Even if the Dead Speak and the Living Listen It is Still Not a Conversation: Sharon Switzer's Falling from Grace

The task at hand is a discussion of Sharon Switzer’s most recent body of work, Falling from Grace. I will approach these new works, even at the risk of performing the sin of a teleological reading, in light of her earlier work. My main argument is necessarily reductive, but I’ll try to embellish it with expansive bits of nonsense. I’m beginning with the assertion that Switzer has produced three distinct bodies of work that constitute a kind of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Falling from Grace is the synthesis. The first body of work: all image; the second body: all text; Falling from Grace: a synthesis of text and image — the images becoming more explicitly discursive, the text becoming increasingly visual.

Thesis

Switzer’s first body of work used various strategies to re-image the vintage photographs of women she had been avidly collecting. In 1997’s Waltzing in Now-time, Switzer employed a scanner to re-image her photographs. Rather than merely placing the photographs on the scanner bed, she held them. Her hands, pressed against the glass, are bright and fleshy as they obscure, reframe, touch and assert ownership over the individual photographs. The resulting images were further cropped into circles with a diameter of about one inch. These image discs were placed into metal holders that were in turn embedded into the adjoining walls, in a seemingly arbitrary pattern reminiscent of a constellation or rash.

Approaching the installation, one initially saw an array of silver metal discs, on closer inspection pink, round fingers and fingernails cast in the intense light and vivid (if shallow) focus of the flat-bed scanner, reproduced at about life-size. Then, on even closer inspection, whatever scrap of photograph was not obscured — generally a woman’s face — as a kind of background, flat and dead next to the vibrant flesh.

This particular installation has many of the hallmarks of Switzer’s work at the time — the flat-bed scanner used as a camera, simple digital manipulations, dispersion of the resulting fragments through abrupt reframing/cropping, followed by a gathering together of the fragments, either as a series, or constellated around an architectural space — a surface evisceration of fetishized images.

Switzer writes about her work in her M.F.A. thesis, with particular reference to Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. (And she writes about it extraordinarily well; one regrets she has not written more.)

Camera Lucida begins with the assertion that photographs are primarily indexical, that they bear the stamp of whatever was in front of the camera at that particular time. Barthes states, “It is as if the photograph always carries the referent within itself.” [2] This assertion, as many have noted, seems at odds with Barthes’ earlier, more rigorous semiotics. Certainly a sign, even one that is primarily indexical, could merely point to, or refer, to its referent, and not literally incorporate, or carry it within itself. But part of the charm, power and persuasiveness of Camera Lucida is that it abandons rigorous analysis and becomes a meditation on mortality and photography. Specifically, Barthes ruminates on a photograph of his mother as a child — the Winter Garden Photograph — as part of the process of mourning her recent death. From Laura Mulvey’s masterful new book, Death 24X a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image:

The question remains, the return of what dead? And for what ends? Although many photographs are reproduced in Camera Lucida, Barthes, famously, refuses to reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph.

Barthes’ wish seems reasonable enough — mourning is, after all, a ritual in which a great deal of privacy is sanctioned. Yet I can only imagine that I would be wounded by the photograph. (The work of Christian Boltanski, for instance, attests to the wounding power of anonymous, archival photographs.) Barthes has described the image, and embedded it within the kind of personal narrative that requires empathy of its listeners, so I find his refusal justified emotionally, but not in any other way. He is keeping the photograph to himself because it is not merely a photograph. It contains a trace of his mother and he wants that trace to be just for him.

