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Should We Put an End to Projection?

Author(s): Dominique Pani and Rosalind E. Krauss


Source: October, Vol. 110 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 23-48
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3397556
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Should We Put an End to Projection?*

DOMINIQUE PAINI
Translated by Rosalind E. Krauss
Should we put an end to projection at the end of this century, at the end of
this millennium?
The advent of technological innovation both in art and in communicationwe must be determined to inscribe these two words in their reciprocal proximity
and their irreducibility-suggests such a possibility.
Projection arises from a little known history belonging to the fields of
physics, of geometry, of optics, of psychology, of pictorial representation, of show
business [spectacle].In its shortest definition, the most ordinary dictionary relays
the equivocal character of the word: the action of projecting images on a screen
and the representation of a volume on a flat surface. Spectacle and geometry,
fields of activity far from each other, are mixed in the same word. With the slide
or the film, it is nonetheless a matter of a comparable result: a volume transferred
to a surface, illusion and geometric codification, mirage and science.
To the word project, common sense associates the words envision, imagine, premeditate,foresee, as much as eject,expel, throw,push. Put otherwise, words that evoke the

activities of thought as much as of physical or bodily exertion. However, if we narrow


our use of projection, this is tied to the luminous transport of images, and if at the
same time we try to list the greatest possible number of categories of image without
consideration of the field of application or their practical or symbolic use, we spontaneously perceive two great modes of achieving the image: material supports to
which the image indissociable from this support adheres, and luminous projection
slides for which a spotless (or not) screen intercepts ephemerally (or not) the ray.
An Image-Light

For a history of art both real and mythological, technical and philosophical,
we know the stakes and the antagonisms. We could make a fiction of a struggle of
*
From catalog to the exhibition Projections:Les transportsde l'imageat Le Fresnoy, Studio national
des arts contemporains, Tourcoing, France, November 1997-January 1998 (Paris: Editions Hazan,
1997). For reasons of space, Paini's discussion of filmmakers Patrick Bokanowski and Pitch,
OCTOBER110, Fall 2004, pp. 23-48. ? 2004 OctoberMagazine,Ltd. and MassachusettsInstituteof Technology.

24

OCTOBER

two enemy goddesses: a noble image at the service of the princes and of their istoria
and a more pedestrian image often associated with saltimbanks and their phantasmagorias. One free to circulate from hand to hand, the other enslaved to the
mechanical apparatus that embodies it; one infinitely modifiable by the one (or by
others) who gave it birth, the other little susceptible to benefiting from metamorphosis unless it has been so conceived repetitively (film in the twentieth century);
one, finally, which calls for being seen through an ambient light or one directed on
it, the other dependent on the light that traverses the transparent veil of its support.
This bipartition divides the beholders, between those for whom the point of
view on the image is not assignable to a particular place and is mandatory in the
space, and those for whom the point of view on the image is marked by the (relative) restraint of being bound to a place inferred by the apparatus of projection. In
other words, visitors and spectators, from whom the contemporary art of the end of
the twentieth century accepts the command of blurring the respective identities
and behavior. Film "exhibits itself' by unreeling in loop within the "installation"
and, inversely, painting and sculpture are exhibited in museums according to
connections that borrow the principles of montage, of light, and of rhythms apparently inherited from the contemporary audiovisual sphere.1 This apparent inversion
has been favored by the video image: the projector and the screen united in the
same miniaturized apparatus. The indissociability of support/image and the luminous ray fuse in the video image-machine for images as much as image-machine.
This comfortable bipolarization of the regime of images is thus profoundly troubled
by the contemporary images that, suddenly, retroactively provoke doubt about the
ontological rigidity of the distinction between applied and projected images. For
example, stained glass in the application of an image indissociable from its support
to which the light necessary for its vision is not reflective but penetrating [transversante]. However, for all that, light does not carry the image beyond its transparent
support. Another example: from the digitization of the givens recorded by the CDROM to the video projector, the transported and enlarged image on a screen does
not emanate from an initial veil-like skin either painted or photographic. Open to
interventions after the fact (interactivity) on its support (the disc, the Net), the digital image is nonetheless projectable.
Whatever, finally, be the blurring of a nice binary rule for categorizing
images, let us agree that the artists who make up the present exhibition manipulate the travel of luminous images, images irreducibly foreign to the surfaces that
intercept the beam of light, surfaces that however embodythem. Of images that
only exist because they are made of light, being images that are of time. Of images
that only exist through the time of their luminous transport.
Time is consubstantial with the projected image. And it is strange that two
founding texts for the projected image have not been retained in a more insistent
Metamkine, andJosef Robakowskihas been omitted.
1.
Roland Recht, "Considerations on the Destination of Museum Space," Le Debat81 (SeptemberOctober 1994), p. 38.

Should We Put an End to Projection?

25

manner from the single point of view of the image in time: Plato's allegory of the
cave2 and the critical commentary by Diderot, in the form of an account of a dream
of a painting by Fragonard.3 One can read these two famous and overinterpreted
texts above all as the tales of projective experience for which the luminous apparatus is described according to principles of a story, organized by "sequential shots"
and narrative intervals. The Platonic allegory is a tale in four moments for which
the connection and the terms give the feeling of a troubling "foretelling" of what
concerns modern projective installations. It is obviously the reverse: contemporary
artists return to an "original installation," one existing only in the philosophical language of Plato, for which we never sufficiently retain the dramatic duration. The
first part of the text describes the "viewers" chained in a cave with their backs
turned to a fire, whose light transports the shadows of figurines onto the opposite
wall. This first part introduces the confusion between reality and representation.
The second part of the narrative description displays the painful pitfalls of the discovery of the illusion: the luminous source not only dazzles but prevents conceptual
clarity. Then, in a third sequence, Plato is interested in describing the exit from the
cave. The discovery of the separation between reality and representation is accompanied by the discovery of the mimetic objects that gave rise to the ressemblant
shadows. At this third, dramatic and initiating stage, the spectators turn toward the
sun, source of vital energy and of knowledge as such. Finally, the spectators turn
back to the darkness of the cave. Their perceptual unfamiliarity renders them
unwanted and gives them the status of victims of light.
The first moment of the journey is a confrontation with images, with the
doubles of real things. The second is a confrontation with things, properly speaking. The two other moments oppose themselves to the domain of the visible and
form the domain of the ideas, or of mathematical discourse and the concepts.
Jean Starobinski notes that, essentially, the projection of the images of
Diderot's dream are produced almost as in Plato's allegory.4 All the more so as
Diderot himself admits to having read Plato on the day on which he missedout on
the vision of Fragonard's painting.5 It is enough to note the shared chaining up of
the spectators in Diderot and Plato for this very captivity, this motor disability with
which contemporary artists are obsessed in their installations. The placement and
the mobility of the spectator are not the least torments in the quasi-totality of the
exhibited artists. We must still note the character of the producers of the illusions
listed by Diderot: kings, apostles, prophets, theologians, politicians, rogues, charlatans, "subaltern rogues with tokens of the first that give to these shadows the
accents, the discourse, the true voices of their roles." In other words, it is to the
2.
Plato, TheRepublic,in Oeuvrescompletes,
pt. 1, books iv-vnl(Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1989), p. 144.
3.
Denis Diderot, "Fragonard no. 176. Le GrandPretreCoresuss'immolepour sauver Callirhoe."Salon of
1765 (Paris:Hermann, 1984), p. 253.
4.
Jean Starobinski,Diderotdans lespacedespeintres,followed by Le Sacrificeen reve(Paris: RMN, 1991).
5.
"Mediatechnology is founded on the principle that nothing must be missed" (Atom Egoyan, Trafic
10 [Paris:POL, Spring 1994], p. 108).

