Dominique Paine Video Cine

Should We Put an End to Projection?Author(s): Dominique Pani and Rosalind E. KraussSource: October, Vol. 110 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 23-48Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3397556Accessed: 17/09/2010 00:40

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Should We Put an End to Projection?*

DOMINIQUE PAINI

Translated by Rosalind E. Krauss

Should we put an end to projection at the end of this century, at the end of this millennium?

The advent of technological innovation both in art and in communication- we must be determined to inscribe these two words in their reciprocal proximity and their irreducibility-suggests such a possibility.

Projection arises from a little known history belonging to the fields of physics, of geometry, of optics, of psychology, of pictorial representation, of show business [spectacle]. In its shortest definition, the most ordinary dictionary relays the equivocal character of the word: the action of projecting images on a screen and the representation of a volume on a flat surface. Spectacle and geometry, fields of activity far from each other, are mixed in the same word. With the slide or the film, it is nonetheless a matter of a comparable result: a volume transferred to a surface, illusion and geometric codification, mirage and science.

To the word project, common sense associates the words envision, imagine, pre- meditate, foresee, as much as eject, expel, throw, push. Put otherwise, words that evoke the activities of thought as much as of physical or bodily exertion. However, if we narrow our use of projection, this is tied to the luminous transport of images, and if at the same time we try to list the greatest possible number of categories of image without consideration of the field of application or their practical or symbolic use, we spon- taneously perceive two great modes of achieving the image: material supports to which the image indissociable from this support adheres, and luminous projection slides for which a spotless (or not) screen intercepts ephemerally (or not) the ray.

An Image-Light

For a history of art both real and mythological, technical and philosophical, we know the stakes and the antagonisms. We could make a fiction of a struggle of

* From catalog to the exhibition Projections: Les transports de l'image at Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing, France, November 1997-January 1998 (Paris: Editions Hazan, 1997). For reasons of space, Paini's discussion of filmmakers Patrick Bokanowski and Pitch,

OCTOBER 110, Fall 2004, pp. 23-48. ? 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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two enemy goddesses: a noble image at the service of the princes and of their istoria and a more pedestrian image often associated with saltimbanks and their phantas- magorias. One free to circulate from hand to hand, the other enslaved to the mechanical apparatus that embodies it; one infinitely modifiable by the one (or by others) who gave it birth, the other little susceptible to benefiting from metamor- phosis unless it has been so conceived repetitively (film in the twentieth century); one, finally, which calls for being seen through an ambient light or one directed on it, the other dependent on the light that traverses the transparent veil of its support.

This bipartition divides the beholders, between those for whom the point of view on the image is not assignable to a particular place and is mandatory in the space, and those for whom the point of view on the image is marked by the (relative) restraint of being bound to a place inferred by the apparatus of projection. In other words, visitors and spectators, from whom the contemporary art of the end of the twentieth century accepts the command of blurring the respective identities and behavior. Film "exhibits itself' by unreeling in loop within the "installation" and, inversely, painting and sculpture are exhibited in museums according to connections that borrow the principles of montage, of light, and of rhythms apparently inherited from the contemporary audiovisual sphere.1 This apparent inversion has been favored by the video image: the projector and the screen united in the same miniaturized apparatus. The indissociability of support/image and the luminous ray fuse in the video image-machine for images as much as image-machine. This comfortable bipolarization of the regime of images is thus profoundly troubled by the contemporary images that, suddenly, retroactively provoke doubt about the ontological rigidity of the distinction between applied and projected images. For example, stained glass in the application of an image indissociable from its support to which the light necessary for its vision is not reflective but penetrating [transver- sante]. However, for all that, light does not carry the image beyond its transparent support. Another example: from the digitization of the givens recorded by the CD- ROM to the video projector, the transported and enlarged image on a screen does not emanate from an initial veil-like skin either painted or photographic. Open to interventions after the fact (interactivity) on its support (the disc, the Net), the digital image is nonetheless projectable.

Whatever, finally, be the blurring of a nice binary rule for categorizing images, let us agree that the artists who make up the present exhibition manipulate the travel of luminous images, images irreducibly foreign to the surfaces that intercept the beam of light, surfaces that however embody them. Of images that only exist because they are made of light, being images that are of time. Of images that only exist through the time of their luminous transport.

Time is consubstantial with the projected image. And it is strange that two founding texts for the projected image have not been retained in a more insistent

Metamkine, andJosef Robakowski has been omitted. 1. Roland Recht, "Considerations on the Destination of Museum Space," Le Debat 81 (September- October 1994), p. 38.

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Should We Put an End to Projection ?

manner from the single point of view of the image in time: Plato's allegory of the cave2 and the critical commentary by Diderot, in the form of an account of a dream of a painting by Fragonard.3 One can read these two famous and overinterpreted texts above all as the tales of projective experience for which the luminous apparatus is described according to principles of a story, organized by "sequential shots" and narrative intervals. The Platonic allegory is a tale in four moments for which the connection and the terms give the feeling of a troubling "foretelling" of what concerns modern projective installations. It is obviously the reverse: contemporary artists return to an "original installation," one existing only in the philosophical language of Plato, for which we never sufficiently retain the dramatic duration. The first part of the text describes the "viewers" chained in a cave with their backs turned to a fire, whose light transports the shadows of figurines onto the opposite wall. This first part introduces the confusion between reality and representation. The second part of the narrative description displays the painful pitfalls of the discovery of the illusion: the luminous source not only dazzles but prevents conceptual clarity. Then, in a third sequence, Plato is interested in describing the exit from the cave. The discovery of the separation between reality and representation is accompanied by the discovery of the mimetic objects that gave rise to the ressemblant shadows. At this third, dramatic and initiating stage, the spectators turn toward the sun, source of vital energy and of knowledge as such. Finally, the spectators turn back to the darkness of the cave. Their perceptual unfamiliarity renders them unwanted and gives them the status of victims of light.

The first moment of the journey is a confrontation with images, with the doubles of real things. The second is a confrontation with things, properly speaking. The two other moments oppose themselves to the domain of the visible and form the domain of the ideas, or of mathematical discourse and the concepts.

Jean Starobinski notes that, essentially, the projection of the images of Diderot's dream are produced almost as in Plato's allegory.4 All the more so as Diderot himself admits to having read Plato on the day on which he missed out on the vision of Fragonard's painting.5 It is enough to note the shared chaining up of the spectators in Diderot and Plato for this very captivity, this motor disability with which contemporary artists are obsessed in their installations. The placement and the mobility of the spectator are not the least torments in the quasi-totality of the exhibited artists. We must still note the character of the producers of the illusions listed by Diderot: kings, apostles, prophets, theologians, politicians, rogues, charlatans, "subaltern rogues with tokens of the first that give to these shadows the accents, the discourse, the true voices of their roles." In other words, it is to the

2. Plato, The Republic, in Oeuvres completes, pt. 1, books iv-vnl (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1989), p. 144. 3. Denis Diderot, "Fragonard no. 176. Le Grand Pretre Coresus s'immole pour sauver Callirhoe." Salon of 1765 (Paris: Hermann, 1984), p. 253. 4. Jean Starobinski, Diderot dans lespace des peintres, followed by Le Sacrifice en reve (Paris: RMN, 1991). 5. "Media technology is founded on the principle that nothing must be missed" (Atom Egoyan, Trafic 10 [Paris: POL, Spring 1994], p. 108).