One may say that all photographs, because of their indexical nature, are in the past tense, asserting in perpetuity, “this once was” while asserting in the given moment “this was now.” Still, in some photographs, the “this” that once was may have personal meaning for us, as in the case of family photographs. Artists use archival photographs in a variety of ways. Some mine the biographical specificity of images, either through some personal connection, or through social or historical research. Others leave the biographical specificity somewhat undetermined, but, through identifying social group affiliations, retain or generate an empathic, wounding power for the images (Boltanski). Others, by leaving both the biographical and social/historical referents of the photographs undetermined, generate a more generalized nostalgia, a decorative kind of mustiness. On occasion, Switzer’s work has been mistakenly seen in this light. One reviewer compared it — favourably! — to lavender potpourri. But Switzer is doing something much more interesting than merely using her archival images for their nostalgic prettiness. She is, in the language of Walter Benjamin from The Arcades Project, attempting to produce images dialectically:

Can the return of the dead in photographs be rendered dialectical? Only under certain conditions. Certainly not if the subject is known biographically; definitely not if the subject is your mother. The subjects in these archival photographs must be any-woman-whatever, which is not to say they are not prized for their individual attributes. As Switzer says in her thesis, “I am not interested in the personal, biographical history of any one of my photographs, and yet I am obsessed with the history that each presents.”

The historic photographs in Switzer’s collection are fetishized as objects, which necessarily involves the fetishization of the women depicted (the referent adheres). They become objects of desire through their singular, specific traits: a flower in a hat band, a mole that appears slightly displaced, or the slight strabismus that was apparently ubiquitous at the time. Despite their specificity, they are any-woman-whatever, stand-ins, place-holders in an endless chain of possible photographs and photographic subjects. They have no use for names or biographies. Of course, one prefers — desires, empathizes or identifies with—certain women and certain traits more than others, but there are always more.

Still, one must love each of these returned dead as a kind of de-biographized individual. If one were completely indifferent to the specificity of the referent, the photographic image would cease to operate indexically. This is the case in works where vintage photographs are used for their nostalgic flavour, as little wisps of slight uncanny potpourri. If it is completely irrelevant who is depicted, the photographic subjects begin to signify iconically rather than indexically. They no longer depict individuals, but types or abstractions, stand-ins for some concept or another.

All artists, I think, must make their own kinds of Winter Garden Photograph decisions, traversing the complexities of auto/biographical discourses. Switzer’s repeated encounter of the fetishized photographs and the artist’s hands on the glass surface of a flat-bed scanner played itself out and that particular body of work drew to a close.

Antithesis

I reproduce here the wall texts from Portraits (2003), the key piece from Switzer’s second body of work. The work consists of these texts, arranged spatially on the gallery wall as if they were portraits. The title works against the viewer’s tendency to read the texts as having a common narrator, as well as the inevitable suspicion that the narrator is the artist speaking confessionally.

It is the dead speaking here, and not just any dead: the any-women-whatever from Switzer’s first body of work find voice, though at the apparent expense of making a visual appearance. And, as with all sado-masochistic relationships, the interaction takes place between the living and the dead.

Synthesis

Let’s begin by describing the individual works in Falling from Grace.

Fall

Fall initially appears as a simple image of heavy rain falling into a body of water, shot from perhaps a 60 degree angle, giving the surface of the water a table-like solidity. There is also something about the image (from a distance) that is reminiscent of early, silent cinema: it is monochromatic, as if black-and-white stock were treated with a tincture of Prussian blue, and it appears to be in the midst of an iris fade, that most common of silent cinema transitions. The camera doesn’t move, nothing (apart from rain) enters or leaves the frame, the oval bright spot — iris — does not shrink or expand. Yet the image is constantly changing.

It changes in two distinct registers: the pro-filmic and the filmic. The simplest of these changes are the pro-filmic. The changes we see are, presumably, changes that occurred in the world in front of the camera as the camera was rolling. In this case, the camera merely recorded whatever changes were taking place in front of it: shifting intensities of rain, of waves and of light. From within the pro-filmic register, the image is likely to be read as a quiet, slightly melancholy, meditation on nature.