26

OCTOBER

political, religious field, as well as to spectacle that the projective model [attraction]
belongs, those fields that generate imposture.6
Is it from this passage between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that
the impurity of the art of projection is born? A decisive epoch, for which the cabinets de curiosite and the intense activity of the peddlers, of the opticians and
various physicists, have decisively modified the arts of representation. Epoch of
the saltimbanks, the phantasmatic political chroniclers (Robertson) who borrow
the luminous transport of images to dazzle, impress, educate, charm, and entertain.7 Filmmakers and projectionist artists of this end of the twentieth
century-"bachelor" heirs of Marcel Duchamp, whose imposture in art was one of
the obsessions of criticism-are they the most recent descendants of Diderot's
rogues, equipped "with a provision of little transparent and colored figures and all
the figures being so well made, so well painted, in such great number and variation, that there were enough to furnish the representation with all the comic,
tragic, and burlesque scenes of life"?8"Here is what I see pass at different intervals
that I combine for brevity's sake," Diderot warns, who clearly inscribes the narrative, and thus temporal character,9 of his iconographic description of a painting
of which the appliedopaqueimage was denied him and replaced in his dream by a
projected image, by an image-light, an image transportedby light, giving rise to narrative dramatization and lyrical effusion.10
It is as if the projective apparatus calls up fiction. A third text would thus
complete the two former founding texts. One byJean-Luc Godard, equally technical and fictional, closely associates tekneand fabula:1
In a Moscow prison, Jean-Victor Poncelet, army officer of Napoleon,
reconstructs without the aid of any notes the geometrical knowledge
that he learned in the courses of Monge and of Carnot. The Treatiseof
the ProjectivePropertyof Figures,published in 1822, constructs in general
method the principle of projection utilized by Desargue for understanding the properties of conic sections and put to work by Pascal in
his demonstration of the mystical hexagram. What was then needed
was a revolving prisoner facing a wall for whom the mechanical application of the idea and the desire to project figures on a screen takes wing
6.
Starobinksi wonders about the status of the painter according to Diderot: "is he also an impostor?"
(Starobinski,Diderot,p. 75).
7.
Laurent Mannoni, Le GrandArt de la lumiereet del'ombre(Paris: Nathan, 1994).
8.
Diderot, "Fragonardno. 176,"p. 254.
9.
"Furthermore,let us observe that the history dreamed by Coresus and Callirhoe is built through a
series of well-structured images, strictly separated from each other. The description of each of them will
help to develop a narrative fabric. The myth will be communicated to us through its supposed spectacular
transcription, itself retranscribed by Diderot as the dramatic program of a possible picture. Narration and
description become discernable only with difficulty"(Starobinski, Diderot,p. 73).
10.
Jacques Aumont, L'mage (Paris: Nathan-Universite, 1990), p. 135.
11.
Jacques Derrida, Psyche:Inventions de l'autre (Paris, Galilee, 1987), pp. 21-22. Quoted by Michel
64 (1997), p. 117.
Frizot in "SaintPromethee, L'inventeur-Createurau XIX siecle," Communications

27

Should WePut an End to Projection?

practically speaking with the invention of filmic projection. Let's equally


note that the instigating wall was rectangular.12
But indeed, can narrative time be exhibited?
A Dialectical Image

Let's sum up.... Given the mythological origins of the invention of painting-cast shadow of a profile on an illuminated surface;13 given the slides
imagined in the seventeenth century by Father Athansius Kircher; given the
dream of Diderot, cinematographic before the fact; given the revolutionary phantasmagorias of Robertson; given the Lumiere brothers; given the installations of
Sovietico-Futurist propaganda by Lissitzky; and given, finally, the taste of contemporary artists for projective installations and performances of light, the present
exhibition suggests a parallel history of art, foreign to the fine arts, more spectacular and often confused with the simplicities of charlatans and of "dealers in hope
and dread":14a history of art of projecting images, indifferent to "skill"or to the
manual virtuosity that characterizes painting and sculpture, the history of an activity of craftsmen of illusions that arises from the mechanical arts, ignorant of the
liberal arts.15 In this "other" history, light no longer encounters an image, nor
bathes it, nor illuminates it. Light penetrates it at first, then transports it, duplicates it in dematerializing it,16 sometimes temporalizing and sublimating it. In this
"other" history, the image travels. In relation to traditional pictorial or photographic representation, projection constitutes an inflaming of the image, a
flourish in the sense of a lyrical transport. It equally has the power to vary its site
(size of image, distance traveled by the light beam). But above all, since the projection of an image mixes in a single composite the image and the light necessary
for its exhibition, it associates representingand exhibiting.Vision equals light and
light is identified with the sense of sight. Is this what the Lumiire brothers
inferred, the projections of films that are "views"?The luminous transport of
images evokes the letter of Albertian theory-sight as light beam-but simultaneously it demonstrates the utopia of it. Further, the projection of the image
maintains the philosophical debates of antiquity with regard to vision. Whence
arises the visual connection? Is it projected from the eyes or from the perceived
image? For Euclid or Pythagoras, inventors of geometry, it is the eyes that expel
the light striking the image. For Aristotle, the images send their miniaturized

12.
Jean-LucGodard:Son + Image, 1974-1991, ed. Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea Bandy (New York:
The Museum of Modern Art, 1992), p. 117.
13.
Pliny the Elder, Histoirenaturelle(Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1997).
14.
Diderot, "Fragonardno. 176,"p. 254.
15.
Georges Didi-Huberman makes the same remark with regard to the imprint. See his L'Empreinte
(Paris: Centre Georges-Pompidou, 1997), p. 21.
An entirely relative dematerialization because partly imaginary:light is still matter.
16.

28

OCTOBER

reproductions to the depths of the visual organ. Plato describes the variations of
intensity in the luminous source: the strongest produces black; the weakest, white;
color results from a medium....
One can distinguish three large "modern" historical breaks: from the
medieval image to the perspectivist vision of the fifteenth century; from the
manipulable applied image to the mechanical and optical modernization of spectacular representation of the nineteenth century; from the analogical supports to
the creation of images outside all indexation with reality: digitalization, synthesis,
virtuality. Projection belongs to the second rupture.
In other words, the image would flow historically from three logics:17
1. formal: that of painting, printmaking, architecture, which concludes with the
eighteenth century.
2. dialectical: that of photography, of film, and of the film frame during the nineteenth century.
3. paradoxical: that which begins with the invention of video, of the holograph, of
cybernetics. At this end of the twentieth century, the accomplishment of modernity seems "marked by the climax18 of a logic of public representation....."19
The projection of the image thus arises from a dialectical logic that connects, of course, to the dialectical image described by Walter Benjamin, for whom
the encounter with the urban crowd and with cinema was the decisive quality of
modernity.20
Projection as dialectical image. ... This comes down to saying that the luminous transport of the image would be an apparatus favoring the encounter in a
flash of Past and Now, a spasmodicimage.21 Again, this comes down to saying that
the apparently least perfect apparatus, its ancient and outmoded look of patchedup archaic machine, is, in a determined historical situation, releaser of flashes, of
constellations, disturbing the teleological manifestations of the positive and positivist progress of technology. In full cybernetic ebullience the insistent return of
projection within contemporary art would thus have the value of instigation and
critical emphasis.
The shock delivered by the encounter in the same space of the digital image
projected by Bill Seaman-whose iconography recalls leisure activity and the popular lotteries of Le Fresnoy-and
of the mobile glass-slide lantern of the
mid-nineteenth century visualizes the critical aims of the exhibition.
17.
Paul Virilio, La Machinede vision (Paris: Galilee, 1988), p. 133.
18.
Virilio speaks later of a "crisisof public representations."
19.
"With the paradoxical logic, in fact, it's the reality of the presence of the object in real time that is
definitively resolved,while in the era of dialectical logic of the preceding image, it was only the presence in
deferred time, the presence of the past that was durably imprinted on the plates, the emulsions, or the
films. The paradoxical image thus acquiring a status comparable to that of surprise, or even more precisely, of 'the accident of transfer"'(Virilio, La Machinede vision,p. 134).
See Blaise Cendrars, ABCdu cinema(1926; Paris:Seguier-Carred'art, 1995).
20.
Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capitalof the NineteenthCentury:Ie Livredespassages(Paris: du Cerf, 1989),
21.
pp. 478-79.

