And
what can we possibly think of the artist, armed with a copy
of Lewis Carroll's epic, trotting into the woods with her
camera to picture an eccentric portrait
of the adventures of Alice? And what of the artist who looks not to the imaginative
fantasies of Carroll, but to the authorless myth of femininity-as-reproduction
realized in the parable of Persephone? The seeming compulsion to eschew a prohibition
on referentiality recasts the artist as raconteur, leaving the critic to stare
blankly in the face of literary allusion and constructed fictions, questioning
whether we are witnessing a revitalized commitment to ut pictura poesis, where
art is the visual handmaiden to a pre-existing text, and criticism is imprisoned
by iconography.
Such an explanation, however, would require an enormous retreat from
the responsibility to history. The hundreds of years since the Renaissance
doctrine prevailed notwithstanding,
it demands that the critic turn a deaf ear to the most recent past, where
the very principles and properties of traditional narrative were
deeply implicated.
Within visual art's critique of illusionism, we can think of the 'specific
objects' of Minimalism, the temporalization of performance, the analytical
exercises of
conceptualism, and the implosion of post-structuralist thinking in the last
decade: in short, all of current art's predecessors that battled
against the belief that
meaning is wholly saturated by a referent, or secured through a transparent
relationship to the author. Art, of course, had taken its cues from
literature, philosophy
and history, whose systematic dismantling of modernism's 'grand ideas' (history
as the progress of spirit, the emancipation of the subject, etc.) constituted,
in the words of Lyotard, a "crisis of narrative". Such was the
tautology of modernism, he explained: appealing to meta-discourses in order
to legitimize
its own ideas, modernism denied their very status as narratives by naturalizing
its codes. What was demanded was a manifold process: an examination of narrative's
operations and cultural functions, and a displacement of epical accounts
by the dissenting voice of 'little narratives'.
In face of current artistic practice, it becomes criticism's imperative to negotiate
the historical within the contemporary, to redefine the reintroduction of illusionistic
devices, folklore and other narrative tropes, through an analysis of the situations
of narrative.
So we return to Gaskell's photographs, where the figure of Alice
is multiplied as so many Alices, sporting identical dresses and pictured
as limbs, arms, torsos,
a face, and crops of blond hair. Within the space of a single picture is
not
so much the original and its copies, but an original that is continually
deferred, reinforced by the photographic manipulations of framing,
cropping, fragmenting
and lighting. The Wonder Series does not operate as pure description, but
presents the fictional Alice––who grows and shrinks and
is never fixed as present––as
a process of infinite becoming.1 It is this instability of identity, marked
as a site of projection and fantasy, which intrigued Collura as she
mined the chronicles
of Persephone: from her abduction into the mythical underworld to the censoring
pen of Walt Disney's drawing pad, which made her into the enduring icon of
feminine purity. Refusing to yield to the demands of image-production
which would secure
its illustrative function, Collura's sculptural arrangement temporalizes
the referent into a mutability of form and color. Negotiating its
discontinuous fragments––a
torso, a tree, corn husks, and a billowy mushroom that doubles as the folds
of the skirt––the viewer is thrust into the shifting space
of parallax.
