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OCTOBER

FILES

JAMES COLEMAN

5

JAMES COLEMAN

OCTOBER FILES Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, George Baker, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Leah Dickerman, Hal Foster, Denis Hollier, Mignon Nixon, and Malcolm Turvey, editors

Richard Serra, edited by Hal Foster with Gordon Hughes Andy Warhol, edited by Annette Michelson Eva Hesse, edited by Mignon Nixon Robert Rauschenberg, edited by Branden W. Joseph James Coleman, edited by George Baker

JAMES COLEMAN

edited by George Baker

essays by Raymond Bellour, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Lynne Cooke, Jean Fisher, Luke Gibbons, Rosalind Krauss, Anne Rorimer, and Kaja Silverman

OCTOBER FILES 5 The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. All images, diagrams, and quotations from the artist’s works © James Coleman. All rights reserved. This book was set in Bembo by Graphic Composition, Inc., Athens, Georgia, and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data James Coleman / edited by George Baker ; essays by Raymond Bellour . . . [et al.]. p. cm. — (October files ; 5) Includes index. ISBN 0-262-02541-8 (hc. : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-262-52341-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Coleman, James, 1941– —Criticism and interpretation. 2. Conceptual art— Ireland. I. Baker, George (George Thomas), 1970 – II. Bellour, Raymond. III. Coleman, James, 1941– IV. Series. N6797.C585J36 2003 700'.92—dc21 2003043640

Contents

Series Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Anne Rorimer

James Coleman 1970–1985 (1985)

Jean Fisher

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman (1983)

Jean Fisher

57

Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE (1993)

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

37

The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead ) (1996)

Luke Gibbons

19

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman (1983)

Raymond Bellour

1

73

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux: James Coleman’s Archaeology of Spectacle (1995)

Lynne Cooke

A Tempered Agnosia (1992)

Kaja Silverman

Live Vocals (2002)

139

113

83

vi

Contents

Rosalind Krauss

“. . . And Then Turn Away?” (1997)

Rosalind Krauss

Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph (1999)

Index of Names

211

185

157

Series Preface

OCTOBER Files addresses individual bodies of work of the postwar period that meet two criteria: they have altered our understanding of art in significant ways, and they have prompted a critical literature that is serious, sophisticated, and sustained. Each book thus traces not only the development of an important oeuvre but also the construction of the critical discourse inspired by it. This discourse is theoretical by its very nature, which is not to say that it imposes theory abstractly or arbitrarily. Rather, it draws out the specific ways in which significant art is theoretical in its own right, on its own terms and with its own implications. To this end we feature essays, many first published in OCTOBER magazine, that elaborate diﬀerent methods of criticism in order to elucidate diﬀerent aspects of the art in question. The essays are often in dialogue with one other as they do so, but they are also as sensitive as the art to political context and historical change. These “files,” then, are intended as primers in signal practices of art and criticism alike, and they are oﬀered in resistance to the amnesiac and antitheoretical tendencies of our time. The Editors of OCTOBER

Acknowledgments

Many of the essays in this collection have been revised or expanded for republication here, in some cases quite significantly. “James Coleman 1970– 1985” by Anne Rorimer was originally published in James Coleman: Selected Works (Chicago and London: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and ICA London, 1985). “The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman” by Jean Fisher first appeared in Open Letter 5–6 (Summer-Fall 1983). Her essay “The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman” was published as an eponymous catalog (Londonderry, Northern Ireland: The Orchard Gallery, 1983). “The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead)” by Raymond Bellour was originally published as “Les morts vivants (Living and Presumed Dead)” in James Coleman (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996) and has since been collected in Bellour’s L’Entre-Images 2 (Paris: P.O.L, 1999). “Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE” by Luke Gibbons first appeared in Artforum 32, no. 4 (December 1993) and has since been collected in Gibbons’s Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork:Cork University Press, 1996). “Memory Lessons and History Tableaux: James Coleman’s Archaeology of Spectacle” by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh was first published in James Coleman: Projected Images, 1972–1994 (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1995) and has since been collected in Buchloh’s Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). “A Tempered Agnosia” by Lynne Cooke first appeared in James Coleman (Lyons: Musée d’art contemporain, 1992). “Live Vocals” by Kaja Silverman is an expanded version of one of four essays on Coleman published by the author in an exhibition catalog for the Lenbachhaus Munich, entitled James Coleman (Ostfildern-Ruit:

x

Acknowledgments

Hatje Cantz, 2002). “. . . And Then Turn Away?” by Rosalind Krauss was first published in James Coleman (Vienna and Brussels: Wiener Secession and Yves Gevaert, 1997); the current version then appeared in October 81 (Summer 1997). Her “Reinventing the Medium: Introduction to Photograph” was published in a preliminary version as “First Lines: Introduction to Photograph” in James Coleman (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1999); its current version includes passages from Krauss’s essay “Reinventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry 25 (Winter 1999). The editor wishes to thank Hal Foster for his support, Roger Conover, Paula Woolley, and Matthew Abbate for their assistance and expertise, Lisa Pasquariello for last-minute aid, and the authors for their willingness to participate in this project and to reexamine essays long since sent to publication. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Kaja Silverman for the intensity of her reexamination, a “communication” that has opened up a dialogue with transformative eﬀects upon the editor’s own work. Thanks are also due to Rachel Haidu for inspired assistance in the task of translation, to Sarah Pierce and Gerard Byrne for facilitating travel to Ireland, and to James Coleman and Aebhric Coleman for making this publication a possibility in every other way. The editor was also supported in this endeavor by a Faculty Support Grant from the State University of New York at Purchase.

JAMES COLEMAN

Projections, 1958–71 Two projected 8 mm color films, silent, profile spot, pastel drawing. Studio installation, Milan.

James Coleman 1970–1985 Anne Rorimer

In 1968 James Coleman began to assimilate in his work a recognition that “art can never totally be reduced to a concept of simple acts of selfexpression.”1 From his first exhibited pieces of 1970 to present achievements, Coleman has evolved a significant and diverse body of work that gives new parameters to traditional image-making processes. Like other artists of his generation, he has chosen to adopt a variety of media, including film, photography, video, recorded sound, and live performance. While each work possesses its own distinctive features, one may, for the sake of discussion, observe to date three separate phases in his oeuvre. As such these may be divided into periods that encompass perceptual installations (1970–74);installations involving a psychological, social, historical, or cultural dimension (1975–79); and works that take place in a theatrical context (1980–85). Works of the early 1970s diﬀer from, but lay the foundations for, Coleman’s later works. An examination of a number of individual pieces from this period reveals the nature of his intent at the beginning of his career. In retrospect, it might be said that Flash Piece, when shown at the Studio Marconi gallery in 1970, set the stage for all of Coleman’s ensuing work. Although by no means predicting the future complexity of his work, it introduced a new element for consideration with respect to the experience of viewing. Flash Piece consisted of four instantaneous electronic flashes of light (1/800 second)—two blue appearing in between two yellow—directed upon the gallery wall in six cycles of three minutes each. The sequence of flashes was spaced as follows: yellow to blue, 60 seconds;

2

Anne Rorimer

blue to blue, 35 seconds; and blue to yellow, 85 seconds. While the time between the individual cycles diﬀered, the cycles themselves were exactly three minutes. As a result, The spectator, reacting to the light flashes (which operate to divide the intervals), will perceive the “event” period as of variable duration. In fact, the length of this duration, diﬃcult to memorize, and its variable location within the cycle . . . lead to diﬀerent perceptions of time.2 As the above description suggests, the significance of this work lies in the way it drew attention to the viewer’s sense of time insofar as time as measured and time as experienced did not coincide. By thus indicating how memory is a factor of perception, Coleman included the perceiver’s response within the subject matter of the work as a whole. Rather than producing a finite, stationary object, he created a piece which not only dealt with the eﬀect of time on seeing but also incorporated the subjective reception of the spectator within the work’s total meaning. From the start, Coleman has been concerned with the way in which something is seen rather than with the thing itself in isolation. Projections (1958–71), for example, studies a specific object in relation to a location in time as well as in space. The work includes a pastel drawing of a beech tree in Tullamore, Ireland, done by the artist when he was seventeen. The pastel hangs on the wall in line with two Super 8 mm film projections. While the first projection shows the site where the tree once stood, the second focuses on the surface of the remaining stump. Projections adds a new note to the landscape tradition and extends the notion of painting to include other methods of rendition. Coleman’s use of film allows him factually to record change over a twelve-year period by documenting a particular spot in existing time. The location stays the same, but the scene changes with the passing of time and the disappearance of the tree. The filmed tree stump bears witness to the formerly present tree while the growth rings of its cross section mark the years. Through views of before and after spanning a period of years, this work allows the passage of time to be captured visually. The work of art, like the stump, thus serves as a gauge for our knowledge of the past in terms of the evidence of the present. The tree survives only as a representation, however, not as a living presence. Whereas Projections gives definitive, straightforward evidence of the part played by time on what is seen, a work entitled Memory Piece (1971)

reflects on the role of memory with regard to perception. If the former work is about time as an external factor for visual change, the latter investigates the internal operation of memory in its attempt to hold on to reality in terms of the past but with reference to the present. In Memory Piece Coleman replicates the mnemonic process. He accomplishes this by means of two tape recorders. The first tape recorder supplies a text of about three to five minutes in length. The participant in the work may hear the original text just once and, having attempted to memorize it, must record it on the second machine. This text, in turn, must be recorded once again as remembered. The activity may be repeated, theoretically, ad infinitum, or until the nearly inexhaustible supply of tapes runs out. Previously recorded texts are not accessible, and as completed, are kept in a provided storage unit. Paradoxically, one cannot repeat the past, but memory retains the knowledge of its existence nonetheless. Memory Piece documents memory functions—that is, how the mind is responsible for change and loss as it accumulates, filters, transmits, and distorts. The storage unit, in essence, becomes an archive of mental processes. The person who participates in this piece activates a work which exists as a record of transformation, not as a graspable object or image per se. It is work shaped by the perceiver who is the one to realize the nature of memory and, in so doing, realize the work itself. In the following year, Coleman introduced language into his work as a means of inducing the active participation of the spectator. For Stereo (or Mono-Dialogue) (1972), two loudspeakers, hidden from sight, were installed at opposite ends of a room. At alternating intervals the speakers emitted phrases that gave the impression of coherency and demanded diﬀering degrees of attention. As described when first shown: A voice coming from a two track stereophonic tape delivers words or short phrases, from opposite ends of the room. The spectator (or rather, the listener) . . . is assailed by these vocal statements in a very complex rhythm, so that the intervals between them can be either brief or long, and the words more or less accentuated or even completely unstressed:making a greater or lesser impact on the listener and at the same time creating the impression of their being correlated, or deriving from the other by evoking their semantic meaning or phonetic value.3

James Coleman 1970–1985

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According to the artist, the work at one moment would lure visitors to one side of the room, or at another, to the other side—as if they were in the middle of multiple conversations attracting their attention—in their attempt to catch the potentially more forceful statement or interesting information.4 Although specific narrative content could not be construed from the text, the text exerted control upon the spectators, directly involving them—in their desire to assign meaning—within the structure of the work. As one writer has observed, Coleman’s work requires the “confrontation of the spectator with his or her act of perceiving.”5 Instead of seeking to re-present reality in the form of a static image, Coleman explores the interval between viewer and viewed. The content of his work derives from his investigation of the gap that separates what is seen from how it is seen. A work of 1972 called Pump serves as a kind of visual anecdote elucidating the rationale behind Coleman’s approach. During the continuous cycle of a Super 8 mm film projection, one observes the interior of an empty bucket hanging beneath the spout of a pump. Water rushes out of the spout to fill the bucket. Once the water has settled, the image of the bucket’s interior appears just as it did without the water. The empty and full bucket look exactly the same despite the intervening information. The work thus reminds us that what is seen in the present has a past and a future, to which the mind has access through memory and anticipation, and which a single, fixed image does not suggest. Slide Piece (1972–73) examines the nature of single-image representation. Three versions of the work exist, one in Italian, one in French, and another in English. A slide projector synchronized with a tape recorder allows the same color slide (a photograph of a deserted city square taken by the artist in Milan) to be projected in coordination with a text. The text, recited by one speaker, is the aggregate of separate descriptions made by various individuals who were asked by Coleman to characterize what they saw within the photograph. While concerning itself with a static image, Slide Piece takes place in time. It is a collection of verbalized viewpoints, and possesses no thematic beginning or end. The text brings the photograph to life, so to speak, and—functioning on the basis of accumulation—gives the work its openended quality. No two descriptions are the same. The multiple readings subject what otherwise seems circumscribed, definitive, and matter-offact to potentially endless visual interpretation. Marked by precision, the descriptions concentrate on detail, and no one of them can register the

Seagull, 1973 Double-screen slide projection with synchronized audio.

contents of the whole at once. The intricacies of description—whose vivid, poetic, or even amusing turns of phrase add to the richness of the piece—display the fact that a totality may only be perceived in time as a sum of its parts; and, equally important, is dependent upon the viewer’s own outlook. Subsequent installations, in 1973 and 1974, build time and viewpoint as factors of seeing into the resulting work. For the first of these installations, Seagull (1973)—also conceived as a work using boats on a river— Coleman divided the gallery in half, placing screens from floor to ceiling at the ends of the two rooms. On each of the screens he projected a continuous sequence of slides, with an accompanying soundtrack, of a seagull on a river arriving, picking up pieces of bread, and departing. Because of the wall between the two slide projections, viewers of the work could observe only one sequence of gulls at a time. Unable to be in two places at once, they had no means of knowing if the image of the bird, on its entry and exit from left to right in both instances, was the same bird going from room to room in a complete circle or if two birds were traveling in separate circles within the individual rooms. Viewers could not decipher whether they had seen the same bird twice or two diﬀerent birds. The

James Coleman 1970–1985

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viewers’ confinement to one series of events in conjunction with their memory/anticipation of a parallel set of circumstances determined their temporal and spatial relationship to the work. Similarly, Installation Made for Location (1974) brought the question of the viewer’s location in time and place to bear on the structure of the work. Each time the work was exhibited, Coleman utilized elements of the existing architecture. At the Ulster Museum in Belfast, a window with a balcony, oﬀ of a corridor that adjoined the main exhibition area, perfectly suited his purposes. Earphones, placed in opposite locations to the left and right sides of the window, contained prerecorded tapes. On each side of the window, respective tapes described the balcony, first in terms of what the person using the earphone on the other side of window was seeing (and in terms of what the present viewer would see, or could have seen, as well). When he installed this work at the Rotterdam Arts Foundation in Holland, Coleman took advantage of two columns at the center of the exhibition space. The texts of the tapes, symmetrically installed in relation to the columns, in this case were identical. From either side of the two columns they delineated for the observer how the columns would be seen from the other side. The same work was also shown in the “Contemporanea” exhibition in Rome. For this installation, Coleman set up earphones in an underground parking lot. The recorded text, as in the Rotterdam piece, spoke of the opposite viewer’s perception of spotlit, linear car park divisions. Despite the variations of each installation, the underlying principle of each work remained the same. The identical optical relationships pertained to the past and future as well as to the present. The mental projection of what had been—and was to be—seen, or else what the other viewer saw, involved the spectator in the activity of seeing. Memory and anticipation were reflected in the knowledge of the other spectator’s viewpoint and by the viewer’s own experience of the past and future “present” in the installation. Two related works of 1974–75, Playback of a Daydream and Images, further illustrate the mechanisms of perception that the preceding installations exposed. Taken from a textbook on perception, ambiguous images which may be read either as a duck or a rabbit in the former—or as a goblet or a face in the latter—provide the imagery of these two works. Playback of a Daydream is projected on the wall as a film, whereas Images takes the form of a half dozen or more individual metallic paintings on paper pasted to the wall.

Playback of a Daydream, 1974 Projected 16 mm black-and-white film, silent. Continuous cycle. Installation view.

Both Playback of a Daydream and Images produce an unending interaction between the image and the spectator, who alternatingly sees a duck or a rabbit (or a face or a goblet). The viewer, through knowledge, can specify that a duck was seen or that a rabbit will be seen or vice versa, while viewing one or the other in the present. However, the viewer cannot determine which image takes precedence or where one begins and the other ends, visually or temporally. By showing the phenomenon of the alternating duck and rabbit as a film, moreover, Coleman pointed out how an immediate visual experience and the documentation of it, in this case, could not be distinguished separately. In the process of drawing the goblet/face painting, the artist maintains that he tried “to get in between the space of when one image became the other.” Each painting represents this impossible task and is slightly diﬀerent. Although the perceptual present dominates, knowledge of past and future intervenes. The work itself, therefore, steps in to postulate where the viewer might stand in relation to the mechanisms of perceiving. The “ambiguous figures” signal the end of Coleman’s predominantly perceptual installations. As of 1975, more complex aspects of perception

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enter into the work as psychological, historical, and cultural factors of experience are taken into account. Photographs of two faces projected larger than life-size on a wall on either side of a large pillar provide the visual component of Clara and Dario, as conceived in 1975. The faces of these two figures change position in relation to each other and in tandem with a narrative text on an audiotape. The text pertains to two adults, referred to as Elsa and Andrea, who intend to revisit the place of their childhood romance near Lake Como in the north of Italy. The text is composed of descriptive reminiscences of a time gone by, which arise out of an intention, never carried out, to return to where they had spent the memorable moments of their youth. As the text begins, “io penso che . . . ,”6 the viewer is immediately given access to the thoughts of the speaker, who continues, “non so se ho voglio di partire in questo momento.”7 During the course of the narrative, the carrousel of slides completes two cycles. Half of the text repeats itself, in reverse and in alternation with new material. The specific subject matter of the text—the proposed journey that leads to a reflection on the past—is thus reflected by the very structure of the text itself. The faces projected on the wall turn back and forth, to and from each other, sometimes—or sometimes not—in response to the words of the audiotape. The absorbing nature of the text in conjunction with the presence of the faces draws the spectator into the work. Rather than presenting a straightforward story, the work—turning back upon itself as it does—revolves around and involves the viewer, who is brought in on the romantic reverie. The artist specifically intended to create an emotional rapport between the spectator and the two figures, who occasionally exchange glances. In this work, as in life, nostalgia for the past and desire for the future combine in the experience of the present.8 The subject matter of Clara and Dario transcends the particular to become a discourse on separation and reunion in time and place:“Che tardi! Ormai non parto più”9 is followed by “ma si! Rimani . . . parliamo ancora”10 at the end of the first cycle of the piece. The text is deliberately ambiguous as to whether it is a monologue or dialogue. Elsa and Andrea are simultaneously divided and connected as images, separate and fused as psyches. They mirror each other, both visually and within the text, in a work that ultimately is a reflection upon the interaction of the inner self with the present in view of the past and future and in relation to another.

Clara and Dario, 1975 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration. Installation at Studio Marconi, Milan, 1975.

As a psychological meditation, Clara and Dario paves the way for the intense psychological drama of Box (ahhareturnabout) (1977), a Super 8 mm black-and-white film in a continuous seven-minute loop with a synchronized audiotape. For this work, Coleman adapted original documentary footage of the historic 1927 boxing match between heavyweight champion Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey. Projected in an enclosed, blackened, tunnel-like space, the film flashes on and oﬀ in front of the viewer, who is surrounded by darkness. The fast, abrupt appearance and disappearance of the image results in the experience of an afterimage in between the frames. The eﬀect is that of “a low pulse similar in frequency to that of a heartbeat,”11 while breathy words and signs, issuing as if from Tunney, are uttered in the same staccato rhythm. Tunney’s thoughts and the blows, given and received, interlock as the viewer has the impression of being both in the fight and in the mind of the fighter. The subtitle of the piece, ahhareturnabout, refers to the fact that the fight of 1927 was the rematch for Tunney to retain his championship title after the famous fight of 1926. The work was inspired by Coleman’s interest in the idea that Tunney was the world champion in 1926, yet had to reaﬃrm that distinction in a second bout the following year. As he has

James Coleman 1970–1985

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pointed out, the interim represents a precise moment in Tunney’s life during which he simultaneously had and did not have a certain status. During the fight he must regain what he already “is.” That moment in time opens Tunney’s identity to question. In the fight, therefore, one witnesses his struggle for mastery, title, and personal status. Box dramatizes the interrelationship between the inner and outer self and between the individual self and society. The physical and mental sides of Tunney’s being are made apparent when language, conveying his thoughts, plays against the visual record of his actions. By fusing sound and image, Coleman is able to portray the interior and exterior person at the same time. The script emphasizes the association between mind and body with phrases such as “ooh . . . aah . . . the liver . . . the liver,” while it also alludes to the desire for power:“the sticks . . . not capital’s . . . right.” Tunney is not merely flesh and blood, a body and a soul, but an individual striving to maintain his contested role—and, ultimately, his self-image— within the social order. Installations following Box, including Strongbow and A-Koan of 1978 and The Ploughman’s Party of 1979–80, refer to the ambiguities and dichotomies within the social order itself. As in Coleman’s preceding pieces, audio and visual elements play upon and against each other, enabling the artist to create works that reflect on the contemporary situation and the state of society in general. The earlier two of these works, Strongbow and A-Koan, were conceived for exhibition in Ireland. Referring to the separation of the country into two sectors, they both contain political overtones. In Strongbow, Coleman juxtaposed a spotlit replica of a twelfth-century tomb eﬃgy from a church in Dublin close to the exhibition space, its hands clasped in prayer, with a spotlit video film of two hands clapping. One of the clapping hands was red and the other green. As the hands moved back and forth, they left ghostlike traces while their colors mixed on the screen. At the same time, the accompanying sound eﬀects in repeated cycles gradually rose from a hushed silence to a resounding boom. The clapping hands, in actual motion, near the stationary figure of Strongbow, carved in stone for posterity, might seem to have awakened the sleeping monarch, whose reputation, carried down through the centuries, has been maintained by history. Strongbow, a Norman invader and king, is a heroic figure of legendary note from the annals of Irish history. Having married a Celt, he stood at the crossroads between the original Celtic and the imported Anglo-Norman cultures. The old never completely rec-

onciled itself to the new, and the color of the hands in the video connotes the division of Ireland into North (red) and South (green). In this work, Coleman links the historical past to the present and confronts the contemporary media. Distinctions are maintained, yet the politically colored red and green hands blur optically, as well as symbolically, on the video screen. The sound of the television reaches a crescendo as the hands continue to move back and forth in ceaseless repetition while Strongbow, a motionless eﬃgy, paradoxically lives on in spirit. Television, a representational device of the media as well as an artistic medium, comments on itself. Without directly addressing the past, yet within its range, the television clamors for attention. Although echoing the noise and confusion of the present, it oﬀers no particular insight on the past nor resolution for the future. In a related manner, A-Koan amplifies, quite literally, the idea of senselessness. The title of the piece, as it sounds in Gaelic, means “a lament.” Having been invited to participate in the Galway Arts Festival, Coleman employed for his work a child actress to recite a short text as if she were crying for her mother: “I’m ready, I’m calling you, I’ve done a poo . . .” Megaphones transmitted the voice of the wailing child while the Irish flag blew violently above in the breeze. The words of the child, which were repeated over and over again, in combination with the frenetic activity of the flapping flag, produced an eerie aura of helplessness, with the self-directed summons of the little girl remaining unanswered. The work itself elicits no logical interpretation, but articulates instead a lack of rational response. The Ploughman’s Party displays the pretension and artifice that has infiltrated contemporary culture. To this end, the work plays on the image of the plough:heavenly constellation and instrument of earthly (and earthy) labor. The plough, set at the end of a velvety, white room, figures as the centerpiece of the installation. Made from a piece of iron, which has been covered in gold leaf, the plough takes on the curving, almost rococo shape of the constellation (also known as the Big Dipper) for which it is named. Blue neon lights, highlighting the gilded iron from behind, and white light from a projector illuminating it frontally give the object its corporate sign and jewel-like look. Upon entering the room with its posh interior, the viewer also hears the voice of a man speaking with an aﬀected accent in double-entendres related to culture and cultivating. He lapses into French phrases and adapts advertising imagery to his talk of perfumes and other such products. The Ploughman’s Party capitalizes on culture. Accord-