Should WePut an End to Projection?

29

"The new is not in what is said but in the event of its return," affirms and
demonstrates Michel Foucault.22 In other words, the modern projection of
images, born concretely and not only in dream, with the traveling spectacles in
Europe organized at mid-seventeenth century by the Dane Thomas Walgenstein
and his "fear lantern," would constitute a rememberingpresentthat upsets and questions the image born today by the matrixial apparatus of numbers, the digital.
The projection of images belongs to an aesthetic of representation that "resists"
an aesthetic of self-definition.23

A CriticalImage
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, artists have experienced the
transport of images through luminous projection. Man Ray, Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy,
Fernand Leger, Frederick Kiesler, Len Lye; then Norman Mac Laren, Marcel
Broodthaers; finally Martial Raysse, Fabio Mauri, Michael Snow, Giovanni
Anselmo, Alain Fleischer, Christian Boltanski, Bertrand Lavier. The list of artists
who have borrowed the projection of the fixed or mobile image is impressive.
To realize an image in fully dematerializing it, in other words, to play with
the absent presence of the image, to add another light in the image than the
one already represented, to escape the weight of the supports (from the paleolithic walls to the canvas!) that embody the images of the history of
representation, doubtless still other dreams much beyond cinematographic fascination, explain the use of projection by the artists of the present century.
However, these same ones often persist in laying claim to the liberal arts, painting, or sculpture. Filmmakers can seem more familiar with, even if somewhat
"unconscious" of, this experimentation. For to really take hold of a space and to
structure it by a light beam is, in another way than that of making a film, a complex enterprise. However, in passing from the staging to this scenography that
liberates the spectator from his captivity to transform him into a mobile visitor,
filmmakers have tried in recent years to "exhibit projections": Chantal Akerman,
Raul Ruiz, Atom Egoyan.24
These filmmakers and the artists present in the exhibition at Le Fresnoy are
the paradoxical contemporary echoes in the museal space of the most advanced
film of the 1990s, critical of mediatic power. Like this cinema, but with other
means, the exhibited works privilege the spectator's sensory acuity-the dilation
of time as well as sensation-as against meaning; they belittle, if not aim at breaking

Michel Foucault, L'Ordre


22.
du discours(Paris: Gallimard, 1977).
Pierre Fedida, "Passeanachronique et present reminiscent. Epos et puissance, memoriale du lan23.
gage" (L'ecritdu temps10; quoted by Didi-Huberman, L'Empreinte,
p. 17).
Chantal Akerman, Galerie nationale duJeu de Paume, Paris, 1996; Raul Ruiz, Galerie national du
24.
Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1991; and Atom Egoyan, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 1996.

30

OCTOBER

the codified boundaries that have separated the image and the viewer ever since
classical film.25 Filmmakers such as Michael Haneke, David Lynch, David
Cronenberg, Quentin Tarantino to a lesser degree, but on the other hand Abel
Ferrara in a more ecstatic way, search for their part in the simultaneously disjointed and cyclical stories for a way to spatialize narrative time.26
From this coincidence between the art of the museum and film is born these
questions: what continuity is there between contemporary images and the former
organization of the visual, between digital images and those of the age called that
of mechanical reproduction? How does the viewing subject penetrate (what is his
place?) into the composition of the new apparatuses of the fabrication of images,
including and above all those that are not chemico-analogical?27 These questions
are to be taken as more dynamic than "reactionary."If they manifest suspicion it is
less according to the melancholy of Rilke-"we are witnessing the disappearance
of all the visible things that will not be replaced"-than
according to the
Brechtian skepticism. In 1927, Brecht remarked with an amused detachment
about radio, the tendency of modernity to overestimate all the things that have hiddenpossibilities.
Image-light, image-text, dialectical image:28 projection equally confers on
the image a critical dimension. The spectacle of luminous transport of the image
is correctly called entertainment.This is to say that it is a ditour,critical detour, theoretical detour faced with the future regimes of the image.
An Image-Machine
One could risk writing a history of the projected image from the sole point
of view of the progressive invisibility of the mechanical apparatus of projection: a
history whose origins would draw on the first magic lantern representations of the
seventeenth century, followed by the great "phantasmagorical" spectacles of the
eighteenth century, then the optical machines (boxes, turning plates, lenses),
which substituted themselves for a time for the apparatuses of projection, properly speaking, in order to efface themselves in their turn before the projected
cinegenesis that the brilliant Emile Reynaud achieved with his optical theater.
25.
ThierryJousse, "Apresla mort du cinema," inJousse and A. de Baecque, Le Retourdu cinema(Paris:
Hatier, 1996), p. 50.
26.
See, for example, Haneke's Funny Games(1997), Lynch's Lost Highway(1997), Cronenberg's Crash
(1996), Tarantino'sPulp Fiction(1994), and Ferrara'sBlackOut (1997).
Some artists have for some years, in an "opportunistic"way,been caught up in the fashion for pro27.
jections in the museum space by using sequences of documentary or fiction films. Stan Douglas, Douglas
Gordon, and Pierre Huyghe, among others, slow, enlarge, copy, or imitate cinematographic images. This
often fetishistic usage of cinema calls up thoughts that outrun the project of the present exhibition. See
10 (Fall 1996), p. 96.
Stephanie Moisdon, Cinematheque,
In the meaning Walter Benjamin gave to this word; also Paul Virilio and above all, more recently,
28.
Bataille(Paris: Macula, 1995).
informeou legai savoirde Georges
Georges Didi-Huberman, in La Resemblance

31

Should WePut an End to Projection?

Finally, the twentieth century and the making sedentary of the filmic spectacle
that established itself definitively around 1910. What can we conclude from this
rapid summary? In the first place, the image transported onto the screen was not
the only source of curiosity and fascination. For all through the centuries, the illusionist prepossession-to conceal the productive machine of the light beam-is
far from having been respected and even from having been the concern of the
artisan of illusions. In second place, and this follows from the first remark, the
mechanical character of the projection was probably an object of mysterious fixation for the spectators. Before the moment when the image-movement engaged
with reality in a definitive (photography) and constructive (montage) mimetic
relation, by "substituting for the model of the true a power of the becoming,"29
one can easily suppose that the projection machines were as much if not more fascinating than the light-image. In fairs or in the great international exhibitions of
science and technology at the beginning of the century, the visible projection
machine, the looped films that repeated the moving images, and the brutally hetof projected sequences, created radically
erogeneous splicings-together
anti-illusionist and chaotic conditions that privileged the blurring of spatial landmarks and the feverish wandering of the spectator outside all the stability of an
ideal point of vision.30 One might add the relative fixity of the image and the fluctuating speeds in order to underscore how much the origins of film go back more
to the performances of the "expanded cinema" of a Stan Van der Beek in the
1960s than to the history of the classical Hollywood film. Basically, the art of cinema could have ceased only in dissimulating the projection machine as the
condition

of deviation/abduction

of the spectatorial

hypnosis toward the single

screen. Cover this machine that I cannot stand seeing!


