James Coleman

James Coleman, Slide Piece, 1972-1973

I have been reading about James Coleman's work for almost thirty years, but have seen very little of it in that time. The small, but superbly curated exhibition at the Pompidou is as challenging as it is welcome. Coleman's is a provocative body of work that has fascinated some of the most prominent figures in the worlds of experimental film, art and photography studies. And with good reason.

The work is challenging because it doesn't fit into the neatly arranged categories that we give art and visual culture today. Coleman's work characteristically occupies the interface between still and moving images. He also plays with the relations between photograph and cinema, art history and cinema, and more recently, the spectacular visual culture of advertising, television, fashion photography and police imaging. Known for his use of transparent images projected through multiple stacked slide carousels, sometimes accompanied by audio tracks that don't describe what's in the image, Coleman's signature works are also about the tension between image and word. We are sure to come away wondering about the efficacy of words and images as modes of communication.

James Coleman, Retake with Evidence, 2007

In one piece at the beginning, Harvey Keitel stands on a stage, intermittently backgrounded by a plain white stage, archaeological ruins, monumental columns, antique sculptures that might be in a museum. Keitel delivers a monologue from Sophocles that is about as impenetrable as the Greeks get. Keitel is not preened and prissed for the camera, but wears a sweatshirt and perspires under the lights. Sophocles text is focussed on questions of social violence and democracy, but it's the contexts and modes of presentation that draw our focus. Issues of performance, staging, frustration of viewer expectations through fragmentation and repetition are brought to the fore. Even if they don't watch the entire performance, viewers will understand they are watching their own process of watching. 

James Coleman, La Tache Aveugle, 1978-1990

Also towards the beginning is a signature Coleman slide projection with synchronised audio, Slide Piece. The voice describes the most important aspects of the image before us: a drab, nondescript square in Milan. Each time the slides move past the light source, a new description begins. But the image is the same, even if it is a new slide. And the audio simply describes different aspects of this same drab square, honing in on what might be important to different viewers. Over time, our eyes will have moved around the image having noticed a window above the awning, the pylon behind the cars, and other innocuous details. The work gives the idea that what is in the image depends on who is looking, and what's important to that viewer. 

James Coleman, Charon (MIT Project), 1989

In other works, such as Charon, the slides are self-conscious performances of the way that moving images are constructed. Even if the images are not moving. Thus in Charon, a synchronised audio tells stories about the people who are in the image, but again, the slides don't fully correspond to the stories we hear. However, there are just enough details—the presence of a child, a hotel room, a window, a fancy outfit—to keep our desire for a sound/image link alive. Unlike the construction of narrative desire that promises an ending, here it is the promise of audio that goes with the image before us. Again, we are faced with images about the frustrations of viewing the moving image, even if we look at still images. Likewise, a piece such as Charon thrusts the difficulty of an image's communication into the foreground. We are made aware of all the elements that aid (and ultimately manipulate) our understanding and consequent interpretation. We start to become cognisant of the influence of things like the title, the descriptions, the uses to which the image is put, who takes the photographs, who directs the set, who dresses the models. 

James Coleman, (Documenta 11 Project), 2002

In a work such as (Documenta 11 Project), Coleman removes the title altogether. Thus, we are left looking at some kind of transient shape in the light that is presumably moving slower than the human eye can perceive it. And we have no idea of what we are looking at because he has removed the title. That said, the work has a title, even if it has been untitled: it is given (Documenta 11 Project) as title.  The work was commissioned for Documenta 11 by Okwui Enwezor in 2002, a Documenta that had its unique identity. Coleman's work in turn takes on that identity. In other words, we are never left to fall into the illusion of the works.

James Coleman, Still Life, 2013-2016

Even when illusion motivates the representation, we are confronted with the exposure of inauthenticity. In Still Life, Coleman plays with the French translation of dead nature. The poppy has been pulled out of the ground, thus destroyed, and is re-animated by Coleman's camera when the flower makes minuscule movements. The piece is projected on the black wall without a sound. Given the looping of audio tracks in other works, the silence of Still Life is itself somehow frustrating. So used to playing games with the audio/image relations, it's difficult to stand still and watch the flower which may or may not be real, in absolute silence. 