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ing to Coleman, the work is about the power of propaganda and merchandizing in a society where a symbol of labor, the plough, may be transformed into a purely decorative tool of the cultural system. In the last five years, Coleman has extended his method of working from stage environments to the domain of theater, where image and text, performance and narration, are woven together within the framework of the viewer’s actual viewing time. So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet (1980) is the first of these ensuing works, whose meaning derives from the theatrical context in which they are presented.12 The artifice of The Ploughman’s Party carries over to So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet, a 50-minute video installation. On the screen of a television monitor, a male piano player and a female model—the latter poised on a chaise longue and successively changing from one stock pose to another—together relate an intricate narrative, which is punctuated by piano music. The images on the video screen are richly colored and back-lit to give them the unnatural quality of the color found in advertising brochures. Set against a deep-blue background, the male figure at the piano—with horns growing out of his head—wears a black tuxedo, while the female speaker is garbed in a shiny green décolleté evening dress, one leg wound with a red ribbon. The narrators’ contrived deliveries, French accents included, are filled with verbal cliché. The story, told in the first and third person, is composed of two intertwining plots and begins on the premises of the dress shop of Vanna, the female narrator, and Laura. It is made up of an accumulation of hackneyed, though riveting, episodes that are associated with sensational romances and thrillers. The two intersecting narratives share several of the same characters. The incidents are held together by phrases such as “meanwhile, back at the dress shop,” but the traditional sequential narrative—with a beginning, middle, and end—is disrupted, shattered into fragments of literary convention replete with characters who, despite constantly changing identities, retain a stereotypical nature. So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet is, in one regard, about revival and re-creation, with the evening dress functioning as the unifying element of its plots. The work harbors multiple possibilities for interpretation on a specifically political level or in more general terms. The dress—which, after all, is green—may be read as a symbol of “an Irish nationalism which has never been destroyed”13 or considered in relationship to aesthetic issues. To what extent is “the latest creation,” an “updated version of the old dress,” transformed and to what end, with what significant results? Brought “into line with today’s fashion,” at one point in the spoken text, it is again “out-

moded” by the conclusion of the tape, having been replaced at the previous point by an imitation, a fake. As the narrators/performers recount the complex series of events, one witnesses the various machinations of the work’s fictional structure rather than being told what happens as a result of connected incidents leading from one to another. The work does not provide a window onto a fiction that is posited as a duplication of real life. Instead it exposes the underpinnings of this activity. In So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet, artificiality and deception assume an authenticity and authority because of the way the alluring devices of its media are revealed. As Jean Fisher has commented, the audience is “captivated by [the speaker’s] image and her unfolding narrative” and “also alienated from both,”14 since the viewer becomes aware, perhaps, of the enjoyment of being taken in. The work as a whole, therefore, achieves an independent reality through its thematic attention to role playing and to the illusions of society as well as to its own illusory content. Coleman’s first work to be performed live, Now & Then (1981), further deals with the subject of illusionism.15 Its scenario is based on the reverie of two adults who in childhood had crawled into a shop window and pretended to be mannequins. Now grown, they reenact their childhood fantasy of bringing themselves in line with the latest fashion. A pianist accompanies the two performers as they demonstrate some twenty diﬀerent ramp-walk poses in a symmetrical manner and, alternatingly, half-sing, half-recite a text. They are elaborately dressed—he in a yellow suit, she in a pink and blue frock and bonnet—in a style evocative of 1950s fashion. Yellow and pink spotlights saturate the colorful atmosphere with artificiality. The reality of the work is, paradoxically, fabricated upon the display of interwoven fictions. As in Clara and Dario, adults romanticize a bygone past “when time seemed to stand still.” In addition, Coleman brings the idea of role playing—as he did in Box—to bear on the broader meaning of the piece. The adults-cum-children imitate the postures of the adult world of fashion, whose styles likewise attempt to recapture the past. The text alludes to the way in which the fading outdoor light increases the indoor light. The changing light transforms the transparent window of the shop into a mirror, allowing the fantasizing adults to see their reflections in the glass. In Now & Then the static interface between past and present, interior and exterior, surface and depth, artifice and actuality becomes blurred. In the glamorous dream world of fashion depicted here, selfimage and projected image fuse.

James Coleman 1970–1985

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During the last several years Coleman has succeeded in integrating language, performance, and sound in a totally original manner. His most recent works cross traditional boundaries to borrow from the disciplines of literature, theater, and music, although their fundamental inspiration and form remain pictorial. As the artist maintained in an interview: I never did feel I abandoned painting. Long before I ever began to introduce other media into my work—when I began to lose interest in a simple retinal reality—I began to sense a feeling that I needed to take cognizance of the psychological dimension. To do this I initially used film to document, and later on, as a device of expression. I realized that my medium was also part of things as much as my mind or eye was.16 Ignotum per Ignotius (1982–84) and Living and Presumed Dead (1983; second version, 1985) analyze, in diﬀerent ways, the fundamental nature of visual representation in its relationship to reality.17 The earlier of these two works, Ignotum per Ignotius, utilizes two simply dressed performers and prerecorded sound.18 On a basic narrative level the work centers upon an inquiry into the cause of a death. It takes place as if it were set in a funeral parlor or a lawyer’s oﬃce. A male and a female player perform successive roles: detective, suspect butler, lawyer, family members, and the corpse. The standard “who-done-it” and “who-will-getthe-inheritance” situations aﬀord the basis for the work’s other levels of investigation. The laconic speech and abrupt gestures of the players, interspersed with strains of diﬀerent kinds of music, convey the story, in which, according to Coleman, an “applied rationale does not yield the expected results.” The guilty party turns out to be the one who has attempted, through language or cultural encoding, to impose a system of interpretation on that which cannot yield its essence or spirit. Later on in the performance the female figure, dancing her fingers childlike on the floor, endeavors to recapture a nostalgic and simplified interpretation of the performed event up to that point. The dance is abruptly terminated by an invisible force which propels her hand to inscribe on the wall:“A Message is Found.” This resurrects the male performer as corpse who attempts to cover up the inscription. As in the case of the writing hand, the canceling hand is visually consumed to a bloody stump. Prior to the finger dance, the two performers had approached one another, symbolically removing each other’s masks in a gesture of transferal to the hand. Traces of the body and, by

symbolic inference, the mask are left on the wall. As the artist has pointed out, “the mask may be equated with the representational aspects of human activity, and the projected image of the self is now transferred to the hand, the instrument of implementation.” The work closes with the two performers attempting to scrape away the red paint and replace their masks in order “to recapture the representation of the self.” Living and Presumed Dead further examines the complex modes of representation. Its meaning derives from the union of several aesthetic forms, in this instance the orally narrated epic with intervals of music, the theatrical performance, and the photographic slide presentation. On a purely narrative level, the work involves four protagonists: Abbas, Borras, Chris or Capax, and Mr., the villain whose past dealings are obscure. The many details of the plot may briefly be summarized as follows: Capax was an acrobat, performing with daggers and fire, and dicing with death. He was “presumed dead” after cutting his throat during a performance. However Borras, his lover, has searched for him for many years in the belief he was still alive. Abbas rescues Capax . . . and discovers that he is disguising himself as his father to avenge his father’s murder.19 Drama, adventure, and confrontations fraught with incidents of mistaken identity contribute to the story’s association with legendary tales, myths, and literary genres in which heroic pursuits are coupled with the quest for truth. For the current exhibition, Coleman has revised the work’s earlier visual content. He has replaced the previous black-and-white line drawings, which were projected on the wall to illustrate the story, with slides that show a cast of twenty characters lined up frontally across a stage. The cast includes live actors and several mannequins, all colorfully and flamboyantly dressed. The costumes locate the individual characters in diﬀerent historical periods—in either the Middle Ages or the Restoration—and in diﬀering social strata. A goblin, a skeleton, an elf, and even a fairy with magic wand complete the cast. As the narrator unravels the story in synchronization with the projected images, the characters appear in diﬀerent places in the line. An optical dissolve system is timed so that the successive photographic images fade into and out of one another. Playing on the realistic aspects—yet fictitious nature—of photography and theater, Coleman links the two together in an unprecedented

James Coleman 1970–1985

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manner. Despite the interchange of character positions, the slides display the same image of the theatrical cast throughout the accompanying narration. As in Slide Piece, Coleman here subjects one view to many interpretations. Telescoping historical time and the social spectrum into a single, two-dimensional scene, he succeeds in capturing the past—as portrayed by the costumed figures—and the present within the frozen moment of the photograph. By means of the optical dissolve mechanism, furthermore, he animates the static image of the photograph. Paradoxically, the stationary image is thus set in motion and changes while remaining the same. On many levels Living and Presumed Dead depicts the multifaceted, layered fusion—and confusion—of reality and fiction on literal and aesthetic planes. The narrative abounds with references to perception and deception. Representation of the action within the story takes place in the zone where theatrical make-believe and real life intercept each other. The characters retain their masks and costumes while they stand in a row as if they were posing for a series of publicity stills. Additionally, the line-up of the entire cast, ready to take a bow, occurs in that interval when the play has ended but before the actors step out of their fictional roles. As the photographic images merge into and out of each other, the characters dissolve into one another and appear to exchange roles continuously. The narrative resists interpretation as a series of events determined by a logical sequence of cause and eﬀect. Instead, the narrative provides a structure for the creation of characters who function to unmask the artifice in which they play a part. Living and Presumed Dead exemplifies the way in which the work of James Coleman expands the definition of pictorial representation to encompass new thematic content, thereby extending the previous boundaries of artistic expression. His work reveals the reality of its own fictional structure as art and, in the process, provides a framework for addressing the fictional constructs of the self and society. Notes

1. James Coleman, quoted in Richard Kearney, “Interview with James Coleman,” The Crane Bag 6, no. 2 (1982), p. 130. 2. Descriptive subtitle in Lisa Ponti, “How Does Your Garden Grow: Documenti e discorsi sul lavoro di James Coleman,” Domus 570 (May 1977), p. 53.

3. Gillo Dorfles, “Mono-Dialogue by James Coleman,” in Irish Exhibition of Living Art, exh. cat. (Dublin: Project Art Centre, 1972), p. 14. 4. James Coleman, conversation with the author, April 1985. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent statements by the artist quoted in this text were made at this time. 5. Jean Fisher, “James Coleman,” in James Coleman, exh. cat. (Dublin:Douglas Hyde Gallery, 1982), p. 13. 6. “I am thinking . . .” 7. “I’m not sure if I’ll leave just yet.” 8. See Fisher, “James Coleman,” p. 7. 9. “How late it is! I guess I’m not leaving.” 10. “Stay! Do stay . . . let’s talk awhile.” 11. Fisher, “James Coleman,” p. 34. 12. See Jean Fowler, “So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet: Language and Theatre in the Work of James Coleman,” Circa 17 ( July-August 1984), pp. 18–24; and Dot Tuer, “Feminine Pleasure in the Politics of Seduction,” C 4 (Winter 1985), pp. 22–23. 13. Luke Dodd, “Five Recent Works by James Coleman” (B.A. thesis, Trinity College, Dublin, 1985), not paginated. 14. Jean Fisher, “The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman” (1983), reprinted in this volume, p. 28. 15. See Jean Fisher, “James Coleman,” Art Monthly 49 (September 1981), pp. 17–18. 16. Coleman, quoted in Kearney, “Interview with James Coleman,” p. 127. 17. On Ignotum per Ignotius, see Jean Fisher, “James Coleman and Operating Theatre,” Art Monthly 61 (November 1982), pp. 11–13; on Living and Presumed Dead, see Fisher, “The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman” (1983; reprinted in this volume). 18. There have been three versions of this work to date, two of which used prerecorded sound and one of which used live harmonium music. 19. Mark Francis, “A Story Projected: LIVING AND PRESUMED DEAD,” poster (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1983).

James Coleman 1970–1985

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So Different . . . and Yet, 1980 Video installation. Installation at the Nigel Greenwood Gallery, London, 1980.

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman Jean Fisher

Plays are normally acted as if the stage had four walls not three; the fourth being where the audience is sitting. The impression given and maintained is that what happens on the stage is a genuine incident from “real life,” which of course doesn’t have an audience. Acting with a fourth wall, in other words, means acting as if there wasn’t an audience. Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues Brecht’s Dramaturg states a condition common to naturalistic theater, commercial cinema, and “narrative” painting, which, while creating a semblance of reality (the Renaissance window on the world), nevertheless situates the viewing subject in an imaginary position outside the real time and space of the action. Brecht recognized that this was an authoritarian mode of representation, which held the audience in a pseudodominant and uncritical relation to it. By contrast, he advocated a thaëter which, imitating reality without reproducing the illusions of naturalism, would allow the audience to share actively in its experience. Brecht emphasized the performance in which the actor produced an illustration of the gestus, a dramatized recitation defining, not character motivation, but the social significance of the action.1 I should like to discuss how, in the work of James Coleman, the visual image is an anchor for a dramatized recitation whose psychological implications for the spectator invite certain comparisons with performance art and theater.2 In visual art, it was Marcel Duchamp who initially raised the question of the social and psychological status of the art object and the spectator’s

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contribution to its production of meanings. Duchamp’s “readymade” gestures, directed against the valorized object of the museums, argued for art that was founded in life: an art that “obliges the spectator or reader to become himself an artist or poet.”3 This implied a move away from the object as a self-contained and pregiven reality whose meanings were imposed by the producer, toward art as a context in relation to which the spectator introjects and reconstructs his or her own reality; that is, the work itself becomes a “theater” in which the spectator is a “co-performer.” Of the various ways in which artists have attempted to demolish the “fourth wall,” two tendencies are germane to performance art: one stemming from dadaist-futurist activities and traceable through New York happenings, Fluxus, and situationist events of the fifties and early sixties, in which the artist initiated a spontaneous “intervention,” often in the street and akin to an impromptu “theatrical” spectacle; and another, more contemplative approach, in which the artist presented the viewer with an installation event which engaged his or her perceptual and associative faculties in real time and space (for example, minimalist sculpture, manifestations of structuralist cinema, and conceptual art). Performance art, emerging from such diverse trends in the late sixties, encompasses a wide range of activities about which it is impossible to generalize. However, a performance may be broadly characterized as an event of fixed duration executed before a collective audience with the artist as principal executant. While it indeed presents an organized spectacle of live bodies and props, it diﬀers from orthodox theater in two major respects: the action is performed in real time, not the logical time of fictional narrative; and usually the artist functions not as a fictive character whose definition or motivation is the rationale of the narrative, but as a signifier in the production of meaning of the action. The audience’s relationship to the performance artist remains, however, ambivalent, since what is enacted is often a narcissistic display which, while it avoids viewer identification with the character typical of theater, nevertheless also fails to provide a reality into which the audience may enter. On the contrary, the viewer is often held at a distance in an exhibitionist-voyeur relationship (one might cite certain performance strategies of Joseph Beuys or Vito Acconci). An ensuing tendency toward the valorization of the artist himself is reinforced through oral dissemination which virtually mythologizes the performer. In such cases, the “fourth wall” remains intact. James Coleman is not a performance artist. He suppresses his own presence as an “author” in the interests of the text, whose structure as work

of art restores the spectator’s “performance.” The work presents a projection, an installation, which both draws and comments on the languages of representation using various time-based media with narration and within a defined space. Coleman uses time as a primary signifying element referring directly to the spectator’s perceptual and mnemonic faculties. His text unfurls and reveals itself in the real time of one’s experience. It is, moreover, a continuous cycle, an endless repetition: a narrative with no implied prehistory, whose inauguration is whichever point the viewer enters its cycle. Thus, unlike conventional narrative, there is no end that would satisfactorily explain a beginning. The spectator’s desire for unity—for the resolution or masking of those contradictions that are the contingent reality of one’s life and which is the lure of fictional (especially naturalistic) narrative—is not gratified. Coleman nevertheless exploits repetition, a characteristic of the diegesis: those enigmas and returns of the action which temporarily suspend the forward impulse of the “plot.”4 Repetition, according to the psychoanalytic schema, is a ritual of return whose logic was clarified for Sigmund Freud through his observation of the Fort! Da! game, in which the child— perceiving his mother’s comings and goings, and attempting to accommodate this traumatic loss—stages the disappearance of an object to experience the pleasure of its return. But this staging refers to an alienation of the self and the symbolization of its desire for the other through representation.5 Repetition becomes the symbolized refutation of the moment of loss, an act which thereafter enacts that which, eﬀaced in perception, cannot be remembered, but within which—as Lacan somewhat enigmatically describes it—the subject “is there to rediscover where it was . . . the real.”6 The real, the immediacy of an often traumatic lived experience, is what is betrayed by discourse, which henceforth mediates the subject through the agency of the signs of language. This incommensurable diﬀerence, or “lost history” of the subject is, however, reenacted in a constant vacillation of repetitions-in-transformation, but an “originary” moment can never be recovered. In much of Coleman’s work repetition is presented in changing contexts. One’s perception of what is repeated becomes converted into memory, but with each successive recurrence and each new juxtaposition there is a shift in what is signified. In recognizing this transformation, viewers become aware of themselves as perceiving subjects, which suggests that the work functions in that ungraspable space between perception and its conscious representation: the “space in which the space of the Other is situated, in which the subject is constituted.”7

The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman

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I Matti, 1968–72 Project notes, 1972.

Jean Fisher

In 1968, Coleman conceived I Matti [The Crackpots], which was to be a filmed performance by three actors, designated A, B, and C, one of whom, C, was to assume the subjective role of the spectator, critically observing the others’ game, yet simultaneously desiring to intervene in their mutual reality. During the course of the piece, the protagonists were to interact on each other’s sense of identity through a confusion between fantasy and reality. This complex work was never fully realized, but it provided the basic plot for those works which followed, namely, a time-dependent sequence of interactive events whose causal relationships would be determined by the audience through an interplay of immediate perception, memory, and anticipation. In simplifying I Matti, the artist focused initially on the spectator’s direct perceptual experience. Flash Piece (1970), and several subsequent installations, utilized (dis)orientating spatiotemporal transformations to enhance the spectator’s self-awareness as a perceiving subject, and to comment on the way that one invests representations or objects with meaning.8 This dialogue continued in Slide Piece (1972–73), with two significant additions: instead of “abstract” contents, the audience is presented with a vocal soundtrack and an “ordinary” pictorial image, extending meaning outside formal art language into everyday perceptual reality. Slide Piece positions the audience in the role of the spectator-identified madman of I Matti, presenting the viewer with a wall-sized image of an unpopulated urban street, repeated in continuous cycle. It is an image analogous to Christian Metz’s cinematic “other mirror,” which, like Lacan’s Mirror Stage, “alienates man in his own reflection and makes him the double of his double . . . desire as a sure eﬀect of lack and endless pursuit.”9 The commentary, delivered by a male voice, directs one’s attention to features of the image described from several subjective viewpoints, creating a dialogue between the sameness of the repeated image and the diﬀerent details of each description. Through information accumulated over successive and remembered accounts, one develops a changing relationship to the image. The spectator, however, becomes subject to a psychological tension, deriving on the one hand from his or her captivation by the image and the lure of the commentary, and on the other from a disturbing sense of being controlled by an outside “will”—the “other” as the unseen commentator. To resolve this entails the displacement of imaginary subjectivity to a progressive identification with the narrator who, one finds, sets up a subtle complicity with the viewer:

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Slide Piece, 1972–73 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

Considérons maintenant le carré qui a pour base la ligne ornementale chromée de l’auto à gauche et, pour côtés, le petit arbre qui se trouve derrière le clignotant et le bord gauche de la photographie. Or, le tronc du petit arbre, en penchant légèrement, eﬀace une partie du L, de TOTAL sur le kiosque de la station d’essence, touche l’angle droit de la fenêtre du premier étage de l’immeuble au fond, continue à monter et rejoint le bord de l’image. Retournons à gauche . . .10 This complicity, expressed through the first person plural present tense— “considérons . . . retournons . . .” [Let us consider . . . Let us return . . . ]— is the means by which the narration enters the immediate reality of the spectator’s thoughts. One is given only what is present and verifiable in the image, and while the narration describes the objects within the image, it also continually returns the spectator to the fact that it is an image, so that one does not remain ensnared in an imaginary illusion in which the signifier itself, the photograph, is transparent. While this text exists in the syntagmatic plane, the texts of subsequent works are encoded paradigmatically, allowing the viewer to enter into a freer flow of associative verbal and visual images. With the introduction of

the human image, the work also begins to speak of how one’s imaginary relationship with the image-object becomes displaced into the symbolic realm of interpersonal exchange. In the original installation of Clara and Dario (1975), a double slide projection with synchronized sound, the audience is confronted with wall-sized faces of a man and a woman, cinematic “close-ups” encouraging the viewer’s emotional identification. They are posed to suggest an intimate conversation, and yet are separated architecturally; they are therefore perceived both as individuals and as a couple, a construction which points toward the self ’s dual identity as both separate, yet inseparable, from the other. This visual duality is reinforced through a narrative which, although containing equal contributions from both partners, is spoken in a single voice. Their conversation is narrated as a twopart cycle, each part of which diﬀers in its order of sequences, and through whose reordered repetitions the audience develops diﬀering interpretations of the couple’s identity.11 As in I Matti, their responses are interdependent, their sense of self mediated through their relationship to each other. Clara and Dario also speaks about how one projects an idea of one’s historical sense of self through the image of the present. The couple “invent” a childhood idyll that the spectator enters through their present. A past is wistfully recalled as an imaginary tableau vivant, a piquant first romance enacted by two adolescents who may have been themselves, but who over time and innumerable life encounters have evolved other identities. With Clara and Dario the spectator recognizes his or her own sense of longing for another, earlier self, whose image cannot with certainty be determined as a memory or a fantasy. Memory produces a private image of the past, but one that maintains an uneasy coexistence with a present social identity while, simultaneously, projecting us into the future and the knowledge of our eventual death. Coleman explores this cruel temporal dilemma in his installation Box (ahhareturnabout) (1977), using the return fight between Tunney and Dempsey in 1927, in which Tunney was defending the title he had won the previous year.12 Coleman’s interest in this historical event stemmed from a consideration that the challenge to a return bout precipitated a crisis in Tunney’s sense of identity—at that moment he was both “champ” and “not-champ.” As a consequence, it was his own sense of coherence that he was fighting to maintain in the second match. Coleman orchestrates short passages of film footage interrupted by lengths of black leader with a soundtrack comprising an insistent pulse

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Box (ahhareturnabout), 1977 Projected 16 mm black-and-white film. Continuous cycle. Extract of voice-over script.