This is not a minor question of the theory of the modern arts and more particularly those of the spectacle. In his "Essayon Wagner,"Theodor Adorno notes
this tendency in the mechanical arts "to conceal the production under the
appearance of the product."31 He underscores "the achievement of the appearance at the same time as the achievement of the illusionist character of the work
of art taken as a specific reality that constitutes itself in the sphere of the absolute
without for all that renouncing its power of representation." The
phenomenon,
recourse to projection at the hands of contemporary artists and of certain precursors in the 1920s, which is to say the recourse to the apparatus that associates
of a light-image, demonstrates an antimachine, transport, and representation
illusionist will. In many propositions
it is a matter, in the
of the exhibition,

Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers


29.
(Paris: Minuit, 1990), p. 95.
30.
"The pleasure the cinema extended to its first viewers didn't reside in their objective interest for a
specific subject, still less in any aesthetic interest in the formal representation of a theme, but in the pure
pleasure that they felt in seeing things move, whatever they be" (Erwin Panofsky,ThreeEssayson theStyleand
Matterof the 7thArt [Paris:Le Promeneur, 1996], p. 109).
31.
Theodor Adorno, Essai sur Wagner(Paris: Gallimard, 1966; reissued, Paris: Gallimard, coll. NRF
Essais, 1993).

OCTOBER

32

manner of Raymond Roussel, to "show the process,"32 in exhibiting the images


transported by the light, hypnotic by their proximity, blinding by the beam that carries them, generative of embryonic stories repeated in loop, indissociably tied by
their effects and their iconographic content to the machine that projects them....
One could say that
the machine repeats the content of the story that it projects forward,
outside time and language, according to a system of translation that
triumphs over duration as over words. The system is thus reversible:
the story repeats the machine which repeats the story.33
The projected images in the present installation need,for their meaning, the
visibility of the machinethat projects them. Mobility of the film and movement of
the eyes with Egoyan, projector and sun with Bertrand, "pursuit" and mirrorscreen with Fleischer, luminous exhaustion and last moment of the century with
Jugnet, filmic scratching and disappearance of the volumes with Foucault, penetration of the image and facingness

of the projectors

with Snow . . .for these

artists, the machine is not ostensible for "enlarging" the cinematic effect.34 The
machine is present to ejectthe image outside the figurative, outside its film-effect
a representationas with Foucault and
"window on the world," even though reversibly
Adorno, strangely united here, say. Projected far in front of the machine that produces it, the image simultaneously continues to stem from it, related by the
luminous ray. It is an image-machine as there exists a stained-glass image that cannot be reproduced without the machine. With the difference from the applied
image whose easy multiplication through reproduction only loses a bit of sharpness of the stroke or the colors and gains grain, the projected image depends on a
cumbersome technical complexity. This image is thus a machine itself in the sense
that the Rousselian written memoir is what the process-works will write, for it is
itself process, or more precisely the rebusof one: a machine to make the reproduction of things visible in a linguistic instrument.35
Projective installations and their validation of the machinic presence are
contemporaries of the application of the computer and its screen: return of the
black box from the age of the camera lucida, other linguistic instruments whose
images began since the language of cybernetics. It is irresistible, in fact, not to
remark on this concomitant appearance in the 1970s of projective installations in
art and by computers, the luminous expulsion and the coded implosion. A history
of the viewing subject cannot be indifferent to this. Of the immobile and collective viewer (chained up in Plato and Diderot), captive in the film theaters of the

Michel Foucault, RaymondRoussel(Paris: Gallimard, coll. NRF Essais, 1993).


32.
Ibid.
33.
americain(Paris: Klincksieck,
34.
Dominique Noguez, Une renaissancedu cinema,le cinema "underground"
1985), pp. 364-65.
35.
Foucault, RaymondRoussel,p. 148.

Should WePut an End to Projection?

33

twentieth century, the viewer of a contemporary projection installation once


again becomes a flaneur, mobile and solitary. The Baudelairian flaneur, thrilled by
the toys in the Tuilleries, makes an unexpected return in the epoch of the solitary
internaut who, while chained to his chair-it is what there is in common with the
spectator at the movies-is nonetheless mobile, or more exactly, interactive,
among the metamorphoses of the text-image. But don't the long evenings of the
Internet fanatics recall the family evenings around the "steam praxinoscope" or
the lantern? From the magic lantern to the console of the domestic computer at the
end of the twentieth century, it is the spiralled return of the omnipresence of the
machine as image.
Above, we pointed to the "return,"in the form of the "reminiscent present"
of the projected image within installations. On the one hand the predominance
of the pure pleasure of the movement36 and of the installation's quality as ideal
for exposing film as symbolicform;37
on the other hand, the visibility of the structure
of the machinic functioning. What gives us the idea that the artists who transport
the image via light tend to make an issue of the narrative destiny of projective
images, aiming to raise a doubt about fiction as the sole model of filmic representation? Put otherwise, luminous sculpture is opposed to the movement of a story,
the shot-sequence is a performance, the looped repetition of a sequence becomes
a picture decomposable into figures.It is this complex regime of the projection of
an animated image in a museal space that Broodthaers describes in 1968:
I am not a filmmaker. For me film is the prolongation of language. I
began with poetry, then visual arts, and finally film, which unites many
elements of art. That's to say, writing (poetry), the object (sculpture),
and image (film). The great difficulty is obviously the harmony
between these elements ... an antifilm nonetheless remains a film, the
way the antinovel cannot completely escape the frame of the book and
of writing; but my film enlarges the frame of an "ordinary" film. It is
not principally or at least not exclusively destined for film theaters.
Because to see and to be able to understand the total work that I wanted to achieve, it is necessary that the film be projected on the imprinted screen, but even more that the viewer also possess the text. If you
please, this film relates to "art."It's one of these "multiples," of which
we've spoken for some time as the means of the diffusion of art. It's
because it will soon be exhibited in a gallery that forty copies of screens
and of books will be produced. Thus it will be exploited as art object, of
which each copy will be made up of a film, two screens, and a huge
book. It's an environment.38
36.
Panofsky,ThreeEssays,
p. 109.
37.
See this happy formulation by Thomas Y. Levin, "Un iconologue au cinema, la theorie cinematographique de Panofsky,"Cahiersdu Museenationald'artmodere 59 (Spring 1997), p. 58.
38.
Marcel Broodthaers, MarcelBroodthaers,
cinema,under the direction of ManuelJ. Borja and Michael
Compton, in collaboration with Maria Gilissen (Barcelona: Fundacio Antoni Tapies, 1997), p. 59. On this

34

OCTOBER

I retain from these proposals of Broodthaers a meditation on the cinematic


as far as that exhibits itself outside of a fictional destiny. Broodthaers weaves the
image of these little films-attractions39with the texts imprinted on the canvas of
the screen, thus ruining the documentary or fictional character, the figurativecharacter of the projected images. As Foucault notes in relation to the imaginary
machines of Roussel,40 the projections in the exhibitions of Broodthaers-visible
projectors, printed screen, numerous potted palms,41wandering spectators-were
for him comparable rebusesand, he says himself, comparable linguisticinstruments.

An Exhibition
Anne MarieJugnet with the Collaboration of Alain Clairet

It is a matter, then, of "leading the mind toward more verbal regions."42That


is the ambition of Anne Marie Jugnet, whose stubborn enterprise consists of
drowning the visible and legible. One might consider her banner as a textual
eclipse to the principle of which she has been partial for a long while now, delivering "restricted information that, however, says a lot but doesn't develop." Her Watch
Out HereComesthe Century!doesn't impress itself like a triumphant slogan but more
like the childish warning Here comethepolice!Yoking pleasure and fear of the coming event, it mixes derision for a new century shared equally by promises of
comfort and worry. In the futuristic architecture of Le Fresnoy, the banner evokes
the dynamic effects that the Soviet architects, constructors of temporary propaganda pagodas, attempted in the 1920s. But Jugnet's slogan is that of a
Post-Futurism that could serve as the title for a hot television "talk show."Jugnet
underscores this alternating force of meaning by tying together air and light,
breath and projection. It is truly a "flicker"effect that this wind rippling her banner produces. As if, at the dawn of the future century, the ambivalence of our
feelings toward the future had been staged in the most metaphorically contemptuous manner possible: gloriously optimistic-a stretched screen that intercepts the
luminous message-and limply pessimistic-the screen is hanging at half mast.
In the exhibition, Jugnet shares with Pitch (Christophe Cardoen) this work on
the pleated/unpleated screen, attracting the spectator's attention to the contradictory status of the surface intercepting the light that carries the image: indispensable
occasion I am anxious to thank M.J. Borja for the detailed visit to the exhibition he allowed me to make in
the last day of June 1997. Probably the first exhibition devoted to the Belgian artist that lived up to his
thought, indissociable from the filmic installations remarkablyreconstituted in Barcelona.
39.
Le Corbeauet le Renard(1967), La Pluie (1969), Une discussioninaugurale(1968), Un voyagea Waterloo
(1969), Unfilm de CharlesBaudelaire(1970).... This last title is obviously not by chance in relation to the
status of the spectator-flaneur.
40.
The Roussel-Broodthaers connection by means of Magritte is, I believe, convincing. This littleknown heritage still needs to be described in iconographic and intellectual detail.
41.
dAfrique.
Vegetation coded with the exoticism that once again recalls Roussel and his Impressions
42.
According to the "grinder"and the "delay in painting" of Marcel Duchamp. The bicycle wheel is
obviously not there for nothing.