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political, religious field, as well as to spectacle that the projective model [attraction] belongs, those fields that generate imposture.6

Is it from this passage between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the impurity of the art of projection is born? A decisive epoch, for which the cabi- nets de curiosite and the intense activity of the peddlers, of the opticians and various physicists, have decisively modified the arts of representation. Epoch of the saltimbanks, the phantasmatic political chroniclers (Robertson) who borrow the luminous transport of images to dazzle, impress, educate, charm, and entertain.7 Filmmakers and projectionist artists of this end of the twentieth century-"bachelor" heirs of Marcel Duchamp, whose imposture in art was one of the obsessions of criticism-are they the most recent descendants of Diderot's rogues, equipped "with a provision of little transparent and colored figures and all the figures being so well made, so well painted, in such great number and variation, that there were enough to furnish the representation with all the comic, tragic, and burlesque scenes of life"?8 "Here is what I see pass at different intervals that I combine for brevity's sake," Diderot warns, who clearly inscribes the narrative, and thus temporal character,9 of his iconographic description of a painting of which the applied opaque image was denied him and replaced in his dream by a projected image, by an image-light, an image transported by light, giving rise to narrative dramatization and lyrical effusion.10

It is as if the projective apparatus calls up fiction. A third text would thus complete the two former founding texts. One byJean-Luc Godard, equally technical and fictional, closely associates tekne and fabula: 1

In a Moscow prison, Jean-Victor Poncelet, army officer of Napoleon, reconstructs without the aid of any notes the geometrical knowledge that he learned in the courses of Monge and of Carnot. The Treatise of the Projective Property of Figures, published in 1822, constructs in general method the principle of projection utilized by Desargue for understanding the properties of conic sections and put to work by Pascal in his demonstration of the mystical hexagram. What was then needed was a revolving prisoner facing a wall for whom the mechanical application of the idea and the desire to project figures on a screen takes wing

6. Starobinksi wonders about the status of the painter according to Diderot: "is he also an impostor?" (Starobinski, Diderot, p. 75). 7. Laurent Mannoni, Le Grand Art de la lumiere et de l'ombre (Paris: Nathan, 1994). 8. Diderot, "Fragonard no. 176," p. 254. 9. "Furthermore, let us observe that the history dreamed by Coresus and Callirhoe is built through a series of well-structured images, strictly separated from each other. The description of each of them will help to develop a narrative fabric. The myth will be communicated to us through its supposed spectacular transcription, itself retranscribed by Diderot as the dramatic program of a possible picture. Narration and description become discernable only with difficulty" (Starobinski, Diderot, p. 73). 10. Jacques Aumont, L'mage (Paris: Nathan-Universite, 1990), p. 135. 11. Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions de l'autre (Paris, Galilee, 1987), pp. 21-22. Quoted by Michel Frizot in "Saint Promethee, L'inventeur-Createur au XIX siecle," Communications 64 (1997), p. 117.

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practically speaking with the invention of filmic projection. Let's equally note that the instigating wall was rectangular.12

But indeed, can narrative time be exhibited?

A Dialectical Image

Let's sum up.... Given the mythological origins of the invention of painting-cast shadow of a profile on an illuminated surface;13 given the slides imagined in the seventeenth century by Father Athansius Kircher; given the dream of Diderot, cinematographic before the fact; given the revolutionary phan- tasmagorias of Robertson; given the Lumiere brothers; given the installations of Sovietico-Futurist propaganda by Lissitzky; and given, finally, the taste of contemporary artists for projective installations and performances of light, the present exhibition suggests a parallel history of art, foreign to the fine arts, more spectacular and often confused with the simplicities of charlatans and of "dealers in hope and dread":14 a history of art of projecting images, indifferent to "skill" or to the manual virtuosity that characterizes painting and sculpture, the history of an activity of craftsmen of illusions that arises from the mechanical arts, ignorant of the liberal arts.15 In this "other" history, light no longer encounters an image, nor bathes it, nor illuminates it. Light penetrates it at first, then transports it, dupli- cates it in dematerializing it,16 sometimes temporalizing and sublimating it. In this "other" history, the image travels. In relation to traditional pictorial or photographic representation, projection constitutes an inflaming of the image, a flourish in the sense of a lyrical transport. It equally has the power to vary its site (size of image, distance traveled by the light beam). But above all, since the pro-

jection of an image mixes in a single composite the image and the light necessary for its exhibition, it associates representing and exhibiting. Vision equals light and light is identified with the sense of sight. Is this what the Lumiire brothers inferred, the projections of films that are "views"? The luminous transport of images evokes the letter of Albertian theory-sight as light beam-but simultaneously it demonstrates the utopia of it. Further, the projection of the image maintains the philosophical debates of antiquity with regard to vision. Whence arises the visual connection? Is it projected from the eyes or from the perceived image? For Euclid or Pythagoras, inventors of geometry, it is the eyes that expel the light striking the image. For Aristotle, the images send their miniaturized

12. Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image, 1974-1991, ed. Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea Bandy (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1992), p. 117. 13. Pliny the Elder, Histoire naturelle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1997). 14. Diderot, "Fragonard no. 176," p. 254. 15. Georges Didi-Huberman makes the same remark with regard to the imprint. See his L'Empreinte (Paris: Centre Georges-Pompidou, 1997), p. 21. 16. An entirely relative dematerialization because partly imaginary: light is still matter.

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reproductions to the depths of the visual organ. Plato describes the variations of intensity in the luminous source: the strongest produces black; the weakest, white; color results from a medium....

One can distinguish three large "modern" historical breaks: from the medieval image to the perspectivist vision of the fifteenth century; from the manipulable applied image to the mechanical and optical modernization of spectacular representation of the nineteenth century; from the analogical supports to the creation of images outside all indexation with reality: digitalization, synthesis, virtuality. Projection belongs to the second rupture.

In other words, the image would flow historically from three logics:17 1. formal: that of painting, printmaking, architecture, which concludes with the eighteenth century. 2. dialectical: that of photography, of film, and of the film frame during the nineteenth century. 3. paradoxical: that which begins with the invention of video, of the holograph, of cybernetics. At this end of the twentieth century, the accomplishment of modernity seems "marked by the climax18 of a logic of public representation....."19

The projection of the image thus arises from a dialectical logic that con- nects, of course, to the dialectical image described by Walter Benjamin, for whom the encounter with the urban crowd and with cinema was the decisive quality of modernity.20

Projection as dialectical image. ... This comes down to saying that the luminous transport of the image would be an apparatus favoring the encounter in a flash of Past and Now, a spasmodic image.21 Again, this comes down to saying that the apparently least perfect apparatus, its ancient and outmoded look of patched- up archaic machine, is, in a determined historical situation, releaser of flashes, of constellations, disturbing the teleological manifestations of the positive and posi- tivist progress of technology. In full cybernetic ebullience the insistent return of projection within contemporary art would thus have the value of instigation and critical emphasis.

The shock delivered by the encounter in the same space of the digital image projected by Bill Seaman-whose iconography recalls leisure activity and the pop- ular lotteries of Le Fresnoy-and of the mobile glass-slide lantern of the mid-nineteenth century visualizes the critical aims of the exhibition.

17. Paul Virilio, La Machine de vision (Paris: Galilee, 1988), p. 133. 18. Virilio speaks later of a "crisis of public representations." 19. "With the paradoxical logic, in fact, it's the reality of the presence of the object in real time that is definitively resolved, while in the era of dialectical logic of the preceding image, it was only the presence in deferred time, the presence of the past that was durably imprinted on the plates, the emulsions, or the films. The paradoxical image thus acquiring a status comparable to that of surprise, or even more precisely, of 'the accident of transfer"' (Virilio, La Machine de vision, p. 134). 20. See Blaise Cendrars, ABC du cinema (1926; Paris: Seguier-Carre d'art, 1995). 21. Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Ie Livre des passages (Paris: du Cerf, 1989), pp. 478-79.