similar in frequency to a heartbeat, and a monologue of gasps, grunts, and abbreviated phrases representing Tunney’s physical exertions and thoughts during the fight. Through the pulsating rhythm of this continuous loop we catch glimpses of the protagonists circling the ring, seemingly into eternity. Tunney, like Sisyphus, is trapped in a perpetual repetition in which he must forever play out the fantasy of mastery over the other, eternally delaying his own death. Box is emotionally shocking by virtue of the manner in which its visual and acoustic space encloses the viewer as if in the mind and body of the boxer: the viewer becomes both voyeur and participant in an erotic struggle with his or her own otherness. The play on circularity in the work—its structural periodicity, the movement of the boxers round the ring, and Tunney’s thoughts—induces

a near-hypnotic state of attention in the viewer, through which the seemingly irrational spoken text begins to acquire sense; indeed, the eﬀect is sensual in its ability to play on the rhythmic chords of the viewer’s mind and imagination beyond the merely visual. Elliptic as dream thoughts and images, it propels the audience into a labyrinth of associations whose meanings oscillate in and out of the image. Phrases concerned with the immediacy of the fight are interwoven with oblique metaphors that seem to refer to Irish identity (“Murphy’s the best . . .”13); to the individual in conflict with an authoritarian Other, specifically the English colonial authority in Ireland (“. . . the wood . . . the sticks . . . not capital’s . . .”);and a type of public, historical immortality contrasted with a realization of individual, physical death (“. . . the liver . . . an evergreen . . . soul . . .”). Neither prose nor poetry, the text may perhaps be described as an exteriorization of an interior monologue, or “inner speech”: a preconscious/conscious reverie of abbreviated and apparently disconnected phrases and mental images saturated not with “meaning” but with “sense.” As the film theorist Paul Willemen (quoting Vygotsky) says, “the sense of a word is the sum of all the psychological events aroused in our consciousness (and unconsciousness) by the word.” Inner speech is “a discursive process determined by the social and psychological histories that combine to produce that particular individual in that time and place.”14 Coleman’s dramatized recitation addresses itself to listening, not to reading. This is due in part to its use of phonetic puns and of fragmentary phrases that do not locate a subject as such; but it is also the result of the way that the voice produces meaning, relying as much on what Roland Barthes described as the “grain of the voice” (enunciation) as on those expressive qualities which are signifiers of character in theater.15 Insofar as it is a performed recitation, Box may be said to be “theatrical,” but in presenting an associative rather than syntagmatic narrative, it is not typical of conventional theater.16 Coleman’s use of language may perhaps be understood partly by reference to an Irish dramatic tradition revitalized by J. M. Synge, who first expressed in drama those convoluted poetic but politicized idiosyncrasies of Anglo-Irish vernacular syntax stemming from the translation of English to and from Gaelic.17 Like Synge, Coleman has a high regard for the oral art of storytelling. Until comparatively recently it was common in the rural districts of Ireland to find an audience gathered intimately around the teller (seanachaí) to hear him spin his tale. This tale (an scéal) would have been known to the listeners (and indeed they would have disputed any deviation

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in the narrative), but it was through the drama of the delivery—the power of the voice, the elaboration of gestures—and in the telling that meaning was created in the minds of the company. Storytelling is a unique kind of “performance,” but it is a dying art, mostly relegated to childhood; and in Ireland, television has been largely responsible for its passing. It is with some irony, therefore, that Coleman chooses to present a storytelling performance as a video installation, So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet (1980).18 Television has a certain intimacy: one sits facing the screen as the company once gathered round the seanachaí; and yet its intimacy is an illusion, lacking that human exchange of experience fundamental to the storytelling situation. Coleman exposes this ambivalence through a play on our relationship to the TV image. The principal narrator is a female model wearing a shiny green dress who, through a sequence of coquettish poses and gestures familiar from fashion photography, seemingly addresses herself to the camera/audience. The piece is a single continuous take in which the camera moves imperceptibly in relation to the model, simulating the eﬀect of a live performance. But while viewers are captivated by her image and her unfolding narrative, they are also alienated from both. The gestures are slow and stereotypic; the narration is spoken in stagy French accents; the pianist in the background wears horns; and the chromo-keying technique denies a naturalistic space and coloration, all of which accentuates the work’s artifice, distancing the spectator from that sympathetic identification with the image of naturalistic theater and TV broadcasting.19 Orthodox broadcasting does not, moreover, sustain a lengthy and uninterrupted narration; it cannot hold our attention span without constantly changing mood and tempo; so that in front of So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet the viewer is uncomfortably caught between fascination and repulsion. The narrative itself is a potpourri of fictional clichés, in which a motley of “characters” surrounding a central “hero” switch sides and identities in functions reminiscent of those described by Propp for the folktale.20 The motor of the narrative and the real visual focus of the work is the green dress worn by the narrator: an “heirloom” which is the object of desire for the protagonists and whose transformation to a more fashionable style initiates the plot. It is indeed a fetishistic, metonymical substitute for desire, which in terms of psychoanalytic theory is the subject’s desire for impossible unity, and for which the usual closure of mythic fiction is—at least momentarily—a catharsis. So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet does not, how-

Now & Then, 1981 Performed by Olwen Fouère, James McHale, and Roger Doyle. Project Arts Theater, Dublin, 1981

ever, provide such satisfaction. Iconographically it is circular—the dress, initially outmoded, is again out of fashion by the “end” of the narration. The narrative closes with a further enigma of character identity, which sends it spiraling into another possible plane of interpretation. Coleman’s dramatized narration is extended live in Now & Then (1981), a work performed by two actors and a pianist before a collective audience. Now & Then draws together themes inherent in earlier work: the interdependent identities and nostalgia of Clara and Dario; and the conflict between private self and social mask of Box (which becomes translated into the sociohistorical masquerade of style and fashion in So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet). Now & Then initially presents the audience with a tableau vivant, which suggests that one is an onlooker at a shop-window display of fashion mannequins. They are flamboyantly dressed: a male figure wears a yellow satin suit in the style of the 1950s, while a female model is dressed in the post-punk style of the ’80s. Brightly colored spotlights accentuate the atmosphere of artificiality. Through its evocative play of associations, the performance gradually becomes the mirror to the spectator’s own

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constructed self-image. As the work evolves, patterns of choreographed movements are interrelated with a partly sung narration, complemented by the additional voice of the piano. The figures do not address each other directly; each is situated in a private world of thoughts and reminiscences. Gesture and narration move back and forth in time, so that as the female character’s modernity encourages the male character to project forward, he seduces her into nostalgia for the past. Gesture refers to the public, projected representations of the subject through fashion, as well as to private images from childhood inflected through the memory or fantasy of the adult. There is a complicity between nostalgia and desire. The child’s desire to emulate the adult accompanies a vision of the past (“. . . peering down into the grass stalks . . . folding and pleating . . .”), while the adult’s nostalgia for moments of his or her youth is articulated with the desire to imitate the style of the latest fashion (the self ’s identification with a social ideal). The narrative thereby contrasts the child’s forward impulse into the future with an adult desire to delay through nostalgia (repetition), dual maneuvers which render the present ungraspable and the past idealized and artificial, described at a moment in the narration as Lovely afternoons in silence In black and pink shadows. Like So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet, Now & Then does not conceal the codes inherent in its use of language. As a performed recitation, it is a “presentation,” not the “representation” of orthodox theater whose psychologized characters are signified through acting—the attempt to render player and character as congruent. Coleman’s players perform not acting but action, central to which is the ritualized gesture, a demonstrative sign that we recognize not as an equivalent of “nature” but as a culturally determined artifice, returning us to Brecht’s proposals for eliminating the “fourth wall.” In this respect, as theater, the work possesses much in common with Japanese No¯ and Bunraku. Neither the mannequin nor the marionette is a representation of an individual with whom the spectator may form a sympathetic identification; instead, they are formalized projections, or signifiers, of social status or human archetypes. In Coleman’s work, the projected image is the visual motif around which his dramatized recitation weaves a temporal web, reflecting back upon the social and psychological implications of the image. This articulates both

one’s seeing and one’s listening, but sound is not necessarily located in the image nor, with the exception of Slide Piece, does it always refer to it directly. Consequently the spectator is faced with two simultaneous texts whose signifiers do not always coincide in the same signifieds. It is therefore the responsibility of the perceiver to insert himself or herself into this perceptual space in order to draw meaning from it. We might say that the work functions as a metaphor of the way one’s imaginary, symbolic, and real relationships to the world are mutually articulated through representations, but that the work also structurally situates the viewer in the oscillation between them. In their reference to the viewer’s direct perceptions, the images of Slide Piece and Flash Piece place the spectator primarily in the imaginary, functioning as the objectified other of the gaze; whereas the dual images of Clara and Dario may be described as playing with the Oedipal, setting up something that the spectator recognizes as a relationship both within and outside of his or her self, and thus moving one into a consideration of the eﬀects of the symbolic order of society where the subject is posed as a signifier of a relation rather than a fixed entity. It is however in touching on the register of the real, an experience that (as yet) eludes the signifying demands of discursive or symbolic formations, that Coleman’s work has its greatest resonance. Despite the assumptions we derive from discourse, language or representation in itself is not transparent; its meaning is not readily available “at a glance” but carried by the context of its use. There is, then, a paradoxical lack of coincidence between the image or work and the thing to which it refers that renders the latter unknowable in its entirety. Coleman’s work exploits this aporia of language. Significantly, his images are not fixed, and in experiencing their narrativity and repetition one’s perceptions become transformed into memory, enabling the building of a spatiotemporal, or “historical,” relation with the work, but one nonetheless that does not lead to closure. It is at this juncture that the verbal narration gains resonance, functioning as a relay that extends the spectator’s relation to the image into a broader sociohistorical context. The audience’s role as listeners is central to the production of meaning here. In speaking of how in reading we mentally identify a narrated event, Roland Barthes mentions that, while “to read is to name, to listen is not only to perceive a language, it is also to construct it.”21 Such is the essential condition of the spectator’s relationship to Coleman’s narration, through whose multilayered signs and discontinuities the audience

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struggles to construct their meanings by connecting with their own past and future, becoming themselves the subject of the text. As Brecht’s Actor says, the notion of “continually observing oneself and referring back to one’s own experience can easily lead a man to alter the text.” To which the Dramaturg responds, “alterations demand a great deal of art”; it is “not the play but the performance that is the real purpose of all one’s eﬀorts.”22 Likewise, in the case of Coleman’s work, priority lies not with the art object as such, but with the dynamic of reception and the performative potential of language, gesture, and image. Thus it is not outside but inside the viewer-listener that the unity of Coleman’s “text” is constituted. In its insistence on attentiveness and response and hence on the immediacy of its experience, the work engages the viewer as a participant not as an observer. This experience is not based in any prior knowledge, which would imply a conscious speaking subject. On the contrary, in the face of the work’s constant slippage away from any determinable referentiality, the viewer experiences a suspension of knowledge, a rendering “speechless,” a loss of boundaries between subject and object. In other words, the work induces moments of desubjectivation, a state of uncertainty that can be referred back neither to a subject nor to a psychological state. Nor is it a return to some presubjective state, but it is instead an experience of the condition of our relation to the limits of language itself where it fails to “speak for” us. The spectator is placed in the position of continuously having, as Barthes says, to “construct language,” which is to say, to invent meaning. Hence, in its play of indeterminacy, the “place of the spectator” in Coleman’s work is the site where an encounter with the real—the ineﬀable diﬀerence between perception and memory (representation), between pure language and discourse—begins to unravel symbolic certitude. Through meanings established and perpetuated in its discursive systems, society tends to reinforce the imaginary; it emphasizes “sameness” and “diﬀerence,” playing on the subject’s desire to unify itself with an ideal other—these days most often derived from media personalities. When we speak of our identity, we are speaking not of an independent entity, but of something which is both relative and defined sociohistorically. In this way society binds us to itself, guiding both our perceptions and the meanings we extract from them in order to maintain its own coherence and “truth.” It is this disparity between mediated reality and reality as individually lived and perceived that Brecht sought to expose in his alienation eﬀect. In

Brecht’s thaëter, this eﬀect “consists in the reproduction of real-life incidents on the stage in such a way as to underline their causality and bring it to the spectator’s attention. This type of art also generates emotions;such performances facilitate the mastering of reality.”23 Coleman’s project is not dissimilar in its aims, because one crucial question asked by it is how we might creatively reinvent a world dominated by “received” information which cripples any sense of subjective agency. In revealing the mechanisms of discursive formations and the ways by which we are inserted into them, Coleman’s work exposes the ideological framework at the root of social discourse, drawing us out of our apathetic unawareness of the meanings inherent in it. Thus, his work is “political” not in the conventional sense (it is never “prescriptive,” nor does it present a “position”), but in the fact that it challenges the very basis of ideology: those relative, socially determined values projected and reinforced through the representations of culture that ensnare the subject in a system of predetermined meanings and relationships which, because familiar, seem “natural” and unquestionable. If Coleman’s work plunges us as spectators into equivocal territory, it is to remind us that even though we may be irrevocably possessed by language, in testing its limits we are better able to understand the nature of this possession. Can one ask more of art than this? Notes

This essay was written as a (perverse) response to an invitation to write on performance art for a special issue of the Canadian journal Open Letter devoted to “Performance and Cultural Politicization.” 1. Brecht’s gestus is a combination of gesture and attitude (a play, a person, a sentence can all have a gestus); see Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. John Willett (London: Eyre Methuen, 1965), translator’s note, p. 46. 2. By “dramatized recitation” in Coleman’s work, I mean a kind of dialogical monologue allowing, as in Brecht’s thaëter, the “subject to be approached from several points of view” (ibid., p. 106), and in which gesture and props combine to reveal the artifices of the performance as distinct from theatrical naturalism. 3. Octavio Paz, “The Castle of Purity,” in Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, trans. Donald Gardner (New York: Little, Brown, 1978), p. 87. 4. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 19. 5. See Jacques Lacan:“Fort! Da! It is precisely in his solitude that the desire of the little child has already become the desire of another, of an alter ego who dominates him and whose object of desire is henceforth his own aﬄiction.” Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977), p. 104.

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6. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 45. 7. Ibid. 8. In Flash Piece, the viewer’s conventional experience of time is disrupted through the intermittent repetition of an event within a narrative structure: a consecutive series of fixedtime cycles is defined by two yellow light flashes. Between these yellow pulses there occur two blue flashes whose intervals vary from cycle to cycle, creating a provocative event, which breaks the spectator’s anticipatory relationship to it. 9. Christian Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier,” trans. Ben Brewster, Screen 16, no. 2 (Summer 1975), p. 15. 10. [Editor’s note: This passage from the French version of Slide Piece has been left untranslated, as the voice-over of each version of the work is slightly diﬀerent. Thus an English translation of the passage would not parallel the English version of the piece.] 11. Clara and Dario are discussing an impending train journey, which one of them is about to make to a place they had known in the past. This projection into the future engenders a train of reminiscences, which introduce “Elsa” and “Andrea.” Through the interweaving of third- with second-person narration, which also moves between the preterite and the present and future tenses, ambiguities arise that create uncertainties about the identities of Elsa and Andrea and their relationship to Clara and Dario: Are they childhood playmates, or the latter themselves as children? The piece recalls the film text of Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1961), whose presentness contains a past of several alternative possibilities. 12. Box is a black-and-white Super 8 mm film in continuous cycle with synchronized soundtrack, situated somewhere that might evoke the public placement of a TV for watching sports events—like above a bar. Edited footage of the original film of the fight appears intermittently; consequently, as with Slide Piece, viewers are made aware of themselves in relation to the medium. 13. “Murphy” is both a common Irish name and the brand name of a beer. 14. Paul Willemen, “Cinematic Discourse: The Problem of Inner Speech,” Screen 22, no. 3 (1981), pp. 85 and 81. 15. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), p. 66. 16. Parallels may be drawn with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, whose “sense” becomes clearer when read aloud; and with passages of the later dramatic work of Samuel Beckett, such as The Mouth’s disjointed monologue in Not I. 17. Of particular relevance is J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World [1907], reprinted in W. A. Armstrong, ed., Classic Irish Drama (Harmondsworth:Penguin Books, 1964), pp. 69– 134. 18. So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet presents the viewer with a video monitor mounted in a sparsely furnished room (a TV showroom?) and spotlit to simulate the artificiality of a color TV brochure. The “program” is a story narrated by two performers: a female model and a pianist in the background who complements the narration with a repeated refrain interspersed with quotations from Irish folk songs, popular and classical melodies. The performers are the actress Olwen Fouère and the composer Roger Doyle, who also collaborated in the production of Now & Then.

19. The pianist’s horned head refers specifically to a hero of Irish mythology; but it also suggests the mythic structure of conventional fictional narrative. 20. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). 21. Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in Image, Music, Text, essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977), p. 102. 22. Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, p. 74. 23. Ibid., p. 102.

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Strongbow, 1978 Video installation. Resin cast, plaster mold, Sony Art Couture monitor, audio equipment, and speakers. Installation at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2000.

The Enigma of the Hero in the Work of James Coleman Jean Fisher

“Who are you?” “Where did you come from?” These questions, posed at the outset of Living and Presumed Dead (1983– 85), a slide and audio projection, have an “everyday” simplicity that masks an immense dilemma. For how are we to answer such questions? We may specify a name, a profession, a location—and yet these nominations are wholly inadequate to describe the totality of experience and feelings that constitute the being who answers “I.” Behind the drama enacted between this “I” and its idea of itself stands the enigmatic figure of the hero, a cultural icon whose significance to the fields of representation and identity formation is explored in various ways in Coleman’s work, and is again under investigation in the scenario of Living and Presumed Dead. Living and Presumed Dead opens with an illustration of a group of youthful “players” who are dressed in personalized interpretations of period and contemporary fashions. They adopt poses complementing the roles suggested by the costumes: that is, they form a cultural typology, not a group of psychologized characters, signified through visual display. The scene becomes animated when a female figure, Borras, emerges from the group and brusquely accosts a flamboyantly dressed youth, demanding, “Who are you? Where did you come from?”—clearly marking him as a “stranger.” Borras’s first question establishes the issue central to Living and Presumed Dead and, although expressed in diﬀerent ways, to all Coleman’s work since the photographic piece Suzi (1966–67)—namely, the problem of what constitutes “individual” identity.1 The second question is already

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Suzi, 1966–67 Selected image from project. Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan, 1966.

installed in the first since an answer can be given only by reference to the past life or “history” of that individual, who is, nevertheless, in part constituted by it. What is self-evident, but of crucial importance to this discourse, is that these interrogative statements are made in language and can only be understood and answered through language. In other words, the “subject” must symbolize his or her identity within language as representation: as “I” in contradistinction to what is “not I.” Throughout Coleman’s

recent work, the manipulation of verbal language as representation, often through montaged fragments of stock phrases, runs parallel to his use of visual representation. The latter expresses the constitution of cultural identity through the visual codes that determine the outward appearance and mannerisms of each of his “players” in relation to the set of circumstances in which they find themselves, as well as through a variety of objects or signs that signify some aspect of the self or its positioning in society. Through Borras’s questions, the youth (whom we later learn is Chris disguised as his father Capax) is presented as the first figure whose enigmatic identity initiates and motivates a plot of violence, murder, and love. Chris refuses to answer Borras, who believes he is her long-lost lover, Capax, whose image she keeps in a locket. Chris wishes to maintain his disguise in order to create a scenario that will threaten and flush out his father’s murderer. He is rescued by the intervention of the girl Abbas who, in the ensuing struggle with Borras, receives an ear injury. When Chris inexplicably attacks Abbas with an ornamental dagger, damaging an eye and leaving her unconscious, both she and Borras have reasons to seek him out. This primary narrative is articulated with a second story, the mysterious disappearance or death of Capax. This is presented simultaneously as a narration and as a dramatization—a “play” within the “play,” as it were— which dislocates our sense of temporal continuity. The absent Capax is, moreover, “present” as a recurrent image: as Chris’s disguise, as the portrait in Borras’s locket, and, finally, in the transference of the disguise to Abbas during the reenactment that forces the murderer to repeat his crime. Even in this brief plot synopsis it is possible to recognize the familiar features of the classical narrative, from the mythic tale to modern crime fiction: the quest to solve a mystery and its implementation by the hero. In this work, the diegetic functions of the mythic hero are dispersed amongst the various dramatis personae: Chris’s initial search for his father’s murderer; the trials of Abbas, represented by her perceptual impairments; Borras’s execution of the villain (Mr.) and her inevitable death.2 Like the heroic role itself, the ornamental dagger also changes hands, functioning as a talisman giving superhuman powers to the holder—it relays the power of destiny. But it is the figure of Capax that undergoes repeated “resurrections,” both in the representation of the past through storytelling and the dramatization (which suggests that Capax symbolizes an aspect of language itself ), and as the identity which the other “characters” variously assume and emulate. Capax, therefore, is the “immortalized” figure who stands as cultural icon, role model, and supreme authority.

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In addition to its narrative content, Living and Presumed Dead presents a cluster of metaphorical conundrums expressed through the roles played by the objects: the costumes, the dagger, the portrait in the locket, and the “insignia,” or ideogram, tattooed on Chris’s body by his father. The insignia is the true enigma of the tale for it holds the secret whose maintenance is the motivation for Capax’s murder and whose interpretation is the real object of the quest. In its most literal sense, the mythic tale is a story of individual action. A young male (seldom a female) of exceptional qualities is singled out by the gods to resolve a problem that the social group is impotent to combat. So it is that, in Living and Presumed Dead, Capax provides the disguise by which Chris will disrupt and threaten the complacency of a social structure that has harbored a disharmonious element, the unsolved crime of murder. The traditional tale, however, carries a moral, for while it describes the hero/individual’s beneficial role in society, it also warns of the penalty should he transgress its Law. Or, put another way, transgressive energy becomes a threat once it has served its purpose and returned a social system to harmony and stability. Thus, Oedipus is ostracized, while the Irish Cuchulainn, Christ, and Borras are punished by death for acts which finally overreach the bounds of social acceptability. Sacrifice, of course, leads to legendary martyr status. The potency of this mythic structure, suﬃcient to survive innumerable cultural and temporal transformations, suggests that the hero’s significance lies elsewhere than simply as literary entertainment. If we dig deeper, we discover another level which suggests that the mythic hero functions as a paradigm for the individual’s transition from the anarchy of childhood to maturity and acceptance into the adult social order. Myth is a particular narrativized form of language that allegorizes the socialization of the (male) self according to a persistent and ambivalent ideal stereotype. Instrumental language is, however, a social institution that “comes from the dead”; we are all born into preexisting linguistic codes embedded within which are culture’s belief structures and collective fantasies, and it is through their negotiation that we must find a place in the world as functional subjects. Coleman speculates on how far one’s sense of reality is conditioned (and stultified) by predetermined and commodified images of subjectivity (projected above all through television), in which the hermeneutic key to the enigma of selfhood—the father’s “insignia” tattooed on Chris’s body—is invariably held by a figure of the symbolic order. Chris’s search for the

meaning of the insignia can perhaps be read as a dual quest: the search for origins and for destiny, in and against his stigmatized place within the social order. How the individual negotiates a sense of self between private and collective desires and social constraints appears to be one of the central themes of an earlier work by Coleman, Box (ahhareturnabout) (1977). In contemporary popular culture, the male figure that most closely resembles the archaic hero is the athlete, and particularly the boxer, whose body, tuned to the peak of physical performance, is capable of “superhuman” feats of strength and endurance. It is through the spectacle of his ritual combat or “trial” that the audience, predominantly the less privileged classes (from which the boxer himself characteristically emerges), identifies by proxy with triumph over adversity. Box suggests some of the poignant internal conflicts endured by such a hero, figured through the Irish boxer Gene Tunney. The artist presents us with a continuous film loop of fragments from the original footage of Tunney and Dempsey’s return fight in 1927 whose hung verdict remains a legend of boxing folklore. As we catch glimpses of the boxers circling the ring and each other between passages of black film leader, we hear a commentary representing Tunney’s circling thoughts—an interior monologue of fragmented, abbreviated phrases and nonverbal utterances—together with a low pulse whose frequency is that of a slightly accelerated heart rate. Through its rhythmic sensuality, it foregrounds the erotic physicality of the fight, turning voluptuously on Tunney’s anxiety about death and mortality, and oblique references to the present and the past—the immediate struggle, Ireland’s (colonial) history and nationalist myths. Tunney’s anguish seems to stem not directly from the contest with Dempsey, but from an internal conflict between his private sense of self and the heroic image conferred on him by a public whose relationship to him is nonetheless capricious. He knows that he possesses power as the heroic role model only as long as he maintains his success as a boxer; should he “transgress,” however, through a failure to fulfil this expectation, the public will then exercise its power as the Law and punish him by depriving him of his champion status. But is Tunney’s private self so imbricated with his public image that to lose the sense of the one is to lose identity altogether? Tunney fights, perhaps, not to win the bout per se but to ensure that the self maintains its illusion of coherence. Suspended simultaneously as “champ and not-champ,” his tragedy is that he must perpetually sustain this split in

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the self, for he is trapped in the endlessness of Box’s structural repetition which echoes the fight’s real-life suspended verdict. There can be no release in “death” because the fight is never concluded. No hero could be more unlike Tunney than Leopold Bloom, James Joyce’s antihero of Ulysses: an unassuming man of inaction whose passivity suggests a resignation to the unresolvable problems of life. Coleman’s commissioned work for the 1982 Joyce centenary was an homage to the author which, rather than presuming to approach this literary hero directly, was oﬀered through the humble character of Bloom. The piece was intended to provoke a contemplation on Joyce’s oeuvre without imposing its own identity and thereby relegating the author’s achievement to secondary status. The reflection centered on temporality and place. On the portal of No. 7 Eccles Street in Dublin, Coleman hung a garland of xeranthemum leaves, a plant whose symbolic meaning—“cheerfulness in adversity”— perhaps sums up Bloom’s persona.3 A sterling silver replica of the garland was hung in the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin: a lasting memento which would symbolize the permanence of Joyce’s literature and the city in contrast to the natural garland whose inevitable decay would stand for the transience of life.4 Joyce’s own heroic literary status was inextricably linked to the city of Dublin. There is a parallel here with Chris’s relationship to Capax, since the status of Dublin in Joyce’s work has the authority of a symbolic father:like the tattoo, the city donates to the son his language and identity but in the end becomes the very factor that limits and frustrates him. As we know, Joyce dealt with the problem of his identity in exile and through the reinvention of language. But as Bloom the Jewish exile makes his nomadic trips through the city streets, so Joyce searches the past through the labyrinth of memory to find his own artistic selfhood. Strongbow was an exile of a diﬀerent order, but perhaps no less uncertain of his identity than Chris, Tunney, or Joyce. During the twelfth century, this Norman knight was invited into Ireland to settle a dispute between two Irish kings. Strongbow himself seems to have been beguiled by Ireland and its people since he married and died there; so perhaps like Tunney his private and public roles became confused. Strongbow (1978) shifts the search for identity into a sociohistorical context through the displacement of this heroic figure into a contemporary setting that questions our relation to cultural mythologies. In Coleman’s installation a cast of the knight’s eﬃgy lies in silent repose in a darkened room;his united hands and worn features are caught in a single shaft of light. Nearby, a video monitor

Ulysses Project, 1982 Eccles Street, Dublin, 1982.