Should WePut an End to Projection?

35

for the image to be achieved, the screen is no less "indifferent"to what it almost fugitively reveals. The screen that receives the light-image would basically be a type of
strange shroud that retains not the slightest trace of the "encounter,"a "Veronica's
veil" without the power of iconic absorption. Jugnet's contribution principally
stresses the mirroring character of all projection. If, customarily, the unstable particles of the light are not perceivable by the naked eye, if the passage of the film frames
is deliberately masked to increase the illusion of restored reality, the fluttering of the
blown screen and the alternation between the flapping and the fall to half-masthere
paradigmatically reinscribes the luminous beat at work in vision itself. Illuminated
and blown, that is the paradigm from which other substitutions or simple meaningful
oppositions develop: the discontinuity of vision and the oscillation of
inhalation/exhalation of breathing, the appearance and retreat of the image that
alternates in filmic projection.
Henri Foucault
Projective geometry, Henri Foucault knows it as-I dare to use this simplistic
word-a ray. The monumentality of his work is only apparent since everything at
stake in it resides in its volumetric foaming, its perceptual fading. Also it is necessary
that Foucault not rest at constructing a film, at digitizing the frames of it, at projecting
the result on a screen of opaque and reflective facets and finally at broadcasting
a synthesis of the whole at the end of the itinerary. Because, in order that the
flaneur-spectator perceive such a process, it must be architected. It is necessary in all
simplicity that Foucault construct... a film theater! In other words, a theatrical volume for the representation of a "geometrical fiction." Perhaps the cinematographic
spectacle is that after all: amorous geometry instead of simply intuitive volumes and
lines that fuse, a bonding between the room and the light beam of projection.
Our experience as spectator has made us live this experience many times.
The ray, translucent and inflamed, metamorphoses the theatrical space in making
the slight motes of dust dance, the fiction makes one forget the spectacle, the
filmic narrative makes us forget the room. The beam strikes the screen, covering
it by volumes of illusory thickness. But, on the other hand, it structures the distance of the representation, luminously materializing the perspective of the
collective gaze of a public. The projection for the cinema is what the ramp is for
the theater, but a non-frontal ramp that "comes from behind," which doesn't confront the gaze of the spectator. A ramp parallel to the gaze that no longer blinds the
actors-already lighted a first time during the filming-but threatens to dazzle the
imprudent and incredulous spectator who turns around to "knowwhere the images
come from." We will see a little later that it is this dazzlement that greatly interests
Jean-Pierre Bertrand.
Nonetheless Foucault has returned to this ramp. By means of the mirror-planes
that make up the screen, he turns the projective ramp around against the gaze of the

OCTOBER

36

flaneur who visits this great volume, a sort of


accelerator of particles of light, a sort of "tube,"
as one speaks of the cathode ray tube. The "terminal" image of the installation is nonetheless
an image on terminals of the same name. But
does this turning of the light around at the spec-

tator's gaze suffice? To what does it give rise? A


of the volume, the
complete deconstruction
erasure of an overstructured space, a fading out
of the boundaries of this space. The volume
loses its skeleton, its angles, its perceptible and
measurable geometry: it becomes formless.

Basically the projection

is experienced

by

Foucault as a luminous geometry dissolving the


spatially concrete geometry, the one actualized
architecturally. As such, it is really "of cinema"
that Foucault speaks: the place and the illusion,

the building and the spectacle, mixed together.


Given that, what does the artist show?
Does he exhibit a light beam without images? In
fact Foucault invites us to a truly technological
HenriFoucault.TadaIma. 1997.
trip that identifies itself with a telescoped history of the regimes of the image: from the
scratched film strip, mythico-anthropological and archeological gesture that it is, and
matrix of all the other projected and broadcast images in the scenographic tube,up
to the cybernetic programmation. From the hand that damages to the hand that
clicks.
But how does scratching the image, streaking the screen, concern cinema
more than video? Don't these two machines entertain "incestuous" relations?

AtomEgoyan
The family is the subject dear to Atom Egoyan through many full-length films:
the latter film featured in 1997 at
FamilyViewing,Calendar,TheAdjuster,Fine Tomorrows,
the Cannes Film Festival. Exotica,in a way even more troubling and through which
incest roams. .... The family and what it breeds, its conformisms, its secrets, its
shames, its cultural and genetic patrimony, the children. For Egoyan the family is a
beginning stage for the stages, truly original, doubtless to the extent of what it represents for the Armenian who has never passed a night there. Primal scene equally for
contemporary audiovisuality,from familial televisual sitcoms to "domestic video."
"Insomuch as my generation looked at films and baby photos with a naive
curiosity, I imagine that the following generation will be overwhelmed by

Should WePut an End to Projection?

37

a mass of video documents on each key moment of its development.


Birth, the first smile, the first word. All these events will be archived and
easy to watch in private,"the filmmaker recently noted, adding: "I always
am astonished by how, despite their frenzy to record, people rarely look at
their material. The phenomenon of private video archives seems to have
more meaning through its very existence than through its function as
repertory of information. To know that such a thing is preserved on a
video cassette can be calming. One feels relieved of the tension one experiences in consigning an event to one's memory."43
On the one hand Egoyan's installation is a development of this pointed commentary. Its origin in a short "home movie" (an extract?) dedicated to Arshile,
Egoyan's young son: first smiles, first words, first curiosities, first seduction, first
spankings. The shot is framed as close as possible to the face, and closer to the eyes
whose intermittent agitation evokes something mechanical. The video image is transferred to the filmstrip. This is projected on a screen achieving, like a childish toy
train, a voyage in the space, materializing its repetitive duration by looping.44 The
filmstrip passes in front of the screen, struck by the very image with which it is
printed; "the projection of the image on its very support," one wants to paraphrase
in thinking of another famous ensemble that conjugates transparency and time (the
delay)in painting.45A "monadic film" of a single shot submitted to "repetition and
variation,"showing "at the same time the transparency of monadological perception
and its essential opacity,"the infinite play of "little unfeeling perceptions and other
lightning flashes in a mirror."46The mobility of the film-strip "plays"with the activeness of Arshile's eyes. And suddenly we think that cinema is the gaze which follows
the images and which loses sight of their passage to the profit of the illusion of the
reproduced reality. The gaze on the film is thus a delay, Egoyan thus shows in his film

deployed in the space of an architecture, which, suddenly, resolves the other question
raised above: what to do with the family archive?
The act of filming Arshile's birth was accompanied by a tension that
was not unfamiliar to me. Often, when I shoot my own films, I am overtaken by panic in wondering how something will be interpreted, or
most often, misinterpreted. And there, in shooting a very intimate subject, I felt the same anxiety. But who goes to see a document? Who is
the source of the pressure?47
43.
Egoyan, Trafic10, p. 108
44.
The filmic eternity is a function of the inexhaustible mechanics and the semi-eternality of the repetition: the always identical "new" and this relation to death that hides there: repetition compulsion.
Youssef Ishaghpour, L'Ange,Cinemacontemporain,
de cecotedu miroir(Paris: La Differance, 1986), p. 323.
45.
This is Duchamp's BrideStrippedBare,which he called a "delayin glass."Trans.
46.
Christine Buci-Glucksman, "Drole de pensee touchant Leibniz et le cinema," 7rafic8 (Fall 1993),
pp. 76-77. "The shot puts together what Leibniz dreamed of in his shadow theater: the vision and the
voice, the image and the rhythm, a little like those Proustian shots where the event crosses and laces
together visual and temporal series in concentric circles or in spirals."
47.
Egoyan, Trafic10, p. 108.

