"The Absent Photograph," from Speaker Receiver

25 Pages·2013·1.36 MB·English

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Melancholy betrays the world for long nurtured the hopes of the photo-
the sake of knowledge. But in its graphic document.
tenacious self-absorption it embrac- In more recent images, we see
es dead objects in its contemplation, yellowing books on overstuffed shelves,
in order to redeem them. outsize dictionaries, and paper-strewn
—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of tables and desks. There are photo-
German Tragic Drama graphs of empty liquor bottles and VHS
tapes;
DUST
Moyra Davey’s photographs seem to
portray a spiraling series of obsolescent
technologies and outmoded objects,
a catalog of detritus and decay. Her
earliest photographs began in the
streets: typologies of decrepit pennies
found on the sidewalk, lumpen news-
stands with their lingering print media,
improbable stores on City Island in
the Bronx selling replacement buttons
labeled “facockta” or “simcha.” But
then the artist appeared to turn away
from the outside world, to become a
prowler of her own domestic interior,
shut off from the urban spaces that so
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54 Bottle Grid (1996—2000), 6 gelatin silver prints, each 31⁄2 × 5 inches 55 Barney’s Collection (1999), C-print, 24 × 20 inches
Melancholy betrays the world for long nurtured the hopes of the photo-
the sake of knowledge. But in its graphic document.
tenacious self-absorption it embrac- In more recent images, we see
es dead objects in its contemplation, yellowing books on overstuffed shelves,
in order to redeem them. outsize dictionaries, and paper-strewn
—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of tables and desks. There are photo-
German Tragic Drama graphs of empty liquor bottles and VHS
tapes; naked light bulbs in their sockets
and vinyl records grouped in series
DUST and in stacks; household appliances
Moyra Davey’s photographs seem to like refrigerators, microwaves, or clocks
portray a spiraling series of obsolescent alongside outdated analog receivers,
technologies and outmoded objects, portable radios, and old-school stereo
a catalog of detritus and decay. Her speakers. There are photographs of
earliest photographs began in the fluorescent light tubes and the widest
streets: typologies of decrepit pennies variety of domestic products, piled up
found on the sidewalk, lumpen news- at random on kitchen counters. There
stands with their lingering print media, are forgotten objects: an old toy behind
improbable stores on City Island in the furniture, a two-year-old copy of
the Bronx selling replacement buttons a daily newspaper under the bed. There
labeled “facockta” or “simcha.” But are destroyed objects: a photograph of
then the artist appeared to turn away the ragged shards of a plaster ceiling
from the outside world, to become a that has collapsed onto the floor.
prowler of her own domestic interior,
shut off from the urban spaces that so
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long nurtured the hopes of the photo-
graphic document.
In more recent images, we see
yellowing books on overstuffed shelves,
outsize dictionaries, and paper-strewn
tables and desks. There are photo-
graphs of empty liquor bottles and VHS
tapes; naked light bulbs in their sockets
and vinyl records grouped in series and
in stacks; household appliances like
refrigerators, microwaves, or clocks
alongside outdated analog receivers,
portable radios, and old-school stereo
speakers. There are photographs of
fluorescent light tubes and the widest
variety of domestic products, piled up
at random on kitchen counters. There
are forgotten objects: an old toy behind
the furniture, a two-year-old copy of a
daily newspaper under the bed. There
are destroyed objects: a photograph of
the ragged shards of a plaster ceiling
that has collapsed onto the floor.