James Coleman, Lapsus Exposure, 1992-1994

Ultimately, this exhibition requires a lot of energy, but it is richly rewarding. Time spent with each work is revealing of our expectations of images, and the relations we take for granted. The bonus reward comes when we stand for long enough and find that we are watching ourselves watching, or at least, we are confronted with the processes with which we engage and the expectations we bring to looking at still and moving images.

All Images courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery © James Coleman

Tony Oursler, JGM Galerie

It’s been years since I have looked at Tony Oursler’s work in any sustained and critical way. In fact, the last time I saw his trademark faces projected onto fabric and resin objects must have been at Metro Pictures in the late-1990s, a time when video installation had so recently broken through the esteemed walls of the Museum of Modern Art. I was excited then by Oursler’s work because, as the second wave of video art, it was still doing something that the first wave – the likes of Gary Hill, Stan Douglas, and Bill Viola – had not yet done. And seeing some of Oursler’s recent work at JGM Galerie in Rue du Temple, I am delighted to report that he is still pursuing the medium in new and exciting ways. 

Tony Oursler, Star, 2005

Describing the works is challenging because they are weird and wonderful, joyous and heartwrenching, funny and sad, and just plain obscure. And on top of all these mixed messages and meanings, the video installations are not for the casual gallery hopper. This is heavy stuff, both intellectually and emotionally challenging in all sorts of different ways. This is my excuse for not promising to understand Oursler’s work fully. Its complexity, multiple layers and not always obvious philosophical, art historical, and theoretical infusions make it difficult to access. 

Tony Oursler, Million Miles, 2007

The faces, or more usually eyes and lips, openings in painted skin, projected onto figures made of fabrics, resin and plaster have a dual function: At one and the same time, the moving images are dependent for support on, as well as animate, often anthropomorphize, the figures, shapes and unidentifiable things onto which they are projected. It’s hard to believe, but the quiet, anxious voice that emanates from huge grey lips surrounded by eight single eyes in Star (2005) solicits our empathy and identification. This monster like image or object, this thing that is created through video superimpositions, has a voice so soft, so gentle that we are drawn close to hear it speak, and as we are drawn close, the image disintegrates, or we lose its sense of cohesion. Her words are disjointed, fragmented, not telling a coherent narrative, but rather, like other of her monster companions, she speaks the agony and alienation of a life of urban loneliness. Million Miles (2007) in the basement of JGM even says as much with her appealing face, and tentacle-like arms wrapped around herself. She cries out, not literally, but in the sensitivity of her voice, the appeal of her deformed face, and her unhealthy skin. She echoes the difficulty of living, being alone, abandoned. Million Miles like Star is a figure, a being, or some kind of monster and discolored aberration who, to our eye, has repulsive features, but to whom we are nevertheless emotionally and psychologically drawn.

Tony Oursler, Thaw

The voices of these animated forms cry simple requests to be fed and loved, and they reminded me of the replicants in Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott, 1982) who want nothing more than to be human. There is something about these nightmarish shapes that has them screaming at us (despite the softness of their voices) wanting the same as us – more life. Therefore, to make another reference, they also reminded me of the grotesque figures out of the urban conflictual nightmares in Cindy Sherman’s world. However, Oursler’s intricate and provocative video installations go further. The figures and forms are appealing, we are drawn to them, and rather than being confronted by Sherman in drag, we actually identify very strongly with the cries of Ousler’s freaks. 

