Published 03.10.2008
Although his influence cannot be overstated, with Doug Aitken,
Douglas Gordon, and Steve McQueen amongst his admirers, the
contemporary significance of James Coleman's work derives less from
this position as precursor than for the rigour with which it
interrogates its medium, and the challenges it poses for the
viewing experience of perhaps over-familiar black-box environments.
Background, 1991-1994 is the final instalment of a trilogy
of slide-tape projections shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art
in Dublin over the last three years (2006-08), following I N I
T I A L S (1993-94) in 2006 and Lapsus Exposure
(1992-94) in 2007. All three works use the same format and
presentation: projected slide images with synchronised audio
narration, running to minutes long. Whilst the earlier two are
staged in an abandoned hospital and a recording studio,
respectively, Background, 1991-1994 unfolds in one room of
a palaeontology laboratory, which serves as background and frame to
the slide by slide configurations, gestures and exchanges of what
we might hesitatingly call a love story involving four characters:
Tom, Joe, Jill and an unnamed second woman who might be the lover
of either one of the men.
Broadly speaking, all three works concern processes of
reconstruction and examination, the documentary potential of
photographic imagery and the uneasy proximity of voice and image;
but also, unavoidably, remembrance and the uncertain and
fascinating passage of the dead amongst the living. Yet the final
work also departs from the previous two by adding to allegories of
perception a greater attention to the intricate human relations
made possible (or impossible) by reproductive media.
Although the trilogy has not been shown in chronological order, the
end of Background suggests some resolution, at least insofar as the
characters line up for what resembles a restless curtain call. But
then this final shot itself quotes from Coleman's earlier
Living and Presumed Dead (1983-85), folding temporal
succession back upon itself, just as Background, 1991-1994
follows the intensity of each character's desires and so allows
their recollections of past loves and moments shared to emerge
simultaneously with what we take to be the narrative present.
Background, 1991-1994 opens as if photographically, 'in a
flash', with a narrator on the voice track stuttering out the need
to communicate. His subsequent assurances - 'it's ok ... it's ok…'
- emphasise the rupture of this event. Any hopes that as his voice
clears he might 'get a message across' fade into musings about the
echoes replying to his efforts, accompanied by the first slide
image, which consists of a broken cast lying on a palette in a
nondescript room. Such themes of non-communication and a growing
air of melancholy and ruination continue into the next sequence,
where we are introduced to the first of a number of frustrated
couplings: a love triangle and an accusation, perhaps tenuous, of
infidelity. Jill is accused of giving up Tom for Joe, although
apparently with little volition of her own. Tom, meanwhile, recalls
the happier times of his childhood friendship with Joe, describing
their rescue of a dying raven - which they released to fly on ahead
of them - and then the smell of fresh grass, a dark combination of
grotesquerie and cliché that mocks any affective investment in this
imagery even as it is invoked. The portentous bird suggests rather
that one listens here to the wistful recollections of ghosts.
Another dark presence in many slides is the skeleton of a
prehistoric sloth, another ruin and a clear symbol of the aphasia
said to afflict the melancholic.
As one becomes aware that this drama is set in a palaeontology
laboratory, one is reminded of other scenes in which spectral
lovers mixed and exchanged looks with the preserved specimens of
another time. Comparisons with Marker's La Jetée are perhaps
inevitable but, as Rosalind Krauss has observed, Coleman's use of
the still sequence, the voice-over and the visual conventions of
the photo-roman is without the narrative coherence and
suturing of Marker, the latter's work remaining far more cinematic
than photographic. This is not to suggest that Coleman does not
draw heavily from cinema: his secure and sparse framing of
vignettes is reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni and Yasujiro
Ozu; his concern with impossible recollection between lovers here
suggesting Alain Resnais. Coleman, however, does not seek to
'restore' the 'degraded' (i.e. commercialised) mediums of the
photo-roman and the slide-tape projection by rearticulating them
through a recognised art form - cinema - but rather derives a set
of conventions and unexpected possibilities from the material and
technical conditions of these mediums. For all its insistent
melancholy, then, there remains, for Krauss and others, something
of a promise in Coleman's work: the promise of renewed imagination
and fascination in the presentation of images in an image-saturated
environment.
