Gunning Vs. Demand at the Hammer

Last night, as rain whipped the windows and cats got their little
paws wet, Old Ken took to the roads of the greater Los Angeles
metropolitan region. The destination? UCLA's Hammer Museum
where film historian Tom Gunning was pitted in conversation against
contemporary photographer Thomas Demand - - whose meditation
on rain we see in the still shot above.



"Pitted" is probably too strong a word, as the conversation was perfectly genial.
Our film historian was the venerable and slightly avuncular Tom Gunning, a professor
at the University of Chicago. Apparently, he had been invited by the Hammer to stage a
public conversation with "anyone he liked." His choice?



Herr Demand, who we see here rappin' with someone else. Taking the stage like
Stockhausen at a well-equipped Radioshack, these two put on a veritable clinic in
virtuosic pyrotechnics the likes of which I haven't seen since I let Pasha loose on
the Steinway.

The set-up was basically this: Demand makes a strange kind of photography
(and now film) where he takes photos from the news and fashions sculptures or models
of them out of paper.



Then, he re-photographs his paper sculptures and destroys them. As here,
he has constructed a view of the Oval Office. In the first image above, he
has made a looped representation of rain; but the "rain drops" are candy
wrappers shot through a stop-motion animation technique used in children's
programs. The sound of the rain is that of eggs being fried. As Demand
explained it, the work is all about presenting an attractive image to
the beholder; but "the picture is dismantling itself before you ... the
action is that of the beholder unpacking the picture."

Gunning, for his part, is now working on a related topic: the "magic" of
motion in film. His line is that the first commentators on film ca. 1900
were intent upon offering a scientific explanation of how it was that a
sequence of still film frames projected onto a flat surface could afford
the illusion of movement. They came up with a theory based on after-images;
how the brain combines these after images together and interprets them as
movement of the represented objects. Apparently, though, this persistent
theory is totally without scientific basis and the problem of motion --
or the illusion of motion -- in film remains to be explained.

So, while they both shared this basic interest in, for lack of a better term,
the "techniques of illusion," one of the main topics of conversation was not
about technical mechanisms of representation but about people. Namely, the
(apparently) frequently-voiced observation that there are no people in Demand's
photos. Gunning observed that the feeling of the images was less that they were
abstract than that people had been erased from them. (Given that the English abstract
is from the Latin abstractus meaning to draw away, while "erase" etymologically
means to scratch, the difference between the two didn't to me seem all that profound.)

More promising was Demand's response: he said that he is always baffled by this comment
as, when he looks at his images, he sees people "all over them: me." That is, against
the conventional thinking about photography whereby it somehow "captures" the real,
everything in his work (so he claims) is put there by him. He then struck up a very
funny analogy: having people in his pictures was never an option, in the way that the
Protestant crucifix doesn't have Christ on it. Just as it is bogus to say that the
Catholics got it right by putting Christ on their crucifix while the Protestants got it
wrong, so it is absurd to call it a fault that his pictures have no people in them.

What was learned by all of this? For yours truly, it was striking how quickly the
conversation between these two brainiacs who spend much of their time thinking about
photographic images verged into the nauseating territory of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida
and its talk of "seeing the dead," being punctured, etc. Surely, we can do better than that
... right?!?