On an intellectual level, the most obvious, and perhaps the easiest, interpretation is the videos’ discourse on death, on age, anxiety and the deterioration of the body as it morphs uncontrollably into something we do not want it to be. In addition, the works must be all about seeing as they are all about the eyes, the body in disintegration, discolored skin. Even when they venture away from images of eyes and mouths, the mixed-media installations will include mirrors, reflections, cut glass and complex visual mazes. In one of the installations, The Angle, The Tilt, and the Point of View for Allendale South Carolina, 1998, a piece of glass is cut both to reflect the video image back onto a resin environment and to allow the same image to filter through onto the wall behind. Critics have written about how Oursler’s works hold a mirror up to us, to our unconscious to the unfettered, uncensored image of our insides. And that mirror is enabling a form of seeing, a new form of vision, it is accordingly, a vision that resonates with a surrealist dream world.

Museum View at JGM

Even without the theoretical interpretation, his works continue to manipulate us physically. As I mention, in Star we are all too ready to walk around, to walk up to the installation, looking and listening for the best angle. Downstairs at JGM there is a miniature man on the ground who forces us to bend and contort our bodies, our vision becoming corporealized, in an attempt to see him. And in another variation on the kinds of vision Ousler pushes us to experience, the faces, the eyes and lips of a work such as Thaw repel us, straining our vision in a different way yet again, as we make compromises to accommodate its distortions. Clearly, these physical experiences of vision resonate with the groundbreaking installations of Bruce Nauman, who was among the pioneers of the art form to invite us to participate in a time based media experience. Like Nauman, my suspicion is that Oursler is not really interested in representation, so much as he wants to create a new experience of the conceptually motivated art work for the gallery goer. And again, this is an experience that is uncomfortable as it challenges the conventions of viewing (mass media) as we have known them up to this point. 

In spite of the frustrations and discomfort, there is also a sense of joy when together with these creatures and microscosms. Each installation is a wonderland, of the unconscious, as well as a place created by stream of consciousness. Just like the surrealist world from the first half of the twentieth century, these works have an uncanniness to them. It is as though a stone has been lifted and a kingdom of crawly things are there, waiting to be set free, by me as I lift that stone. There is, ultimately, so much going on in Oursler’s work, most of which resists rationalization and conscious process. Letting go to this confusing place outside of language, is the joy of being with Oursler’s video installations.

Top Image © Tony Oursler studio 
All others © André Morin courtesy JGM. Galerie

Ryoji Ikeda, data.matrix[no.1-10], 2010 Forum, Centre Pompidou

Georgia and I met on Friday one last time before she goes off to the sun and surf of California for the winter. Because it was our final get together we chose carefully: Nancy Spero and Aman at the Pompidou Centre. While we bemoaned the vacuity of Aman’s work and the small range of the Spero’s on exhibition, sipping our tea, I started folding the Pompidou’s “what’s on today” sheet and suddenly realized that we were perfectly timed for the opening of the latest Ryoji Ikeda installation, data.matrix[no.1-10], 2010. And so we rushed downstairs for what I knew would be an unforgettable experience.

data.matrix[no.1-10]

Ikeda’s work is the closest thing I know to brilliance. In fact his work is so haunting, mesmerizing, hypnotic, challenging in every way — physically, emotionally, spiritually — that I can never do justice to it in writing. If you only go to see one piece of art this year, Data.matrix [no.1-10] has to be it. 

datamatics [prototype-ver.2.0]

Apparently Ikeda is a composer, but he could just as easily be an engineer, a computer programmer, a filmmaker, a mathematician, a physicist, an architect or a philosopher. His electronic and digital sound-image installations and environments are so expansive, so complex that they not only engage us on every level, demanding activation of all our senses, our minds, our instincts, but they also embrace every form of epistemology, and every form of communication. It is difficult to capture data.matrix [no.1-10] in words because its uniqueness demands a whole new language. I don’t fully understand Ikeda’s work. Not only because the acoustic and visual environment is beyond human time and space, but I am not a sound technician, neither am I a physicist, a mathematician, a computer programmer or an engineer. And my guess is that if I were, I still wouldn’t understand because I am not a filmmaker, or a musician. In the same way that the data that produces the lines, patterns, scenes and sounds is motivated by a logic of aleatory proliferation and sequencing, so the audio visual construction is infinite and always unknown. And yet, while this is conceptual art at its most cerebral, Ikeda’s installation is also inviting, seductive, sensuous, and it echoes my desire.