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presents the image of another pair of hands, one red, the other green. They begin to clap, slowly at first, then quickening to a crescendo suﬃcient, we might say, to wake the dead. But Strongbow slumbers on, impassive to the discordant drama enacted in his presence, or simply impotent to intercede in the ongoing conflict between the present sons of Ulster. The clapping hands in Strongbow remind us of the Uprising’s invocation of Ireland’s other slumbering heroes, Finn and the Fianna, who as role models likewise failed to assist in the struggle to realize the dream of restoring a precolonial Irish identity that would have any productive value for resolving the problems of present reality. It is the one-time benign image of Strongbow that has undergone transformation into the rancorous emblem of colonization: a father symbolic of an alien authority, dead but ever-present in the memory of conquest. However, as Coleman has recently intimated in Ignotum per Ignotius (1982–84), “the sword is no antique”: mythic battles live on in their perpetual recounting. But rattling the arms of heroic fiction produces a blind spot. Myth is a universal fiction occupying a timeless space, and both Strongbow and Ignotum per Ignotius seem to imply that to seek the gods and heroes is only to find the implacable distance that separates them from mortal space, from a workable reality. The supernatural hero embodies collective aspirations and dreams of transcendence. Through his perpetual resurrection in narrative, the hero defies time and in so doing provides the social group with a cohesive sense of identity and continuity. And yet, to misinterpret this metaphorical role of the hero, to dwell in an image of the past, mythologized or historical, is nonetheless to risk a pathological view of reality and to court a failure of the present. It is this confusion between “reality” and “fiction” that Coleman explored in Kojak and Zamora (1975–). Although this work remains unfinished, it is an important reference point for the artist’s subsequent explorations of the complex relationships between cultural mythologies and commodified identities, lived experience and subjective agency. As his starting point, Coleman took the much-publicized murder trial of the young Puerto Rican boy Romney Zamora. His defense based its case on the psychiatric claim that the boy was so influenced by watching television that he could no longer distinguish reality from fiction, proposing therefore that the boy’s crime was the result of his “acting out” an identification with his media heroes, Kojak and Superman (whom he nevertheless fantasized he could outsmart). Kojak/Telly Savalas was called as a witness in the defense’s attempt to establish that the representation of violent crime on TV

Kojak and Zamora, 1975–( ) Project documentation.

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perverted the young’s sense of values, a strategy that at the same time placed the actor in a morally ambiguous position. Coleman explores Zamora’s confusion of identity through the interrelationship of two plots representing “reality” and “fiction”: the making of a film with Kojak and the “real” Zamora, and the film story itself of Kojak and Zamora-as-Superboy in a crime investigation that includes the latter’s trial. The diﬀerence between reality and fantasy becomes increasingly ambiguous as the two narratives collapse into each other. The work was intended as a video installation which cross-referenced with the media’s intervention in the Zamora case. It was the first live TV broadcast of a murder trial which, with the additional presence of Kojak/Telly Savalas in his customary role as a crime investigator/witness, created a fictionalized spectacle from a real-life tragedy (itself replicating the problem of the TV crime series) and gave the mute and confused boy a moment of “stardom.” Coleman’s fiction suggests that Zamora’s “other” unspoken crime is his attempt to usurp the role of the hero-father, for which Kojak as the embodiment of the Law punishes him. Zamora falls victim to the discrepancy in culture between what is sanctioned in fiction, as representation, and what is censored in real life, and where this positions individual agency:one might argue that Zamora, in a sense, commits murder “in good faith.” He is trapped in his fantasy of an idealized self just as Kojak/Savalas is caught in the fiction of his own representation. As in Strongbow, this hero finally emerges as the representation of a paternalistic value structure which cannot accept the consequences of it own mythmaking machinery. The self ’s desire to identify with another who appears more perfect than itself, and less subject to societal constraints, leads it to nominate cultural figures which set the style for its behavior and sense of selfhood. Unlike the heroes of mythic narratives, however, contemporary celebrities like Kojak/Savalas are not models that confront the complexities of life but are reflections of the traditional role model distorted through the desires of a materialist society whose values are based on the status of glamour and wealth. Manufactured to the expediency of fashion and profit, these are images of a technology of consumerism in which desire itself is exploited, in which “reality” becomes increasingly a mediated and collective fantasy, and in which, indeed, “acting out” prescribed roles becomes the only available form of agency. At the end of Living and Presumed Dead, Chris has shed his disguise and stands naked with his enigmatic tattoo. Unlike the mythic hero, he has not

Kojak and Zamora, 1975–( ) Project documentation.

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solved its mystery and must be resigned to the absence of meaning. Perhaps now, like Bloom, he is more freely able to transform his fantasy of an “absolute truth” into a workable reality. Coleman’s Tunney and Zamora, on the other hand, cannot perform the suture that will reconcile the “real” and “projected” selves and consequently must suﬀer a forlorn alienation. Zamora and Chris remind us that one of the central features of fantasy and the symbolic power of the hero is dramatization: an enactment in language, a narration of the subject whereby it creates itself as a representation. If, however, the moment it enters into preexisting social codes the subject is directed to narrate itself only in the terms that culture has established for it, can one imagine individual agency outside of such prescriptions? The work so far discussed focuses on the question of identity formation through the singular figure of the hero; other works deal with the more abstract socializing function of instrumental language through which the subject is constituted into a collective order. Whereas Kojak and Zamora reflects upon the limits of our inscription in language, Now & Then (1981) perhaps can be described as a reverie on our formation in language.5 In both So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet (1980) and Living and Presumed Dead, style of dress and gesture are signs which refer to the social role of the subject; they create an image for public consumption, indicating the social territory with which the desire of the self for an integrated identity is coerced or otherwise encouraged to identify. In So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet, the antique green dress, like the dagger in Living and Presumed Dead, is a talisman which changes hands and undergoes transformation, but which also functions as the fetishized object of desire. In Now & Then the two figures narrate their idea of themselves through interdependent temporal movements which develop themes of earlier works, such as Clara and Dario (1975) and So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet.6 The first theme is the subject’s narration of the past inflected through apparent memory of childhood images and role models; the other is the subject’s present and fantasized reflections on its desire to be like culture’s currently fashionable images, recalling Zamora’s confusion between self and TV persona. Through this complex reverie the past reveals itself as an idealized fiction, continually being retold (like the retelling of the hero’s tale) through the private and collective fantasies of the present. Perhaps we contain the anomalies and uncertainties of the present only by reworking them (“folding and pleating,” as the narration says) into the continuously transforming narrative of our own history. Perhaps Zamora’s real tragedy was that he had no history to speak of. Is “real-

Ignotum per Ignotius, 1982–84 Performed work for theater. Performed by Isabel Carlos, Rui Orfão. Music by Roger Doyle. Theatro Estúdio Citac, Coimbra, Portugal, 1983.

ity,” then, but a comic masquerade in which our heroic fantasies shadowbox with that cluster of roles that culture deems appropriate for us to perform, a mime play of shifting representations in which, trapped in our solitude, we may be as mute as Strongbow and Zamora? Language—which donates our sense of self but also limits that sense of self within socialized boundaries—perhaps this is the key by which Ignotum per Ignotius, Coleman’s second performed work, invites us to unlock some of the complexities of identity formation, and whose decoys and metonymic substitutions lead us back again into the abstract enigma of the mythic self. Although it is not a play—indeed it transgresses many of the codes of Western naturalistic theater and performance and seems closer to pantomime—it is nevertheless a drama of recitation, actions, and music performed, as in Now & Then, by two players. The simple setting, sculptural lighting, and prerecorded harmonium music suggest a church or funeral parlor. While the first player confesses a guilty secret, the second makes a sequence of moves indicative of a coming-into-life, which is the coming-into-language of the drama itself:

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I’m only a newcomer. Start the proceedings! It’s a simple story . . . Meaning, we are told, will not be revealed by applying logic: “Anyone wearing binoculars is looking for trouble.” This discourse between the drama as a representation and the performance as a performed reality continues through various narrative displacements:the deliberate operation of the sound props; monologue with recitative and singing; ritualistic actions and abrupt “twitches” seemingly out of context with the narrative flow, indicating shifts in time or space, or connections between consciousness and the unconscious processes. The plot dovetails a plane of “myth” with one of “reality.” “Start the proceedings!” suggests a trial: the initiation of the hero quest, as well as the investigation of a mysterious death in a crime story. Various “characters” in the plot are symbolic of the social order— the priest, the lawyer—while the plot itself follows many of the moves in the heroic tale: a supper, a betrayal, a reference to crucifixion, and the lament that closes the work: Dreams a shadow Lacrymosa Infants scowl Lacrymosa What is being mourned perhaps is the death of “innocence,” the loss of the Edenic undiﬀerentiated and fantasized self before the symbolic order of language trapped us in its socializing constraints. This sense of loss may be what links Ignotum per Ignotius to Coleman’s enigmatic A-Koan (1978), an installation whose continuous film loop presents an image of the Irish tricolor flapping wildly above a cluster of large public address loudspeakers. The accompanying soundtrack combines a low sonorous tone with a child’s voice calling plaintively to its mother: Mummy, I’m ready I’ve done a poo I’m calling you . . . Several of the work’s signifiers suggest “speaking,” or language (the gaping “mouths” of the loudspeakers projecting the voice of authority; the small

Ignotum per Ignotius, 1982–84 Performed work for theater. Performed by Olwen Fouère and Roger Doyle. Shaffy Theater, Amsterdam, 1982.

voice of the child); others suggest silence (the flag is soundless; the child’s call is unanswered). Thus between image and sound there is an oscillation between “utterance” and “muteness.” Between need and the unanswered demand, the child speaks: but the sense of unutterable loss that pervades A-Koan links coming-into-language to the longing for that loss by which desire itself comes into being. Like most of Coleman’s recent work, Ignotum per Ignotius has a narrative structure (a “revelation” in time, although not one that one would commonly anticipate) expressed through a narrator—one who tells. What Ignotum per Ignotius “tells” is the enigma of death, the ultimate mystery, and the phantasm which underlies mythic fiction and perhaps all representation. For what is storytelling but a retelling of that which has already passed away, a representation of that which is no longer present? From its beginning, which must acknowledge an end, the conventional story narrates the process of its own death, an entropic move that invites comparison with

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the story of the self whose entry into language (the inauguration of selfdramatization) marks an acceptance of the limits to life. But this acceptance is not without resistance; like the body, language works to sustain itself against dissolution in death. The returns and repetitions of the plot of the mythic tale and its continual recounting—the epic journeys of Cuchulainn, Gulliver, and Ulysses; Scheherazade’s 1001 nights of procrastination; the continuous cycle of Box—these are strategies of deferment by which time is suspended and death is postponed. If in narrative we seek knowledge of death without its finality, perhaps what we find comforting in the hero is his continuous cycle of death and rebirth that conquers the power of time and provides a sense of continuity to life. But repetition serves another, related function. In Clara and Dario, Now & Then, and Living and Presumed Dead, repetition is the continuous restaging of memories: a renarration of the past in terms of the present, which serves to bind the threads of life into a semblance of coherent meaning, and through which the dissociated self manufactures the semblance of a unified identity—it represents itself, it creates a history. In Ignotum per Ignotius there is also a mnemonic revision seeking the causes and the resolution of the self ’s present uncertainty:“I needed to reinvest.” But as in Living and Presumed Dead and Strongbow, there is an ironic edge, for at the same time a question arises whether or not this search for unified and coherent meaning through a “knowledge” that obligates language to rules and institutions is predicated on an absurd contradiction: that what we seek we nevertheless embody in a concept of all-knowingness—the supreme authority or “cosmic father,” which is itself unnamed and unknowable (this is the meaning of ignotum per ignotius). And the more we search for unity and certitude, the more we seem, like Tunney and Chris, to encounter a mute and abyssal nothingness. What Coleman’s work makes clear is that cultural mythologies are representations that enable us to utter and define a place within the symbolic order, but at the same time, they present a fiction that not only masks the anomalies of life but also tends to deprive us of belief in our own sensuous relation to the world, and hence to cripple individual agency. Instrumental language, the Law and its institutions, are donations from the “cosmic father,” the substance of culture which supports the myth of man’s divine origin and heroic destiny. But the price paid for this disavowal of nature is a rupture between the identificatory demands of society and the desire of otherness of private dreams and fantasies. It is through this conflict that the

Living and Presumed Dead, 1983–85 Storyboard (detail).

group must establish a collective identity, and each “subject” within the group find its own sense of reality. The child must sustain this conflict as soon as he enters the symbolic realm, but while this enables him to articulate a subjectivity that guarantees his place within society, it simultaneously confronts him with his separation from the “maternal body” (nature) and the sense of wholeness with which this body endowed him.7 Living and Presumed Dead articulates this split: for while it is Borras, the woman, who holds the key to Chris’s imaginary identity (his inheritance, or physical likeness to the father in the locket), it is Capax the father who provides the son with his symbolic identity (the ideogram/tattoo). The “subject,” then, eternally divided, henceforth is motivated by the desire for a coherent identity—to “reinvest,” to find the meaning of the insignia—which can only be realized in death. Life contains, therefore, both a resistance to and a drive toward death: the dream of immortality and the fear of an endless alienation. At the end of Living and Presumed Dead, we find that neither Chris nor Abbas is able to interpret the insignia; like the erased message in Ignotum per Ignotius, perhaps it was never intended to be deciphered. At the end of his quest Coleman’s hero finds only the impossibility of meaning:both origin and destiny remain ineﬀable. The enigma articulated by the hero is

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that the self occupies the space of an absence: at the very moment the self comes into language, it “dies” and is simultaneously resurrected as an other with which there can be no reconciliation. Coleman therefore inverts the significance of the cultural hero. In his work there is no graspable center to satisfy our desire for closure, or coherence, only a continuous decentering that speaks of the impossibility of unified meaning, of not one ideal self but a mask of relations, of not one reality but a play of many shifting realities that is our constant negotiation between past and present, memory and desire. Through its complex layering of signs and narrative disjunctions, Coleman’s work undoes the sutures in instrumental language, in those discursive codes which would present the world as a seamless unity. In disengaging language from the inertia of its representations, what is liberated is that voice of unreason through which language and the self may renew their configurations in the world.8 Notes

This text was written around a version of Living and Presumed Dead which was to be presented as a strip story of commercial-type illustrations. The narration, read by Noel Purcell, was a reminder of Ireland’s tradition of the storyteller. The images of the later, more familiar version consist of a sequence of photographic stills of mannequins and stock “characters” reminiscent of the masks of commedia dell’arte or medieval street theater, organized in variable juxtapositions as if taking a curtain call. This motley throng recalls the cast of narrated characters in So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet and Ignotum per Ignotius, and, together with Coleman’s references to genres of popular or mass culture, makes clearer the work’s relationship to the popular carnivalesque. What is important here is the political dimension of the carnivalesque as a disarticulation of normative discursive language, whose eﬀect is to precipitate the viewer-participant into the uncertain, liminal territory of “becoming-other.” 1. For brief descriptions of this and other work, see James Coleman, exh. cat. (Dublin:Douglas Hyde Gallery, 1982). 2. For the classic analysis of such “diegetic functions,” see Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas, 1968), p. 25. 3. James Joyce used this address in Dublin as the home of the fictional Leopold and Molly Bloom in Ulysses. 4. Ironically, this familiar and popular landmark on Eccles Street was itself bulldozed not long after Coleman’s xeranthemum wreath had withered away. 5. Now & Then was Coleman’s first work to be performed live. It is a double narration performed to music by two players posing as male and female mannequins dressed in the fashionable styles of the fifties and eighties, respectively. 6. On Clara and Dario, see again the exhibition catalogue cited in note 1. 7. The reading of Coleman’s work presented in this essay makes general reference to Lacan’s discourse on the self and language. See, for example, Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in

Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968); and Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977). 8. Given that Coleman’s work centers on an interrogation of the language of art and our positioning in relation to it as viewers, the title Living and Presumed Dead may also be seen as a sidelong reference to the interminable debate on the status of painting as an eﬃcacious medium for reflecting on contemporary reality since the advent of photography. The “hero” in question might then be the author-artist, who is no longer—according to postmodern critique—the modernist, unified, transcendental subject of knowledge.

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Living and Presumed Dead, 1983–85 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

The Living Dead (Living and Presumed Dead ) Raymond Bellour translated by George Baker

Between the living and the dead. Between life and death. Between film and photography, theater and painting: between all the forms of representation linked to these extremes of motion and stasis, there lies a perverse and precise art, one dedicated to a future still partly unknown, and of which James Coleman is the inhabitant. There is a piece by Coleman that—through its title and the ambiguous situation that it creates—can serve as an index of this fluid field, the interstices and edges of which Coleman has filled with thirty years of work in every genre and subgenre, in projects ranging from the most minimal to the most expansive. Modest and not very well known (but recently reexhibited), the work was given the title Images (1975): seven almost identical paintings arranged as a horizontal series that can be followed by the viewer in either direction. Lit violently, in fact in such a manner that the flood of light seems to dissolve the little that one can make out, the seven images display a metallic silver ground against which two lines trace a single motif. The motif is recognizable but fleeting, transformed by each movement of the viewer’s eye or body. In eﬀect, it is just as possible to perceive the work as presenting an abstract space or a vague shape pinioned at the work’s center, as it is to see in it two faces that suddenly emerge from either side to face each other with shifting expressions. Or yet again, because its recent appearance was in an exhibition on what is called the “Cinema Eﬀect,” it is even more tempting to see the paintings as giving rise to the image of seven miniaturized movie screens, or seven immeasurably enlarged still frames from a film.1

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Series of Images, 1975 Installation at Studio Marconi, Milan, 1975.

Spectatorial displacement, perceptual ambiguity, an indeterminate classification and apparatus: James Coleman’s art is wedded to such a succession of interference. And these obstacles only increased in number and type as soon as his work opened itself—with a single-mindedness paradoxically driven by a love of the heterogeneous—to all the major issues of the day while still finding a part of its strength in the dimension of local memory. Coleman achieved renown from the moment of his earliest works, which broke with the conceptualist fallacies of an international art scene in which he nevertheless quickly became one of the canniest members. He was trained abroad, in France and in Italy, where he worked for a long time before returning to Ireland. Coleman seems to owe the force of his work to the contradiction that makes of him an internal exile in his own country as well as a nomad who carries this country with him wherever he exhibits and develops his art. The good fortune of Irish literature has always been that it is a “minor” literature, divided in its language and pushing the language of its colonizer, now its own, to points of rupture, so that the occupier is displaced from his own territory to the extent that it is reclaimed by the use of language as an act of sabotage.2 The good for-

tune of the Irish artist is perhaps to confront a similar situation with the particularity proper to a culture constructed in opposition to a realism of the image. Initially this opposition was due to the legacy of religion and magic, but subsequently it became part of the historical destiny that has forced Ireland for more than three centuries of terror and disaster to face what we might call the unrepresentable.3 There is such a thing as an Irish iconoclasm, an iconoclasm that finds a way to use words to the detriment of images, even as it treats words as the images of words in order to extract from them the symbolic weight of the local, archaic, and territorial attachments that tempt all “minor” cultures. Here we can locate the force specific to an iconoclasm that—while inspired by the analytical and illusory gestures of contemporary art—finds the tools for a critical deconstruction of figures and meanings just as much in the remains of its own culture. It is for this reason that among Coleman’s works, and especially among those that belong to his great reinvention—the slide projection with voice-over—the piece Living and Presumed Dead seems to occupy a privileged position: in this work, cultural and archetypal references become an unprecedented means of inquiry into what the image can do, what the image must do, and what new type of observer it constructs. Like all of the numerous examples where Coleman foregrounds the textual component of a piece through its sheer quantity and density of variation, the challenge in dealing with this work is to know where to situate oneself in relation to the information that comes or seems to come from the text. The information given is excessive, elliptical, linked to a succession of images whose meaning it inflects, but whose perceptual complexity disallows in return the ability truly to linger over the words—words which in any case never linger themselves, and from which, one suspects, something essential is constantly slipping away.4 There is thus a temptation: to stop the text, to freeze it, or rather, to go no further than it, in an attempt to understand what is accomplished among the images; and especially to grasp, in an illusion of mastery, what is happening at any given moment between the words and the images, in the room or the hall where we are. This is a largely vain eﬀort, one that can only lead to a delirium of interpretation. For it is precisely interpretation that is being targeted here and that before being destroyed—like the Carthage of our childhood Latin primers—opens this condition to the possibility of another delirium, one far more agonizing and seductive. Given the dangers of such interpretation, one understands better why Coleman has been so resistant to the idea

