THE FOOTPRINT AND THE READYMADE.

From its inception, photography has been placed within narratives of illusionism, of the increasing mastery of the depiction of the visible world. As a new medium, it was feared that it would make painting obsolete. While such assumptions have been criticized in postmodern theory, the developments in new media in the last decade seem to bring them back to life. This time, however, it is photography that is outdone, reduced to a chapter in an ongoing story of a quest for images that give the greatest sense of immediacy and transparency. In their 1999 book Remediation, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin analyze how contemporary new media enthusiasts are claiming that new technologies (mainly within the field of virtual reality) offer an ever greater experience of "immediacy" that fosters "a sense of presence" in the viewer. [1] These accounts remain basically within the teleological paradigm that earlier saw photography as an improvement over painting in terms of the level of realism it offered.

Nonetheless, there has been a change of accent. After all, photography was uniquely valuable to the discourse that traced an ever greater realism in the history of art because of its status as an imprint, as an index. It shared this status only with its younger relative, cinema. Lev Manovich has succinctly described pre-digital film as the attempt "to make art out of a footprint"; the footprint is, in Charles Sanders Peirce's classification of signs, an index, like the photographic image or the film image. [2] In texts such as "Rhetoric of the Image" (1964), Roland Barthes analyzed both the "coded iconic message" and the "non-coded iconic message" of photographs--the former being indexical and the latter cultural. [3] However, in Camera Lucida (1980), Barthes focused on those elements of photography that espace the clutches of culture, of codedness. In this late book, he contrasted studium with punctum: studium is the analysis of a photograph as a cultural, coded artifact, whereas a punctum occurs when the v iewer is touched by some detail that has escaped the photographer's control. The detail that creates the sensation of punctum appears to be--for a moment--pure indexicality, a point that escapes the code. [4]

Bolter and Grusin make it clear that this approach to photography becomes problematic at a time when computer images are becoming indistinguishable from photographs: "An image could be synthesized without the need for the objects in the image to have existed or to have been together at any time, which was exactly the condition that Roland Barthes considered the definition of photography in Camera Lucida." [5] Pragmatically, Bolter and Grusin note that "because a digital photograph can sometimes be regarded as transparent, it too can express our desire for immediacy." [6] This may be true, and it certainly is true that pre-digital photography has many means of manipulating the image and many photographic practices have focused on this. The question still remains if this "desire for immediacy" will be so easily swayed to accept the loss of the (illusion of) indexical truth. "Whatever else its power, the photograph could be called sub- or pre-symbolic, ceding the power of art back to the imposition of things," Rosalind Krauss stated in her "Notes of the Index: Part 1." [7] The self-assurance of such a statement--made well before the impact of digitization--indicates how much has changed in a comparatively short time. What is the status of photography when "things" are no longer necessary, when the "photorealistic" simulation of reality (as in Hollywood special effects) is considered by some to be more "real" than indexical images because it gives a greater sense of "immediacy"?

For photography to be accepted as an art, "ceding the power of art back to the imposition of things" was never enough. It was even a threat. Technical and formal mastery, a signature style in the selection and ordering of the things shown, were of the utmost importance in establishing photography as an art. The canonical status of Walker Evans derives in part from his success in making his art strictly realistic, hence indexical and "true to its medium," while on the other hand his formal elegance and characteristic approach to the American scene made him an auteur. Late in his life--culminating in the vast amount of Polaroids made shortly before his death--Evans's style relaxed somewhat. The use of the point-and-shoot Polaroid camera produced less refined pictures that have the virtue of relating Evans's photography even more closely than before to his activities as a collector of Americana (and/or junk). Especially in his final years, Evans often went on scavenging hunts, wresting all kinds of street signs from their rightful places. In a note for an exhibition in which he presented some of these signs, he wrote, "This lifting is, in the raw, exactly what the photographer is doing with his machine, the camera, anyway, always." [8] Therefore, a Polaroid of a sign or of old lettering on a facade enacts a less "raw" act of "lifting" than if Evans had actually taken the object with him. The photographic imprint serves as a substitute. Photography and the readymade thus appear closely related; both cede "the power of art" to "the imposition of things."