data.matrix[no.1-10]

My first response is one of wonder at the persistence of vision I experience as I focus on one screen and its rapidly changing “images.” Bursts of color appear, indeterminate, as I continue to stare at white on black that is really on the screen. I struggle to find familiarity. The sound reminds me of that distinctive clicking of the train timetables in European stations as one train departs and all the others move up a notch on the schedule.  And I think of Las Vegas, of the eternal spin of the roulette wheel with a clicking sound that is so addictive, so filled with expectation and carries in it the promise of disappointment. The infinite and constant stream of undecipherable numbers on one screen reminds me of the stock exchange, and I watch hypnotized by the rhythms and the beat of the images as they proceed like a LED light display, only faster to the point of imperceptibility. My only reassurance is that sound and image are synchronized, as far as I can tell.

And then when both image and sound disintegrate into white or black, static, all at once, I know there is some power behind them, too immense for me to imagine. Perhaps this is the power of mathematics looking to understand the universe? The screens explode in synchonization. And then it all starts over again. Something is repeated. But it is not repeated in the sense of the same: This is repetition where there is no original, no telos, and every iteration is in search of these non-existent end points.  The mathematical precision that energizes this other world is again inexplicable because if the secret were known, cognizeable, no limits would be challenged, in fact everything would take place in the realms of human time and space.

Data.matrix [no.1-10] is, as I say, visually entrancing: mesmerized, I cannot take my eyes off it. And the sounds, the rhythm of the beeping, the ticking, the otherwordly chimes, are hypnotic. And so, this highly intellectual and cerebral exercise seduces me. With my constant search to control and to know it, I am reminded of Peter Kubelka’ Arnulf Rainer or a Tony Conrad flicker film. These ten screens  like structural film, though in a whole new medium, or concert of media, are light reduced, and elevated to image such that it is the substance of what our eyes behold. And then there is the acoustic environment I cannot account for.

data.matrix[no.1-10]

As Georgia pointed out Data.matrix [no.1-10], is also clean, free of the messiness of the human body. It might be all about perception, audition, desire, seduction, and the sheer density of emotions. But, in a characteristic, I want to say, typically Japanese way, it is also slick and with no trace of the clinical. Yet another characteristic that makes Ikeda’s work unfathomable. This is what makes all other art in its midst pale by comparison. Data.matrix [no.1-10] is beyond the constraints of the body, constraints not only imposed by the physicality and substance, the material of human flesh, but, as I say, the constraints of time and space as we know and imagine them have been disintegrated and left behind.

All images copyright Ryoji Ikeda

Chantier paysage, Mark Lewis at the Louvre

As always, I came away from last Friday night at the Louvre filled with ideas and inspiration. However, rather than being mesmerized by old master paintings, it was the complex and intriguing films of contemporary artist Mark Lewis that were the topic of the “face à face” series in the Auditorium.

The woman who chaired the discussions apologized for the fact that Lewis’ films were being projected in a cinema, rather than looped on monitors in a gallery space. However, their mode of projection took nothing away from these images: they were mesmerizing, unsettling, slow but deeply revelatory, simultaneously unique and filled with references to the past, present and future of picture making.

Lewis’ films are as much “about” the places that appear to the camera as onlooker as they are about the camera that sees them, the movements it makes, and the visceral effect these movements have on us, as onlookers en abîme. For example, in Forte, 2010 [above]. the camera approaches an old fort in Italy from high above snow-covered mountaintops. We are first surprised to find the aerial view of the fort appear on the other side of the mountain, and then when people start to stream out of the fort and run down the winding pathway, like ants whose habitat has been destroyed, we are looking for more, a reason, a narrative that will help us make sense of this disruptive human motion. At the very same time, the movement of the camera as it has been attached to the underside of the plane from which Lewis films the scene made me feel more and more nauseous. While avant-garde filmmakers have repeatedly played with the disorientation caused by the absence of an establishing shot, Lewis confounds his spectator, and sets the stomach churning when the image is nothing but an establishing shot in slow motion, an absent “narrative” that is an establishing shot empty of purpose.