The movement of displacement, Lyotard emphasizes, constitutes the
work of little narratives. He introduces another story to explain
this dynamic and
give it
a proper name- paganism. He tells us that he was thinking of the "lesser Greeks",
the Sophists, who were derided by the Aristotelians for foregoing an allegiance
to truth in favor of the play of rhetoric. Yet, Lyotard argues, "(T)hey
have always indicated that we are dealing with what they call phantasmata, that
is representations, and that it is not true that a rational knowledge of social
and political facts is possible, at least insofar as they imply judgments and
decisions."2 Paganism reframes the goal of knowledge, revealing the violence
of consensus which quiets dissent by banishing those who refuse to participate
within predetermined rules. His analogy is the realm of language-games, where
in every instance the terms must be redefined, "a society of gods that is
forced to redraw its code", he writes.3
The visual economy of Walker's deceptively simple forms materialize
this process. Carefully cut from matte paper, they hybridize conflict––references
to slave tales are overlaid with those of Romance fictions and nostalgic
images the
Old South––all given visual equivalence in the formal language of eighteenth
century silhouette portraits fancied by the aristocracy. The images don't tell
the whole story, in that they gain meaning only through the reception of their
visual cues––such that the subject of L'il White Drop, Seesaw, Whip
becomes the transaction between narrator, story and receiver. It is such a process
that might allow us to understand Vega's obsession with Paradise. The biblical
story of origins becomes an entire lexicon which reveals the shaping of Western
identity, and the perpetuation of its arrogance. The quest to rediscover a lost
Eden will permit the inheritors of Genesis to locate other cultures outside of
history and time. The images and texts in Vega's work––drawing on Christian
iconography, a 17th century book by Antonio de LÈon Pinelo, and an invented tale––are
superimposed into a series of cinematic frames, where 'paradise' reveals
itself as a heterological operation, the historical arbiter of cultural othering.
For both Vega and Walker, to shift narrative's relation to time from the fixed
repository of memory, to a retention of the past in the present, becomes crucial
in the creation of
dissensus. Pearlstein's Still thematizes this temporality of repetition,
or more precisely, recitation, as a blank white interior becomes the constant
backdrop
for a shifting series of scenes. A man stares at the corner; a couple enters
and has a dispute; a woman lies upon the floor. Recalling Richard Serra's
verb
list which redefined 'sculpture' as a series of operations ("to roll, to
crease, to fold..." and so on), Still places each vignette not in the descriptive
but in the transitive plane––pose, embrace, concentrate, play....––creating
stories which cannot be constituted outside the enunciative act. This process
of interpolation undergirds the isolated phrases that the hand scratches on the
blackboard in MacArthur's video. A constant metronomic beat, audible in the background,
structures the actions of the hand: writing its "confession", covering
it with a monochromatic surface of white chalk, wiping the slate clean, wetting
it with a wash of water, and then repeating the entire procedure. Initiating
each phrase with the word "I", MacArthur's video materializes the linguistic
shifter, as the "I's" reference constantly fluctuates between the
pole of narrator and that of the addressee or reader: a single gesture which
encapsulates
the complexity of narrativity.
What I have provisionally called 'pagan' stories claim no universality,
provoking the cynic to accuse them of being a hermetic retreat from
public discourse into
the realm of private meaning. So I will end our story with what might be
called the 'first' story. It is the ostensible subject of Starr's
and Fujiyoshi's "self-portraits".
The story is well-known; Starr, the nomadic artist installed at the Hague to
create art, fashioned the alter-ego "Junior" from stockings and stuffing,
and then proceeded to collect objects and pictures that marked the mundane events
of each passing day. The results of her labor, crammed into the limited space
of her room, were called The Nine Collections of the Seventh Museum, an epigrammatic
aside to the operations of museology and collecting. This depletion of the self
enacted in the portrait as a narrative of place and time similarly has driven
Fujiyoshi's extended project, Self-Portrait as Still Life, executed over several
years. In the L.A. From N.Y. series, everyday objects and collaged imagery culled
from Hollywood films, serve as indexes of the artist counting down the five days
preceding, and five days during a trip to Los Angeles where she participated
in an exhibition. The photographs operate without securing a transparent relationship
to the 'subject' (Fujiyoshi) but, as in Starr's Nine Collections, by generating
meaning through the exposition of their procedures of making. Negotiating autobiography
within the performative plane, the words of another critic can be heard, "the
ultimate form of narrative transcends its contents", he wrote. Our story
will conclude with his proposition.
"... it may be significant that it is at the same moment (around the age
of three) that the little human 'invents' at once sentence, narrative, and the
Oedipus."4
©1997 Janet Kraynak
1. See Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, translated
by Mark Lester
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
2. Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just
Gaming, translated
by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 75.
3. Ibid, p. 17.
4. Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives",
in Image-Music-Text, translated by Stephen Heath (New York: The Noonday Press,
1977), p. 124.
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