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of allowing all or part of the texts of his installations to be published, why he refuses even simply to distribute them or to respond to their meaning. For their meaning—constructed from a scintillation of possible meanings, endlessly torn down and recombined—does not, properly speaking, exist. Or it exists only in proportion to the parodic displacement—eﬀected through flashes, overly grand schemes, empty turns, and abrupt sensations—of which it has now become the object. We should not then attempt to reconstruct the narrative, or rather the fanning network of narratives, burgeoning forth from the carnivalesque voice of the vaudeville actor Noel Purcell, who as the narrator plays all the voices of the living and the dead in this work. It seems advisable to content oneself instead with the state in which the narrative was initially presented upon the first showing of Living and Presumed Dead in London in 1983. In this preliminary version, the “projected narrative” consisted only of a series of drawings that were meant to sketch the main characters in a schematic way, close in spirit to the method of comic strips or early animated films: Living and Presumed Dead concerns a cast of characters, Abbas, Borras, Chris or Capax, and an unidentified man, whose past relationships are confused and complex. Capax was an acrobat, performing with daggers and fire, and dicing with death. He was “presumed dead” after cutting his throat during a performance. However Borras, his lover, has searched for him many years in the belief that he was still alive. Abbas rescues Chris, who appears identical to the image of Capax, from his past and discovers that he is disguising himself as his father to avenge his father’s murder. . . .5 There is thus no shortage of murder, and of fathers, and of Hamlet’s ghost, in a plot where the doublings include sexual ambiguities as well. But this entire system of symbols is always already travestied, dilapidated, spent in a series of stereotypes and of logics without issue. It is worth emphasizing that Coleman has always pointed out that, in order to build his narrative and to work out its permutations, he had recourse to Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale and to the seven principal “functions” and the seven protagonists that Propp isolates within the finite number of possible situations found in the Russian folktale. Of course. But it is just as clear that Propp’s “functions” have no more real validity here than the subject positions schematized by Freud or Lacan in the Oedipus complex and its theater. One could even argue that in ascribing his work to them, the “functions”

that Coleman plays with come much closer to the logic of the “mytheme” as analyzed by Lévi-Strauss. In his critique of Propp, Lévi-Strauss prevents permutation from ever reaching arbitrariness; and above all, it is never on the morphological level alone but on all the levels of language, taken as a model, that the folktale, like the myth, must be grasped so as to establish the structure of the world of which it is a part.6 If, following the inverse of this logic, everything in Coleman’s work seems arbitrary—thanks to a kind of teeming oversignification—that would be in keeping with the collapse of the structure of a world in which memory, denuded and redistributed as dislocated perceptible elements, is still able to transmit emotion and warmth, but never meaning, due to the irreversible cleavage between aﬀective potential and psychic distance. An intense, almost joyous melancholy thus radiates from the flute of the musician Brian Dunning, a music—seemingly half classical and half based in folk traditions—that modulates the thousand-and-one accidents of a tale that ends where it began. One is touched by various words and phrases emitted during its course. They seem to turn around a secret: around identity and belief, love and death. It is as if they were from a play or a novel where the voices themselves so perfectly recapitulate those of previous books that we believe the plots are actually happening to the characters that the images parade before our eyes. And yet such is our dissociation that nothing overcomes it; nothing can cross its barrier. The absolute separation for Propp between characters and the functions that they are expected to perform returns here in the impossibility truly to relate what one hears to what one sees, without however ever being able to cease attempting to do just that. (In this respect, Coleman’s work is ironically Proppian.) On the wall that serves as a screen, there are twenty characters arranged in a straight line, as if on stage the moment just before or after a curtain call. They shift positions continuously, and more or less drastically, dramatizing the full length of this fictive line, at the mercy of 157 projected images (not counting ten black ones) whose unequal rhythm can be heard through the staccato punctuation of the computer-controlled slide projector. Of course, everything is knowingly, even perversely calculated; the changes in position as well as the gestures, the attitudes as well as the aﬀects put on by these strange frozen actors all seem intended to respond to the utterances of the soundtrack. And this they certainly do. But as with the “method” of Raymond Roussel so well described by Foucault—where the simple change of a phoneme suﬃces to change the direction of the whole story (“les bandes du vieux pillard”/“les bandes du vieux billard”)—

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the visual arrangement of the characters in a single line and their continual permutation, feeding oﬀ the material disjunction between sound and image, make it very diﬃcult to follow this story even if it is obstinately mimed by one after the other of them. Or better, try to follow the trajectory of one or more of the characters trotted along the entire length of the line, through all the dissolves and blanks that punctuate the passage from image to image—a movement of whirls and eddies that, however much it fulfills the minimum narrative contract, detaches from the fullness of the text and initiates a genuinely hallucinatory, zigzag relationship between image and sound. The viewer emerges conscious of this but defeated—or worse, with a false sense of victory, if he or she places the desire for mastery above that which the reality of the work permits. The only true recourse is to abandon oneself to the intellection of that which the projection is and can become during the twenty-five minutes that it lasts. Or longer. For, like Finnegans Wake with its infamously circular last line, the projection takes oﬀ immediately from the last image, rearranging the characters as they were at the beginning—in an order that, of course, has already been forgotten. Where are we during this time, in this empty space where we can wander, seat ourselves upon the ground, rove along the line of permutations, get close to the image, touch it without anything happening? Where are we during this seemingly unfettered time during which each viewer must find his or her own distance and imagine his or her own path through the work? We are, first of all, placed squarely in a space of memory, the grand memory of reference. While in costume, makeup, and sometimes even masks—including among them a fairy, an elf, a goblin, and a skeleton— these male and female characters from diverse epochs and places force images upon one’s memory in the same way as does the text: the Shakespeare of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the comedies, as much as the theater of Yeats or Synge; the Irish legends of the mythological cycles as much as the nineteenth-century novel. ( Just look at the governess holding a book in her hand, like something right out of Jane Eyre or The Turn of the Screw.) However, even memory freezes in front of the image, getting nowhere thanks to the particularities of the mise-en-scène. No one seems to have asked Coleman if one of the inspirations for Living and Presumed Dead might be the long, final short story in James Joyce’s The Dubliners, namely “The Dead.” This would have to be considered with its supplement, John Huston’s last film, made of course after Coleman’s installation (1987), but today almost indissoluble from the text, so vividly does it—the last testa-

ment of an American director of Irish origin—capture the original story. (As Duras once put it, in a tone of distraught complicity:“Before the madness of Huston, the cinematic madness of Huston.”)7 What is striking is the same idea in “The Dead” of a procession, a parade of characters, the occasion for which is the annual party given by the Misses Morkan. It is as if their successive arrivals, their positions during the dance, their presence around the long table, their leaving singly or in groups, as if all this represented mentally what Coleman initiates through the stubborn line of his figures. In this story where “the most striking characters seem like each other’s possibilities,”8 death fulfills a double role. It is figured first through the characters dedicated like automatons to “paralysis,” circling around themselves as much as around others for the duration of the long evening. But death here also carries the force of a bygone desire, one that suddenly focuses the current relationship of Gretta and Gabriel Conroy upon the image of a dead man whom Gretta once loved. This dead man is thus more alive than the living, but his memory merges with the snow that Gabriel sees falling on Ireland and on the world—these are the last words of the story—“like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” One can best understand the singular strategy deployed by Coleman in Living and Presumed Dead by reconsidering the relationship between these two types of death (which correspond to two moments in the short story, to the fashionable display of the reception and to the visionary intimacy of the conclusion in the hotel room). Or one can think instead of the film and the way it imparts to these two states the reality of living images produced through the use of depth, proportion, positioning in time and space—in short, through types of shots. Among Coleman’s numerous completed projections, from Seeing for Oneself to I N I T I A L S, from Background to Lapsus Exposure, this is in fact the only time that he maintains the constraint of a single frame within which all the characters involved in the dialogue—and the others of whom nothing is said—are presented equally, despite the gap that one experiences in their roles. Reluctant to use the close-ups that sustain in cinema the flow of time and create the sentimental identifications that he purges from his characters, Coleman did however choose to frame the “heroine” of Lapsus Exposure in just such a manner, going even so far as to produce an enigmatic complicity with her that the dreaminess of the voice-over only echoes. Nothing of the sort in Living and Presumed Dead. Progressing so to speak in the distance and through simple changes of place—staged and restaged in the same way one shuﬄes a deck of cards—these figures aligned with a sort of

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Background, 1991–94 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

indiﬀerence give us the illusion that at each moment the entire story is laid out, as if the full logic of the story’s development could be encapsulated despite its ceaseless progression. One senses this in the actors’ voices and stiﬀ gestures, which correspond rather well to the functional immobility of the work’s episodes, coded and recoded by a narrative art that seems to find resolution only in our analytical and theoretical responses to it. The result is a multiplication of the work’s photographic eﬀect. It is the singular and perhaps unique force of this installation to push the photographic eﬀect to the extreme signaled in its title. For in itself, the photograph is already that object which displays as dead that which is living, becoming itself presumed dead, immobilized forever and yet frozen alive. The interspace of the still-image projection—between photography and cinema—contradicts this destiny of photography, from the moment that it dramatizes the photograph, concatenates it by a sort of quasi-movement. Chris Marker’s La Jetée has become the crucial example of this within cinema, transforming death and its moment—indeed the very image of this moment—into the film’s subject, and working this to the full by the combined forces of editing, music, and commentary. The commentary’s reflexive character increases, rather than suspends, the film’s pathos and

search for the sublime. This feature of coordination that the photograph thus receives from cinema finds itself attenuated within the conditions of a museum, where the projection becomes more material (if only because of the physical presence of the slide projectors) and the spectator’s situation is transformed. Replacing the frozen vision of cinema, the aleatory nature of the situation of a visitor-become-spectator materializes when the decision is made to perceive an object through the angle of greatest coherence—despite the fact that it is by definition open to any number of approaches. But here again, potential solutions diﬀer or diverge. Consider, for example, Allen Street (1994), the beautiful series of projected photographs by Beat Streuli, taken with a zoom lens in a New York courtyard among a group of African-American adolescents. There is no voice-over, no music, no story—nothing but an immense wall covered from floor to ceiling by a series of images, grouped in short sequences and linked together by dissolves.9 These shots focus quite closely on the body, and their motion is wedded to the rhythm and the relationships of the frames that the dissolves link together, to the surprise that oﬀers up one spontaneous pose beneath another (a face seen head-on that had first been seen in profile, a smile appearing where there had been none). The photographic interruption—that freezing of movement that lasts forever—here

Background, 1991–94 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

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seems eminently variable (this is the intimacy of the work, its depthless mystery);as each image is oﬀered up only to fade into another, the moment of stasis is never experienced as an interruption, or a sudden eruption of the tragic. It only prepares a movement that will resume, an example of the sweetness of what Lacan called the “moment of seeing,” as if for the pure love of the body, experienced in the simplicity of anonymity. A tender as well as carnal play on the advertising image—this is the charm particular to Beat Streuli’s work. In Living and Presumed Dead, on the other hand, the horror of what Lacan named the fascinum is unrelenting.10 It is the response of the image to the text, to its coded truculence, to the role played ( jouée) by death in this story, constantly foiled (déjouée). The impact of the image stems first— one cannot repeat this enough—from the line of figures that we are asked to take as living beings, although they are not only playing dead but indeed seem to be so. This is what is at stake. It is not insignificant that such a project could initially do without actual bodies, contenting itself instead with drawings, with body-signs. And they continue to remain signs, as always because of the stark uniformity of the line. Approaching this line in order to increase the intimacy with a character solves nothing: the horror proper to that which is indistinct is now added to that which is frozen. There is but one point—variable but singular nonetheless—from which a viewer can both see everything and experience the transformations undergone by the line. For with each dissolve, the scene is reborn; after each short-lived eternity, it is reinstalled. The fascination thus emerges from each arrested movement through which an actor finds himself or herself frozen, whatever the expressions or the gestures dictated by his or her role (for example the string of gazes that one cannot pin down as being directed either within or beyond the frame). In this, one finds oneself confronted with a generalized freezing of the image; in place from the start, it is subsequently diﬀracted in as many diﬀerent ways as there are characters through which to verify its eﬀect. The turn of the screw in this subdued horror lies in the realization that five of the characters are not actors at all but mannequins, constantly rearranged, feeding oﬀ of this indecision between life and death. For they move only in their function as extras, like a population in reserve, forming a type of chorus between the actors and the viewers. To the extent, let me repeat, that such an obsessional choice becomes almost natural and dictated by the work’s design, one can choose similarly to follow a specific character from image to image in order never

Living and Presumed Dead, 1983–85 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

to lose sight of him or her: a stubborn alternation of sameness and diﬀerence that in itself justifies a full screening. For example, take the governess with her book—closed, open, half-open, closed again, open once more— a book into which other characters seem to glance upon occasion, a book that seems to follow the thread of the story as if to demonstrate the extent to which the story is born from it. And this continues until the very last image, where the young woman pulls herself up straight behind Borras, who is kneeling in front of one of the three Capaxes cloaked in fire—the false Capax, a puppet made by Abbas to fool the real one, according to one of the most appealing summaries of this story11—and presses the closed book against her chest, as if to indicate definitively that the story is over. So, in short, what really happens to the viewer caught up endlessly in these variations, in these micro-extenuations of an elaborate horror of stasis? Curiously, this: in following like a panicked insect the transformations aﬀecting these always frozen bodies, an actual movement is born, like a jagged cutout returned from the trick mirror of the scene. This movement is attached to the jubilation that penetrates the body of the spectator thus given over to the mad traversal of his or her own thought. Between cinema and photography, theater and painting, this singular species of tableau vivant

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forces the body into thought. It relentlessly produces the enigma of the perception of an image in terms of both plot and story—simultaneously the index, symptom, and symbol of memory—starting however from the fully stopped events of which it is composed. And these full stops are individuated by each odyssey of perception through all of these shots, through the pieces (pans)12 and fragments of images, through their transitions, through images in infinite regress, images of other images.13 Coleman did once push such an experience to its extreme limit, no doubt to prove both that it was possible and that the majority of his works put it in play. This project took him eleven years to perfect. It involved appropriating at first thirteen and then ultimately nine frames from a tracking shot used in a film: James Whale’s The Invisible Man of 1933. We are not informed about this source, as the context of the shot is impossible to pin down, and yet Whale’s title is suggestive in terms of the goal of Coleman’s process. The stills are projected in the form of slides according to a dual principle of delay:the first concerns the forward thrust of the projection, which opens onto an almost infinite duration because each full projection of the slides takes four hours to complete, repeats in reverse, and then begins again; the second concerns the lighting, which works so that the luminosity of the two slide projectors used in the installation is regulated according to a principle of inverse proportional variation. The latter results in a sort of discrepancy, a long imperceptible gap between two images projected as one whose figurative content is diﬃcult to discern. But this gap does finally become apparent, gradually doubling the contrasting black-and-white lines of the original image with a pale shadow that ends up in part substituting itself for them. To this experience, barely sustainable by the powers of perceptual attention and the physical body, Coleman has given the name La Tache Aveugle (the blind spot).14 Which is simply to say in another way what Deleuze has said, echoing Leibniz: “I am forever unfolding between two folds, and if to perceive means to unfold, then I am forever perceiving within the folds. Every perception is hallucinatory because perception has no object.”15 From this perspective, the photographic eﬀect is given a second life, at the limits of that which can be articulated. It is like the utopia that drives one of the propositions of Coleman’s Charon (MIT Project) (1989), a meditation or reverie on photography, where Zeno’s paradox is reformulated from a temporal perspective. In it, a woman believes that the photograph is living proof that death does not exist. Ironically, she believes that dying itself lasts an eternity, because one’s life would flash before one’s eyes at the moment of death in an uninterrupted succession of images. Of course, the

final moment of this series would have to have in turn its own succession of memory images, and this without end, in infinite regress. No matter how close one is to death, it could never be reached. Sensing the imminent approach of death, the woman intends to prove her point by preparing herself to be photographed. Living and Presumed Dead is then not just a title. It is the dime-novel guise of a story that establishes itself only to be inverted in the mesmerizing life of the image, ceaselessly returning toward its viewer. In this, it demonstrates an aesthetic principle that seeks to push the limits of the conceivable into the register of intermediary states between motion and stasis, in objects as well as in thought. It is doubtless also through this a political allegory: Ireland—so long taken for dead, carrying and touched by death to its core—is perhaps also terribly alive.16 Notes

Translator’s note: A previous English translation of this text exists, completed by Michael Cronin and published in the Irish magazine Circa, no. 79 (Spring 1997), pp. 24–29. While I have consulted this text, it has proven largely unreliable, thus necessitating the work of retranslation. The present translation has benefited from a thorough revision at the hands of Rachel Haidu and from the suggestions of Raymond Bellour. A note on the essay’s title: Bellour’s “Les morts vivants” retains in French an ambiguity that the horror-movie connotations of my English translation somewhat foreclose. “The Dead Alive” might be a closer, if less elegant, rendition of Bellour’s French, the ambiguity of which is hopefully retained in the contradiction and the collision between Bellour’s “The Living Dead” and Coleman’s “Living and Presumed Dead.” 1. The exhibition “L’Eﬀet-cinéma: art contemporain et cinéma” ran in Paris at the Musée du Luxembourg from 25 October to 22 December 1995. 2. On the notion of a “minor literature,” its capacities for deterritorialization, and its directly collective and political dimension, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975), especially pp. 29–35. Their analysis of the German used by the Jews of Prague applies particularly well to the Irish example that they otherwise evoke briefly through Joyce and Beckett: on the one hand, this impoverished German can be pumped up artificially by “all the resources of a symbolism, an oneiricism, an esoteric meaning,” as one witnesses in the Prague School (Gustav Meyrink, etc.); on the other hand, it can be led to a point of exacerbated aridity that makes it vibrate with intensity, as in the case of Kafka. 3. Luke Gibbons importantly suggests how the traumatic memory of Irish history, attached particularly to the two great famines of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (during which the country each time lost a large part of its population), has made a pictorial realism impossible in Ireland, and more generally has made impossible a belief in the mimetic force of the image, which has been driven toward a “disfiguration” more easily conferred on language than on the visual arts. One sees this, for example, in the work of Edmund Burke—too infrequently recognized as Irish—in his conception of the sublime. See Gib-

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bons, “L’art et l’inimaginable: le verbe et l’image dans la culture irlandaise,” in Pascal Bonafoux, ed., L’imaginaire irlandais (Paris: Hazan, 1996). 4. Of course, there is a notable diﬀerence in the level of understanding for English-speaking viewers, especially Irish ones, and non-English-speaking viewers, no matter how well they understand English—the idioms packed into the text are potentially overwhelming, never mind the diﬀerences in pronunciation. But this also is not the main point. There might even be a precise inversion between the understanding of the narrative and the process that really belongs to the work. 5. This is taken from a poster on the back of which appear the elliptically cut-out and travestied figures of the four (or five) principal characters. Text written by Mark Francis. 6. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “La structure et la forme,” in Anthropologie structurale deux (Paris: Plon, 1973). Lévi-Strauss sums up in the following way the opposition between formalism and structuralism, from the perspective of the connections between form and content:“For the first, the two domains must be absolutely separated, for only form is intelligible, and content is but a residue bereft of signifying value. For structuralism, this opposition does not exist: there is not on the one side the abstract and on the other the concrete. Form and content are of the same nature, susceptible to the same analysis. Content takes its reality from its structure, and what one calls form is but the coordination, the structuring, of the local structures that make up the content” (p. 158). 7. Marguerite Duras, Le monde extérieur (Paris: P.O.L, 1993), p. 222. This is from a transcription of an intervention on the French-German TV channel Arte from 1992. 8. This is cited from Hélène Cixous’s analysis of the short story, published as the introduction to the bilingual French edition, James Joyce, Dublinois (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1974), p. 49. 9. This, at least, was how the work was presented at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva at the end of 1995. Other presentations of the work have been made using the form of the triptych or even more numerous screens. 10. In the chapter “What Is a Picture?” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973; New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), Jacques Lacan opposes the “identificatory haste” proper to the “moment of seeing,” the initial time of the gaze, to the terminal time of the “fascinatory eﬀect” that “has the eﬀect of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life” (pp. 116–18). [Translator’s note: The term fascinum comes from this passage as well, which it seems useful in this context to cite in greater detail: What I noticed . . . was the suture, the pseudo-identification, that exists between what I called the time of terminal arrest of the gesture and what, in another dialectic that I called the dialectic of identificatory haste, I put as the first time, namely, the moment of seeing. The two overlap, but they are certainly not identical, since one is initial and the other terminal. . . . The terminal time of the gaze, which completes the gesture, I place strictly in relation to what I later say about the evil eye. The gaze in itself not only terminates the movement, it freezes it. Take those dances I mentioned—they are always punctuated by a series of times of arrest in which the actors pause in a frozen attitude. What is that thrust, that time of arrest of the movement? It is simply the fascinatory eﬀect, in that it is a question of dispossessing the evil eye of the gaze, in order to ward it oﬀ. The evil eye is the fascinum, it is that which has the eﬀect of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life. At the moment the subject stops, suspending his gesture, he is mortified. The anti-life, anti-movement function of this terminal

point is the fascinum, and it is precisely one of the dimensions in which the power of the gaze is exercised directly. The moment of seeing can intervene here only as a suture, a conjunction of the imaginary and the symbolic, and it is taken up again in a dialectic, that sort of temporal progress that is called haste, thrust, forward movement, which is concluded in the fascinum. (pp. 117–18)] 11. See Jan Debbaut and Frank Lubbers, James Coleman (Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1989). For a more complete but also confused summary, cluttered with elements of interpretation, see Michael Newman, “Allegories of the Subject: The Theme of Identity in the Work of James Coleman,” in James Coleman: Selected Works (Chicago and London: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and ICA London, 1985), pp. 36–39. 12. I use this word in the sense that Georges Didi-Huberman has given it:“In the detail, the part can be isolated from the whole, while in the piece [le pan], the part swallows the whole.” See Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image (Paris: Minuit, 1990), p. 314. [Translator’s note: It has proven diﬃcult to locate an English word—patch, facet, section, segment—that encompasses the full range of meanings Didi-Huberman plays with in the term pan. Seeking to locate an experience opposed to art history’s reliance upon the “detail”—which shores up iconographic readings as a form of concentrated vision, a vision that has become transparent to meaning—Didi-Huberman turns to a description of Vermeer’s View of Delft by Marcel Proust, a description that itself turns around an infamous “petit pan du mur jaune.” This is from the account of Bergotte’s death (upon setting eyes upon this “petit pan”) in The Captive, the sixth section of Remembrance of Things Past, and the phrase is given in the English translation as a “little patch of yellow wall.” Taking up Proust’s use of the term, Didi-Huberman opposes the “detail” to the pan: a fragment that attempts to focus vision, meaning, and clarity, versus another where meaning evaporates, where transparency gives way to eﬀects of materiality and opacity. The pan, for Didi-Huberman, is the “beyond” of “the detail principle” of art history; as a form of supreme contingency, it is compared both to the “symptom” of Freud and the “punctum” of Roland Barthes. I have chosen the inadequate translation “piece” for its connotations of sheer materiality and fragmentation, with none of the direction, focus, and completeness of a “detail.”] 13. Based on the idea of an impossibility of description and its extenuation within the works that make up Coleman’s project, a convincing formulation of this process has been given by Marie-Ange Brayer at the end of her essay “James Coleman: The Detective and the Secret,” Art Press, no. 179 (April 1993), p. 34. She particularly focuses on his film Untitled (Philippe VACHER):“The description winds around itself, multiplying possible identities and transforming the gaze into a cluster of chronologies wherein each temporal thread is called an ‘image.’” 14. On La Tache Aveugle, see Lynne Cooke, “A Tempered Agnosia” (1992; reprinted in this volume); as well as Arthur C. Danto, “James Coleman, Slide Artist,” The Nation (3 October 1994). Danto convincingly connects this work to Warhol’s experiment in Empire. 15. Gilles Deleuze, Le pli (Paris: Minuit, 1988), pp. 124–25. Italics in source. 16. This political reading would have to take into account other works: Box, Strongbow, So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet, Line of Faith, and above all the theater piece guaiRE, on which see the eloquent account of Luke Gibbons, “Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE” (1993; reprinted in this volume). Based on the life of a legendary Irish king, this play’s performances took place in the castle that bears his name, his alleged fortress near Galway (Galway which Joyce used in “The Dead” as the setting for Gretta’s teenage love for Michael Furrey, and where Furrey dies).

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guaiRE: An Allegory, 1985 Performed work. Performed by Olwen Fouère. Set design by Dan Graham. Dun Guaire Castle, Kinvara, Ireland, 1985.