On approaching the image, spending some time with it, things become more complex. The image gets chunky, and not with analog film grain, that most pleasant and comforting of visual noises, but with something decidedly digital. Moreover, the “digitalness” of the image, its chunkiness, is in constant flux. This is the second type of change the image undergoes, and it is a far more destabilizing one than the pro-filmic. These changes are in the register of the filmic; the material we are actually seeing, in front of us, without regard to origin or reference. In fact, they throw into doubt the very existence of the pro-filmic event we initially presumed we were witnessing. Could it be that the entire image is computer generated? Or, is it simply that images of rain were processed, digitally manipulated? We search the image for visual clues as to its ontological status. What are we looking at? Where did it come from? How was it made? There remains something mesmerizing about it. Whatever it is, it still seems to have many of the soothing qualities of rain falling. Perhaps the image is generated from a computer model of rain, some complex algorithm, undoubtedly incorporating chaos theory, which can replicate rain falling into a body of water. This image, then, would have a mathematical, scientific truth in excess of a simple film — indexical record — of rain falling.

And what about the spotlight? It seems to gently ironize the whole proceeding. It is, after all, a spotlight on nothing in particular: one assumes the rain drops more or less evenly on the entire surface of the water and that there is no particular reason for choosing this particular spot, this particular shot, over another. The particular framing, then, is arbitrary: any other chunk of water could be substituted. Still, the camera — if there was a camera — must choose a particular vantage point: the scene must be framed. The spotlight, functioning as it does as a kind of double framing mechanism, foregrounds the arbitrariness of the image’s framing.

So, the world may or may not exist, and the rain may or not be rain. Still, we can rest assured that we know from where the rain falls: from grace. In her text works, the basic unit Switzer works with is, generally, the sentence. Text on paper will be a single sentence, text on screen, likewise. There are, of course, other choices for working with text as image. One could work instead with the letter, syllable, word, paragraph, etc. as the basic visual unit.

In the works that feature multiple sentences, the question arises as to how individual sentences are related. In much of Switzer’s work there is a tension between the paragraph, which would suggest a particular narrator and situation, and the list, in which utterances are more dispersed and not necessarily attributable to a particular narrator speaking of a particular thing. Hope is the least dispersed, most paragraph-like of her multi-sentence works, so I present it below reconstituted as a paragraph. Like all of the pieces of Falling from Grace, Hope is constructed from familiar materials. The text hovers between the confessional (as a paragraph) and a mere recitation of clichés (if seen as a list).

As a work of motion graphics, it the most complex of the Falling from Grace series. The basic image is a desert night scene, a traveling scene, presumably from a car. It is unclear whether it is a series of stills or a video image. These images are beautiful, blandly evocative in the manner of cinematically familiar landscapes: this is a place in which something might happen, but it is unclear what that thing might be. Intruding on this image is a shape that rotates clockwise, a kind of foreshortened plinth of light, greenish. It sweeps the visual field, somewhat like radar. Its path is, of course, circular. Although the shape has some indication of depth (the foreshortening) it is more or less flat and operates as a purely graphic element that interrupts the surface of the image.

The sentences are animated in a way that is referred to as “rubber-banding” — as if each individual letter were attached to a rubber band that operates at a ninety degree angle to the picture plane.

Heaven

This is the simplest piece of the series: text over a slowly moving image of a lovely cloudy sky. The sentences here are a list, each item beginning “I once won a free trip to heaven” (zooms out) and ending with a feeble excuse for why the prize was not claimed “but I couldn’t get anyone to water my plants” (zooms in). The tension here is between a kind of lame populist humour, laced with a kind of psychologizing moralism masquerading as inspiration, and the possibility that something sincere is being expressed. In other words, the piece, like its companion Gravity, hovers between a sweet, subtle satire and the more horrible specter of kitsch as a bearer of truth. (Who’s laughing now.)