Disrepair, if not disaster, seems the
subtext of such an image, and dust
58 Ceiling (2003), C-print, 24 × 20 inches 59
spreads all around. It is there in almost motivations behind this body of work, each be titled Copperhead.
every one of Davey’s works, clinging the artist simply replied: “I’d say
to a dog’s paw or to a turntable’s needle that these pictures are about the life of
glinting in the sun. In other photo- objects.” As if to underscore this
graphs, we see the dust running ram- understated point, Davey clarifies in
pant along a floorboard, or lurking the same interview that the spreading
on the backside of a shelf, or covering dust in her domestic scenes is also
a pile of books, or hiding out beneath “alive” for her: “Dust is made up of dead
the bed. matter, but it’s also totally alive in its
With the broken shards and gather- entropic, inescapable fashion.”1 And so
ing dust, Davey signals an indirect, my initial argument can be reversed:
subterranean connection in her work The life that has fallen on Davey’s
to that of Marcel Duchamp, considering domestic objects and spaces seems to
the fractured state of the artist’s have fallen on the traditional photo-
magnum opus, The Bride Stripped Bare graphic image, too.
by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large
Glass) (1915 — 23), and his notorious use (My white-haired dog is blowing her
of household dust in its making. winter coat. As I write, piles of dog
Perhaps one might take this whispered hair lie in clumps around my desk,
evocation as a sign of Davey’s emulation rivaling the worst you see in any
of Duchamp’s particular brand of of Davey’s photographs. The hair is
anti-productivity, an artistic model of strewn under the dining table,
laziness and extended languishing—one where it mixes with assorted crumbs;
that started with the proclamation of attached to the fabric of ottoman
the death of a medium, painting, and and couch; and at its worst in the
ended in the artist’s disingenuous claim kitchen, which I haven’t cleaned in
to have abandoned art altogether. a week. My dog prefers the house
For death and abandonment seem the this way, I think, and shares her coat
central point of Davey’s images: Here willingly with my socks and slacks,
are photographs, we might say, that a gift from which they will never be
emerge as “last” photographs, pictures free. This morning I quarrel with
that turn inward, in melancholic self- my wife over who will walk the dog,
absorption, away from the urban spaces saying that I have to write. But
of street photography; documents as soon as they leave, I become con-
that relinquish all purchase on the vinced that I can no longer concen-
social field in which photography once trate, and take a break from my
thrived. We thus face lingering images work to vacuum the entire house,
of obsolescent things that echo the knowing that I will need to do it
increasingly attenuated existence again in a day.)
of analog photography. In other words:
The dust that has fallen on Davey’s
domestic spaces seems to have fallen on COPPERHEADS
the traditional photographic image, too. At the tail end of the 1980s, Davey
But with this reading, the artist began to photograph money.
would not agree. Davey has a different Produced during the crisis moment of
explanation for her melancholic a widespread economic recession,
images. When asked recently about the Davey’s low-tech color images would
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62 Copperhead Nº 57 (1990), C-print, 24 × 20 inches 63 Copperhead Nº 27 (1990), C-print, 24 × 20 inches
64 Copperhead Nº 28 (1990), C-print, 24 × 20 inches 65 Copperhead Nº 18 (1990), C-print, 24 × 20 inches
each be titled Copperhead. The images reception. This is what we might call
focus on the profile of Abraham Lincoln the formal logic of the series, a medium
engraved on the United States penny, logic, a rethinking of the photograph
the cheapest, most devalued piece itself. Or, in other words, a first
of American currency. At the moment instance in which Davey found what
of the series’s emergence, the “Copper- she now often calls a new “way to
heads” would have been safely en- work,” and that I will understand here
sconced within readings of postmodern- as a consistent drive to reconceive the
ism that stressed its “allegorical” practice and given models of photogra-
procedures. The series announces its phy. The series’s flirtation with a
filiation, for example, to one of the notion of “betrayal” makes perfect sense
earliest projects by artist Sherrie on this level, for not only would Davey’s
Levine, her “Presidents” series from the work assert a transformation of the