38

OCTOBER

The reply is carried by the


present

installation:

the

pressure comes from the


spectator-visitors,the museal
flaneurs who will discover
the staged exhibition of the
familial document, its projection in the public space.
Thus the projection is what
gives meaning to what was
nothing but "private documentation," as Egoyan still

says, in becoming

at the

same time "a projection of


social behavior of my son's
generation in relation to the ritual of that very private documentation."
Which is to say that the filming of his child, "the natural desire to film one's
fanily," is basically not so natural and innocent an act as it seems. Egoyan
remarked once again in the same gripping text:
Just as the largest part of the process of psychoanalysis consists in trying
to recover certain events of one's personal history, perhaps in a rather
near future, one will turn toward an epoch where a type of entirely new
analysis will become current. Will we examine videocassettes looking
for traces that will say more than is apparently shown? It is not inconceivable that the way in which these basic moments of family life are
recorded be submitted to the same deepened aesthetic analysis as the

scene conceived by professionals.


Beyond the passage of domestic video to the public world, from amateurism

to professionalism, from archive to fiction, something else is at stake that we could


characterize as a choreographic
approachof the ego,as Rosalind Krauss says in relation
to the works of Bruce Nauman, which she described as an interminable distantiation of the ego that, however, never escapes from it.48We could thus interpret the
Egoyan installation EarlyDevelopment:the body of the spectator is absorbed by the
triple effect of darkness, by the perspective drawn by the film strip hung in the
room that redoubles the light beam of projection, and finally, by the strip itself

that passes by as close as possible to the screen, forcing the visitor-spectator to


draw near to the screen. But the absolute mystery remains, the precision of the
facial features of the child-the ego at the source-is distanced because of the
video grain seen close-up as a result of the attention devoted to the passage of the
Rosalind Krauss,"Nouvelles technologies, enjeux et perspectives,"Parachute84 (October-November
48.
1996), p. 52.

Above and facing page: Atom Egoyan. Early Development.

1997.

39

Should WePut an End to Projection?

single

IR_
V

strip fogging

the vision

of the large

screen.
^14^d ^

Moreover, the strip redoubles against the


screen the striations of the surface of the cathode-screen. The video web, "distanced" by its
transfer to film, makes its metaphorical return
against the web of the strip "zig zagging"
before the screen, additional cause of the constant distancing that the visitor-spectator, like
the artist, doesn't reduce despite "his nose

glued to the screen."

*^3~

v^1

Jp^v

^~3Mj ^

AB
dl_

~^

4\

~Jean-Pierre
^^9^^~

Bertrand

To close in on the image is a current fanfilm lovers. Aren't they familiar with the
of
tasy
front rows of film theaters? To be in the image,
to lose oneself in it, to be surrounded by it, is
not a desire foreign to the incarceration,
to
the forgetting of the world: to substituting for

tthislatter its illusion. In Les Carabiniers(1963),

Jean-Luc Godard gives life to the brutal experience of one of his two heroes, Michel-Ange.
For wanting to see too much on and in the
image, the choreographic approach of the ego
of the Carabinier ends in the depths of an
orchestra
and
shaken,
pit.
Haggard,
exhausted, Michel-Ange then turns around, his
'
the opaque screen for the
body become
B ^Hp
film
of
the
that continues to run. There
images
the
was the very painful test of confronting
luminous source of projection "at the risk of vision," as Hubert Damisch said one
day in prefacing a fine exhibition in Marseille.49 For Damisch, the cinema has
been, biographically, a violence against vision. In his installation, Jean-Pierre
Bertrand takes this violence literally. For him as well, "vision never proceeds without risk" and "its operation could eventually turn around against itself." Moreover,
"the new and multiplied ways that film has opened for the scopic drive have only
been (and haven't been able to be) a risk of blindness."50 To film the sun, to look
_B , ,^\

49.
Peinture,cinema,peinture,ed. Germain Viatte (Paris: Hazan, Musees de Marseille, 1990). Hubert
Damisch thus introduces projection as a structural tie between cinema and painting (p. 25).
50.
Ibid., p. 26.

OCTOBER

40

at the projector, to confront the sun-machines well before the invention of the
cinema, since the thirteenth century were conceived to observe the sun. Before
Roger Bacon (1214-1294), astronomers underwent the burning experience of
not guarding against the sun in wanting to observe it. This monk imagined a
screen on which to project the light rays in order to study them without fear.51
Bertand has conceived a machine worthy of these very sophisticated arrangements of the Renaissance scholars, as if they had been gifted with contemporary
technology. But the technological difference is not the major one. Bertrand's
"tower" is imaginatively and symbolically a "Leonardesque" machine that organizes the encounter of vision and sun as if the artist wanted to verify this
certainty of Rodin: "Beauty quickly changes, almost like a landscape that ceaselessly modifies the setting of the sun."
Through this unexpected version of a "Kaiser-panorama,"which forces on
the spectator a seated, immobile, and uncomfortable viewing position (always this
memory of Plato and Diderot) and to which is added the dazzle of a facing projector that upsets the perception of the images, Bertrand offers a paradoxical filmed
performance: to film "handheld," to achieve in walking the panoramic views (from
which the nature of the installation that evokes certain optical curiosities of the
nineteenth century), to encounter one's shadow, to confront the sun which is the
cause of it, to show the world as installation. Thing, lights, and shows will already
be filmed images and the sun will be the primordial projector of them. The world
not filmable but already filmed, already representation, already projection.
Bertrand's "tower,"paradoxical lighthouse whose beams spend their energy at the
inside of its column, achieves another dream, this one modern, well distanced
from Diderot's pictorial fantasy but as upsetting, the photo-projective ecstasy of
Robert Smithson:
The sun's light filmed the site, making the bridge and the river an overexposed image. When I photographed it with an Instamatic 400, this
was as if I photographed a photograph. The sun became a monstrous
bulb that projected a series of still images detached against my
Instamatic until inside my eye. When I passed over the bridge, it was as
if I walked on an enormous photograph made of wood and steel, and
above the river there was like an enormous film that only showed an
empty image.52
Projection is a form of hypnosis. Conceptual artists such as Smithson,
Bertrand, or, in a way still different and at the same time related, James Turrell,
exhibit the maladjustments of vision, in the sense of "having a vision." Would
Bertrand then suggest another transport, forgotten until now, escaping from
reason, toward unknown regions of the sensory-motor rupture that Bertrand's
51.
52.

Mannoni, Le GrandArt,p. 17.


In Regis Durand, Le Tempsde l'image(Paris: La Differance, 1995), p. 164.

Should WePut an End to Projection?