Narratives of No Return: James Coleman’s guaiRE Luke Gibbons

“In using what I considered traditional symbols,” W. B. Yeats observed ruefully toward the end of his life, “I forgot that in Ireland they are not symbols but realities.”1 Culture in these circumstances cannot be reduced to an aesthetic pursuit at one remove from reality; it is a material force in its own right, as its role in turn-of-the-century Irish nationalism attests. Indeed, the later Yeats was tormented by the thought that some of his plays might have contributed to the violence of the Irish War of Independence, of 1916–22. He may have had in mind not just his incendiary Cathleen ni Houlihan, of 1902, but his less-known The King’s Threshold, staged a year later, which introduced hunger-striking into Irish politics as a form of symbolic resistance.2 Drawing on Irish legend, The King’s Threshold describes a struggle between Guaire, a seventh-century king of Connaught renowned for his generous banquets, and Seanchan, his chief bard. Guaire accuses the poet of an excess of words that is inimical to orderly statecraft, the practical obligation to attend to material needs and get things done. Seanchan responds with a hunger strike, which he sees as a way of releasing the imagination: “For when the heavy body has grown weak,/ There’s nothing that can tether the wild mind.”3 In early versions of the play the king yields, but in 1922, probably as a result of the death on hunger strike of Terence McSwiney, the nationalist mayor of Cork, Yeats gave the play a new, tragic conclusion. What is interesting here is the notion of narrative as an event informed by its historical moment:the “original” version of 1902 was no longer possible given the events of the War of Independence. The question is not just one of revision but of a story structured by the circumstances of its telling.

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James Coleman too has dealt with the Guaire legend, in guaiRE: An Allegory (1985), a complex reenactment of the myth using video, gesture, text, and music. And though his work is usually discussed in terms of a European and American tradition of conceptual art, guaiRE reveals it as deeply informed by its Irish context and situation. The Guaire of Irish legend would not have approved of exposing the legacy of the past to the vicissitudes of narration. In popular tradition, he was fighting with Seanchan because the poet could remember only fragments of the Táin Bó Cuailgne, a key repository of Irish mythology. Guaire asked Seanchan’s son to recover the original, as if the power of the state depended on preserving the continuity between past and present. It was precisely such narratives of return that Coleman countered in guaiRE. Narrative in this staged allegory did not just take the form of a story: it took place, the place in question being Dunguaire Castle in County Galway, supposedly Guaire’s stronghold. The initial act of restoration that Coleman contested by working here was the Irish heritage industry’s version of history: the “authentic” banquets laid out for tourists at castles like Dunguaire, to give the illusion of communion with the medieval past.4 Indeed, on the way into the “throne room” in which guaiRE was performed, the audience was shown the backstage of such illusions—a painter at work on the set, costumes being prepared. From the performance’s opening words, it was clear that Coleman’s Guaire too is obsessed with continuity—with lineage and pedigree, the foundations of his legitimacy as king. A prophecy has foretold that he will be overthrown by the son of his rival Ceallach, whom he has disposed of to assert his claim to the throne:“My will be done . . . a formula to dissect . . . thwart the course of destiny . . . the prophecy . . . Yet it can be employed to extend life . . . Nobody can rob me of my formulae . . . Buried deep inside.” “Will” here signifies not just volition but inheritance, which is in turn secured by the “formula,” an elixir of life (or death), but also the source of repetition and continuity in oral culture.5 In the legend, when Guaire has Ceallach murdered, the body is stuﬀed in a hollow tree.6 In Coleman’s work, however, an obstetrician rather than a coroner appears on the scene. It is as if Ceallach had been returned to the womb—as if Guaire had sought to remove his rival from aﬀairs of state by inserting him into a maternal narrative. For Coleman, though, this insertion becomes a form of empowerment. The maternal gestures toward an alternative public sphere that jams the machinery of patrilineal power.

Though the voices of guaiRE’s “characters” are mainly male, they are articulated through a masked female actress (Olwen Fouère), the only onstage presence. At one point in the text her body is explicitly linked to Ceallach’s tree. Is the female body merely a hollow vehicle for a male line of transmission? Is it devoid of its own narratives? Marina Warner points out that the allegorical use of the female form to embody abstract ideas such as “Justice” and “Liberty” does not mean that these virtues are actually extended to women. Indeed, it often implies the opposite: the materiality of women’s bodies is emptied out to carry what are essentially masculine ideas. Hence the reduction of woman’s body to a shell in icons such as the Statue of Liberty: “The statue’s hollowness, which we occupy literally when we make the ascent to Liberty’s empty head, is a prerequisite of symbols with infinite powers of endurance and adaptability. She is given meaning by us, and it can change, according to what we see or want.”7 Yet an allegory that insists on the corporeality of the sign would seem to obstruct such instrumental uses of the female form. In guaiRE, the maternal body is such a figure. As the performance opens, the actress’s body comes alive, tentatively discovering itself from the inside. Her left leg twitches, but she grabs her right leg by mistake. She pinches her nipple and is startled by the pain. Her throne is a plaster head, on which is projected a face; it is as if she were giving birth. It may be, of course, that the mother remains a “relay” or extension of patriarchy, on the assumption that behind every maternal body lies a great man. This is no doubt as the king would like it to be. But guaiRE throws such notions into question; it is less allegory than a reflexive commentary on allegory’s workings. For Freud, every family romance contains the underlying anxiety that whereas “paternity is always uncertain, maternity is most certain.”8 James Joyce, writing within the colonial frame of turn-of-the-century Ireland, spells out the political implications of this anxiety when he has Stephen Dedalus exclaim in Ulysses that “paternity may be a legal fiction,” and is only as secure as the power of state and law to back it up.9 (Hence Guaire’s “my will be done.”) The anomaly posed by colonial Ireland to an equation of nation and fatherland was that Irish men lacked the control of the public sphere that paternal authority required. As Elizabeth Butler-Cullingford writes of the representation of Ireland in eighteenth-century aisling poetry, a genre in which the male poet would personify Ireland as a woman, “She is still a sexual object, for the poet lovingly describes her

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physical charms, and occasionally she is shown as ravished by the invader. Colonization, however, has destroyed native masculinity along with political independence, and no true Irishman remains to mate with her.”10 Hence the colonial construction of the Irish body politic as female, with its corollary that without “manly” British rule, government was impossible in Ireland. (In 1898, Sir George Baden-Powell contrasted the patriarchal benefits of Ireland’s union with Britain to the “emasculated” self-government that would result from Home Rule, the latter resembling the dependency of a “southern señora on her father confessor.”)11 It may be, then, that these female personifications of the nation in some sense do mask patriarchal power on the part of the colonial administration, but it is not at all clear that this instrumental use of allegorical forms extends to the colonized culture itself. As Anne Owens Weekes writes, Gaelic Ireland’s distance from power meant that the entire population, both male and female, shared the condition of women in the metropolitan center: “Colonization, then, makes female both country and people. . . . ‘Excluded from landed wealth, from political life, from the “oﬃcial” church . . . the Irish erected a counter-culture, not so much rebellious as evasive,’ also a strategy, like women’s, decreed by their similar repression, and one whose end was survival.”12 In these circumstances, the recourse to female imagery in poetry and popular protest turns the colonial stereotype against itself, positing an alternative “feminized” public sphere (imagined as the nation) against the oﬃcial patriarchal order of the state. In guaiRE, this refiguration of female allegory finds expression through location, the ruins of Dunguaire Castle. (For Walter Benjamin, the ruin is the most evocative allegorical emblem, its fragments testifying to an unrestorable origin.) At one point the king’s anxiety requires that he “sponges his perspiration,” an action accompanied by the line “Sponging over a will.” The reference is to Lady Christabel Russell, who lived in Dunguaire in the 1920s. Becoming pregnant soon after her marriage, Russell was sued for divorce by her husband in 1924 on the grounds that since their marriage was unconsummated, she must have committed adultery. Yet examination by two gynecologists showed that she was a virgin. It followed that her son was the rightful heir, even if paternity could not be established. (Coleman’s sponge remark—a sponge which she shared with her husband was found in Russell’s bathroom—adverts to one lurid explanation of how she became pregnant.)13 It was as though the maternal body had ceased to be a

vehicle for the male line—as though the female had usurped the “meaning” it was patriarchally intended to carry. In one of Coleman’s recent works, Charon (MIT Project) (1989), a series of fourteen photographic vignettes, a baby gazes intently at the camera, and hence, as Lynne Cooke suggests, at “the photographer, who seems to be both father of the child and allegorical father of the image.”14 In guaiRE, allegory’s temporal lapse in the image, the delay between the sign and what it signifies, displaces the sovereignty of the eye. In Dan Graham’s set, a curved two-way mirror acts as a video screen behind the “throne,” providing the audience with a panning shot of the room from the point of view of the king. (For Michel Foucault, analyzing the birth of “classical representation” in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, the individual subject/spectator is constituted by an identification with the king.)15 At the end of the performance, this pan dissolves into an image of the throne/ head on which the performer sits, with its lifelike face. The masked performer turns her back on the audience, and reveals her face—which turns out to be the face projected on the plaster head—but her reflection in the real time of the mirror is mediated by a time-delay video, which superimposes on the mirror/screen a flashback of her removing the mask. It is as if the mirror possesses memory. The “mirror stage” on which the performance literally takes place is not a medium of representation so much as a pretext for the uncanny, a reminder, in the phrase Jo Anna Isaak adapts from Joyce, of “the ineluctable temporality of the visible.”16 A conventional critique of allegorical idealizations of the female is that they privilege the relation of the image to other images rather than to women in the real world. This spiriting away of the physical body is addressed in Paul Muldoon’s “Aisling,” a parody of the eighteenth-century Irish visionary poems: Was she Aurora, or the goddess Flora, Artimedora, or Venus bright, or Anorexia, who left a lemon stain on my flannel sheet? . . . In Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital a kidney machine supports the latest hunger-striker to have called oﬀ his fast, a saline drip into his bag of brine.17

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guaiRE: An Allegory, 1985 Performed work. Performed by Olwen Fouère. Set design by Dan Graham. Dun Guaire Castle, Kinvara, Ireland, 1985.

Luke Gibbons

Here the aisling figure is linked to the harlot (“the lemon stain”) and the hunger-striker, the anorexic bodies of all three sharing the rarefaction of the flesh. This image of decomposition assumes a diﬀerent valency, however, if we recall Benjamin’s reclamation of the prostitute’s sensuality through the image of the ruin.18 The fragmentation of the ruin is an allegory of desire as well as of death, its incompletion finding expression in a ceaseless quest that acknowledges rather than reverses the passage of time. In guaiRE’s enigmatic maternal narratives, the denial of the body that is implicit in virginity is recuperated through the desire of the harlot. So, in the Russell case, the absence of an identifiable father was read as evidence not of parthenogenesis but of promiscuity—the likelihood of many fathers in her mansion. Outside the family structure, the maternal becomes a figure of erotic abandon. While Coleman was preparing guaiRE, such anxieties returned to haunt the Irish state in the forms of a divisive abortion referendum in 1983 and of the Kerry babies controversy shortly after. Two babies were found dead in County Kerry, at locations fifty miles apart. A young woman, Joanne Hayes, confessed under police questioning to the killing of the first baby, then withdrew her confession, admitting to the killing only of her own, diﬀerent, child. The state insisted that she had carried, and killed, both babies—an implausible charge, for it was shown that the blood group of her own baby’s father was incompatible with that of the other infant. The prosecution then suggested that she had carried babies by two fathers at the same time—a legal fiction that even the power of the state could not uphold, even against a vulnerable single mother. Paternity had to be established at all costs, as if the inability to name the father called the legitimacy of the state itself into question.19 Clearly, allegory in guaiRE derives its impact not from a suppression of the real but from an anchorage in events, in narratives of time and place. Its engagement with questions of narrative, representation, and sexuality paradoxically depends on the contingency that, set in another time and place, it would be a diﬀerent story. Erich Auerbach has noted the links between allegory and prophecy in scripture, both of which look through signs for other meanings; for Auerbach, though, prophecy diﬀers from allegory in its insistence on grounding its interpretations in “literal truth” (for the early Church Fathers “refused to consider the Old Testament as mere allegory,” insisting that “it had real, literal meaning throughout”).20 Coleman’s guaiRE also retrieves allegory for history, except, unlike prophecy, it

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denies that the real is the sole preserve of the literal. This version of allegory opens rather than closes narratives, establishing a gap between the present and a past that awaits completion. Notes

1. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 416. 2. See W. B.Yeats, Plays in Prose and Verse (London: Macmillan, 1931), p. 423. 3. Ibid., p. 72. 4. “At Dunguaire Castle, the past is relived again and again . . . when guests from all over the world assemble at the nightly banquets set out by the Shannon Free Airport Development Company whose property the castle now is.” James Patrick Hynes, White-Shrouded Fort: A History of Guaire, the Hospitable, King of Connaught, and His Descendents (Mold: Studio 365, 1980), p. 61. 5. See B. A. Stolz and R. S. Shannon, eds., Oral Literature and the Formula (Ann Arbor: Center for the Coordination of Ancient and Modern Studies, 1976). 6. See Lady Ferguson, The Story of the Irish before the Conquest, 2d ed. (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers and Walker, 1889), p. 15. 7. Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Picador, 1987), p. 11. 8. Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 7 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 223. Freud is quoting an old legal tag, in Latin:“Pater semper incertus est,” while the mother is “certissima.” 9. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York:Modern Library, 1946), p. 205. See also Karen Lawrence, “Paternity, the Legal Fiction,” in Robert D. Newman and Weldon Thornton, eds., Joyce’s Ulysses: The Larger Perspective (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), pp. 89–97. 10. Elizabeth Butler-Cullingford, “‘Thinking of Her . . . as . . . Ireland’: Yeats, Pearse and Heaney,” Textual Practice 4, no. 1 (1990), p. 6. Butler-Cullingford observes that such personifications may project “male anxieties . . . of the need to control and subordinate the female sex,” anxieties introducing a fault line in the native patriarchal order—the weakness induced by colonization. 11. Sir George Baden-Powell, The Saving of Ireland: Industrial, Financial, Political (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1898), p. 291. See also chapter 3 of David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 12. Anne Owens Weekes, Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), pp. 15–16. 13. See Eileen Hunter, Christabel: The Russell Case and After (London: Andre Deutsch, 1973). The controversy was reactivated after Russell’s death, in 1976, with litigation between her first son and her husband’s next son. 14. Lynne Cooke, “A Tempered Agnosia” (1992), reprinted in this volume, p. 115. 15. See Michael Newman, “Allegories of the Subject: The Theme of Identity in the Work of James Coleman,” in James Coleman: Selected Works (Chicago and London: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and ICA London, 1985), p. 44. Foucault’s argument

recalls F. W. Maitland’s famous dictum, “For the first time, the Absolute State faced the Absolute Individual,” quoted in Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 63. 16. Jo Anna Isaak, The Ruin of Representation in Modernist Art and Texts (Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Research Press, 1986), p. 23. 17. Paul Muldoon, Quoof (London:Faber and Faber, 1983), p. 39. See also Clair Wills, “The Lie of the Land: Language, Imperialism and Trade in Paul Muldoon’s Meeting the British,” in Neil Corcoran, ed., The Chosen Ground: Essays on Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland (Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1992), pp. 136–49. 18. See Christine Buci-Glucksmann, “Catastrophic Utopia: The Feminine as Allegory in the Modern,” in Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laquer, eds., The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1987), pp. 220–29. 19. See Nell McCaﬀerty, A Woman to Blame: The Kerry Babies Case (Dublin: Attic Press, 1985). Joanne Hayes’s own book, My Story (Dingle: Brandon Books, 1985), was withdrawn from circulation due to a legal action following the state tribunal into her case. 20. Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 30.

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Now & Then, 1981 Performed by Olwen Fouère and James McHale. Music by Roger Doyle. Project Arts Theater, Dublin, 1981.

Memory Lessons and History Tableaux: James Coleman’s Archaeology of Spectacle Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

I have already remarked that memory is the great criterion of art; art is a mnemotechny of the beautiful. Charles Baudelaire, Salon of 1846 Baudelaire’s remark seems to have sprung from an intuition of imminent loss, articulating the insight that his (and Manet’s) was the last moment of modernity when the aesthetic could still be related to the mnemonic. The statement’s normative emphasis clearly went unheeded in the subsequent unfolding of modern visuality, since the exact opposite of Baudelaire’s desire became the founding principle of modernism in the twentieth century: the triumphant annihilation of cultural memory. The orders to eradicate all remnants of the past, the imperatives to make it “new” and to be absolutely “modern,” remained strident from the inception of the avantgarde up to the late 1960s. Already a contemporary of Baudelaire, the politically reactionary Maxime Du Camp, would voice the first protofuturist proclamations for the need to assimilate artistic practice into the structure of science and industry, and would suggest that the imagery of the myths of antiquity should be eﬀaced by modernity’s myths of technical progress: Everything advances, expands and increases around us. . . . Science produces marvels, industry accomplishes miracles, and we remain impassive, insensitive, disdainful, scratching the false cords of our lyres, closing our eyes in order not to see, or persisting in looking towards a

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past that nothing ought to make us regret. Steam is discovered, and we sing to Venus, daughter of the briny main; electricity is discovered and we sing to Bacchus, friend of the rosy grape. It’s absurd.1 If modernism did not try to assimilate the governing techno-scientific paradigms, resulting in nonrepresentational painting and construction, it engaged in the mimicry of the commodity image, approximating congruence with the actual object in the collage and the readymade. If in 1912 the tabula rasa of abstraction promised liberation from the fetters of BeauxArts culture in favor of the new social and cultural hygiene of industrial society, it was with the same vehement conviction that minimalist abstraction in 1960 pronounced the shift from a purely self-reflexive empiricism to a phenomenologically defined perception, by assimilating the morphology and materials of technological and corporate design. Similarly, a prohibitionist tradition in literature was established and maintained, from the emphatic declaration of a structural linguistic foundation of poetry in the phonetic revolution of 1912 to Theodor W. Adorno’s final interdiction of all possibilities of lyric poetry after the Holocaust. While each generational account argued in diﬀerent terms against the mnemonic dimension of culture, the declared enemies were identical and remained the same throughout the twentieth century: historical narrative, figural representation, theatrical enactment—in other words, all the conventions of depiction and figuration that painting had once shared with the other arts, theater and literature in particular. In contrast to visual modernity, however, literature, theater, and the cinema retained in all but the most radical instances (such as structural cinema and so-called experimental poetry) a complex network of interrelationships with the representational conventions that modernist aesthetics had set out to displace. Yet, even in structural cinema, the authors who had most systematically dismantled narrative and representation in 1960s experimental film reconsidered these conventions barely a decade later (e.g., Michael Snow’s Rameau’s Nephew and Yvonne Rainer’s Christina Talking Pictures) without forgoing their originary criticism of the ideological implications and eﬀects of cinematic narrativity. Structural film could never claim to be the authoritative and exclusively valid voice of cinematic modernity in the manner that its static visual counterparts always insisted on being definitive on a constantly changing stage (this was even truer in literature, where nobody would even have thought of doubting, for example, the validity of Paul Celan’s work, in spite

of its manifest deviation from the historical prognosis issued by Adorno). Perhaps, more importantly, theater and literature maintained a consciousness of their own discursive status as representation and fiction, an awareness of their origin in complex traditions of rhetoric and dramaturgy that—while displaced—were nevertheless sublated in the new forms (the way dialogue with Aristotelian theatrical conventions permeates Brecht’s epic theater throughout). By contrast, visual modernity of the twentieth century—at least in its most relevant moments—insisted not only on its absolute break with tradition, but furthermore on its proximity to, if not congruity with, the “real,” emphasizing its characteristic of immediate intervention within its parameters. The visual avant-garde claimed eﬀects for these interventions that varied as widely as the positions from which it departed, ranging from the positivist ideal of empirical verifiability, forced to the extreme of the tautological (“the black square is a black square”), to another moment when the repressive force of abstraction as cognitive and perceptual purification promised a heightened degree of transparency, both in the construction of the object and in its modes of experience. Later yet, that very tradition— as, for example, in the conceptual art practices of the late 1960s—promised that a rigorous elimination of all remnants of symbolic space and rhetorical figuration could purge representation altogether, engendering a language of “mere” information, a photographic imagery of “pure” documentation and performative interventions, allowing for an unmediated presence and egalitarian exchange between performer and spectator. And inasmuch as modernist representational strategies insisted on being coextensive with, rather than fundamentally diﬀerent from, the objects of the “real,” they also insisted on the aesthetic object’s almost miraculous inversion of object experience within the spaces of the “real”: to the extent that all object relations were increasingly controlled and had acquired the condition of the fetish, the aesthetic object had to inscribe itself mimetically within these conditions to generate at least the illusion—if not actual instances—of a critical negation of the principles of instrumentalizing rationality and fetishization. The aesthetic object claimed to situate itself in a manifest opposition against false consciousness constituted in ideology. One could argue, then, that one of the most crucial preconditions of visual modernity had been not only to disavow art’s mnemonic functions, but equally to annihilate the memory of its proper discursivity as visual fiction (e.g., its status within a long and complex system of representational traditions) as well as its conventionality (in the linguistic sense). This meant

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concretely that visual modernism had to deny its functions of figuration and its rhetorical dimension. A critical departure from this positivist/empiricist fallacy of modernism in the field of literature is described by Wlad Godzich: The realm of the apparent holds the truth hidden away, so that its only means of access are the figures of the apparent;yet these figures are not known to be figures for they are the only mode of being that lends itself to knowledge. . . . In the (deluded) possibility of methodological absolutism, truth is meant to be visible in unmediated form, in and of itself, and especially free of figuration. In the realm that is ours, where we have shed any belief in the ineﬀable and know the impossibility of unmediated truth, we are indeed back in the figural; but more specifically, in a relation to the figural where the figural is known as figural. In other words, we are in the rhetorical, as Paul de Man has been showing us all along.2 While the beginnings of James Coleman’s work can be situated in the final chapter of modernism in the late 1960s, the formation of his independent work from the mid 1970s onward illuminates the degree to which the definition of his artistic project no longer depended on the modernist paradigm of a radical dismantling of traditions. Its intense critical dialogue with the—primarily American—context of postminimal and conceptual art opened the apparatus of the historical repressions constitutive of this last phase of high modernist and literalist art, precisely in order to reconsider the disavowal of rhetoric and figuration in these practices—questions already posed by postminimalism’s Italian counterpart, Arte Povera,3 and certainly articulated theoretically in Paul de Man’s simultaneously emerging reconsideration of modernist literary studies.4 The first works that Coleman installed in gallery spaces in Milan in the early seventies, such as Flash Piece (1970), shared all the features of the most advanced practices of that historical moment.5 While following a complex set of instructions from experimental-psychology textbooks and philosophical introductions to the principles of phenomenology, Coleman’s work suggested the radical dissolution of the aesthetic object, the deployment of quasi-scientific means and technical tools to engage the viewer at the highest level of a critically self-conscious participation, and the decision to focus increasingly, if not exclusively, on the available and constitutive conditions of perception.

Flash Piece, 1970 Programmed electronic flash. Installation view.