Marcel Duchamp derived the generic name "readymade" from the term readymade clothing, which he encountered in New York during World War I. At the time, he also stated that, "the only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges. " [9] The plumbing, at least, directly found its way into Duchamp's work with Fountain (1917), the pristine white urinal signed "R. Mutt." Two decades later, when he had already glorified the Brooklyn Bridge in a series of photos, Walker Evans glued an illustrated ad for a "portable folding bathtub" and an image of a toilet seat with the caption "BEAUTIFUL" on one of the pages of his album of "Pictures of the Time," that contains images clipped from newspapers and magazines--among them a photograph of Duchamp and fellow artist Joseph Stella. [10] While Evans--the photographer--had a penchant for the readymade and sometimes he preferred "lifting" things to photographing them, Duchamp--coming, as it were, from the other side-used the term "snapshot" (instantane) in o ne of his notes when he discussed the option of signing a readymade at a specific date and time, hence equating the "lifting" of an object from non-art to art (or at least to the status of readymade) with the taking of a snapshot. [11]

This readymade perspective on photography can serve as an alternative to teleological accounts of illusionism, that see virtual reality and digital photography as improvements on traditional photography because they give a more complete sense of presence. Somewhat ironically, it might be argued that it was the readymade that fulfilled the promise of photography by giving it a heightened sense of immediacy and presence, as it gives the viewer the object itself, rather than an ever more perfect illusion of the object. Whereas contemporary digital illusionism does away with the index in favor of constructed images, the readymade moves in the opposite direction by exchanging the index for the object, the footprint for the foot. On the other hand, photography might of course be said to be more immediate because it can portray more complex ensembles at a specific point in time, while the readymade cannot: the readymade is rather than depicts. Duchamp tried to efface this difference in his proposal for signing a re adymade at a set time "like a snapshot."

Duchamp again equated photograph and readymade in some of his later works, like Torture-morte (1959). This piece consists of a highly realistic sole of a foot executed in painted plaster, into which dead flies had been squashed. The foot resembles a cast; the indexical footprint is turned into a pseudoreadymade, a simulacrum of a real foot made by casting and painting it. The flies also relate this object to photography. In some important twentieth-century photographs, the fly has figured as an indicator of photography's power to see reality with all its imperfections. It can be a symbol of photography's indexicality, a symbol of its privileged relationship to reality. For instance, small black points dot the white blanket on the bed in one of Evans's photographs of a sharecropper's house (Bed-room in the Burroughs House, Hale County, Alabama, 1936): these dots are flies. Evans's photography is an art of structures that are beset by imperfections and decay: beds covered with flies, crumbling exteriors of old colonial mansions, torn posters, wrinkled sharecroppers' faces. One is reminded of the foot of Torture-morte with its wrinkles sand blemishes and its readymade flies (each perhaps killed by Duchamp, snapshot-like, at a previously set time).

The invention of the readymade has been characterized by Gerhard Richter as "the invention of reality"--an "invention" he equates with the realization that what counts is not some ideological worldview, but a sober assessment of the hard facts. One-sided as this statement appears, it is far from being beside the point. Duchamp's work manages to partake in two opposed tendencies in modern art the one striving toward realism and the other towards a more spiritual, or intellectual art. As an admirer of Stephane Mallarme and Raymond Roussel who used his readymades and other works as porte-manteaus for elaborate sexual puns and abstruse pseudo-scientific speculations, Duchamp wanted to place art "in the service of the mind" again. [12] He has an intense dislike for "retinal" art, that is to say, art meant purely for visual pleasure. But the cerebral, intellectual dimension of Duchamp's readymades is in a sense invisible as it manifests itself by means of punning titles and a web of allusions to Duchamp's preoccupa tions and his other works. The objects themselves could hardly be more realistic, as they are in fact real. If the readymade is, among other things, the point where realism makes a qualitative leaps and becomes reality, this sabotages narratives that place recent developments at the pinnacle of a history of immediacy. What good is the ever greater effect of reality if reality itself has already been invented by Duchamp?