41

projective incarceration translates: "the mental dazzlement," hallucination, mad


blinding?
Alain Fleischer
This artist, pedagogical formulator of the National Studio of Contemporary
Arts-as it was habitual in the 1930s to confer the places of training to artists-has
experimented since the end of the 1970s with projective films, ideally conceived as
rebuses and linguistic instruments, to adopt once more the expression of Michel
Foucault.53
Fleischer and his GoldenPrisons is in a dialogue with Bertrand. In another
"hallucinating" manner, Fleischer attracts the spectator-flaneur into a labyrinth.
At the fairs, it is the mirror reflections that multiply the dead ends of a
labyrinth, often called a galerie des glaces.With Fleischer, it is the projections that
distract the gaze and the understanding. Many films are projected onto screens
that bear mirrors on part of their surface, thus sending part of the projected
image onto other screens. It is to say in this way "the exchangism" that sets in
between the narrative of the films, true extractions and incrustations that
Fleischer operates at the end stage of the representation and not at the initial
stage of the recording, the shooting. Very canny the character who dreamed
himself as definitively belonging to his film! Projection surpasses its passive role
of transporting the image; it doesn't only set forth images, it sets them up. As a
result, the embryonic stories are "ruined" because of the paradoxical fact of too
much narrativity-which results from the intrusion of images from one film into
another, but which on the other hand confers on each of them too narrow a fictional quality. The filmic fragment sent back to the space reserved for its
reception in the frame of another film makes one suddenly conscious of the narrative incarcerationof ordinaryfictions.
"This crossover of stories, this undermining of the rule of editing and of the
narrative limit" (Fleischer) results from catoptric procedures whose origins one
could rediscover very exactly in the theories of Renaissance physicists. In his
Magiae naturalis, the Italian physicist Giovanni Battista Della Porta (1540-1615)
describes the experience that consists of making an "image hanging in the air by
means of a mirror" appear.54The apparatus imagined by Della Porta is a touching
ancestor of Fleischer's "pursuit of images": darkroom, tilted mirrors, image
painted on translucent paper lit from behind by the sun or by a fire, throwbacks of
the image, optical "billiard"... : The image is "thrown into the air and separated
from everything," Della Porta concludes. Fleischer's installation is programmed by
53.
In 1980, at the Paris Biennale, Fleischer presented installations conceived throughout the 1970s:
Gonewith the Wind,and yetit still moves,theprojected
imageof a filmedprojector.
54.
Mannoni, Le GrandArt,p. 29.

42

OCTOBER

Alain Fleischer.Golden Prisons.


1997.
an ancient history of representation. But it is even more a true hinge between past
and present. How is one not to dream, in staring at these fictional transfers of an
of characters,
image however finished in appearance to another image-transfer
transfer of bodies extracted from their setting, reversedin the film as this happens
is one not to dream of video incrustation, of digital metamorin printing-how
of morphing
and other
fiction,
phoses of the images of contemporary
simulations? No cybernetics, no software, nor numerical matrix with Fleischer;
only the very archaic catoptric procedure. The present is spoken by the past. No
described by
eternal return, but rather, again, this haunting "constellation,"
Benjamin, of Past and Now.
This structural homology of procedures, between catoptics and cybernetics,
of messages
doesn't only affect the images. It "computes" all the communication
today. Something in Fleischer's installation asks me to define it as a "hyper-film,"
as we say a "hyper-text," which is to say a film exposed to constant deformation, to
permanent rectification, to continual addition, to the accumulating weaving of
images, in the way the Internet weaves and accumulates data.
A projecting film the vision of which would be the projection, the way the
reading of a text on a Web site consists above all of a written intervention that
enriches it. An act of vision that would be an act of projection the way an act of reading in "the Net" today is an act of writing. A hybrid film submitted to a continual
so much does its memory-the
mechanization,
images recorded on the filmexhibit itself to reception, within a reserve negotiated in the frame in effect of images

Should WePut an End to Projection?

43

belonging to other films. Jean-Louis Boissier noticed one day how interactivitywas
more a new means for artists to manipulate the public than an increase in its participation in a spectacle. In this sense, the films installed by Fleischer are interactive.55
Technical information will not grant mastery and freedom with regard to
new technologies of communication. On the other hand, projection conceived
with a poetic and "critical" apparatus grants artists with a political responsibility.
This is the obvious "message"of Fleischer's GoldenPrisons.
Fleischer and Snow are the only two artists who, in the exhibition, minimize
the machine. And by contrast to the other installations, one has the right to wonder where the projection machines have gone with Fleischer, to such an extent is
the customary bias of modern artists, as we have seen, to "show the process." In
fact, it is the whole installation that is a projector, generalized to the full scale of
the room and of the representation. In the apparatus put to work by Fleischer the
mirrors receive a "delegation" on behalf of the projectors and prolong the luminous action. In these GoldenPrisons,projection becomes fallacy and aberration. It
is not surprising that in fact it was inventedin a prison.56 Reflections become projections; the film theater is the projector, and the spectator revolves inside it.
Recently, Jean-Louis Schefer questioned the absence of representation of
the human body in the cave paintings of paleolithic art.57Other darkrooms, other
projections.... Schefer hypothesized that the cave is the human body that frames
the group of the figures; the human body is the interpretantby exceeding its sole
figurative function. "Humanization is not in the approximative human figures; it
is not of a graphic but of a topographic kind," Schefer says.58Fleischer's installation, another cave,59decidedly deserves its name: the spectator is imprisoned with
the images, at the very interior of a projection machine, amid its mirrors and its
fires, "development and interior of a huge body [of a huge apparatus] which
frames, contains, multiplies and 'interprets' all the possible figurations."60 For
Fleischer, the projection of images thus creates an interpretantspace.

Michael Snow

As in the projective cave of Alain Fleischer, the presence of projectors is


not a priority in Michael Snow's work. Two Sides to Every Story (TSES) (1974) is a

55.
Third Lyon Biennale, 1995.
56.
See above, the text byJean-Luc Godard.
57.
Jean-Louis Schefer, Cahiersdu Museenational d'art moderne,p. 5. This text is the development of a
first approach in Trafic3 (Summer 1992).
58.
This hypothesis is drawn from the work of the structuralistethnographerJean-Louis Gourhan. See
translator'snote.
59.
Flashes of images, escaping and weaving, outside the frames set up to receive the images, the walls
of the scenographic cube containing the installation.
60.
J.-L. Schefer, Cahiersdu Museenationald'artmodere, pp. 28-29.

44

OCTOBER

historical installation, the oldest of the projects of this exhibition.61 Snow shares
with Fleischer a precedent status in contemporary art from the point of view of
the use of projected light within museum space. To clarify my thinking and
avoid provoking envious retorts, I want to designate a certain type of projective
installation, midway between fiction, visual figuration, and language, defined in
the first part of this essay.
In general, Snow doesn't display particular fascination for the mechanicoTSES was thus described in 1978:
machinic aspects within his installations.
"simultaneous projection of two films on two sides of a screen hung in the midst
of a room making use of the simultaneously opaque and transparent nature of the
filmic material in a series of variations on reality and illusion of a represented
space."62 Undeniably correct description, precise and above all complete, which
nonetheless
displaces, in all
good faith, the exact point on

which Snow works, because it


is the screen, essentially the
screen, more than an abstract
is
which
filmic
material,
Snow's burden. The screen

however being, in short, nothof an


ing but the surface
of a fleeting
apparatus,
impression. But a screen that

finally permits here, in this


to satisfy the
installation,
curiosity of the Carabinier Michel-Ange: to cross and see behind the screen, to
take literally ("au pied de l'oeil," we should say) the perspectivist illusion of the
image, to cross the screen so as to penetrate the depth
photocinematographic
beyond the screen and tear it if necessary. And it is necessary! It is this that Snow
invites in granting as an "actress" to us another walking woman,63 to achieve,
according to many illusionistic experiences between reality and representation

and some rituals that recall those of Robert Morris, the decisive and cutting act of
Lucio Fontana: to slice the screen-fabric, to show the absence beyond what the
illusionistic strengths of painting dissimulate.64But Snow's aim is obviously slyer. It
is less to deconstruct or disillusion that interests him. An earlier modernityMondrian, Pollock, Newman, Fontana, "minimal" art-are already at work on
61.
Except for Michael Snow and Jozef Robakowski, the artists have suggested original works (produced by the National Studio of Contemporary Art in Le Fresnoy), based on the "mandatory"theme of
the exhibition. The artists have been chosen based on knowledge of their earlier work, which led to their
being invited to participate in the exhibition.
Pierre Theberge, MichaelSnow(Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1978), p. 9.
62.
At the end of the 1960s, a series of urban, sculptural, and photographic interventions consisted of
63.
setting in the street a stylized profile of a walking woman.
64.
Painting plays an important role in Snow's performance-installation: bombast, painted target.