late 1970s, which also deployed the patriarchal image—a literal opening up
profiles of political patriarchs, fusing of an image of the (symbolic) father to
them with advertising images of women experiences that Oedipal law should not
in a feminist allegorization of the linked allow (an association with excrement,
but gendered spaces of consumption for example, or worthlessness, or utter
and political power. and ceaseless fungibility)—it would
Similarly, a longer historical and twin this opening with another trans-
political dimension emerges within gression, an expansion of the photo-
Davey’s work: the title “Copperhead,” graph itself.2 Indeed, the medium logic
we might observe, serves not just as of the series is simple to see: it is basic,
a literal description of the profiles and almost primordial, for the “Copper-
the money before us, but also as a term heads” comprise an archive of silhou-
used during the American Civil War, ettes, a typology of portraits, pointing
the historical event to which Lincoln’s back to one of the origins of the photo-
image directs us. “Copperhead” was graphic impulse itself, an ur-form
the name given to the so-called Peace of the medium. To return to the silhou-
Democrats who opposed the North’s use ette, to prioritize the portrait, to alight
of war to reunite the sundered nation. upon the typology: we face primordial
While the Peace Democrats came to forms of the technology of the photo-
embrace the name, and began to wear graph, as well as of its social usage. And
copper coins as proud badges of their yet, in the end, the kind of recursive-
antiwar position, the label “Copper- ness that Davey seeks hardly seems
head” originally made explicit reference self-reflexive or medium-specific;
to the so-named poisonous snake, instead, betrayal or treason become her
and was thus an epithet of treason and formal logic, for she locates photo-
betrayal (many Copperheads were graphic qualities in an analog outside of
forced into Canadian exile, as would the photograph itself.
occur to those Americans opposed Basically worthless, the pennies
to fighting in the Vietnam War a cen- that Davey depicts are “like” photo-
tury later). graphs in many different ways. They
This allegorical dimension of are objects of circulation and objects of
Davey’s work opens, however, onto use; they are objects kept close to
another reading that was not immedi- the body, in wallets and pockets, and
ately present in the artist’s early fingered by hands; they are tokens
66 Copperhead Nº 77 (1990), C-print, 24 × 20 inches 67
stamped with their time and date. They of what seem to be “latent” images, an (Sometimes I simply open my apart- Late in his text, Benjamin describes
are small objects, miniatures, enlarged irreducibly unique but incomplete ment’s front door and let the the photograph of Schopenhauer. He
by the photograph’s innate habit form at the point of its emergence, like wind from the far windows blow the has just finished introducing the reader
of holding on tight to its object-world, a landmass surfacing from the ocean’s dog hair like tumbleweed out into to the images of Eugène Atget, noting
progeny of the close-up and the zoom. depths, or an unknown object blanketed the hall.) that they are empty of people: “The city
They are obsolete, throwaway vestiges, by deep but melting snow. The “Copper- in these pictures looks cleared out, like
but also keepsakes, collector’s items, heads” are photographs of destruction a lodging that has not yet found a new
useless avatars of blind luck or cunning and resurrection, loss and potential COATS AND CHAIRS tenant.” This photographic experience
thrift simultaneously. The one hundred rebirth, at once. Their latency implies Two more images of 19th-century patri- of a “salutary estrangement between
pennies that Davey photographed were an opening, a potential becoming. archs need to be placed in dialog man and his surroundings” emerges as
found at random on city streets, like Almost twenty years after first with Davey’s photographs of Abraham the opposite of the qualities that
so much discarded garbage, and indeed, producing the series, Davey recently Lincoln. They can be found in Walter Benjamin locates in the image of the
each Copperhead seems a memorial published a book devoted to the Benjamin’s 1931 essay “Little History of philosopher. “To do without people
to analog photography’s contemporary one hundred images in her miniature Photography.” This essay wishes to is for photography the most impossible
eradication, or—amounting to the same archive. Previously displayed in a grid explain the “charm of old photographs”; of renunciations,” Benjamin observes.