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"The new is not in what is said but in the event of its return," affirms and demonstrates Michel Foucault.22 In other words, the modern projection of images, born concretely and not only in dream, with the traveling spectacles in Europe organized at mid-seventeenth century by the Dane Thomas Walgenstein and his "fear lantern," would constitute a remembering present that upsets and questions the image born today by the matrixial apparatus of numbers, the digital. The projection of images belongs to an aesthetic of representation that "resists" an aesthetic of self-definition.23

A Critical Image

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, artists have experienced the transport of images through luminous projection. Man Ray, Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy, Fernand Leger, Frederick Kiesler, Len Lye; then Norman Mac Laren, Marcel Broodthaers; finally Martial Raysse, Fabio Mauri, Michael Snow, Giovanni Anselmo, Alain Fleischer, Christian Boltanski, Bertrand Lavier. The list of artists who have borrowed the projection of the fixed or mobile image is impressive.

To realize an image in fully dematerializing it, in other words, to play with the absent presence of the image, to add another light in the image than the one already represented, to escape the weight of the supports (from the paleolithic walls to the canvas!) that embody the images of the history of representation, doubtless still other dreams much beyond cinematographic fascination, explain the use of projection by the artists of the present century. However, these same ones often persist in laying claim to the liberal arts, painting, or sculpture. Filmmakers can seem more familiar with, even if somewhat "unconscious" of, this experimentation. For to really take hold of a space and to structure it by a light beam is, in another way than that of making a film, a complex enterprise. However, in passing from the staging to this scenography that liberates the spectator from his captivity to transform him into a mobile visitor, filmmakers have tried in recent years to "exhibit projections": Chantal Akerman, Raul Ruiz, Atom Egoyan.24

These filmmakers and the artists present in the exhibition at Le Fresnoy are the paradoxical contemporary echoes in the museal space of the most advanced film of the 1990s, critical of mediatic power. Like this cinema, but with other means, the exhibited works privilege the spectator's sensory acuity-the dilation of time as well as sensation-as against meaning; they belittle, if not aim at breaking

22. Michel Foucault, L'Ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1977). 23. Pierre Fedida, "Passe anachronique et present reminiscent. Epos et puissance, memoriale du lan- gage" (L'ecrit du temps 10; quoted by Didi-Huberman, L'Empreinte, p. 17). 24. Chantal Akerman, Galerie nationale duJeu de Paume, Paris, 1996; Raul Ruiz, Galerie national du Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1991; and Atom Egoyan, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 1996.

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the codified boundaries that have separated the image and the viewer ever since classical film.25 Filmmakers such as Michael Haneke, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Quentin Tarantino to a lesser degree, but on the other hand Abel Ferrara in a more ecstatic way, search for their part in the simultaneously dis- jointed and cyclical stories for a way to spatialize narrative time.26

From this coincidence between the art of the museum and film is born these questions: what continuity is there between contemporary images and the former organization of the visual, between digital images and those of the age called that of mechanical reproduction? How does the viewing subject penetrate (what is his place?) into the composition of the new apparatuses of the fabrication of images, including and above all those that are not chemico-analogical?27 These questions are to be taken as more dynamic than "reactionary." If they manifest suspicion it is less according to the melancholy of Rilke-"we are witnessing the disappearance of all the visible things that will not be replaced"-than according to the Brechtian skepticism. In 1927, Brecht remarked with an amused detachment about radio, the tendency of modernity to overestimate all the things that have hid- den possibilities.

Image-light, image-text, dialectical image:28 projection equally confers on the image a critical dimension. The spectacle of luminous transport of the image is correctly called entertainment. This is to say that it is a ditour, critical detour, theo- retical detour faced with the future regimes of the image.

An Image-Machine

One could risk writing a history of the projected image from the sole point of view of the progressive invisibility of the mechanical apparatus of projection: a history whose origins would draw on the first magic lantern representations of the seventeenth century, followed by the great "phantasmagorical" spectacles of the eighteenth century, then the optical machines (boxes, turning plates, lenses), which substituted themselves for a time for the apparatuses of projection, properly speaking, in order to efface themselves in their turn before the projected cinegenesis that the brilliant Emile Reynaud achieved with his optical theater.

25. ThierryJousse, "Apres la mort du cinema," inJousse and A. de Baecque, Le Retour du cinema (Paris: Hatier, 1996), p. 50. 26. See, for example, Haneke's Funny Games (1997), Lynch's Lost Highway (1997), Cronenberg's Crash (1996), Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), and Ferrara's Black Out (1997). 27. Some artists have for some years, in an "opportunistic" way, been caught up in the fashion for projections in the museum space by using sequences of documentary or fiction films. Stan Douglas, Douglas Gordon, and Pierre Huyghe, among others, slow, enlarge, copy, or imitate cinematographic images. This often fetishistic usage of cinema calls up thoughts that outrun the project of the present exhibition. See Stephanie Moisdon, Cinematheque, 10 (Fall 1996), p. 96. 28. In the meaning Walter Benjamin gave to this word; also Paul Virilio and above all, more recently, Georges Didi-Huberman, in La Resemblance informe ou le gai savoir de Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995).

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Finally, the twentieth century and the making sedentary of the filmic spectacle that established itself definitively around 1910. What can we conclude from this rapid summary? In the first place, the image transported onto the screen was not the only source of curiosity and fascination. For all through the centuries, the illusionist prepossession-to conceal the productive machine of the light beam-is far from having been respected and even from having been the concern of the artisan of illusions. In second place, and this follows from the first remark, the mechanical character of the projection was probably an object of mysterious fixa- tion for the spectators. Before the moment when the image-movement engaged with reality in a definitive (photography) and constructive (montage) mimetic relation, by "substituting for the model of the true a power of the becoming,"29 one can easily suppose that the projection machines were as much if not more fas- cinating than the light-image. In fairs or in the great international exhibitions of science and technology at the beginning of the century, the visible projection machine, the looped films that repeated the moving images, and the brutally het- erogeneous splicings-together of projected sequences, created radically anti-illusionist and chaotic conditions that privileged the blurring of spatial land- marks and the feverish wandering of the spectator outside all the stability of an ideal point of vision.30 One might add the relative fixity of the image and the fluc- tuating speeds in order to underscore how much the origins of film go back more to the performances of the "expanded cinema" of a Stan Van der Beek in the 1960s than to the history of the classical Hollywood film. Basically, the art of cinema could have ceased only in dissimulating the projection machine as the condition of deviation/abduction of the spectatorial hypnosis toward the single screen. Cover this machine that I cannot stand seeing!

This is not a minor question of the theory of the modern arts and more par- ticularly those of the spectacle. In his "Essay on Wagner," Theodor Adorno notes this tendency in the mechanical arts "to conceal the production under the appearance of the product."31 He underscores "the achievement of the appearance at the same time as the achievement of the illusionist character of the work of art taken as a specific reality that constitutes itself in the sphere of the absolute phenomenon, without for all that renouncing its power of representation." The recourse to projection at the hands of contemporary artists and of certain precur- sors in the 1920s, which is to say the recourse to the apparatus that associates machine, transport, and representation of a light-image, demonstrates an anti- illusionist will. In many propositions of the exhibition, it is a matter, in the

29. Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers (Paris: Minuit, 1990), p. 95. 30. "The pleasure the cinema extended to its first viewers didn't reside in their objective interest for a specific subject, still less in any aesthetic interest in the formal representation of a theme, but in the pure pleasure that they felt in seeing things move, whatever they be" (Erwin Panofsky, Three Essays on the Style and Matter of the 7th Art [Paris: Le Promeneur, 1996], p. 109). 31. Theodor Adorno, Essai sur Wagner (Paris: Gallimard, 1966; reissued, Paris: Gallimard, coll. NRF Essais, 1993).

