Family, Resemblance

Here you see a photograph of my grandmother, Edith Hunter, giving a talk at a luncheon for Vermont Public Radio (VPR) commentators. After a celebrated career -- and after a celebrated career as a commentator -- my grandmother "retired" from VPR several years ago. She's struggled with her health especially in the past year. But, feisty as ever, she began to stage a remarkable recovery over the course of the past fall. She took up her commentating again and, less than a month ago, had hip surgery. So, here she is, post-operation, giving a speech to an audience of fellow commentators.

But, how do you know that this is really my grandmother and not just some photograph I picked up on the street or found on the internet? Do you want to say that there is some kind of family resemblance to Old Ken? If you are committed to saying this, I think my grandmother may wish to have words with you. (Be forewarned!) Alternately, if you know my grandmother, you could appeal to your knowledge of her or perhaps to other images of her and then assess (presumably using criteria of resemblance) whether or not this particular picture likely also designates her. For usually, we like to think, photographs do designate particular persons.



But, what about images like these?



Which one better resembles a unicorn? As philosopher Nelson Goodman pointed out over forty years ago, this is a nonsensical question. There is no such thing as a unicorn, so a picture can't resemble one. But it is no problem to say that there is a certain category of "unicorn pictures" that visualize unicorns or other mythological beasts; the history of art is full of them. And, Goodman argues, so too it goes for portraits. It's easy enough to distinguish between a man-portrait from a woman-portrait -- or a portrait from a landscape -- without having any knowledge of whom these portraits might designate. Or, indeed, if they designate anyone at all. Plenty of those can also be found in the history of art.



Take this portrait of the stern looking fellow before which my grandmother was speaking at the VPR commentators event. Does it designate someone (as we know that man-portraits need not do any more than landscape-pictures need designate some particular piece of real estate)? And if it does designate someone, who is it? I put the latter question to my grandmother and here is her response: "Don't you recognize Daniel Webster!!!! 'It is a small college but there are those who love it!!!' Shame on you."



"So much for Old Ken's fancy-dancy mumbo jumbo," you may be saying. Clearly, he should be spending a little more time studying the Great Men of nineteenth century American History and a less time with those funny ideas about images. But, hang on. What's this? It's a follow-up from my grandmother on this very topic:

"I cannot let Daniel Webster rest until I have explained to you why Daniel Webster is so important to Dartmouth College. In 1819 a group tried to take over Dartmouth and turn it into a state run college. The group that wanted to keep it private hired Daniel Webster to represent them and argue their case. It was at the beginning of his
career, I think. He ended his argument with these now famous lines: 'It is a small college, but there are those who love it.' I was talking with John Wright who graduated from Dartmouth and he said he did a lot of research on Webster, and nowhere are these lines actually written down in his writings."

So, in addition to our range of Daniel-Webster-pictures that we have to trust actually resemble Daniel Webster (trust, because even if we could exhume his body, it would not provide any interesting evidence regarding his physical appearance in the nineteenth century), we also now have a class of Daniel-Webster-statements, which we want to associate with him and his ideas even though we don't have textual evidence to prove it. The historian's dilemma!

Simon Starling at The Clever Object

Not so long ago, yours truly was over on that other side of the pond where they make sure not to leave the crisps in the boot when they fill up the lorry with petrol. The reason? Nothing other than a seminar Old Ken likes to call Clever Object, in this case part three.

As has been the tradition of this seminar series, the discussion of historical cases and theoretical readings has been juxtaposed by conversation with contemporary artists. This time, the artist in question was 2005 winner of the Turner Prize, Simon Starling (who we see seated at the center of the picture above in what I can only charitably call a "nice" sweater).



Starling is perhaps best know for his work Shedboatshed (seen above) in which he transformed a garden shed into a boat, sailed it down a river, and re-installed it in the Tate as a shed. Now, to summarize the work in as cursory a manner as I have just done is certainly contrary to the spirit of Starling's practice. Not only is he a formidable raconteur who considers his stories (so he told the seminar) to be "part of the work, if not artworks themselves", but his objects have sufficiently long gestation that they effectively gather stories around them -- stories that Starling can prune and reshape. He becomes a curator of his objects' stories.



Suggestive of this way of working is an installation he developed at MassMoca called The Nanjing Particles. At the core of this project was a photograph (magnified and perforated in the installation shot above) representing Sampson's Shoe Factory which stood (or, possible still stands) opposite to MassMoca in far western Massachusetts. During a labor dispute in the 1870s century, the factory managers fired all the would-be unionizing workers, replacing them with Chinese laborers. We see these Chinese workers in the foreground of the repeated photographic image. Background as it appears to be in this installation shot, the photograph becomes both backstory and groundwork for Starling's subsequent intervention.

What he did was this: harvesting tiny deposits of silver crystals from the regions of the photograph punctured in the installation, Starling inspected the crystals at tremendous magnification with an electron microscope. Then, selecting a few crystals that seemed particularly interesting -- and that were neither excessively "figurative" nor otherwise referential -- he ran them through a 3-D modeling program, which gave them virtual dimensions. From these simulations, Starling then fabricated table-top objects - - globular things generated upon the extensively-modulated form of certain highly magnified crystals selected by the artist and then mediated through a software program.



Now, at least so it seems to Old Ken's pea brain, part of what is happening here is that Starling is offering a literalization and, consequently, a reductio ad absurdam of some of the more squishy sentiments expressed by dear M. Barthes in later life. If it is true that photographs are effectively contact relics embued with the trace of the things they depict, so Starling's objects seem to say, then here are those "depicted persons" -- those Chinese workers -- up close and personal. Or, if that's not convincing, then maybe we might reconsider our stories about exactly what it is that is happening in photographs.



I'll leave all of that to some photo-historian brainiacs and get back to Starling. Because after he was finished with his model-making, he sent them off to -- where else? -- China to have them transformed into these massive and massively-reflective objects.



The fact that the beholder cannot not but see themselves in the "telltale object" (in Starling's words) is certainly part of the point as is the fact that it has had to retrace its steps to China to be re-incarnated. For me, this is some of Starling's more compelling work. It spins its web and enables serious conceptual questioning out of an ordinary artifact, thus escaping the feeling of preciousness that clings to many of Starling's other, frequently art-based (if not art-obsessed) works. And whether or not we want to follow recent philosophers who have theorized the "constrained design" of scientific models as crucial to their ability to generate epistemic agency, it is by Old Ken's lights a liberating notion that a humble photograph of Chinese workers can, monad-like, generate this new world.

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?!?