thing—its ceaseless dedication to that upon the wall, or in blown-up images written during the initial moments Another relation to one’s environs
which is on the verge of disappearance. arranged in smaller sequences in a row, of the Great Depression, it argues for can be imagined: “The generation that
For ultimately, the works capture the “Copperheads” would now appear a return to the earliest potentials of the was not obsessed with going down to
in the greatest detail the immeasurable in a seemingly never-ending series, one photographic medium, glorifying the posterity in photographs,” Benjamin
variety of the decay of each cast profile image to each and every page. Arranged obsolescent achievements of the pictures writes, “rather shyly drawing back into
on the penny’s surface, embodying in this way, the photographs are easy made in the first decade of photogra- their private space in the face of such
meditations on loss, erosion, and the to set in motion with the flick of a finger. phy’s history, before the onset of the proceedings—the way Schopenhauer
slipping of a thing into the status of In effect, Davey has transformed the medium’s ruinous industrialization. In withdrew into the depths of his chair in
detritus. gridded typology into a kind of flipbook, this, the essay shares much with the Frankfurt picture, taken about
And yet, in fixating on this image- a proto-cinematic device that carries Davey’s regressive but optimistic vision 1850—for this very reason allowed that
loss, the “Copperheads” depict the the photograph and the image into for the photograph. space, the space in which they lived,
penny (and the patriarch) as a receptor other domains. No longer metaphorical, Although the images have rarely to get onto the plate with them.”5 Before
surface, a skin infinitely susceptible the image literally began to “move,” been noted or discussed, Benjamin the full onset of the self-alienation
to wounds, gouges, and scratches—as, to bloom—not along any narrative or offers descriptions of two photographs that the photographic image came to
in other words, a site of contact, an directional axis, but with the anarchic of philosophers—Arthur Schopenhauer represent, the “depths” of the philoso-
object, like the photograph, endlessly force of infinite difference, an endless and F. W. J. Schelling—during the pher’s chair entered the photograph
open to receiving the marks of the riot of texture and color, the full en- extended flash of brilliance that is his because the philosopher was attached
world. The images also depict the penny tropic beauty of the living processes of text. Both images concern the phi- to his objects, inseparable from them,
as a reactive surface, the site of myriad decay. Emerging on the back of what losophers’ relationship to their daily immersed in them.
eruptions and chemical “blooms.” I have elsewhere called “Oedipal environment, and in this the images Benjamin presses further in an
In recording this, Davey’s “Copperheads” fatigue,” Davey’s “Copperheads” project provoke connections to Davey’s obses- earlier passage on the photograph of
mirror photography in yet another way: opened up the image of the patriarch sive reflection on photographs of Schelling. The passage is crucial,
they are images of serial objects, repli- from rigidity to flux, the photograph domesticity and everyday objects. On for in it Benjamin sets up the terms in
cas, each given over to the condition from immobility to motion.3 With a deeper level, however, these images which he will define the experience
of absolute chance and singularity. And photography placed in relation to allow Benjamin to open up a philosophi- of “aura” that his text otherwise delin-
if each photograph seems an image of cinema, the work contemplates a shar- cal point of the greatest significance: eates. One of the most complex ideas
disappearance, a cast or imprint fading ing of form that converts the expanded the photograph’s mediation of the split in Benjamin’s lexicon, aura seems
away before our eyes—like the indexical photograph into a vehicle with, in the between subject and object, or rather, to refer to the experiences of singular-
properties of photography itself—the artist’s words, an intense “potential for photography’s role in crafting a poten- ity that photography and its reproduc-
images’ condition as “last” photographs transformation and surprise.”4 tial new relationship of the one to tive vocation come to betray, as well
can also be reversed. For it is as if we the other. as to a temporal duration in experience
gaze upon photograph after photograph that the photographic image also
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eventually disallows (Benjamin: “to the passage of time: these are photo- I don’t find any images of him in Dictionaries (1996), we see two
trace a range of mountains on the graphic attributes, and for Benjamin a chair, but I do become interested immense and browning tomes, posi-
horizon, or a branch that throws its the “creases” in the philosopher’s coat in his book Studies in Pessimism. tioned like bookends, or like
shadow on the observer, until the are not unlike these, a second “skin.” And I locate the following descrip- mouths gaping at a pile of smaller
moment or the hour become part of But, even more, the philosopher’s tion of his daily routine: “From the books that mounts between them.