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manner of Raymond Roussel, to "show the process,"32 in exhibiting the images transported by the light, hypnotic by their proximity, blinding by the beam that carries them, generative of embryonic stories repeated in loop, indissociably tied by their effects and their iconographic content to the machine that projects them.... One could say that

the machine repeats the content of the story that it projects forward, outside time and language, according to a system of translation that triumphs over duration as over words. The system is thus reversible: the story repeats the machine which repeats the story.33

The projected images in the present installation need, for their meaning, the visibility of the machine that projects them. Mobility of the film and movement of the eyes with Egoyan, projector and sun with Bertrand, "pursuit" and mirror- screen with Fleischer, luminous exhaustion and last moment of the century with Jugnet, filmic scratching and disappearance of the volumes with Foucault, pene- tration of the image and facingness of the projectors with Snow . . .for these artists, the machine is not ostensible for "enlarging" the cinematic effect.34 The machine is present to eject the image outside the figurative, outside its film-effect "window on the world," even though reversibly a representation as with Foucault and Adorno, strangely united here, say. Projected far in front of the machine that produces it, the image simultaneously continues to stem from it, related by the luminous ray. It is an image-machine as there exists a stained-glass image that cannot be reproduced without the machine. With the difference from the applied image whose easy multiplication through reproduction only loses a bit of sharp- ness of the stroke or the colors and gains grain, the projected image depends on a cumbersome technical complexity. This image is thus a machine itself in the sense that the Rousselian written memoir is what the process-works will write, for it is itself process, or more precisely the rebus of one: a machine to make the reproduction of things visible in a linguistic instrument.35

Projective installations and their validation of the machinic presence are contemporaries of the application of the computer and its screen: return of the black box from the age of the camera lucida, other linguistic instruments whose images began since the language of cybernetics. It is irresistible, in fact, not to remark on this concomitant appearance in the 1970s of projective installations in art and by computers, the luminous expulsion and the coded implosion. A history of the viewing subject cannot be indifferent to this. Of the immobile and collective viewer (chained up in Plato and Diderot), captive in the film theaters of the

32. Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel (Paris: Gallimard, coll. NRF Essais, 1993). 33. Ibid. 34. Dominique Noguez, Une renaissance du cinema, le cinema "underground" americain (Paris: Klincksieck, 1985), pp. 364-65. 35. Foucault, Raymond Roussel, p. 148.

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twentieth century, the viewer of a contemporary projection installation once again becomes a flaneur, mobile and solitary. The Baudelairian flaneur, thrilled by the toys in the Tuilleries, makes an unexpected return in the epoch of the solitary internaut who, while chained to his chair-it is what there is in common with the spectator at the movies-is nonetheless mobile, or more exactly, interactive, among the metamorphoses of the text-image. But don't the long evenings of the Internet fanatics recall the family evenings around the "steam praxinoscope" or the lantern? From the magic lantern to the console of the domestic computer at the end of the twentieth century, it is the spiralled return of the omnipresence of the machine as image.

Above, we pointed to the "return," in the form of the "reminiscent present" of the projected image within installations. On the one hand the predominance of the pure pleasure of the movement36 and of the installation's quality as ideal for exposing film as symbolicform;37 on the other hand, the visibility of the structure of the machinic functioning. What gives us the idea that the artists who transport the image via light tend to make an issue of the narrative destiny of projective images, aiming to raise a doubt about fiction as the sole model of filmic representation? Put otherwise, luminous sculpture is opposed to the movement of a story, the shot-sequence is a performance, the looped repetition of a sequence becomes a picture decomposable into figures. It is this complex regime of the projection of an animated image in a museal space that Broodthaers describes in 1968:

I am not a filmmaker. For me film is the prolongation of language. I began with poetry, then visual arts, and finally film, which unites many elements of art. That's to say, writing (poetry), the object (sculpture), and image (film). The great difficulty is obviously the harmony between these elements ... an antifilm nonetheless remains a film, the way the antinovel cannot completely escape the frame of the book and of writing; but my film enlarges the frame of an "ordinary" film. It is not principally or at least not exclusively destined for film theaters. Because to see and to be able to understand the total work that I wanted to achieve, it is necessary that the film be projected on the imprinted screen, but even more that the viewer also possess the text. If you please, this film relates to "art." It's one of these "multiples," of which we've spoken for some time as the means of the diffusion of art. It's because it will soon be exhibited in a gallery that forty copies of screens and of books will be produced. Thus it will be exploited as art object, of which each copy will be made up of a film, two screens, and a huge book. It's an environment.38

36. Panofsky, ThreeEssays, p. 109. 37. See this happy formulation by Thomas Y. Levin, "Un iconologue au cinema, la theorie cine- matographique de Panofsky," Cahiers du Musee national d'art modere 59 (Spring 1997), p. 58. 38. Marcel Broodthaers, Marcel Broodthaers, cinema, under the direction of ManuelJ. Borja and Michael Compton, in collaboration with Maria Gilissen (Barcelona: Fundacio Antoni Tapies, 1997), p. 59. On this

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I retain from these proposals of Broodthaers a meditation on the cinematic as far as that exhibits itself outside of a fictional destiny. Broodthaers weaves the image of these little films-attractions39 with the texts imprinted on the canvas of the screen, thus ruining the documentary or fictional character, the figurative character of the projected images. As Foucault notes in relation to the imaginary machines of Roussel,40 the projections in the exhibitions of Broodthaers-visible projectors, printed screen, numerous potted palms,41 wandering spectators-were for him comparable rebuses and, he says himself, comparable linguistic instruments.

An Exhibition Anne MarieJugnet with the Collaboration of Alain Clairet

It is a matter, then, of "leading the mind toward more verbal regions."42 That is the ambition of Anne Marie Jugnet, whose stubborn enterprise consists of drowning the visible and legible. One might consider her banner as a textual eclipse to the principle of which she has been partial for a long while now, deliver- ing "restricted information that, however, says a lot but doesn't develop." Her Watch Out Here Comes the Century! doesn't impress itself like a triumphant slogan but more like the childish warning Here come the police! Yoking pleasure and fear of the com- ing event, it mixes derision for a new century shared equally by promises of comfort and worry. In the futuristic architecture of Le Fresnoy, the banner evokes the dynamic effects that the Soviet architects, constructors of temporary propaganda pagodas, attempted in the 1920s. But Jugnet's slogan is that of a Post-Futurism that could serve as the title for a hot television "talk show." Jugnet underscores this alternating force of meaning by tying together air and light, breath and projection. It is truly a "flicker" effect that this wind rippling her banner produces. As if, at the dawn of the future century, the ambivalence of our feelings toward the future had been staged in the most metaphorically contemptu- ous manner possible: gloriously optimistic-a stretched screen that intercepts the luminous message-and limply pessimistic-the screen is hanging at half mast.