In another film, Northumberland, 2005,[above] a camera moves laterally across a typical English stone wall in a seemingly endless tracking shot. In the background, tree trunks in winter remain vertically static, thus creating a friction between the movement of the camera across the wall in the foreground and the stasis of the trees in the background, albeit a background that is flattened out by the removal of all perspectival markers. Whether the tension or discordance is between foreground and background, stasis and movement, the appearance of color where the film articulates itself as definitively black and white (5262 Washington Boulevard, 2008) or in the appearance of unanticipated, “unwanted” disruptions to the mise-en-scène, Algonquin Park, September (2001), we are left grasping for something to hold onto in these worlds where our powers of rationality fail us.

There is much more to say about these intriguing four-minute gems, but for now, I want to briefly mention the panel of speakers. What made the films more powerful was their screening across the evening before, during and around the presentations of Philippe-Alain Michaud (curator of film at the Centre Pompidou), art historian Stephen Bann and Laura Mulvey. This strategy meant that as the evening went on, like the individual films’ revelation of the illusions of what they see and of the filmmaking process itself, the seemingly infinite layers of complexity in their construction were gradually peeled away. Somehow, the more films I saw, the more disturbing they became. At the same time, they became less and less graspable, more and more elusive and challenging in their construction.

While I appreciate that the Louvre invited three scholars who have published on Lewis, the choice of two art historians was somewhat disappointing. Of course, it’s always a pleasure to listen to Stephen Bann and to witness art history at its most eloquent in his presentation. But really, it was only Mulvey whose discussion of the films were gratifying. Michaud was preoccupied with Lewis’ references to Breughel and Chardin, Poussin and others, but his observations gave little insight into Lewis’ films. Mulvey was, as I say, insightful, eloquent and accessible, and I cannot remember the last time I was so convinced by her observations. In fact, her comments on the splitting of time and space in Lewis’ films, the resultant disturbance to the viewing process, and how these are concerns that can be traced back to Hitchcock, demonstrated film studies at its best.

Rather than listening to art historians, I wanted more discussion of Lewis’ relationship to film, for example, to the American Avant-garde. The films of Michael Snow, especially films such as Back and Forth in which vision becomes corporealized through the back and forth of the camera, seem instructive to understanding Lewis’ films. Or, for example, la Région Centrale where we become mesmerized by the movement of the camera across time, and Snow creates a landscape with a life of its own, a life wholly separate from the presence of the camera, a technology that nevertheless becomes integral to our journey into this landscape. Snow sets up very different relationships between landscape, camera and viewer, but surely access to Lewis’ films would become easier if approached via film, rather than painted history?

As illustration of the need for a more precise language with which to discuss Lewis’ films, a more precise language than that offered by art history, Stephen Bann referred to the lateral motion of Lewis’ camera in Algonquin Park, September (2001)[above] as “a track or maybe a pan.” When he said this, I thought “well, it has to be one or the other, which is it?” But in fact, this is the very complexity and challenge of Lewis’ films. Because he creates these camera movements for which we have no language. Nevertheless, they are wholly unique to the cinema, because they are integral to the moving, not that static image. Any film student would immediately,be reminded of that terrifying moment at the beginning of Vertigo when Scotty looks down from a height, his fingertips slowly losing their grip on the ledge from which he imagines he will fall. Hitchcock’s simultaneous movement of the lens and the camera to envision Scotty’s vertigo and to ensure our nausea would surely be a logical place to begin understanding Lewis’ complicated production and post-production techniques?