After this opening sequence the coordinates of the love triangle
become difficult to maintain, as those parts of the voice-over
explicitly in the first-person are cast adrift, momentarily
snagging onto one character, then another, more often none at all,
but always issuing from within the images, never fully detached
from them. Although statements and visibilities are, for the most
part, exactly coterminous with one another, this rarely secures the
intelligibility of their correspondence: the voice-over provides no
continuity from one slide or sequence to the next, and the
stickiness of a familiar phrase or gesture only serves to increase
the tension of this correspondence. Nonetheless, largely deprived
of any diegetic horizon within which they would make sense, each
character's slightest gesture, posture or statement - however banal
or conventional, however lacking in pathos - undergoes extensive
allegorical dissemination perpendicular to the anticipated
unfolding of a narrative. In this way, ruins and ghosts are
'brought into the light', as the narrator states at one point, and
the burden of deciphering and interpretation rests with a viewer
engaged as participant. For all the closure of Coleman's work,
then, for all its apparent lack of participatory credentials, it is
quite uniquely generous. Yet although we might consider this one of
Coleman's most accessible works, encouraged by the few recognisable
motifs of an unfolding romance and betrayal, it is possible that
the work's accessibility derives not so much from the familiarity
of its motifs as from the fact that it places us in a direct
relationship with our own interpretive and affective responses to a
medium whose inherited structures of meaning have been destabilised
and made unreliable: just following a rather derisive consideration
of the possibility of union, where it is quite clear that what is
at stake is not only marriage bu also physical or sensory
connection ( 'eyes, tissues ... but they do not meet'), the
narrator seems to shif the terms of debate to the potential of any
such response: 'I could feel ... seeing.'
This being said, Background, 1991-1994 is also,
undoubtedly, a melancholy work. The next sequence concerns the
efforts of the two lovers, overlooked by the other 'couple', to
possess 'images to immortalise our love', a vain but familiar
desire to consign love to a repertoire of images and so secure the
union of those involved, if only in retrospect. The syllabic
spacing of 'im-mort-alise' stresses that what is at stake is
precisely that flat death, as Barthes once described
posing for a photograph. One could say that the piece as a whole
variously stages photography's commitment to death and memory. The
hubris with which we routinely define the photograph as document is
indicated when, after the suggestion that the lovers 'catalogue the
sections, the photos', that same voice states, more firmly, that
'Jill will not speak for the dead'. Likewise, the absurdity of
attempts to reanimate images through illusory movement is archly
shown when the characters are encouraged not to stand in front of
the sloth but to 'dance a-round'. This they appear to do, to the
accompaniment of the narrator's satisfied humming. This momentary
parodying of the cinematic is turned back upon the audience as they
wander around in front of the screen, themselves periodically
frozen in the slow flicker of the slide carousels, their movements
mirroring the dance of the shadows on screen. Jorge Luis Borges
ends the short story 'The Circular Ruins' with the sentence,
succinct as ever: 'With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he
understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another'.
Witnessing oneself amongst others enter into the 'labyrinth of
chimeras' that Background, 1991-1994 opens on to, to quote
Jean Fisher only slightly out of context, makes this sentence even
more compelling, with all its sentiments intact.
Background, 1991-1994 ends with a phrase uttered in
darkness, in the most solemn tones: 'And the black raven in its
glass case is moved, room to room'. Were it not for its absurd
melodrama, one might thread this statement back through all those
dark intervals between slides and voices, and trace the flight of
that raven that flew on ahead. But then again, one might do better
to laugh.
- Tim Stott