In the exhibition, Jugnet shares with Pitch (Christophe Cardoen) this work on the pleated/unpleated screen, attracting the spectator's attention to the contradic- tory status of the surface intercepting the light that carries the image: indispensable

occasion I am anxious to thank M.J. Borja for the detailed visit to the exhibition he allowed me to make in the last day of June 1997. Probably the first exhibition devoted to the Belgian artist that lived up to his thought, indissociable from the filmic installations remarkably reconstituted in Barcelona. 39. Le Corbeau et le Renard (1967), La Pluie (1969), Une discussion inaugurale (1968), Un voyage a Waterloo (1969), Unfilm de Charles Baudelaire (1970).... This last title is obviously not by chance in relation to the status of the spectator-flaneur. 40. The Roussel-Broodthaers connection by means of Magritte is, I believe, convincing. This little- known heritage still needs to be described in iconographic and intellectual detail. 41. Vegetation coded with the exoticism that once again recalls Roussel and his Impressions dAfrique. 42. According to the "grinder" and the "delay in painting" of Marcel Duchamp. The bicycle wheel is obviously not there for nothing.

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for the image to be achieved, the screen is no less "indifferent" to what it almost fugi- tively reveals. The screen that receives the light-image would basically be a type of strange shroud that retains not the slightest trace of the "encounter," a "Veronica's veil" without the power of iconic absorption. Jugnet's contribution principally stresses the mirroring character of all projection. If, customarily, the unstable particles of the light are not perceivable by the naked eye, if the passage of the film frames is deliberately masked to increase the illusion of restored reality, the fluttering of the blown screen and the alternation between the flapping and the fall to half-mast here paradigmatically reinscribes the luminous beat at work in vision itself. Illuminated and blown, that is the paradigm from which other substitutions or simple meaningful oppositions develop: the discontinuity of vision and the oscillation of inhalation/exhalation of breathing, the appearance and retreat of the image that alternates in filmic projection.

Henri Foucault

Projective geometry, Henri Foucault knows it as-I dare to use this simplistic word-a ray. The monumentality of his work is only apparent since everything at stake in it resides in its volumetric foaming, its perceptual fading. Also it is necessary that Foucault not rest at constructing a film, at digitizing the frames of it, at projecting the result on a screen of opaque and reflective facets and finally at broadcasting a synthesis of the whole at the end of the itinerary. Because, in order that the flaneur-spectator perceive such a process, it must be architected. It is necessary in all simplicity that Foucault construct... a film theater! In other words, a theatrical volume for the representation of a "geometrical fiction." Perhaps the cinematographic spectacle is that after all: amorous geometry instead of simply intuitive volumes and lines that fuse, a bonding between the room and the light beam of projection.

Our experience as spectator has made us live this experience many times. The ray, translucent and inflamed, metamorphoses the theatrical space in making the slight motes of dust dance, the fiction makes one forget the spectacle, the filmic narrative makes us forget the room. The beam strikes the screen, covering it by volumes of illusory thickness. But, on the other hand, it structures the distance of the representation, luminously materializing the perspective of the collective gaze of a public. The projection for the cinema is what the ramp is for the theater, but a non-frontal ramp that "comes from behind," which doesn't confront the gaze of the spectator. A ramp parallel to the gaze that no longer blinds the actors-already lighted a first time during the filming-but threatens to dazzle the imprudent and incredulous spectator who turns around to "know where the images come from." We will see a little later that it is this dazzlement that greatly interests Jean-Pierre Bertrand.

Nonetheless Foucault has returned to this ramp. By means of the mirror-planes that make up the screen, he turns the projective ramp around against the gaze of the

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flaneur who visits this great volume, a sort of accelerator of particles of light, a sort of "tube," as one speaks of the cathode ray tube. The "ter- minal" image of the installation is nonetheless an image on terminals of the same name. But t does this turning of the light around at the spectator's gaze suffice? To what does it give rise? A complete deconstruction of the volume, the erasure of an overstructured space, a fading out of the boundaries of this space. The volume loses its skeleton, its angles, its perceptible and measurable geometry: it becomes formless. Basically the projection is experienced by Foucault as a luminous geometry dissolving the spatially concrete geometry, the one actualized architecturally. As such, it is really "of cinema" that Foucault speaks: the place and the illusion, the building and the spectacle, mixed together.

Given that, what does the artist show? Does he exhibit a light beam without images? In fact Foucault invites us to a truly technological trip that identifies itself with a telescoped his- Henri Foucault. Tada Ima. 1997. tory of the regimes of the image: from the scratched film strip, mythico-anthropological and archeological gesture that it is, and matrix of all the other projected and broadcast images in the scenographic tube, up to the cybernetic programmation. From the hand that damages to the hand that clicks.

But how does scratching the image, streaking the screen, concern cinema more than video? Don't these two machines entertain "incestuous" relations?

Atom Egoyan

The family is the subject dear to Atom Egoyan through many full-length films: Family Viewing, Calendar, The Adjuster, Fine Tomorrows, the latter film featured in 1997 at the Cannes Film Festival. Exotica, in a way even more troubling and through which incest roams. .... The family and what it breeds, its conformisms, its secrets, its shames, its cultural and genetic patrimony, the children. For Egoyan the family is a beginning stage for the stages, truly original, doubtless to the extent of what it repre- sents for the Armenian who has never passed a night there. Primal scene equally for contemporary audiovisuality, from familial televisual sitcoms to "domestic video."

"Insomuch as my generation looked at films and baby photos with a naive curiosity, I imagine that the following generation will be overwhelmed by

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a mass of video documents on each key moment of its development. Birth, the first smile, the first word. All these events will be archived and easy to watch in private," the filmmaker recently noted, adding: "I always am astonished by how, despite their frenzy to record, people rarely look at their material. The phenomenon of private video archives seems to have more meaning through its very existence than through its function as repertory of information. To know that such a thing is preserved on a video cassette can be calming. One feels relieved of the tension one experiences in consigning an event to one's memory."43 On the one hand Egoyan's installation is a development of this pointed com-

mentary. Its origin in a short "home movie" (an extract?) dedicated to Arshile, Egoyan's young son: first smiles, first words, first curiosities, first seduction, first spankings. The shot is framed as close as possible to the face, and closer to the eyes whose intermittent agitation evokes something mechanical. The video image is transferred to the filmstrip. This is projected on a screen achieving, like a childish toy train, a voyage in the space, materializing its repetitive duration by looping.44 The filmstrip passes in front of the screen, struck by the very image with which it is printed; "the projection of the image on its very support," one wants to paraphrase in thinking of another famous ensemble that conjugates transparency and time (the delay) in painting.45 A "monadic film" of a single shot submitted to "repetition and variation," showing "at the same time the transparency of monadological perception and its essential opacity," the infinite play of "little unfeeling perceptions and other lightning flashes in a mirror."46 The mobility of the film-strip "plays" with the active- ness of Arshile's eyes. And suddenly we think that cinema is the gaze which follows the images and which loses sight of their passage to the profit of the illusion of the reproduced reality. The gaze on the film is thus a delay, Egoyan thus shows in his film deployed in the space of an architecture, which, suddenly, resolves the other question raised above: what to do with the family archive?

The act of filming Arshile's birth was accompanied by a tension that was not unfamiliar to me. Often, when I shoot my own films, I am over- taken by panic in wondering how something will be interpreted, or most often, misinterpreted. And there, in shooting a very intimate subject, I felt the same anxiety. But who goes to see a document? Who is the source of the pressure?47

43. Egoyan, Trafic 10, p. 108 44. The filmic eternity is a function of the inexhaustible mechanics and the semi-eternality of the repetition: the always identical "new" and this relation to death that hides there: repetition compulsion. Youssef Ishaghpour, L'Ange, Cinema contemporain, de ce cote du miroir (Paris: La Differance, 1986), p. 323. 45. This is Duchamp's Bride Stripped Bare, which he called a "delay in glass." Trans. 46. Christine Buci-Glucksman, "Drole de pensee touchant Leibniz et le cinema," 7rafic 8 (Fall 1993), pp. 76-77. "The shot puts together what Leibniz dreamed of in his shadow theater: the vision and the voice, the image and the rhythm, a little like those Proustian shots where the event crosses and laces together visual and temporal series in concentric circles or in spirals." 47. Egoyan, Trafic 10, p. 108.

