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Essay by Lynne Cooke
The act of seeing is an act of interpretation: it is at once reflexive
and conditioned by the social contract. Both that which is seen
(hence, representation) and the act of seeing have long been central
preoccupations for Irish artist James Coleman. In the early 1970s
he abandoned painting in favor of reproductive media -- film, video,
and photography -- and theater. And though he continues to employ
these art forms, photography, in the guise of slide projections,
has become his preferred format. Projected Images: 1972-1994
concentrates exclusively on that medium in order to provide an
introduction and overview to key issues in Coleman's oeuvre of
the past twenty-odd years. In each work sound and image interface
somewhat differently as Coleman explores what has been defined
as "the relationship between the identities of the subject
and image as they are mutually conditioned or 'caused' through
time."1
Slide-Piece, the earliest work in the exhibition, typifies much
in Coleman's practice at the beginning of the 1970s when his art
first matured. It is comprised of an image of an ordinary, even
prosaic, urban setting--a square in Milan shot soon after dawn--accompanied
by a recorded audio track. An authoritative, equable male voice
analyzes the scene which is projected on the scale of a large
painting or small cinema screen. His elaborate, almost painstaking
description of the photograph concludes as the slide changes,
to an identical image of the scene accompanied, this time, by
a quite differently based analysis intoned, nonetheless, by the
same narrator. No single one of the ensuing descriptions takes
priority or gains preeminence over previous examples. Every point
of view was determined by the preoccupations of its individual
analyst each of whom Coleman asked to respond objectively to the
scene as a purely retinal image. One consequence of their varying
responses, the result of differing practices of inclusion and
exclusion as well as subjective estimates of significance and
value, is that the process of viewing itself becomes the subject
of the work; the interpretive responses are the objects of enquiry.
Although this reflexive component continues to inform Coleman's
subsequent work, his focus has widened considerably in recent
years to incorporate a concern with the way the subject is de-
and reconstructed in the act of viewing. Constant in his evolution
is an engagement with the medium itself and with its role in shaping
apprehension. (Consequently, there is never an attempt to disguise
the mechanisms of projection: the equipment is always straightforwardly
presented in the viewer's space). Charon (MIT Project), in particular,
makes this evident since in each of its sequences of fourteen
brief, but diverse, episodes, photography is the ostensible subject
under review. These succinct, yet pithy, vignettes explore just
some of the many roles it plays, and functions it serves in contemporary
society. A dispassionate eye. A documentary idiom. An unwavering
testament to truth. A fiction and construct pressed into the service
of advertising, marketing, or promotion. A primary vehicle in
the construction of memory and history. The edges of these typical
convictions and certitudes regarding the role and nature of photography
are frayed by the conflicting, competing, contrary, and, hence,
irreconcilable attitudes encapsulated here. The principal counter
to this act of deconstruction resides in the svelte voice of the
commentator, whose very reasoned and reasonable tones, akin to
those of an earnest sales representative, seem blithely indifferent
to the subtle, disintegrative humor with which Coleman has approached
this project. As elsewhere in his oeuvre, as Jean Fisher astutely
notes, "meaning is to be sought not through mediated, inherited
structures of knowledge but through the disjunctions and incongruities
we discover in our own enunciations."2
Whether what was actually perceived and what was thought to have
been seen can be separated and distinguished is in part the question
raised by La Tache Aveugle. This silent work takes as its starting
point a half-second segment from James Whales's 1933 film The
Invisible Man. Marking the very moment when the protagonist begins
to lose his immunity and is about to become visible once again,
this fragment was separated into its individual frames then transferred
into a slide projection that by means of a slow dissolve takes
several hours to unfold. Through its inexorable unraveling La
Tache Aveugle dramatizes ways in which perception and interpretation
interconnect, significance is adduced, and seeing is conditioned
by the sociocultural nexus.
Background, Lapsus Exposure, and I N I T I A L S, the three
most recent works in Coleman's oeuvre, have been linked retrospectively
by the artist into a trilogy. With approximately the same duration
and similarly sized casts, all of these narratives may be described
at their most immediate visual level as a grouping of figures
in preparation for a photo shoot. The accompanying texts, however,
manifest an increasing tangentiality to the imagery of protagonists
arranging and aligning themselves in readiness for the camera.
The three sites in which the tableaus unfold--a paleontology laboratory,
a film and recording studio, and rooms adjacent to the operating
theater in a hospital--tellingly condition and govern interpretation.
For, tabulating, examining, even dissecting, the body as well
as the gaze have now assumed seminal importance in this trio of
works.3 The forms in which each work was realized are indebted
to various popular culture genres, including pulp fiction, TV
soap operas, and photo romances. They offer a repertoire of familiar
idioms, which Coleman mines as deeply as he does certain high-art
modes--seventeenth-century Dutch portraiture, or twentieth-century
Irish literature, for example--as well as related cinematic conventions.
Weaving references drawn from film, from drama, and from painting,
Coleman situates his trilogy in a hybrid realm, one that allows
him to comment obliquely on these canonical art forms and their
traditions without, however, fully subscribing to any.
Presented in darkened rooms with soft, carpeted floors, Coleman's
works refuse to ascribe fixed viewpoints, preferred sight lines
or standardized positions. Spectators move through the rooms finding
their own preferred vantage points. As they locate themselves
temporarily and provisionally, they become aware that they have
in large part negotiated the positions they adopt. Simultaneously,
as subjects, they undergo a process of decentering. Having implicated
viewers into their audiovisual texts by means of shifting perspectives
and changing modes of address, these works deconstruct the mechanisms
that inform their audiences' methods of comprehension and apprehension.
By thus rendering the ascription of meaning a self-conscious act,
Coleman is able to continually readjust his viewers' relations
to reality and to competing modalities of subjectivity.
Notes
1. Michael Newman, "Allegories of the Subject: The Theme
of Identity in the Work of James Coleman," James Coleman:
Selected Works (Chicago: Renaissance Society and Institute of
Contemporary Art, London, 1985), 27.
2. Jean Fisher, "Inexorable Dissolve: James Coleman Blindsides
Art," Artforum 32, no. 4 (December 1993), 97.
3. Jean Fisher has argued that "...for the Enlightenment,
the operating theater, no less than popular theater, was a place
where the body as spectacle was laid out for the public gaze,
dismembered and investigated, to reveal inner truths of life and
death." Jean Fisher, "On Seeing for Oneself: A Perspective,"
Michael Asher/James Coleman (New York: Artists Space, 1988), 21.
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