Aboveandfacing page:MichaelSnow.
Two Sides to Every Story. 1974.

45

Should WePut an End to Projection?

that. With Snow, one "lost illusion" may start up another. After the "actress" has
torn the screen, she reappears from the other side; a second fiction projected on
the reverse of the screen takes up the relay, in the most athletic sense of the word.
Suddenly, the spectator is led to move past his supposed "knowledge" about the
filmic illusion. As imprisoned and frozen [meduse] as the Carabinier Michel-Ange,
he leaps to the other side of the screen and, filled by this unwonted transgression
of the laws of representation, the screen not melting away as in Godard's film, he
links up, he ascends a narrative and spatial becoming that substitutes itself for his
desires. The illusion continues behind the screen. The story continues after the
word "End." The spectator joins, ascends by passing from the front to the back
side of the screen. The filmic material is thus sent in its totality to the screen. The
editing that organizes this material for the main part is no longer the result of a
succession that unreels from an
of two
end-to-end
juncture

filmic
segments.65

and

temporal

The editing

here

is a matter of simultaneity, of
the synchronism of independent temporal
sequences,
projected outside of all collage.
It is in space that this simulwith
taneity
operates,
the
so
much
difficulty by
way,
act
must
the
spectator
to
the
end
of
solder
promptly

the right-side sequence to the opening of the reverse-side sequence. It is a temporal as much as spatial connection. It is the screen, its hair-fine thickness that is the
seal. A seal that one could define dialectically: optical opacity--the

transparent-and

fictive transparency-the

screen is not

two sequences join up. It is by this

putting the screen to the test insofar as it is a second machine for the projected image,
complementary to the projector, that Snow joins up with Fleischer, but according

to a more conceptual than poetical project. TSESis central within the work of the
Canadian artist. Before I evoked the hair-fine thickness of the screen on which it
invited the spectator to meditate, but I must add that a large part of this work is
attached to the question of illusionism in art.66 In 1979 Snow summarized this as
follows:
TwoSides to EveryStoryimplies a visual skepticism. I compared the thinness of the filmic image of light on a surface to that of painting or of
"A film is truly linear,"Snow said in 1979, in a fatalistic but not resigned manner (MichaelSnow, p.
65.
43).
From the crushed breakfast table (7able TopDolly, 1972-76) to the holograms and to his master66.
piece, Wavelength (1966-67).

46

OCTOBER

ink. Its lack of substance moves me because it re-creates our way of seeing when light strikes a surface. I try to underscore this thinness that
results from the compression of three-dimensional objects, of individuals, etc., onto a two-sided object. I examine there as much the mystery
of the light as the reduction of illusion of the depth that can be strong
if one faces the image but weakens as soon as one shifts position and
changes one's point of view. Viewed from the side, the image becomes
more and more flat, more and more thin and one sees the illusion
there more than the realism.67
It is the illusion of the world for which Snow is passionate, more than for the
world itself. That being said, this latter can benefit, to be better understood, from
such an entertainment.
Two Sides to EveryStoryis a piece that takes on another aspect of projection
and its effects.
The transport of the image barely preoccupies Snow. For him the projective
installation constitutes instead a privileged apparatus to upset the metonymic fate
of the story made up of moving images.68 This is what Pierre Th6berge cannily
noticed in one of his questions put to Snow: representation of simultaneous temporal states or clearly narrative contents?69 The filmmaker of La Region centrale
deliberately took the side of simultaneity against succession, if one can thus place
and schematize an aesthetic for which the dialectic ambition is not the least feature. But I make this over-crude hypothesis in order to suggest a stake that
exceeds this contradiction, this latter being able, however, itself alone, to justify
the best of experimental film aesthetically.
This stake opens onto the nature of the time to which the projected moving
image gives rise and which Snow's installation tried precociously to translate the
crystallinecomplexity within it, at the very moment when Gilles Deleuze was thinking this same temporality turned into image. In this sense, one can consider that
simultaneity/successivity contradiction that forms the unity of Two Sides to Every
Story,equivalent to the unity formed by the actual image and "its"virtual image in
Deleuze. Snow in fact looks, beyond the ordinary simultaneity of sound-image, for
a more mental simultaneity:
The memory of a past thing put in the mind of the spectator can offer
another kind of simultaneity. That also applies to Rameau's Nephew...
within which each section is so different from every other that the
apprehension or the comprehension of the past moment can be modified by the one where you find yourself and the one you have just left.
It produces in the mind a layering of individual things.70
67.
68.
69.
70.

MichaelSnow,p. 40.
Roland Barthes, CameraLucida(Paris: Gallimard, 1981).
MichaelSnow,p. 43.
Ibid.

Should WePut an End to Projection?

47

A remark that draws its full force if we associate it with the precedent where
Snow insisted on the real and imaginary thinness of his double-faced screen. A
remark that takes on still another force, if we relate it to this quote from Bergson
to which Deleuze has recourse for the analysis of his crystals of time: "Every
moment of our life thus offers two aspects: it is real and virtual, perception of one
side and memory of the other."71
The spectator of TwoSides to EveryStorybasically conjugates simultaneity and
succession, the recent past of a temporal segment interrupted on the reverse side
and the present of a repeat of another segment on the front. Snow sets this
"exchange between an actual image and a virtual image, the virtual becomes
actual and conversely; and also there is exchange between the limpid and the
opaque, the opaque becoming limpid and conversely; finally there is exchange
between a seed and a context. I believe that the imaginary is this ensemble. The
imaginary is the crystal image."72
If before I argued that Snow was little concerned with the transport of
images, this is because, for him, this transport arises less from the spatial domain
than from a temporal disquiet. The image projected in TSES forms an apparatus
that unites the linkage and the reversibility, perception of one side and memory of the
other, which is to say a transport of which the time leans toward its shortest possible
duration, this having the thickness of the screen-cloth. Put otherwise, no longer a
luminous transport, but a luminous virtual interface:
... the virtual image in its pure state is not defined in function of a new
present in relation to which it will be (relatively) past, but in function
of the actual present "of which" it is the past, absolutely and simultaneously: particular, it is nonetheless "past in general," in the sense that it
has not yet received a date. Pure virtuality, it has only to actualize itself,
since it is rigorously correlative of the actual image with which it forms
the smallest possible circuit which serves as the base or the summit for
all the others. It is the virtual image that corresponds to such and such
actual image, instead of actualizing itself, to have to actualize itself in
"another" actual image. It's a circuit walking an actual-virtual line, and
not an actualization of the virtual in function of a shifting actual. It's
an image-crystal, and not an organic image.73
From images that only exist because they are made of light, therefore images
that are made of time: it was my opening hypothesis whose first stage of "verification" was of a literary nature. Michael Snow offers experience
in visual and
to
the
initiative
of
the
as
well
scenographic acts, performance
spectator-flaneur, of
the relative, dialectic temporality, of the projected image, "critical" balcony of the
71.
72.
73.

Henri Bergson, quoted by Gilles Deleuze, L'Image-temps,


p. 106.
Deleuze, L'lmage-temps,
pp. 106-07.
Ibid., p. 106

48

OCTOBER

future regimes of the image. Final illustration, if there is still need for one at the
end of this visit, of the fact that the artists, if they don't prefigure the future-they
are no more divine than other human beings-speak of future worlds before
these arise. Why not call this statement, paradoxically both outmoded and
utopian, a projection,a dreamy and poetic transport toward the future?

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