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The reply is carried by the present installation: the pressure comes from the spectator-visitors, the museal flaneurs who will discover the staged exhibition of the familial document, its projection in the public space. Thus the projection is what gives meaning to what was nothing but "private documentation," as Egoyan still says, in becoming at the same time "a projection of social behavior of my son's

generation in relation to the ritual of that very private documentation." Which is to say that the filming of his child, "the natural desire to film one's

fanily," is basically not so natural and innocent an act as it seems. Egoyan remarked once again in the same gripping text:

Just as the largest part of the process of psychoanalysis consists in trying to recover certain events of one's personal history, perhaps in a rather near future, one will turn toward an epoch where a type of entirely new analysis will become current. Will we examine videocassettes looking for traces that will say more than is apparently shown? It is not incon- ceivable that the way in which these basic moments of family life are recorded be submitted to the same deepened aesthetic analysis as the scene conceived by professionals.

Beyond the passage of domestic video to the public world, from amateurism to professionalism, from archive to fiction, something else is at stake that we could characterize as a choreographic approach of the ego, as Rosalind Krauss says in relation to the works of Bruce Nauman, which she described as an interminable distantia- tion of the ego that, however, never escapes from it.48 We could thus interpret the Egoyan installation Early Development: the body of the spectator is absorbed by the triple effect of darkness, by the perspective drawn by the film strip hung in the room that redoubles the light beam of projection, and finally, by the strip itself that passes by as close as possible to the screen, forcing the visitor-spectator to draw near to the screen. But the absolute mystery remains, the precision of the facial features of the child-the ego at the source-is distanced because of the video grain seen close-up as a result of the attention devoted to the passage of the

48. Rosalind Krauss, "Nouvelles technologies, enjeux et perspectives," Parachute 84 (October-November 1996), p. 52.

Above and facing page: Atom Egoyan. Early Development. 1997.

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IR_ V ^ single strip fogging the vision of the large screen.

^14 ^ d ^ Moreover, the strip redoubles against the screen the striations of the surface of the cathode-screen. The video web, "distanced" by its transfer to film, makes its metaphorical return against the web of the strip "zig zagging" before the screen, additional cause of the constant distancing that the visitor-spectator, like

* the artist, doesn't reduce despite "his nose glued to the screen."

v^1 *^3~ ^^9^^~ ~Jean-Pierre Bertrand

To close in on the image is a current fan-

Jp^v ^ tasy of film lovers. Aren't they familiar with the front rows of film theaters? To be in the image, to lose oneself in it, to be surrounded by it, is not a desire foreign to the incarceration, to

AB 3Mj ^~ ^ the forgetting of the world: to substituting for dl_ ^ ~ 4\ tthis latter its illusion. In Les Carabiniers (1963),

_B , ,^ \ Jean-Luc Godard gives life to the brutal experience of one of his two heroes, Michel-Ange. For wanting to see too much on and in the image, the choreographic approach of the ego of the Carabinier ends in the depths of an orchestra pit. Haggard, shaken, and exhausted, Michel-Ange then turns around, his

B ^Hp ' body become the opaque screen for the

images of the film that continues to run. There was the very painful test of confronting the

luminous source of projection "at the risk of vision," as Hubert Damisch said one day in prefacing a fine exhibition in Marseille.49 For Damisch, the cinema has been, biographically, a violence against vision. In his installation, Jean-Pierre Bertrand takes this violence literally. For him as well, "vision never proceeds without risk" and "its operation could eventually turn around against itself." Moreover, "the new and multiplied ways that film has opened for the scopic drive have only been (and haven't been able to be) a risk of blindness."50 To film the sun, to look

49. Peinture, cinema, peinture, ed. Germain Viatte (Paris: Hazan, Musees de Marseille, 1990). Hubert Damisch thus introduces projection as a structural tie between cinema and painting (p. 25). 50. Ibid., p. 26.

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at the projector, to confront the sun-machines well before the invention of the cinema, since the thirteenth century were conceived to observe the sun. Before Roger Bacon (1214-1294), astronomers underwent the burning experience of not guarding against the sun in wanting to observe it. This monk imagined a screen on which to project the light rays in order to study them without fear.51 Bertand has conceived a machine worthy of these very sophisticated arrange- ments of the Renaissance scholars, as if they had been gifted with contemporary technology. But the technological difference is not the major one. Bertrand's "tower" is imaginatively and symbolically a "Leonardesque" machine that organizes the encounter of vision and sun as if the artist wanted to verify this certainty of Rodin: "Beauty quickly changes, almost like a landscape that cease- lessly modifies the setting of the sun."

Through this unexpected version of a "Kaiser-panorama," which forces on the spectator a seated, immobile, and uncomfortable viewing position (always this memory of Plato and Diderot) and to which is added the dazzle of a facing projector that upsets the perception of the images, Bertrand offers a paradoxical filmed performance: to film "handheld," to achieve in walking the panoramic views (from which the nature of the installation that evokes certain optical curiosities of the nineteenth century), to encounter one's shadow, to confront the sun which is the cause of it, to show the world as installation. Thing, lights, and shows will already be filmed images and the sun will be the primordial projector of them. The world not filmable but already filmed, already representation, already projection. Bertrand's "tower," paradoxical lighthouse whose beams spend their energy at the inside of its column, achieves another dream, this one modern, well distanced from Diderot's pictorial fantasy but as upsetting, the photo-projective ecstasy of Robert Smithson:

The sun's light filmed the site, making the bridge and the river an over- exposed image. When I photographed it with an Instamatic 400, this was as if I photographed a photograph. The sun became a monstrous bulb that projected a series of still images detached against my Instamatic until inside my eye. When I passed over the bridge, it was as if I walked on an enormous photograph made of wood and steel, and above the river there was like an enormous film that only showed an empty image.52

Projection is a form of hypnosis. Conceptual artists such as Smithson, Bertrand, or, in a way still different and at the same time related, James Turrell, exhibit the maladjustments of vision, in the sense of "having a vision." Would Bertrand then suggest another transport, forgotten until now, escaping from reason, toward unknown regions of the sensory-motor rupture that Bertrand's

51. Mannoni, Le Grand Art, p. 17. 52. In Regis Durand, Le Temps de l'image (Paris: La Differance, 1995), p. 164.

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projective incarceration translates: "the mental dazzlement," hallucination, mad blinding?

Alain Fleischer

This artist, pedagogical formulator of the National Studio of Contemporary Arts-as it was habitual in the 1930s to confer the places of training to artists-has experimented since the end of the 1970s with projective films, ideally conceived as rebuses and linguistic instruments, to adopt once more the expression of Michel Foucault.53

Fleischer and his Golden Prisons is in a dialogue with Bertrand. In another "hallucinating" manner, Fleischer attracts the spectator-flaneur into a labyrinth. At the fairs, it is the mirror reflections that multiply the dead ends of a labyrinth, often called a galerie des glaces. With Fleischer, it is the projections that distract the gaze and the understanding. Many films are projected onto screens that bear mirrors on part of their surface, thus sending part of the projected image onto other screens. It is to say in this way "the exchangism" that sets in between the narrative of the films, true extractions and incrustations that Fleischer operates at the end stage of the representation and not at the initial stage of the recording, the shooting. Very canny the character who dreamed himself as definitively belonging to his film! Projection surpasses its passive role of transporting the image; it doesn't only set forth images, it sets them up. As a result, the embryonic stories are "ruined" because of the paradoxical fact of too much narrativity-which results from the intrusion of images from one film into another, but which on the other hand confers on each of them too narrow a fictional quality. The filmic fragment sent back to the space reserved for its reception in the frame of another film makes one suddenly conscious of the narrative incarceration of ordinary fictions.