their appearance—this is what it means coat itself is “like” a photograph, which age of 45 until his death 27 years
to breathe the aura of those mountains, Benjamin thus seems to define in the later Schopenhauer lived in Frank-
that branch”).6 But Benjamin often most extraordinary way: a photograph furt-am-Main. He lived alone, in
reverts to fabric metaphors when is a “shape” that is “borrowed” from ‘rooms’, and every day for 27 years
attempting to define aura, calling it its subject. Or to state this another way: he followed an identical routine.
a “strange weave of space and time,” as philosopher and coat, the old man He rose every morning at seven and
and praising an old photograph for and his wrinkled skin, or subject and had a bath but no breakfast: he
capturing an “aura that had seeped into object “borrow” form from one another, drank a cup of strong coffee before
the very folds of the man’s frock coat so too the photograph participates in sitting down at his desk and writing
or floppy cravat.”7 This is photography, this intimate connection of subjective until noon. At noon he ceased
it seems, prior to its own alienation life and objective form, like a coat filled work for the day and spent half-an-
from its innermost potential, as out by the body of its wearer. At its hour practicing the flute, on which
Benjamin describes this experience as origins, and at the height of its poten- he became quite a skilled performer.
one of “congruence” between the tial, the photograph emerged as a model Then he went out for lunch at
camera and the bourgeois subjects it that allowed one to “think” the com- the Englischer Hof. After lunch he
initially represented (“subject and munion of subject and object, a concrete returned home and read until four,
technique were as exactly congruent as example of the analogy between being when he left for his daily walk:
they become incongruent in the period and appearance. he walked for two hours no matter
of decline that immediately followed”).8 It is with such a luminous passage what the weather. At six o’clock he
But such congruence of photography in mind that we need to look again visited the reading room of the
and its subject emerges from a deeper at Davey’s photographs of inert domes- library and read The Times. In
congruence, a more intense escape from tic objects, devoid for the most part the evening he attended the theater
alienation: the photograph’s ability to of people, perhaps photographed like or a concert, after which he had
imagine a form of connection between Atget’s city streets, which for Benjamin dinner at a hotel or restaurant.
the realm of the subject and the object. were images that address us like He got back home between nine
This is where Benjamin’s descrip- the “scene of a crime.”10 For if Davey’s and ten and went early to bed. He
tion of the photograph of Schelling images are instead about the “life was willing to deviate from this
becomes transformative. “Everything of objects,” then we have to imagine the routine in order to receive visitors
about these early pictures was built force of this animation, perhaps even [R. J. Hollingdale, Introduction to
to last,” Benjamin asserts. “The the absent subject from which quotid- Arthur Schopenhauer’s Essays and
very creases in people’s clothes have ian object and indexical photograph— Aphorisms].”)
an air of permanence. Just consider analogs all—have borrowed their form.
Schelling’s coat: It will surely pass into
immortality along with him: the (I don’t know what exactly Benjamin READER
shape it has borrowed from its wearer meant by the “Frankfurt picture” A critic in the New York Times once
is not unworthy of the creases in his of Schopenhauer. The image of described Davey’s domestic photo-
face.”9 The passage is breathtaking, for Schelling in his coat is reproduced in graphs as presenting “disheveled living
Benjamin here seems not only to de- the English version of Benjamin’s spaces,” most likely belonging to a
scribe an individual photograph, but to text. But the Schopenhauer photo- “depressed and possibly dangerously
describe within Schelling’s image graph isn’t there. My essay is by now alienated person.”11 In these spaces,
objects and qualities that are them- a week late, and yet I spend hours books seem to be everywhere—on every
selves “photographic.” Wrinkles, aging, googling Schopenhauer anyway. surface, table, or shelf. In the image
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