All of Lewis' films can be seen in their entirety on his website

Ryoji Ikeda, +/- [ the infinite between 0 and 1], Museum Of Contemporary Art Tokyo

Back from Tokyo nearly three weeks now, and with one foot on the plane to NY, there are elements of my trip to Tokyo still on my mind. The Ryoji Ikeda exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo being foremost among them.

Part of my attraction to Ikeda’s work is that I don’t really understand it. Something about his engagement with the infinite makes it impossible to grasp, let alone master in the way we like to with art. I have been reading Jeanette Winterson’s Art and Objects which has brought me back to why it is that I write, why I look at art, why I write about art, and how my relationship to art is at the core of who I am. I go to see myself in art, and it is my goal, always, to lay myself open to art as a gesture of my humility to the world. I look to it to move me, to challenge me, to change my view on the world, to tell me who I am, who I could be. Winterson is interested in the relationship between me and a painting, me and my writing, me and all art, a relationship that exists purely, at a level beneath consciousness, in a place “where the balance of an ordinary day is overturned.” Great art strives in the breakdown between language and our emotional state. I believe Winterson.


However, this is not what Ikeda is doing. Still it is great art. Because he visualizes something which cannot be visualized. He gives the experience of a reality outside of the time and space of my daily life, a reality that exists only in the intensity of the relationship between me and the work, the point at which vision, audition, tactility is no longer. It’s something like an experience of the sublime, but unlike the sublime, I do not turn away from Ikeda’s works in the same instant that I experience their “beauty.” Rather, I recoil slowly, reluctantly, as they imperceptibly and gradually disturb me.

Ikeda imagines another kind of not looking. It’s distinct from the relay of glances around Velasquez’ Las Meninas. Or the consumption of distraction that is captured so imaginatively in Thomas Struth’s photographs of the same paintings. And it’s different again from the kind of not looking that we confront in Paul Strand’s Blind in which only one of us owns up to looking, the photograph seeing us through blind eyes. In Ikeda, we find a kind of not looking that is somewhere between that of conceptual art — in which there is nothing to see — and the turning away from a very violent image because it is too painful to watch. This is a sensory experience that is constantly mitigated by the desire to master, and to know what it is we cannot see. Because we never really let go to the senses, always insisting on comprehending the incomprehensible. Likewise, this same desire to rationalize is relentlessly stymied by the nauseating discomfort that pushes away when the sounds start to become recognizeable as sine waves, and we are blinded by the strobe effect of the constant turning over of pixels and data.


Ironically, this ineffability that is realized through the tension between medium (sound and light) and our desire to rationalize is best illustrated in the most tactile of his works. Take, for example, the transcendental (e) [no. 2-a], 2009 in which an infinite series of numbers is etched into a stainless steel plinth, and Data Film [no.1-a], 2007, a light sensitive film strip bearing the same infinite series of numbers against a light box strip that runs the length of the room. In both works we are drawn up close, physically, studying them for logic, familiarity, for a single place from which to hear and see. Our inability to see, even though we are right up close, is just the point, both the form and the media are endless enigmas, transcending anything we could ever cognize. And still I tried. As I watched myself looking up close to the film strip – I saw the absurdity of it – what did I think I was seeing or, better still, looking at? Whatever it is, takes me way beyond my existing perceptual experiences, and thus, maybe Winterson is right after all. Maybe the real insights of Ikeda’s work come from not looking, hearing, or thinking. What we really need to “see” is that the subliminal experience of being in the presence of these compositions in sound and light take us to another realm. Because Ikeda’s sounds and images are located outside the limits of perception, cognition, they are other to our familiar perceptual and linguistic dominion. First they conjure and then they curtail our sovereign gaze, our pretentions to omniscient authority, only to ask us not to look, not to hear, not to speak, not to think, but simply to “be.” These works ask us to experience the limits as they are on display, and as a consequence, experience our own boldily and perceptual limits. This is an environment that requires a whole new experience of art, and in turn, a whole new experience of ourselves.
That’s what makes them masterpieces.