"This crossover of stories, this undermining of the rule of editing and of the narrative limit" (Fleischer) results from catoptric procedures whose origins one could rediscover very exactly in the theories of Renaissance physicists. In his Magiae naturalis, the Italian physicist Giovanni Battista Della Porta (1540-1615) describes the experience that consists of making an "image hanging in the air by means of a mirror" appear.54 The apparatus imagined by Della Porta is a touching ancestor of Fleischer's "pursuit of images": darkroom, tilted mirrors, image painted on translucent paper lit from behind by the sun or by a fire, throwbacks of the image, optical "billiard"... : The image is "thrown into the air and separated from everything," Della Porta concludes. Fleischer's installation is programmed by

53. In 1980, at the Paris Biennale, Fleischer presented installations conceived throughout the 1970s: Gone with the Wind, and yet it still moves, the projected image of a filmed projector. 54. Mannoni, Le Grand Art, p. 29.

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Alain Fleischer. Golden Prisons. 1997.

an ancient history of representation. But it is even more a true hinge between past and present. How is one not to dream, in staring at these fictional transfers of an image however finished in appearance to another image-transfer of characters, transfer of bodies extracted from their setting, reversed in the film as this happens in printing-how is one not to dream of video incrustation, of digital metamorphoses of the images of contemporary fiction, of morphing and other simulations? No cybernetics, no software, nor numerical matrix with Fleischer; only the very archaic catoptric procedure. The present is spoken by the past. No eternal return, but rather, again, this haunting "constellation," described by Benjamin, of Past and Now.

This structural homology of procedures, between catoptics and cybernetics, doesn't only affect the images. It "computes" all the communication of messages today. Something in Fleischer's installation asks me to define it as a "hyper-film," as we say a "hyper-text," which is to say a film exposed to constant deformation, to permanent rectification, to continual addition, to the accumulating weaving of images, in the way the Internet weaves and accumulates data.

A projecting film the vision of which would be the projection, the way the reading of a text on a Web site consists above all of a written intervention that enriches it. An act of vision that would be an act of projection the way an act of reading in "the Net" today is an act of writing. A hybrid film submitted to a continual mechanization, so much does its memory-the images recorded on the film- exhibit itself to reception, within a reserve negotiated in the frame in effect of images

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belonging to other films. Jean-Louis Boissier noticed one day how interactivity was more a new means for artists to manipulate the public than an increase in its partici- pation in a spectacle. In this sense, the films installed by Fleischer are interactive.55

Technical information will not grant mastery and freedom with regard to new technologies of communication. On the other hand, projection conceived with a poetic and "critical" apparatus grants artists with a political responsibility. This is the obvious "message" of Fleischer's Golden Prisons.

Fleischer and Snow are the only two artists who, in the exhibition, minimize the machine. And by contrast to the other installations, one has the right to won- der where the projection machines have gone with Fleischer, to such an extent is the customary bias of modern artists, as we have seen, to "show the process." In fact, it is the whole installation that is a projector, generalized to the full scale of the room and of the representation. In the apparatus put to work by Fleischer the mirrors receive a "delegation" on behalf of the projectors and prolong the luminous action. In these Golden Prisons, projection becomes fallacy and aberration. It is not surprising that in fact it was invented in a prison.56 Reflections become projections; the film theater is the projector, and the spectator revolves inside it.

Recently, Jean-Louis Schefer questioned the absence of representation of the human body in the cave paintings of paleolithic art.57 Other darkrooms, other projections.... Schefer hypothesized that the cave is the human body that frames the group of the figures; the human body is the interpretant by exceeding its sole figurative function. "Humanization is not in the approximative human figures; it is not of a graphic but of a topographic kind," Schefer says.58 Fleischer's installation, another cave,59 decidedly deserves its name: the spectator is imprisoned with the images, at the very interior of a projection machine, amid its mirrors and its fires, "development and interior of a huge body [of a huge apparatus] which frames, contains, multiplies and 'interprets' all the possible figurations."60 For Fleischer, the projection of images thus creates an interpretant space.

Michael Snow

As in the projective cave of Alain Fleischer, the presence of projectors is not a priority in Michael Snow's work. Two Sides to Every Story (TSES) (1974) is a

55. Third Lyon Biennale, 1995. 56. See above, the text byJean-Luc Godard. 57. Jean-Louis Schefer, Cahiers du Musee national d'art moderne, p. 5. This text is the development of a first approach in Trafic 3 (Summer 1992). 58. This hypothesis is drawn from the work of the structuralist ethnographerJean-Louis Gourhan. See translator's note. 59. Flashes of images, escaping and weaving, outside the frames set up to receive the images, the walls of the scenographic cube containing the installation. 60. J.-L. Schefer, Cahiers du Musee national d'art modere, pp. 28-29.

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historical installation, the oldest of the projects of this exhibition.61 Snow shares with Fleischer a precedent status in contemporary art from the point of view of the use of projected light within museum space. To clarify my thinking and avoid provoking envious retorts, I want to designate a certain type of projective installation, midway between fiction, visual figuration, and language, defined in the first part of this essay.

In general, Snow doesn't display particular fascination for the mechanico- machinic aspects within his installations. TSES was thus described in 1978: "simultaneous projection of two films on two sides of a screen hung in the midst of a room making use of the simultaneously opaque and transparent nature of the filmic material in a series of variations on reality and illusion of a represented space."62 Undeniably correct description, precise and above all complete, which nonetheless displaces, in all good faith, the exact point on which Snow works, because it is the screen, essentially the screen, more than an abstract filmic material, which is Snow's burden. The screen however being, in short, nothing but the surface of an apparatus, of a fleeting impression. But a screen that finally permits here, in this installation, to satisfy the curiosity of the Carabinier Michel-Ange: to cross and see behind the screen, to take literally ("au pied de l'oeil," we should say) the perspectivist illusion of the photocinematographic image, to cross the screen so as to penetrate the depth beyond the screen and tear it if necessary. And it is necessary! It is this that Snow invites in granting as an "actress" to us another walking woman,63 to achieve, according to many illusionistic experiences between reality and representation and some rituals that recall those of Robert Morris, the decisive and cutting act of Lucio Fontana: to slice the screen-fabric, to show the absence beyond what the illusionistic strengths of painting dissimulate.64 But Snow's aim is obviously slyer. It is less to deconstruct or disillusion that interests him. An earlier modernity- Mondrian, Pollock, Newman, Fontana, "minimal" art-are already at work on

61. Except for Michael Snow and Jozef Robakowski, the artists have suggested original works (produced by the National Studio of Contemporary Art in Le Fresnoy), based on the "mandatory" theme of the exhibition. The artists have been chosen based on knowledge of their earlier work, which led to their being invited to participate in the exhibition. 62. Pierre Theberge, Michael Snow (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1978), p. 9. 63. At the end of the 1960s, a series of urban, sculptural, and photographic interventions consisted of setting in the street a stylized profile of a walking woman. 64. Painting plays an important role in Snow's performance-installation: bombast, painted target.