Gravity

The background image here is the kitsch equivalent to Fall, one of those signs one finds in bars: a waterfall with rotating lights that make it appear as if the water is falling. It is a crude animation in the form of a lamp, or a beer advertisement. (I’ve been informed the waterfall image comes from a gold-framed back-lit image with rotating coloured cellophane, to which Switzer added any clips of small sections of Niagara Falls to make the cellophane Falls look more real.) The image plays endlessly, with no beginning or end. A relentless series of short sentences — advice and inspiration — cycle through the screen.

Little Town Blues

A video is seen though a round magnifying lens placed on a wooden box. It is a snow globe of Manhattan that is wound and shaken. Snow falls, “New York, New York” plays. The camera seems stationary, but the image shakes — violently at first (to get the snow going) and then slightly as it falls. The Statue of Liberty seems to be on Fifth Avenue, but these inaccuracies just make the city more iconic. Reminiscent of Waltzing in Now-time, the hand which shakes the globe intrudes into the circular picture plane, in front of the globe. Also as in Waltzing, there is no background: the snow globe fills the entire frame.

A New Song

This is a video/sculpture like Little Town Blues. Two yellow mechanical birds are placed on a floral cloth and, facing each other at about a 150 degree angle, chatter away. They are shot from various angles and distances. The shots leisurely fade together. It is an apparently endless, amiable conversation. It may be a new song, but as it is also an empty song. With no beginning or end, no resolution or outcome possible, this is pure repetition, and as such the song is a form without the possibility of carrying content.

The animating force behind Falling from Grace is, in fact, animation. Or, more specifically, the figural, a concept D. N. Rodowick adopts from Jean-Francois Lyotard in his (Rodowick’s) Reading the Figural, or Philosophy After the New Media. The figural is the force that erodes the distinctions between image and text, between looking and speaking. It makes images speak; it opens them into discourse. It spatializes text, placing it in the visual realm. For Rodowick, the figural is, pardoning the pun, the animating force behind motion graphics, animation, and new media.

Rodowick — following Eisenstein’s wish to “blow up the Chinese Wall that stands between the primary antithesis of the ‘language of logic’ and the ‘language of images’” — presents the current opposition between text and image as an emerging parallel to Enlightenment rationalism.

Lyotard theorizes the figural as aligned with desire. It is neither primarily spatial (image) nor discursive (text) but a force that erodes those very distinctions. He disagrees with Lacan’s assertion that the unconscious is structured like a language. Instead he returns to Freud’s comparison of the dream to a rebus, a puzzle that combines visual and linguistic representations.

Switzer’s impetus in her first body of work, as exemplified by Waltzing in Now-Time, was not to get the women in the photographs to speak. Rather, it was to give voice to her own desires with, against and through the magic fetish objects, the photographs and their still-adhering referents, the dead any-women-whatevers. It is easy enough to ventriloquize, but Switzer’s goal has always been a full, true articulation. That is, an articulation that understands meaning as something that cannot be limited to the linguistic. “Every discourse is haunted by the perspective that in order to mean, it must refer. Indexicality means that discourse is shot through with the visible: the énoncé must point beyond its borders to objects positioned in space with respect to it.” [9]

Like many (most?) artists, Switzer merely wants to articulate her desire, her place in the world, but her images would not speak and her words would not point to any solid referent. Her solution, then, was to empty out the discourse and empty out the images and put them together; to skate along the edges of kitsch and cliché, and open up a space in which the figural might begin to operate.

Bibliography

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982).

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, (Boston: Belknap Press, 2002).

Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Chris Gehman and Steve Reinke, eds., The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema (Toronto: YYZ Books, 2005).

Rachel Moore, Hollis Frampton: (nostalgia) (London, Los Angeles: Afterall Books, 2006).

Laura Mulvey, Death 24X a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).

Jean-Michel Rabaté, ed., Writing the Image After Roland Barthes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).

D.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or Philosophy After the New Media (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

Sharon Switzer, Waltzing in Now-time: the unlikely event of a correspondence between

Barthes, Benjamin, Proust and my mother, M.F.A. thesis (University of Western Ontario, 1997).