On
the 16th of July 1945, on the Trinity site in a remote area of
south-eastern New Mexico, the first atomic bomb was detonated in
preparation for potential use against Japan during World War II. The
explosion left an impact zone 731m in diameter, with a central crater
3m deep by 340m wide. This crater was shaped like a slightly
irregular circular splash, not dissimilar to Harold Edgerton’s
“Milk Drop Coronet” photograph, taken almost 10 years previously.
The central crater was glazed with molten quartz sand containing
olivine and feldspar so, when viewed from the air, it appeared as a
lake of green.
Edgerton was a professor of electrical engineering who pioneered a process for photographing objects that moved faster than the naked eye could see using a high speed stroboscopic flash. He was employed by the Atomic Energy Commission during the war, and after developing the Rapatronic camera, which is capable of producing inconceivable exposure times, he went on to document the early atomic bomb tests. His photographs of the Trinity explosion were taken using exposures of around 10,600,000 frames per second, and the camera exploded after producing two-thirds of a mile of 35mm film.
The relationship between Edgerton’s milk splash and the Trinity test site becomes a key element in the conceptual framework for Richard Paul’s new video work “Sea of Green” (2013), onto which he constructs a densely woven associative narrative, incorporating loose themes of Cold War anxiety and extreme material transformation. He does this in production of dualistic montage of images taken from an archive of stereoscopic 3D slideshows from the 1950s.
The work is vivid, richly coloured and has been lent the unavoidably nostalgic glow of the stock of Kodachrome slides from which the images were taken. Many of the images have a slick commercial feel, bringing to mind the cynical impenetrability of Richard Prince’s early work. Yet, when viewing the work something magical happens: the viewer makes associative leaps in making sense of the dualisms and binaries with which they are presented. Information exposited in its raw form and strung together through associative conceptual narrative is imbued with rich allegorical meanings by the viewer; simultaneously placing him / her in the position of both ad-man and consumer. Chocolate is presented as oozing molten matter next to a grid of seductive gleaming gem-like chocolates; a collection of china dolls is seen adjacent to a group of children – painted with make-up and huddled around a box of chocolates; an eye test charts overlays desert resembling a post-apocalyptic landscape – the flat letters define receding 2D planes within the illusionary 3D space. The work is a hermeneutic web of possible meanings and ways to interpret them. The wildly arcing connections between possible visual metaphors appear to be obtusely allegorical, drawing comparisons with the work of Matthew Barney. Paul suggests that this comparison is only relevant in the context of Barney’s notions of potentiality and liminality. Semiotic disparities formed in the relationship between the images and voices embedded within the audio track, further add to this sense of ungendered meaning. We are instructed as to the correct pronunciation of words and phonics, and the mismatch between words and images, for example yolk / yoke, highlights the restrictions of language and the constant slippage between signifier and signified.
Connections are made between eye charts, nuclear testing sites and TV test cards. Materials such as steel are presented as raw matter (in earth), in their world (of production / manufacturing) and in the context of their usefulness (as product). Indeed, all these connections close the Heideggerian loop between ‘earth’ / ‘world’, ‘mere matter’ / ‘formed matter’, ‘equipment / usefulness’. In this sense, Paul is not presenting allegory but instead that which Heidegger (1978) refers to as aletheia or ‘unconcealedness’. Therefore, the work becomes less about conceptually obtuse codification and more about the failed disclosure of reality. Paul refers to this process as “transparency”, suggesting that the images are neither symbolic nor allegorical but are simply indexical. Yet for Jervis (1998), allegory, is unavoidable and everywhere in today’s image saturated world. All images can become allegorical and the photograph is always haunted by that which is missing from it. The “photograph, raises the spectre of the double: allegory is one text doubling another” . Moreover, Sontag (1973) suggests that all photographs harbour this poignancy in stating “the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading towards their own destruction” . Indeed Paul suggests that Edgerton himself was obsessed with this relationship between photography and mortality; and many of his images are attempts to capture the moment of destruction, as a bullets pass through balloons, fruit, playing cards and other inanimate objects.
We cannot help but see pathos in images of steel works presented alongside gleaming advertisements; nuclear test sites next to TV test cards. They evoke a historically specific sense of the failings of modernity and the impending destruction of mankind. Both the holocaust and the atomic bomb were the greatest lessons of the 20th Century, teaching us the dangers of enlightenment thinking in generating moral uncertainty and essentialist ethics to justify totalitarian beliefs and actions; what Bauman (1989) terms ‘the consequences of modernity’. The technological risks of modernity are implicit within many these images, which have something of the same unsettling ambivalence as Warhol’s car crash series, Dirk Skreber’s sculptures or Robert Longo's charcoal drawings of natural and manmade disasters.
Many of the images evoke the golden age of consumerism; the imaginative space occupied by Richard Hamilton in his interiors; a time before the power of advertising had been demystified and undermined by the ultra-cynicism of post-modernity and the new-found agency of ‘consumer power’, respectively. The images are encased within an illusionary frame, which serves to objectify them within the picture plane. This effect makes the work begin to resemble those lenticular place mats of European holiday destinations or the stickers that came free with packs of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, early holograms or - most relevantly - the Viewmaster stereoscopic slide viewer; all of which are familiar and nostalgic objects to anyone brought up in the Cold War era.