Above and facing page: Michael Snow. Two Sides to Every Story. 1974.

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that. With Snow, one "lost illusion" may start up another. After the "actress" has torn the screen, she reappears from the other side; a second fiction projected on the reverse of the screen takes up the relay, in the most athletic sense of the word. Suddenly, the spectator is led to move past his supposed "knowledge" about the filmic illusion. As imprisoned and frozen [meduse] as the Carabinier Michel-Ange, he leaps to the other side of the screen and, filled by this unwonted transgression of the laws of representation, the screen not melting away as in Godard's film, he links up, he ascends a narrative and spatial becoming that substitutes itself for his desires. The illusion continues behind the screen. The story continues after the word "End." The spectator joins, ascends by passing from the front to the back side of the screen. The filmic material is thus sent in its totality to the screen. The editing that organizes this material for the main part is no longer the result of a

succession that unreels from an end-to-end juncture of two filmic and temporal segments.65 The editing here is a matter of simultaneity, of the synchronism of indepen- dent temporal sequences, projected outside of all collage. It is in space that this simultaneity operates, with difficulty by the way, so much must the spectator act promptly to solder the end of

the right-side sequence to the opening of the reverse-side sequence. It is a temporal as much as spatial connection. It is the screen, its hair-fine thickness that is the seal. A seal that one could define dialectically: optical opacity--the screen is not transparent-and fictive transparency-the two sequences join up. It is by this putting the screen to the test insofar as it is a second machine for the projected image, complementary to the projector, that Snow joins up with Fleischer, but according to a more conceptual than poetical project. TSES is central within the work of the Canadian artist. Before I evoked the hair-fine thickness of the screen on which it invited the spectator to meditate, but I must add that a large part of this work is attached to the question of illusionism in art.66 In 1979 Snow summarized this as follows:

Two Sides to Every Story implies a visual skepticism. I compared the thinness of the filmic image of light on a surface to that of painting or of

65. "A film is truly linear," Snow said in 1979, in a fatalistic but not resigned manner (Michael Snow, p. 43). 66. From the crushed breakfast table (7able Top Dolly, 1972-76) to the holograms and to his master- piece, Wavelength (1966-67).

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ink. Its lack of substance moves me because it re-creates our way of seeing when light strikes a surface. I try to underscore this thinness that results from the compression of three-dimensional objects, of individu- als, etc., onto a two-sided object. I examine there as much the mystery of the light as the reduction of illusion of the depth that can be strong if one faces the image but weakens as soon as one shifts position and changes one's point of view. Viewed from the side, the image becomes more and more flat, more and more thin and one sees the illusion there more than the realism.67

It is the illusion of the world for which Snow is passionate, more than for the world itself. That being said, this latter can benefit, to be better understood, from such an entertainment.

Two Sides to Every Story is a piece that takes on another aspect of projection and its effects.

The transport of the image barely preoccupies Snow. For him the projective installation constitutes instead a privileged apparatus to upset the metonymic fate of the story made up of moving images.68 This is what Pierre Th6berge cannily noticed in one of his questions put to Snow: representation of simultaneous temporal states or clearly narrative contents?69 The filmmaker of La Region centrale deliberately took the side of simultaneity against succession, if one can thus place and schematize an aesthetic for which the dialectic ambition is not the least fea- ture. But I make this over-crude hypothesis in order to suggest a stake that exceeds this contradiction, this latter being able, however, itself alone, to justify the best of experimental film aesthetically.

This stake opens onto the nature of the time to which the projected moving image gives rise and which Snow's installation tried precociously to translate the crystalline complexity within it, at the very moment when Gilles Deleuze was thinking this same temporality turned into image. In this sense, one can consider that simultaneity/successivity contradiction that forms the unity of Two Sides to Every Story, equivalent to the unity formed by the actual image and "its" virtual image in Deleuze. Snow in fact looks, beyond the ordinary simultaneity of sound-image, for a more mental simultaneity:

The memory of a past thing put in the mind of the spectator can offer another kind of simultaneity. That also applies to Rameau 's Nephew ... within which each section is so different from every other that the apprehension or the comprehension of the past moment can be modified by the one where you find yourself and the one you have just left. It produces in the mind a layering of individual things.70

67. Michael Snow, p. 40. 68. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). 69. Michael Snow, p. 43. 70. Ibid.

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A remark that draws its full force if we associate it with the precedent where Snow insisted on the real and imaginary thinness of his double-faced screen. A remark that takes on still another force, if we relate it to this quote from Bergson to which Deleuze has recourse for the analysis of his crystals of time: "Every moment of our life thus offers two aspects: it is real and virtual, perception of one side and memory of the other."71

The spectator of Two Sides to Every Story basically conjugates simultaneity and succession, the recent past of a temporal segment interrupted on the reverse side and the present of a repeat of another segment on the front. Snow sets this "exchange between an actual image and a virtual image, the virtual becomes actual and conversely; and also there is exchange between the limpid and the opaque, the opaque becoming limpid and conversely; finally there is exchange between a seed and a context. I believe that the imaginary is this ensemble. The imaginary is the crystal image."72

If before I argued that Snow was little concerned with the transport of images, this is because, for him, this transport arises less from the spatial domain than from a temporal disquiet. The image projected in TSES forms an apparatus that unites the linkage and the reversibility, perception of one side and memory of the other, which is to say a transport of which the time leans toward its shortest possible duration, this having the thickness of the screen-cloth. Put otherwise, no longer a luminous transport, but a luminous virtual interface:

... the virtual image in its pure state is not defined in function of a new present in relation to which it will be (relatively) past, but in function of the actual present "of which" it is the past, absolutely and simultaneously: particular, it is nonetheless "past in general," in the sense that it has not yet received a date. Pure virtuality, it has only to actualize itself, since it is rigorously correlative of the actual image with which it forms the smallest possible circuit which serves as the base or the summit for all the others. It is the virtual image that corresponds to such and such actual image, instead of actualizing itself, to have to actualize itself in "another" actual image. It's a circuit walking an actual-virtual line, and not an actualization of the virtual in function of a shifting actual. It's an image-crystal, and not an organic image.73

From images that only exist because they are made of light, therefore images that are made of time: it was my opening hypothesis whose first stage of "verifica- tion" was of a literary nature. Michael Snow offers experience in visual and scenographic acts, performance as well to the initiative of the spectator-flaneur, of the relative, dialectic temporality, of the projected image, "critical" balcony of the

71. Henri Bergson, quoted by Gilles Deleuze, L'Image-temps, p. 106. 72. Deleuze, L'lmage-temps, pp. 106-07. 73. Ibid., p. 106

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future regimes of the image. Final illustration, if there is still need for one at the end of this visit, of the fact that the artists, if they don't prefigure the future-they are no more divine than other human beings-speak of future worlds before these arise. Why not call this statement, paradoxically both outmoded and utopian, a projection, a dreamy and poetic transport toward the future?

Article Contentsp. [23]p. 24p. 25p. 26p. 27p. 28p. 29p. 30p. 31p. 32p. 33p. 34p. 35p. 36p. 37p. 38p. 39p. 40p. 41p. 42p. 43p. 44p. 45p. 46p. 47p. 48

Issue Table of ContentsOctober, Vol. 110 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 1-130Front Matter [pp. 1 - 2]An Archival Impulse [pp. 3 - 22]Should We Put an End to Projection? [pp. 23 - 48]Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics [pp. 51 - 79]An Interview with Pierre Huyghe [pp. 81 - 106]No Ghost [pp. 107 - 130]Back Matter [pp. 49 - 50]

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