These are the premises that link Coleman’s early practice directly with the work of artists such as Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham (who would become a close friend of Coleman at that time). Both Nauman and Graham had attempted to radicalize the implications of minimal sculpture, which in their view had remained implicated with the pictorial and the sculptural in spite of the minimalists’ claims to have literally incorporated a new spectator. Michael Newman situates Coleman’s work accurately in this historical context: While much conceptual art appeared in the form of a proposition or commentary, Coleman’s “pieces” of 1972–1974 involved the viewer in a process of investigation or problem solving (without necessarily presupposing a definitive solution) which his works continue to do to this day. . . . Through all these works, time, memory and causality are in question:How do diﬀerent interpretations come about? What part do inference and memory play? Does this imply a continuity or discontinuity of the subject through time? . . . Coleman is concerned with the relationship between the identities of the subject and image as they are mutually “conditioned” or caused through time: Is it the

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subject who “projects” a diﬀerent interpretation or the aspects of duck and rabbit which cause a change in the subject by inserting him or her in the field of representation? Does the continuation of the “absent” figure in the memory of the viewer “anticipate” its reappearance?6 The accuracy of the critic’s description, however, reveals also the scientistic literalism which Coleman’s work of the early 1970s shares with that of many of his contemporaries, a literalism embodied emblematically in his deployment of schemata from standard works of theories of perception (such as the “duck/rabbit” schema of perceptual ambivalence). But typically, in an eﬀort at critical distancing from that aesthetic, Coleman has commented that the deployment of these schemata was addressed at undoing rather than enforcing the traditionally convenient scientific concept of ambiguity: I would never use the word “ambiguity,” I dislike it intensely. The “Duck/Rabbit” piece exemplifies that there is no ambiguity—but those are clearly two images, ambiguities are the result of the perception that insists on a resolution of those images.7 Conflicting definitions of spectatorship seem to determine the specific dialectic of Coleman’s works from the early seventies: on the one hand Flash Piece, in its functional and experimental deployment of colored electric lights, demarcates a polemical departure from the still primarily painterly and pictorial concerns of the work of Dan Flavin, who had recently electrified abstraction but who had repositioned the viewer in a space- and object-experience of traditionally passive and contemplative reception. On the other hand, the activation of spectatorship in Coleman’s installation (as in many works by Dan Graham from that time), with its emphatic disregard for any convention of pictoriality or plasticity, reduced the viewer to the dubiously emancipated role of the participant in an elementary scientific experiment on the phenomenological relation between memory and perception. This dilemma, constitutive of the radicality of postminimal work in general, resulted from an unresolvable historical contradiction:namely, that the work’s phenomenological and theoretical ambition could no longer acknowledge its specific status as an aesthetic object, nor admit its linguistic conventionality within traditions of artistic and, therefore, rhetorical figuration. At the same time, the work’s dependence on institutional and discursive legitimation prevented it both from actually abandoning its sta-

tus as a traditional aesthetic object and from claiming the status of a scientific or political intervention. This reductivist dilemma applies even more to Memory Piece (1971), which literally eliminated all traces of perceptual plasticity in favor of a programmatic foregrounding of the viewers’ public enactment of mnemonic processes. The work took the participatory dimension within a simply defined structure to its logical conclusion: with a vengeance typical of early seventies deconstructions of notions of authorship, the work eﬀaced its artistic “original” textual definition only to have it replaced by a potentially infinite contingency of viewers’ memory projections. These recorded responses were superimposed on the artistic “urtext” as so many accumulated palimpsests which eventually made up the work in its entirety. As a result of its exclusion of visuality and its focus on speech and the subject’s enunciation, the work indicated another important shift: Memory Piece leads not only from the death of the author to the birth of the viewer but also from the dissolution of the primacy of the visual to the instantiation of the subject in linguistic articulation. Anne Rorimer’s minute and eloquent description of Memory Piece clearly indicates that the work generates a precariously circular viewing condition: Memory Piece . . . reflects on the role of memory with regard to perception. . . . Coleman replicates the mnemonic process. He accomplishes this by means of two tape recorders. The first tape recorder supplies a text of about three to five minutes in length. The participant in the work may hear the original text just once and, having attempted to memorize it, must record it on the second machine. This text, in turn, must be recorded once again as remembered. The activity may be repeated, theoretically, ad infinitum, or until the nearly inexhaustible supply of tapes runs out. Previously recorded texts are not accessible, and as completed, are kept in a provided storage unit.8 Spectators/participants are suspended within the sudden and radical emancipation from their status as mere viewers, only to find themselves restricted to the experience of the deconstruction of their traditional aesthetic expectations. What seems to have become evident to Coleman, then, was a dilemma similar to the one recently identified by Jürgen Habermas concerning the function of philosophy once it has become apparent that the philosopher can no longer pretend to provide privileged access to truth: namely, the

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question of how aesthetic objects can claim a specific truth value and how this claim can be legitimized. For Coleman, this problem posed itself first of all with regard to an artistic activity that demanded the absolute dissolution of the author’s privileged position and of the object’s special status, and secondly with regard to the condition that artistic practice had increasingly insisted on the necessity of abolishing the specific forms of experience it had traditionally generated. The contradictory nature of such a claim would become all the more evident once the aesthetic object had assimilated itself in its entirety to the condition of the scientific experiment, yet continued to operate exclusively within an institutional and discursive framework that provided definitions which were exclusively valid within the sphere of aesthetic experience.9 In order to resolve this dilemma in a complex process of critical differentiations, Coleman’s work had to engage with several problems simultaneously. The first one was the legacy of the neo-Kantian aesthetic of (American) modernism, with its emphasis on perceptual empiricism, selfreflexivity, and medium-specificity and its prescription of an essential and exclusive visuality as the sole legitimate modus of the experience of high art objects. The fallacies of this position had been brilliantly (and inadvertently) articulated in 1967 in the swan song of late modernist criticism, Michael Fried’s essay “Art and Objecthood.” In an almost desperate attempt to shore up the territory of American modernism at the moment of its definitive disappearance, Fried had uncannily singled out theater, precisely the domain of modernism’s utmost historical repression, as its primary enemy. In a statement sounding oﬀ its attack on minimalism with a peculiar hybrid of nineteenth-century phraseological and terminological borrowings from Walter Pater’s normative aestheticism and Max Nordau’s theory of degeneracy, Fried had pronounced a highly phobic prohibition against theatricality: Theater and theatricality are at war today, not simply with modernist painting (or modernist painting and sculpture), but with art as such. . . . The success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theater. Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theater. Theater is the common denominator that binds a large and seemingly disparate variety of activities to one another, and that distinguishes those activities from the radically diﬀerent enterprises of the modernist arts. . . . The concepts of quality and value—and to the extent that these are central to art, the concept of art itself—are meaningful, or wholly

meaningful, only within the individual arts. What lies between the arts is theater.10 It is certainly against this doxa of modernist visuality that Coleman directed his—at first gradual, and then almost programmatic—embrace of the conventions of theatricality and narrativity in his work after 1973. At the same time, he would have wanted to reposition himself in relation to postminimalism and conceptual art, work which had in fact already initiated a critical analysis of that modernist legacy, yet which had remained ultimately within the orbit of modernism’s parameters. It was precisely this work that had become the actual target of Fried’s polemical (and erroneous) association of the phenomenological dimensions of minimal art with the conditions of theatricality. Evidently, this duality of a simultaneous diﬀerentiation and critical negation of both the modernist as well as the minimal and conceptual aesthetic would have situated Coleman in a complicated dialogic relationship with the practices of his contemporaries.11 The key objection against the theatrical implications of minimal sculpture in Fried’s argument had addressed the fact that the presence of the beholder was programmatically foregrounded, in manifest opposition to modernist work that had been defined as autonomous and complete. Fried’s argument had actually claimed that a medium-specific object could be envisaged without considering either the spectator or the discursive and institutional framework constitutive of the specificity of aesthetic experience. With hindsight, the argument appears as a last attempt to maintain the traditionally defined and regulated place of the spectator and to prohibit the emerging comprehension of the necessary syntagmatic character of structurally produced (visual) meaning: Literalist sensibility is theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work. [Robert] Morris makes this explicit. Whereas in previous art “what is to be had from the work is located strictly within (it),” the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation—one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder.12 Coleman’s critical departure from this position, as for example in Slide Piece (1972–73), would therefore not just redeem perceptual phenomenology in explicit opposition to late modernist claims, but would radicalize the

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phenomenological as the reappearance of the theatrical. This all the more so since he would explicitly historicize the theatrical within its proper discursive conventions (speech and rhetoric, enunciation and performance), positioning it against the minimalists’ and postminimalists’ claims for a universal legibility of the phenomenological object or performance: after all, the performances of Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, and Bruce Nauman had reincorporated the theatrical in both speech and gesture, but they did so precisely in total opposition to traditional definitions of theatricality. They had enacted theatricality as manifestly outside of the conventions of rhetoric, enunciation, and dramaturgy. In Coleman’s Slide Piece, a projected photographic image of an apparently banal urban site becomes the subject of numerous (between three and five) oral descriptions, recorded in the language of the country in which the piece happens to be installed. Each of these descriptions—in a Rashomon-like eﬀect of diverse perceptions and narrative recountings of a singular incident—isolates utterly diﬀerent aspects of the photograph. Each speaker/observer seems to follow a diﬀerent perceptual logic, while the viewer follows the continuous sequence of the reiterative projection of identical slides. Slide Piece thus withholds perceptual information (or rather reduces it to the threshold of the most minute diﬀerences of an extremely slow, gradual perception) and emphasizes that perceptual objects are unthinkable outside or independently of the linguistic activation and consciousness of the viewer. Thus the work reverts attention utterly onto the level of reception. In fact, it is constituted exclusively in the polyphonous acts of reading, since the “work” itself provides nothing but an empty iconic point of reference for the activation of the speakers’ (and the viewers’) responses. “Theatricality” for Coleman meant at this early moment to displace the traditional concept of the visual object as the integrated and privileged locus of aesthetic knowledge or experience, and to dismantle it as the site of a supposedly autonomous visual specificity. Yet the interaction between Coleman’s work and the work of his immediate peers of the 1970s is even more complex than his critical diﬀerentiation from the modernist legacies of the 1960s. Within the very moment of conceptual art in which his work originated, Coleman reformulated his approach to language in distinct opposition to the preoccupations of conceptual artists whose work originated primarily from principles of analytical philosophy or structural linguistics. Whereas they had articulated a purely textual aesthetic in critical response to minimalism, and had oﬀered up language as a matrix for artistic practice by defining it either according

to the philosophical model of the analytic proposition or that of the linguistic performative, Coleman’s work would now expand the range of linguistic conventions eligible for artistic practice to include rhetoric and dramaturgy, and—perhaps most important—the register that Roland Barthes would call the “grain of the voice”:the phonetic definition of subjectivity within the acts of enunciation. Coleman’s work would insist—once again in distinct opposition to conceptual art—on the necessity of sustaining the dialectic between the linguistic dimension and the dimension of visual and theatrical representation. Since the mid 1970s, his work has juxtaposed these extended registers of linguistic competence with an equally expanded conception of visuality, incorporating all those practices of theatrical and performative figuration that modernist visuality had excluded. Even though some conceptualists, such as Robert Barry or Lawrence Weiner, had already situated their work within an emphatic and often unfathomably ambiguous relation to both the language of theory with its instrumental logic and poetry with its seemingly random and arbitrary conditions, Coleman would now construct a manifest hybrid of linguistic functions, operating simultaneously within each of his projects: the performative, the rhetorical, and the dialogical/theatrical. It is certainly not accidental that the slide projection would become one of Coleman’s typical formats, a technology and presentational device first introduced into the visual arts in the context of conceptual practices of the late 1960s. For example, Robert Barry’s projections of typewritten or typeset slides (showing word lists to be read as accumulations of performative statements) opened the limited definitions of language functions given in the conceptual model of the analytic proposition, as did Lawrence Weiner’s Statements in 1968. By introducing the decisively temporal dimension of the linguistic structure, they displaced both the static visuality of modernist pictoriality as well as the problematic compromises with the visual in more recent photographic works that conceived the visual as “pure” documentary records. From the first installation of Slide Piece in 1973, Coleman would construct the visuality of the projection within the traditions of static pictoriality and the linguistic and performative dimensions of the projection within the hybrid conventions of linguistic temporality, theatricality, and narrative. As much as the photographic aesthetic of conceptual art is at the center of Coleman’s strategies from the mid seventies onward, his work never acquired the mythical status of conceptual photography as purely functional

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documentation. On the contrary, the photographic image itself is constantly suspended in juxtapositions with language and pictoriality. Thus, the presentational format of the slide projection emerges as an ideal device to sustain the dialectics between the pictorial and the photographic, between narrativity and stasis, between language in its performative and theatrical modes. To the avant-gardiste triumphalism of certain forms of conceptual art, which prides itself on having shed the last fetters of visuality and advanced to a realm of pure linguistic performativity, Coleman’s work responds with skeptical contemplation and a countermemory of the forms of experience still embedded in the representational and linguistic conventions from which conceptualism had proudly divested itself. Similar to Marcel Broodthaers’s insistently posed—yet highly rhetorical—questions about the incompatibility between the language models underlying conceptual art and those originating in late nineteenth-century literary modernity, Coleman poses questions concerning the apparent incompatibility between the radically emancipatory forms of a linguistic and photographic critique of traditional models of visuality and the diﬀerentiated forms of linguistic and specular experience embedded in the traditions of figuration, rhetoric, and dramaturgy. Yet at no moment in Coleman’s work does countermemory as resistance against avant-gardiste triumphalism make the profoundly reactionary claim to have the privilege of historical continuity, or worse yet, to have renewed the forms of experience that the avant-gardiste enterprise had publicly and exemplarily declared as annihilated. Seeing, through Coleman’s work, Fried’s blindness concerning the phenomenologically refigured spectator, however, reveals that spectatorship was not the sole, perhaps not even the primary question that motivated Coleman’s critical contribution to the demise of modernist positions. Rather, his aesthetic of “theatricality” seems to have corresponded as well to the problematic implications of theories of subjectivity and signification that had been implicit since Duchamp’s declaration of the death of the author in the aesthetic of the readymade, and that had become theoretically explicit in the influence of poststructuralist theories of subjectivity on artistic practice of the 1970s. Most important, however, was the realization that Duchamp himself had already articulated a polemical revision of the universally accepted aesthetic of the readymade when engaging in the clandestine project of Etant donnés as an allegory staging the desire of figuration. The tableau vivant as a hybrid model between pictoriality and theater, between an aesthetic of randomness and one of extremely studied preci-

sion, had already attracted artists like Yvonne Rainer and Robert Morris in the mid 1960s. That genre’s innate dialectic corresponded to their desire to deconstruct the traditions of virtuoso (dance) performance and simultaneously to adopt the antihierarchical logic of Duchamp and Cage (without ending up with a static object conception or the atrophy of orthodox minimalism).13 As a genre redeemed from obscurity and as the most outmoded and unlikely convention of prototheatrical display, the tableau vivant suited Coleman’s investigation of the phenomenological boundaries of minimalism and its followers: its fusion of choreographed movement and pictorial stasis, its synthesis of present immediacy and arrested temporality (making the present appear to be verging incessantly on the past), its aleatory choices from an infinity of possible moments fused with a decisive specificity— all of these were features of considerable interest in the elaboration of Coleman’s subsequent projects. Once again, though, his systematic engagement with the model of the tableau vivant in his work since the early 1980s—in performances such as Now & Then (1981), or his exceptional video work So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet (1980)—not only seems to voice doubts about the restrictive and literalist interpretations of the modernist and Duchampian legacies in postminimal and conceptual work but, more important, seems to question the restrictive and orthodox applications of poststructuralist concepts of subjectivity. What emerges from a contemplation of Coleman’s work is neither a literal enactment of poststructuralist concepts of subjectivity (as many of his best interpreters have argued)14 nor the extension of Duchampian concepts of authorship and objecthood, but rather a critical complication of these concepts in a manner similar to Duchamp’s own critical revision of his readymade doxa and the prematurely proclaimed death of the artistic author in the return to the figuration of the Etant donnés. Arguments developed by Maurice Blanchot in response to the legacies of Foucault and the prematurely proclaimed death of the subject seem to articulate a position that parallels the critical complexity of Coleman’s dialogue with these legacies: For example, it is accepted as a certainty that Foucault, adhering in this to a certain conception of literary production, got rid of, purely and simply, the notion of the subject: no more oeuvre, no more author, no more creative unity. But things are not that simple. The subject does not disappear; rather, its excessively determined unity is put in question. What arouses interest and inquiry is its disappearance

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(that is, the new manner of being which disappearance is), or rather its dispersal, which does not annihilate it but oﬀers us, out of it, no more than a plurality of positions and a discontinuity of functions (and here we reencounter the system of discontinuities, which, rightly or wrongly, seemed at one time to be a characteristic of serial music).15 Such a “system of discontinuities” is certainly apparent as one of the structuring principles of Coleman’s work from the late seventies onward, and it is precisely in the emphatic juxtaposition of methodological fragments—in the work’s deliberately constructed incompatibility of visual and textual conventions—that its profoundly allegorical character manifests and mourns the inability of contemporary visual practices to contemplate subjectivity, construct narratives, and represent the process of historical experience. Yet it is evident that Coleman’s “system of discontinuities” resists at the same time even the slightest thought of a simple return to a centered humanist subject conception or a pre-Duchampian aesthetic. Coleman’s Box (ahhareturnabout) (1977) is almost programmatic in its reinscription of both figural representation and literary narrative into the traditional, perceptually determined object. A loop of found film footage is combined with alternating insertions of short units of black film leader and a soundtrack of an internal monologue scripted by the artist. Jean Fisher has observed with great clarity how the text operates in the structure of the work: Coleman’s dramatized recitation addresses itself to listening, not to reading. This is due in part to its use of phonetic puns . . . ; but it is also the result of the way that the voice produces meaning, relying as much on what Roland Barthes described as the “grain of the voice” (enunciation) as on those expressive qualities which are signifiers of character in theater. Insofar as it is a performed recitation, Box may be said to be “theatrical,” but in presenting an associative rather than syntagmatic narrative, it is not typical of conventional theater.16 One could understand Box’s subtitle, ahhareturnabout, not just as a reference to a strategy in the prize fighter’s arsenal of aggressive and defensive movements, but also as an announcement of a radical reversal of the paradigmatic features governing postminimal and postconceptual artistic production in the mid 1970s. As Coleman’s film loop follows mimetically an exchange

Box (ahhareturnabout), 1977 Projected 16 mm black-and-white film. Continuous cycle. Installation at Julian Pretto Gallery, New York, 1977.

of punches in rapidly alternating sequences of blackouts and image-sound flashes, it literalizes the optical beat that Rosalind Krauss has brilliantly described as the moment of departure from disembodied modernist opticality toward a phenomenological inscription, toward the grounding of visual experience in the range of the optical unconscious and its bodily foundations.17 Yet to the same degree that Box reiterates the experience of the perceptual pulse in the spectator, pushing it almost literally across the threshold of physical discomfort, this pulse alternates with an iconic sign of two fighters exchanging actual punches. Not only does this correspondence generate an eﬀect of the doubling of the semiotic as the physical (bordering on a pun), but it also situates the image of bodily performance within a very specific historical event and within the confrontation of two historically identifiable protagonists. Box (ahhareturnabout) signals a major departure from American postminimalist aesthetics, since the bodies of Coleman’s performers no longer appear as neutral and naturalized transhistorical givens within a universally valid field of potential phenomenological inscriptions—as the body was still being presented in the work of Graham or Nauman in order to oppose the techno-scientific orthodoxy and morphology of minimalist literalism,

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while ultimately still participating in its very logic. Jean Fisher succinctly describes the refiguration of the body in Coleman’s work in a more theoretical perspective, stating that “if the ‘body’ returns here, it is not as ‘nature’ but as a referent to the conflictual sociopolitical narratives that constitute the real conditions of experience.”18 In comparison to Flash Piece, which deployed the device of flashing lights as a phenomenological critique of opticality, Box reveals the degree to which Coleman’s approach was changing by the mid 1970s. In its manifest theatricalization of the performing body, this work weaves the reappearance of figuration instantly into a complex set of historical references and of immediate experiences and dialogic responses. Integrated within the perceptual pulse we now encounter both an acoustic as well as a representational and a narrative dimension, even though the seriality of the loop as well as the internal repetition still recall the structuring principles of sculptural work and structural film of the seventies. The stark graphic and grainy loop of found footage evokes the persistence of the iconic dimension in the images of Warhol’s paintings, and their incessant reminder of the inescapable condition of referentiality, even in the most rigorously serial structural order of pure repetition.19 Rather than simply initiating a return to a cinematic mode of representation, unleashing a false plenitude of narrative upon the spectator, Box operates clearly within the demarcations that the critiques of modernist practice themselves had articulated, since these restrictions of representation are the focal points of Coleman’s analytical approach as much as his resuscitations of figuration and narrativity emerge as the subversive strategy aiming to dismantle these restrictions. This dialectic of Coleman’s complex allegorical operations since the mid 1970s, in its attempt to criticize the inability of visual practice to engage in narrativity and figuration and at the same time to probe the possibilities of their redemption as fragments, is articulated in the continuous reworkings of these paradigmatic restrictions, in the opposition between the emphatic recovery of the mnemonic dimension and the rupture of the governing conventions of visuality. Thus, the viewer of Box is suspended in a continuous alternation—in a manner similar to the condition of undecidability in the “Duck/Rabbit” work titled Playback of a Daydream from a few years earlier: on the one hand, the visual pulse of phenomenological inscription and the indexical registration of the light-emitting projector; and, on the other, the historically specific event of the boxing match and its iconic representation.