Much of Paul’s past work focuses on the process of demystification, which occurs within the direct relationship between consumer and product. Once the middleman of advertising has been removed, new relations are formed in the triangle between the viewer and the juxtaposition of objects within Paul’s images. Working within the parameters of catalogue photography, his photographs present appropriated images and objects as enunciated speech, free from the commoditised confines of their original context, yet these are paradoxically still framed within the formal vernacular of that context; the photographic forms and conventions for presenting ‘required’ products to an active audience.
His photographs give more than a passing nod to Haim Steinbach’s sculptures, yet move the discussion on. These images not only demystify commodity fetishism but also enable us to question the version of reality it presents. In “The Raw And The Cooked”, for example, Paul presents and over ripe banana next to an ugly ceramic resembling raw meat whilst mimicking the surface of the banana. The banana is ‘raw’ and yet is beginning to undergo the process of decomposition while the ceramic is ‘cooked’. This becomes a metaphor for Lévi-Strauss’ assertion that semiotic binaries are formed around culturally specific socio-structural distinctions.
As someone with a background in catalogue photography, Paul seeks to negate the opaqueness of advertising and to present objects striped of allegory by embodying the materiality of the sign. Instead he replaces allegory with mimesis as objects present new layers of referent signification in a Lacanian game of semiotic peekaboo. However, in an age where images no longer represent “any sort of naked reality” but instead “a world already clothed in our systems of representation” , is there any real difference between allegory and mimesis or intertextuality and multi-accentuality? This is perhaps a less than useful paradigm in the context of Paul’s work, which tries to avert poststructuralist readings. Instead, it may be best to turn to view Paul’s work in terms of the viewer or consumer’s desire to generate authenticity.
Hughes (1995) outlines two conflicting discourses that make the issue of people’s ability to generate authenticity in everyday life problematic. On the one hand, we seek authenticity through the production of personal meaning; the appropriation of images, things and places as ‘symbols’ of personal ideology. On the other hand, we generate illusionary authenticity via commercialized consumption practices in which we assimilate things and places as ‘signifiers’ of self-identity. Both discourses characterise our need to produce authentic relations with ‘world’. The former succeeds by resisting the logic of late capitalism, turning empty ‘signifier’ into ‘symbol’; thus foregrounding the ideological aspirations of individuals to produce ‘truer’ versions of themselves. The latter fails, however, in becoming a part of that logic, by forever deferring meaning of the signifier only ever producing what Taylor (1989) terms ‘allegory’. Allegory is undoubtedly something which alludes to depth but in the context of postmodern texts, where it no longer serves the purpose of encrypting substantive messages / meanings, it remains as impenetrable, depthless surface. For Lash (1994) “[a]llegory is cynical, urban, artificial, radically individualist and highlights the materiality rather than the transparency of the signifier” . Yet Hughes argues that by grounding the free-floating signifier with an ideological ‘signified’, it is possible to generate self-oriented ‘existential authenticity’ by transforming ‘signifier’ into ‘symbol’.
It
is for this reason that it is wise not to overstate the innate
symbolism within “Sea of Green” beyond suggesting that what
appears to be allegorical is merely indexical. And, instead we leave
the production of substantive meaning or 'symbol' to the viewer.
Without the viewer, each signifier, in turn, defers meaning onto
another in an endless chain of signification. The meaning of a single
image is not defined or understood by its similarity to the next in
the chain but in relation to its difference; a process Derrida terms
‘différence’. The role of the viewer is to anchor the chain of
signification in order to find his / her own meaning in the work; to
complete it, much in the same way as the listener fills in that which
is lacking in an MP3. Each image becomes a solitary speech act -
pronouncing its liberation from its original context. A stock
photograph of someone in Welsh national costume sitting on a green
hill surrounded by mountains is indexed to the formal conventions, to
both the word and colour green, and to the previous and proceeding
slides. Each image is set forth to speak and to find mimetic
relationships to the other images, thus undermining their original
intention as informational and transparent.
Paul argues that the more romantic elements of the work are incidental to its conceptual grounding:
“I think my interest in the atomic aspect is that of extreme transformation - sand to glass; its aestheticisation through images, its relation to the milk drop coronet and the glass vases; and the period of the 3D images themselves”. However, as much as Paul protests his work’s emancipation, it is hard for him to entirely escape the insidious and nagging anxiety that haunted him as a child growing up in the ’70s and early ’80s. An anxiety undoubtedly fuelled by TV dramas like “The War Game” (1965) and “Threads” (1984), together with a growing belief in the potential for nuclear attack from the USSR, which grew to media frenzy in the early ‘80s with the advent of the Reagan administration in the US. Indeed, Paul suggests that, for him, the beginning of the ’80s was the most formative in seeding an awareness of the atomic bomb and its potential implications, “probably because of Reagan ratcheting up the Cold War. There was a bit of hysteria about the subject – and for good reason, given how close we got in 1982, according to recent TV documentaries”.
Bevis
Fenner 2013
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