” (2009: 284). If this has been for Bernstein at least, a defining characteristic of modernist art,  I’m especially interested myself in the degree to which the kind of picture-making we find in Tarkovsky’s polaroids can plausibly be understood as an exercise in capturing and holding onto a form of sensuous particularity. Whatever claims to modernism are at stake here, I do think it is possible to explore these images as scenes of “significant sensory encounter” (Bernstein, 2006: 7) that are capable of relaying both the felt materiality of the polaroids as well as the dense sensuous textures that are conveyed in the images whether they are portraits and scenes of everyday life or atmospheric landscape compositions. Taken together these images represent a significant contribution to advanced photographic practice and, if anything, only further radicalize the kind of demands that they put on the way in which photographs are meant to be seen.

Polaroid Landscapes

“An image is not some idea as expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected in a drop of water. In a single drop of water.”

-Andrei Tarkovsky

“Art is a sense of magic.”

                                                                   -Stan Brakhage

 

It’s been a long time since I handled a polaroid camera. There is something about the particular way in which they seem to offer access to an immediate present that I really miss. While there has been plenty of ink spilled recently about the contemporary emergence of large scale tableau-sized photographs, the modest artefactual quality of the polaroid would seem to solicit a form of beholding that merits further critical attention in its own right.  

I recently picked up a remarkable volume of polaroids produced by the famous Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky. Bright, Bright Day is edited by the photographer Stephen Gill and includes polaroids shot by Tarkovsky in Italy between 1979-1984 as well as some images shot in Russia in 1980 and 1981. 

The results are staggering. In an interview that the director made during the production of his film Nostalghia, he commented on the relationship between nostalgia and the experience of time. Nostalgia, he opined, “is not the same as longing for the past. Nostalgia is a longing for the space of time that has passed in vain” (quoted in Bird, 2008: 189). Or as Robert Bird, one of the director’s more prescient interlocutors has recently argued, “time becomes palpable when it coincides with space; it is at this very moment that it becomes the object of our longing and of our regret” (Bird, 2008: 189). 

If Tarkovsky’s films are famous for their long takes, his polaroid images transpose these concerns to a more intimate space. These are images saturated with the ‘substance’ of time and one senses that the very materiality of the polaroid format only serves to intensify this effect. Tarkovsky, it should be said, often likened the practice of filmmaking to a kind of “sculpting in time” and it is clear that such a ‘working method’ finds further distillation and perhaps even refinement in his series of polaroids. 

But these are images that also recall earlier painterly antecedents. As the art historian Boris Groys has noted, “they look like Romantic painting of the nineteenth-century, in their composition, and also in the play of light” (2008: 124). While Groys sees similarities with some of the early images of Jeff Wall,  their documentary qualities ultimately eschew the kind of constructedness which comes to overdetermine much of Wall’s impressive body of work. What distinguishes Tarkovsky’s polaroids from some of the more recent examples of advanced photographic practice is, in my view, an ability to somehow inhabit and bridge that seemingly irreducible discrepancy between intention and effect. These are images that rework the “extraordinary copiousness” of the medium in order to create a rich painterly texture out of the most ordinary and personal of scenes (see Fried, 2008: 272). There are few if any more important statements of why, to quote, Michael Fried, “photography matters as art as never before.”