It is in the light of this programmatic declaration of the return to a historical subject that Coleman’s subtitle itself—ahhareturnabout—almost reads as an indication of a strategic move by the artist within the field of given artistic operations. Moreover, one could argue that within the general project of reconstituting a historically specific body to the universalist abstraction of phenomenology, Coleman insists on a sociopolitically specific body, structured by the discourse on national identity (in this case by presenting the Irish fighter Gene Tunney as the struggling protagonist who tries to save his boxing championship as much as his sociopolitical identity as an Irishman). The emphasis on this geopolitical specificity opens the way for yet another critical dimension in Coleman’s work: rather than claim a space of phenomenological neutrality or aesthetic exemption from the apparatus of spectacle culture, Coleman positions his work instantly within the spectacle’s own parameters by invoking the archaic imagery of the boxing match as one of the most charged metaphors of social conduct within capitalism and as one of the key topoi of modernity and its spectacular forms of mass entertainment.20 Precisely in his insistence on the historical specificity of the incident and its ramifications for the conception of a national identity constituted by means of the cultural construct, Coleman also opposes the totalizing claims of spectacle, for only in the extreme emphasis on the particularity of historical experience can the last vestige or the first index of unalienated subjectivity be found. Paradoxically, this specificity and concreteness can only assert itself with the allegorical hindsight of the cultural construct, because any insistence on a realization of that specificity of identity within the very sociopolitical reality that has totally obliterated it would instantly turn into the most reactionary conviction of nationalism and ethnicism currently played out on the stages of the disintegrated nation-states. A position similar in complexity to Coleman’s approach to the problematic intertwinement between cultural production and sociopolitical identity has been described by Seamus Deane with regard to Irish literature and its reception: To combat some fetishized version of Irishness on the political and social level often has, as a consequence, the acceptance of an equally fetishized notion of Art. If the Art is Literature, and if the Irish are agreed to be quite gifted in this area, then there is, inevitably, a resmuggled version of Irishness operating within the economy of the

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debate. Literature, art, poetry, the province formerly assigned to the 19th-century colonial version of the Celt, has now become part of a late-20th-century repossession of Irishness by those who would, in all other respects, reject the existence of such an essentialized quality. . . . The politics of such countries not only become less interesting than their literature, they are eﬀectively erased by it. The inflation of the esthetic always leaves a political deficit. The recruitment of postcolonial literature to post-Modernity dooms the politics of postcolonial societies to pre-Modernity. . . . Postcolonial theory conspires at times with the very essentialisms that it aspires to rebuke;it permits the reintroduction of the “feminized” construct that it took so much trouble to expel, and it is persuaded to do so in the name of “Art.” In a similar, but also diﬀerent way, feminism confronts this issue, wishing to assert for itself a radical independence that is over and over again rearticulated in the residually essentialist discourse it wishes to erase. Perhaps Irigaray’s way of going through it in order to come out the other side, or on the side of the Other, is the only recourse. A stereotype should not perhaps be demolished until it has been reinhabited.21 This dialectic seems to assume a central importance in the subsequent development of Coleman’s work, since in all instances the abstract universality of specular conventions and spectacular display is juxtaposed with an interrogation of the possibilities of temporally and geopolitically determined forms of experience. The conception of identity through aesthetic practice now seems to be constituted within unresolvable contradictions: the necessary cultural production of sites of subject articulation and structures of memory conflicts with the simultaneous, inevitably ideological enforcement of a mythical identity; and the same schism exists between cultural production as the most complex form of spectacularization and cultural practices as the last resistances against the global homogenization generated by spectacle. This becomes evident if one considers, for example, Coleman’s exceptional (and singular) tribute to the conventions of static sculpture in his work The Ploughman’s Party (1979–80).22 Conceived as an “Irish” contribution to an exhibition of Irish art in England in 1981, The Ploughman’s Party intensifies the confrontation between artistic constructions of identity and their immediate falsification within the process of spectacularization that cultural consumption now inevitably enforces. One of the rare static and nonphotographic works by Coleman, it consists of a forged-iron relief in the shape

The Ploughman’s Party, 1979–80 Projected slide image with audio narration. Blue neon, forged iron, and gold and silver paint.

of a plow (reminiscent of both the stellar constellation and the political emblem of Sinn Féin, the historical protagonist and name of the political party for an independent and united Ireland). Its surfaces covered with gold leaf, the “relief ” was installed in a room entirely lined with white felt and was lit from behind with bright blue neon light. As though the already insuﬀerable association of a symbol of radical identity politics with a luxurious cultural construct of dubious pedigree did not suﬃce, the relief ostentatiously positioned itself within a derivative and hybrid aesthetic, fusing David Smith and Dan Flavin via an excursion through the legacy of Yves Klein. Played continuously, the audio component of The Ploughman’s Party reiterated the slippage from the symbol of a radical political cause to the luxurious pomp of yet another variation of installation art: an actor’s voice on a tape loop recited a textual montage written by Coleman that made the listeners slide through similar turns and inversions of language modes. In a perpetual phonetic and lexical glissando, the speaker articulated all the demarcations of class that can be revealed through enunciation and vocabulary. Ranging from a statement of peasant rules to the promises of perfume and jewelry advertisements, the recitation alternated in sudden switches

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between the grainy voice of a subjectivity seemingly in its “natural” state uttering obscenities and the histrionics of a commercial using all the phonetic registers of seduction. This sculptural and phonetic grotesque—certainly Coleman’s most comical work—deploys the allegorical strategy of a simultaneous devalorization of all accepted linguistic and artistic conventions to induce the experience of a semiotic field run amok, and the travesty necessary for a cathartic emancipation from the aspirations to culturally or politically constructed identity in the present. Three years after Box, Coleman produced So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet, his first and—for the time being—only work employing video imagery. As though he were constructing an archaeology of the genres and techniques of the specular and of spectacularization, Coleman moved from film and the mass-cultural athletic ritual in Box through the display of the fashion show in his performance Now & Then; from the phonetics of alienation in the juxtaposition of advertisement languages and the foundational discourses on identity in The Ploughman’s Party to his critical analysis of video/television conventions in So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet; and from all of this to a culmination in the elegiac and declamatory embrace of the theater in Living and Presumed Dead (1983–85). Coleman’s archaeology of figuration appears to be engaged in the investigation of the intricate interrelationships between the history of scopic desire from its earlier embodiments in pictorial conventions to their subsequent desublimation and dissipation in mass-cultural forms. His archaeology of narrative traces the transformations of language experience from the poetic and communicative dimensions of theatrical dialogue and dramaturgy to their subsequent dilapidation in contemporary film and television and in the narrative structures of pulp fiction and the photonovel.23 In So Diﬀerent . . . and Yet, a single color monitor is displayed in a large white architectural frame, generating a sense of an unusual sculptural formality while at the same time clearly opposing the televisual medium’s standard self-presentation as a “casual” universal presence, as a “natural” contingency of everyday life. Corresponding to the emphatic recognition of the continuous infliction of the electronic image on spatial and visual experience, a single fifty-minute take of the camera forces the viewer/listener to confront a continuous dialogue between a female and a male protagonist.24 They assume in rapid succession the roles of a number of increasingly intertwined and disparate characters within a trivial melodrama, unraveling for the patient viewer/listener the almost painfully unusual experience of a visual continuity and temporal duration that the medium’s mass-cultural

So Different . . . and Yet, 1980 Performed by Olwen Fouère and Roger Doyle. Rehearsal.

conventions strictly prohibit. Thus the work’s dialectic unfolds in the tension between the singularized image, its quasi-architectural presentation, the extremely attenuated dialogue, and its perpetual intertwining of seemingly incoherent, manifold narrative strands. The two voices alternate in an unpredictable slipping and sliding between French and English accents, a slippage reminiscent of that which had taken place earlier in the class-bound discourse of The Ploughman’s Party. Enunciations range from the “grain of the voice” of aﬀected arrogance and pretense to the vilest language of hypocrisy and abuse. The narrative plots, recited in the most vapid French or haughty English pronunciation of platitudes, are jumbled and compressed, repetitive, fragmented and futile, and they generate an almost grotesque eﬀect of a continuous cancellation of the listener’s desire for closure, resulting in the total suspension of any narrative logic or function. The conventions of visual representation appear on Coleman’s archaeological stage in the classical scopic trope of the reclining female figure, the very figuration and staging of patriarchal desire. Originally a pictorial and photographic topos, the female odalisque or gîsante emerges here as an allegorical device of the desire to “figure,” strangely displaced into a pseudo-theatrical performance on the video/television screen.25 A

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most peculiar detail of the actress’s costume (a strangely outmoded green evening gown continually referred to in the accompanying narrative)—a spiraling red garland ornamenting her right leg from foot to thigh—seems to enforce in the manner of an abstract synecdoche the very mechanism of scopic desire that the figure embodies at large. In the same manner, the desire for narrative as an archaic mythical structure, deeply imbedded in the construction of subjectivity, now appears to have become itself the subject on display, with the female protagonist accompanying the narrative’s every twist and turn with a literal repositioning of her body and an adjustment within her repertoire of poses. The male actor, placed further in the distance, seems to generate the piano music accompanying the dialogue with the alternatingly haunting and sentimental or naively mimetic dramatic tunes that were once integral to silent film. This peculiar reenactment confronts us—as do the body language and costume of the actress—with an enigmatic sense of temporal dislocation, an outlived form of experience that suddenly acquires an uncanny sense of presence and reality in the evident contrast with the electronic equipment from which it emanates. After a period of careful observation, the viewer recognizes that the male protagonist, dressed in a white tuxedo, wears a pair of horns on his forehead that are no less astounding than the spiraling red bandages on the female protagonist’s leg. Clearly, this signals a return to the realm of mythical experience. Yet the mythical structure is to be found not by identifying the ethno-cultural sources of the horned male figure, but rather by recognizing that it is the technological image of television itself and the types of narrative production it enforces which have inflicted myth with a vengeance onto the aspirations for an emancipation from the cult value of images through their technological reproduction.26 Coleman’s allegorical operation reconstitutes the by now all but unimaginable experience of temporal duration to the viewer of the electronic image.27 Yet within the same approach, in an apparently complete reversal of the principles of real time and duration, the uninterrupted imagery confronts the viewer with a persistently fragmented and decentered narrative. It generates a radical negation of the viewer’s restless anticipation of narrative closure and provides, once again, the fundamental counterexperience to the governing principles of electronic image production. In the last of Coleman’s early works to concern us here, the slide projection Living and Presumed Dead (1983–85), theater itself seems to have taken the center of Coleman’s archaeology. Yet theater as the historical

matrix of spectacle arises here once again only to disintegrate in the very moment of its reconstitution into a series of pointlessly and perpetually shifting, projected photographic images. These images show a large troupe of actors in the masks and costumes of what appears to have been a popular play (one can, after a while, identify some of the figures as a fishwife, skeletons, goblins, acrobats and other garishly dressed theatrical performers, along with the strangely discomforting presence of shop-window mannequins dressed in street costumes). The large horizontal line-up of the figures suggests that we are, in fact, witnessing a final curtain call. Thus, from the very beginning of the slide sequence, the sense of the end of the play is present. It is only the voice of the narrator, Noel Purcell (an older popular actor from Dublin who performs the role of the narrator with a sublime diﬀerentiation of phonetic registers and dramatic tempi), that makes us anticipate an unfolding rather than a closure. As the narrator is threading through the complicated story of a number of invented characters, most of whom bear names in an unidentifiable language (Abbas, Borras, Capax), the spectator realizes that each individual projected slide alters the line-up of characters or their positions ever so slightly, even though the overall structure of the panoramic display of disappearing actors remains identical throughout the entire projection. The highly dramatic yet stark and graphic plot—an archetypal, Oedipal story of murder, mayhem, and love, with its convoluted and confusing traps and trackings—is related by the narrator with a vivacity that recalls both a first theatrical experience at the Grand Guignol and a first encounter with Greek tragedy. Thus the work generates almost an etiology of the desire for narrativity and spectacle by recovering those structures of individual and collective experience in which the desire for theatrical figuration still corresponded to a function in the formation of subjectivity. Roland Barthes identifies the fusion of oedipality and narrativity with extraordinary clarity; his description seems to account for almost every structural aspect of Coleman’s Living and Presumed Dead: The Oedipus complex is a narrative, but this narrative is never made known except through the subject’s discourse, where it is presented not as a unitary, monological narrative (even if it is a monologue) but as a form broken into fragments, repetitions, infinite metonymies. In its current eﬀort, contemporary literature is at the level of that same expression of an apparently obscured narrative, one which has no other place (no other referent), however, than its own utterance.28

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Living and Presumed Dead, 1983–85 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

We must recall, however, that Coleman’s work deliberately situates itself in the discursive and institutional frameworks of visual culture, not those of literature. His work is inextricably bound up, as we have seen, with the domination of spectacle over visuality. But we still have to account for the tension that holds Coleman’s elegiac recovery of the origins of theatrical and narrative desire, and their allegorical staging in Living and Presumed Dead, to the peculiar photographic presentation of a series of continuously, if minutely, altered static images. Contrary to expectations, the photographic image in Coleman’s work does not provide access to a representational plenitude of which modernism supposedly deprived its spectators. Neither abolishing its semiotic radicality as a continuously fragmented allegorical image nor accepting that a new figuration—a representation of historical memory embodied in the conventions of cultural production and representation—was now impossible to attain, Coleman’s work engenders a peculiar dialectic. If the former function establishes the work’s critical opposition to spectacle, the latter positions it in critical distance from the limitations of the discursive practices of the sixties, their antirepresentational and countermnemonic identification with techno-scientific epistemes or with the paradigm of the commodity image. Each attempt to reconstitute narrative continuity

and closure, as with any eﬀort to reconstruct mimetic representation, falls instant prey to the very mechanisms that aesthetic practice at this moment negates if it wants to constitute itself at all in the face of a continuous and totalizing demand of spectacle to demolish particularity and diﬀerence. This is all the more obvious in instances of contemporary artistic practice with which Coleman’s work could be falsely associated, practices that naively reclaim the realm of representation in the guise of an inscription within the contemporary “realism” of advertising imagery, or that aspire to constitute historical memory by claiming a possible continuity with the last instance of the mnemonic in painting in the art of Manet. What remains to be understood then is the necessity for Coleman to refigure—literally and semiotically—the status of the aesthetic object. Or, put diﬀerently, one might ask what determined Coleman in the late 1970s to fuse linguistic performativity, indexical visuality, and the rhetorical conventions of narrativity and of theatrical figuration, and to synthesize these seemingly irreconcilable elements into one of the most complex aesthetic projects of postmodernity? Denis Hollier has recently clarified in a brilliant essay the historical shift from the symbolic/iconic axis of traditional literary realism to what he identifies as the performative realism of indexicality. Overcoming the traditionally symbolic and literary dimensions of narrative fiction, Hollier’s definition of a “performative realism” seems astonishingly apt also for the semiotic changes brought about in Coleman’s continuous citations of theatrical and narrative conventions in his work since the late 1970s: Thus the heart of the matter is not a change in the referent, a passage from imaginary to real characters as one would do by leaving the novel for historiography; rather it is a change in the mode of enunciation; the passage to the real must be inferred not by a change of the object as much as by the entry onto the stage of the subject and its index. . . . The real function of photography is not so much allowing the narrator to dispense with the tiresome naturalistic ritual of the description of settings. It begins by indexing the tale. It makes it pass from a descriptive realism to a performative one.29 Notes

1. Maxime Du Camp, Les chants modernes (1858), as quoted by Robert Herbert in Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 4.

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Raymond Williams gives us a more recent critical description of this “naturalized” precondition of avant-garde attitudes toward the historical:“What we now know as modernism, and certainly as the avantgarde, has changed all this. Creativity is all in new making, new construction: all traditional, academic, even learned models are actually or potentially hostile to it, and must be swept away.” See Raymond Williams, “The Politics of the Avantgarde,” introduction to Peter Timms and Edward Collier, eds., Visions and Blueprints (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 5. 2. Wlad Godzich, introduction to Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. xxvii. 3. It is perhaps noteworthy not only that Coleman spent the late sixties and early seventies in Italy, being acquainted with most and befriending some of the artists of Arte Povera, but also that he actually co-curated an exhibition of Italian Arte Povera in Dublin in 1973. See Franco Toselli, ed., An Exhibition of New Italian Art (Belfast: Arts Council of Northern Ireland; Dublin: David Hendricks Gallery, 1973). 4. Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight was first published in 1972. (See note 2.) 5. As happens so often, we owe the most precise, diﬀerentiated, and legible description of Flash Piece to Anne Rorimer: “Two blue flashes appeared between two yellow in repeated three minute cycles. During each cycle, the time between the flashes diﬀered, although spectators remembered them as being the same. Thus time as measured and time as experienced did not coincide. In this way, Coleman succeeded in introducing a subjective aspect of viewing—namely that of memory—into the subject matter of the resulting work.” See Rorimer, “Michael Asher and James Coleman at Artists Space,” in Michael Asher/James Coleman (New York: Artists Space, 1988), p. 7. 6. Michael Newman, “Allegories of the Subject: The Theme of Identity in the Work of James Coleman,” in James Coleman: Selected Works (Chicago and London: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and ICA London, 1985), pp. 26–27. 7. Author’s conversation with the artist, Dublin, May 1994. 8. Anne Rorimer, “James Coleman 1970–1985” (1985), reprinted in this volume, pp. 2–3. 9. Coleman’s critical response to this dilemma parallels that of other artists, such as Marcel Broodthaers and Gerhard Richter, but shares aspects of the positions developed within Italian Arte Povera that were temporarily and perhaps erroneously associated with postminimal and conceptual art. 10. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5 ( June 1967); reprinted in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), pp. 139–42. 11. In the early 1970s—resonating with Fried’s condemnation—nothing would have appeared more disqualified as a point of departure than a programmatic reconsideration of the conventions of theatricality. Coleman’s decision to engage precisely with those conventions seems to have alienated audiences both in Europe and the United States, keeping his work in relative historical illegibility and delaying its recognition. Not surprisingly, audiences of the seventies were oblivious to artistic strategies from the origins of nineteenth-century modernism, obscured by their proper orthodoxies: when Manet needed to reposition himself with regard to the doxa of Realism, he drew upon the dialectic of historical memory and oblivion, in the same manner that the surrealists had redeemed figuration, sensing that only the contemplation of obsolescence could recognize the falseness of an orthodoxy of modernist instrumentalist concepts of truth.

12. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” p. 125. 13. More intuitively, perhaps, than programmatically, Morris had already attempted to reestablish this tradition within the context of a minimalist performance in his peculiar piece Site (1964), which featured Carolee Schneeman reclining in the pose of Manet’s Olympia (1863). This intervention, however, just as much as Yvonne Rainer’s, would remain obscure and inconsequential in a larger theorization of the aesthetics of the sixties; yet both could now be recognized as precursors to Coleman’s systematic deployment of the tableau vivant. 14. One of the clearest and most convincing arguments positioning Coleman’s work in a poststructuralist perspective is Lynne Cooke’s excellent essay on the artist, “A Tempered Agnosia” (1992; reprinted in this volume, p. 127): In these recent works Coleman engages more closely with the medium in which representation occurs, and through that with the ways that media construct the subject— as much as the object—of perception. Because they are indexical, reproductive media of the kind that he employs necessarily refer beyond the realm of aesthetics. If all forms of picturing are intrinsically discursive, if all images require being read, and read in ways that involve and engage psychic, social, and institutional “texts,” Coleman in this and related ways is able to bypass the self-referential restrictions underpinning the high modernist concept of visuality which Rosalind Krauss [“Antivision,” October 36 (Spring 1986), p. 147] has aptly termed an engagement with “the intransitive verbs of vision.” Such an engagement “excludes the domain of knowledge, both moral and scientific, to revise the visual in the realm of a reflexive relation to the modality of vision rather than to its contents, to savor in and for itself qualities like immmediacy, vibrancy, simultaneity, eﬀulgence and to experience these as qualities without objects.” 15. Maurice Blanchot, “Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him,” in Foucault/Blanchot (New York: Zone Books, 1987), pp. 76–77. 16. Jean Fisher, “The Place of the Spectator in the Work of James Coleman” (1983), reprinted in this volume, p. 27. 17. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993), passim. 18. Jean Fisher, “Inexorable Dissolve: James Coleman Blindsides Art,” Artforum (December 1993), p. 97. 19. Coleman has emphasized in conversations with the author that Warhol was one of the crucial figures in his own artistic development. 20. The image of boxers fighting calls up historical references to that topos, from Thomas Eakins to George Bellows and August Sander, from Bertolt Brecht to Ernest Hemingway. 21. Seamus Deane, “Critical Reflections,” Artforum (December 1993), p. 105. 22. Jean Fisher gives us the best description of this piece: The air of sorrow that gently murmurs through [some of Coleman’s] works finds its counterpoints in a subtle irony, which in its quiet debunking of myths, questions our understanding of the past. This duality emerges in the play of associations poetically woven into the commentary of The Ploughman’s Party (1979–1980). Coleman uses a central image, the plough, to reveal how, among other things, this powerful archetypal symbol oscillates through a number of significations: from an earthly myth and peace-

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ful utility, to the historic militancy of the Sinn Féin, to its corruption into mere decoration by a frivolous culture. The visual focus of the piece is a gilded Rococo-style translation of the constellation, which hangs shimmering in an evanescent blue light; an Ultimate Object. Jean Fisher, “James Coleman,” in James Coleman, exh. cat. (Dublin: Douglas Hyde Gallery, 1982), p. 20. 23. Coleman has emphasized the extent to which his late-1960s encounters with the Italian model of the fotoromanzo influenced his selection of photographic display formats as much as the construction of his narratives (for example, his work Seeing for Oneself, which is entirely structured in the manner of a fotoromanzo). Narratological studies of pulp fiction (such as those of Janis Radway, or Tania Modleski’s study of the Harlequin romance novel) have been instrumental both in the development of Coleman’s selection of popular culture material and in his deconstructionist interest in the functions of fiction. 24. While the work is perceived as being the result of a single take, it actually incorporated two edits, which were performed for technical reasons. 25. Once again, Manet’s classically modernist figure of Olympia comes to mind in the peculiar display of Coleman’s protagonist, as in the tableau vivant by Robert Morris mentioned earlier. Frédéric Migayrou makes this historical association in his essay “James Coleman: le cas des figures,” without, however, coming to similar conclusions. See James Coleman (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1989). 26. Michael Newman has suggested that the horns refer to “Cernunnos, the god with the horns of a stag, ram or bull, a symbol of fertility who was assimilated to Satan during the early Christian period.” As fascinating as the idea might be to trace Irishness and pagan sources in Coleman’s work as part of a broader investigation of the problematic condition of Irish national identity, the exactitude of the identification in this case seems to generate in fact very little in the reading of the work. See Newman, “Allegories of the Subject,” p. 35. 27. It seems appropriate at this point to recall the filmic work of Andy Warhol, who also recuperated a subversive antinarrative dimension by reconstituting an experience of actual time in his films of the sixties, most notably in Chelsea Girls. 28. Roland Barthes, “On the Fashion System,” interview with Raymond Bellour, in The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), p. 53. 29. Denis Hollier, “Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows,” October 69 (Summer 1994), p. 126.

Untitled: Philippe VACHER, 1990 35 mm color film, silent.

A Tempered Agnosia Lynne Cooke

We do not explain pictures: we explain remarks about pictures—or rather, we explain pictures only in so far as we have considered them under some verbal description or specification. . . . The nature of language or serial conceptualization means that the description [of a picture] is less a representation of the picture, or even a representation of seeing the picture, than a representation of thinking about having seen the picture. Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures “My work is not about true or false realities, it’s about consciousness of shifting realities,” argued James Coleman in a rare interview in 1983.1 “From the start Coleman has been concerned with disclosing the apparatus of perception and how reality is filtered through the mind,” Anne Rorimer recently wrote. One of Coleman’s most astute critics, she concluded her introduction to his work with the assertion, “he has succeeded in redefining the tradition of picture making usually associated with easel painting.”2 “Coleman is concerned with the relationship between the identities of subject and image as they are mutually conditioned or caused through time,” wrote Michael Newman in 1985 in a penetrating analysis of the construction of identity in Coleman’s work.3 Realities, perception, representation, picture making, and identity are all issues that have concerned James Coleman over the past twenty years. They variously weave through a complex oeuvre which—as Rorimer argues, perhaps following the artist himself—may be related to the tradi-

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tion of (easel) painting but has been couched to date in media tangential to it: video, film, slide tape, theater, and performance.4 If the terrain Coleman has mapped during this period is at once broad and yet cohesive, within it emphasis has fallen diﬀerently at diﬀerent moments. In his work of the past few years, questions concerning the materiality of the medium together with its codes and conventions seem to have become the principal subject under review, though not, of course, to the exclusion of all other concerns. Coleman’s earliest works, from the beginning of the seventies, had involved reflexive examinations of the medium in phenomenological terms, or the invocation of narrative as the inevitable product of dealing with any medium like film in which time and sequence were integral components. Subsequently narrative became a central issue in itself, not merely as the product of the process but as a genre in its own right, as istoria, the telling of significant events in ways that presuppose rhetorical tropes and standardized fictional modes. In his works from the end of the eighties, by contrast, questions relating to visuality are now identified as transitive in that they directly invoke the sociocultural context that shapes and frames them. The type of reflexivity that results may warrant distinguishing Charon (MIT Project) (1989), La Tache Aveugle (1978–90), Untitled: Philippe VACHER (1990), and Line of Faith (1991) as a new subgroup within Coleman’s oeuvre as a whole. With this recent veering of attention to other modalities, not least to the technologically and historically conditioned character of the reproductive media, Coleman has relinquished the use of visual clichés and canonical aesthetic models he employed previously in favor of material with a particular specificity. At the same time his erstwhile privileging of language has given way to a framing of visual imagery by its own traditions and histories. In confining himself to the art gallery or museum for most of his output, Coleman has made evident his continuing dialogue not only with the tradition of painting, but with its current debates. Painting continues to act as a repressed leitmotif, a correlative to whichever of the oﬀspring of the mechanical image—photography, film, video, slide—he is employing on that occasion. If, given the importance it accords verbal narrative, Charon (MIT Project) (1989) is in certain respects a transitional piece, it foreshadows Coleman’s work of the nineties in significant ways. It is composed of fourteen episodes whose subject is always, despite great internal diﬀerences, photography.5 Visually and episodically discrete, these vignettes are linked aurally by the use of a single voice for the key protagonist (who ranges from

Charon (MIT Project), 1989 Projected slide images with synchronized audio narration.

male to female, old to young, white to black) and theoretically by the overriding theme of representation. Each section begins with a description of an image and an account of the circumstances of its genesis. The narrative functions analogously to printed captions accompanying still photographs, providing the frame through which the imagery is comprehended. Normative and ubiquitous uses of photographs in the contemporary world, uses far removed from the artificially controlled para