That recent developments should not be placed in such a teleological history is also evinced by the qualities that are searched for in classical photography by contemporary audiences. Pre-digital photography seems to offer a kind of reality that is missing from other images; photography is used as an antidote to digitized images. When the town archive of Amsterdam showed a retrospective of Jacob Olie, who photographed Amsterdam in the late nineteenth century, enormous billboards were placed in various locations from which Olie had taken photographs. One could simultaneously see Olie's enlarged picture on the billboard, as well as the present view, without the mediation of photography in the latter case. It was, once again, an invocation of photography's indexicals status, of its status as an imprint of how things were at a certain point in time. In the 1990s, art photography has often emphasized this status as well, as in the snapshot aesthetics of artists such as Nan Goldin and Richard Billingham. Perhaps t his is already a nostalgic, or at least a backward-looking practice. Perhaps one of the keys to its success is that, like the Olie billboards, this sort of photography reassures the viewer that there is still ground that registers and preserves footprints.

Of course, it would be simplistic to equate pre-digital classical photography with the index. From multi-exposure photographs to pictorial photography and photomontage, artists have struggled to overcome its indexical status, to create a form of photography that would obey the mind or the painterly instincts rather than the mechanical reproduction of objects. Such practices have often had a difficult stand in museums and in historical publications. The photomontage received some attention from politically minded art historians, but on the whole such impure practices were considered to be secondary in importance to work like Atget's or Evans's--"true" photography. Even in the past decade, there has been a tendency to regard the staged photography of artists like Cindy Sherman as a concession to the demands of the art world and a betrayal of true, straight photography. While it may be true that staged photography was preferred by the 1980s art market because it seemed more closely related to painting, one migh t also say that these practices, while working hand in hand with a historical and theoretical reconsideration of earlier practices of staged photography and montage, heralded the digital revolution. Jeff Wall is one of a number of artists who easily made the transition from staged photography to digitally manipulated work, ultimately giving him almost complete control over the final image.

To his statement about the readymade and the invention of reality, Richter added that there will come a time when it will be imperative to "deny the value of this reality" and to "set up pictures of a better world" again. [13] While Richter's romantic-conservative longing for a lost social unity comes into play here, this statement can[ also be seen as a prediction about what might happen if the index loses its grip, if reality becomes an effect. It is possible to think of a society where the modern fetishism of the index will be seen as a strange deviance--a culture that sees no value in footprints whatsoever. Such a society will see reality as something to be improved upon, perfected, transmuted into images. At first, images would still to some degree be simulations of photography, but soon, in a more advanced phase, photography might be regarded as a base half fabricate that needs to be improved upon. For the moment this is an exercise in theoretical science-fiction, but perhaps we have already witnessed the dawn of such a culture. It would explain why, as is usual in periods of transition, the old world view is clung to with ever greater longing. But nostalgia, blind as it is, is in itself a symptom that should make one wary of placing digital post-photography at the end of a teleological narrative. Nostalgia is at least ahead of some forms of contemporary theory by perceiving differences that certain theoretical story tellers seek to obliterate.

SVEN LUTTICKEN is an art historian and critic based in Amsterdam. He is an editor at the Belgian-Dutch art magazine De Witte Raaf.

NOTES

(1.) Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 21-24.

(2.) Lev Manovich. The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 295.

(3.) Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image" (1964) in Richard Howard, trans., The Responsibility of Forms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 27-44.

(4.) Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

(5.) Bolter and Grusin, ibid., p. 106.

(6.) Ibid., p. 111.

(7.) Rosalind Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Part 1," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 203.

(8.) Quoted in Belinda Rathbone. Walker Evans: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), p.290.

(9.) Anonymous (probably Marcel Duchamp with Beat-rice Wood), "The Richard Mutt Case" in The Blind Man, no. 2 (May 1917), unpaginated.

(10.) Evans's unbound album of "Pictures of the Time" from the 1930s has been published in Jeff L. Rosen-heim and Alexis Schwarzenbach, eds., Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology (Berlin, New York and Zurich: Scalo and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), pp. 214-245.

(11.) Marcel Duchamp in Michel Sanouillet, ed., Duchamp du signe (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), p. 49. This note is analyzed by Krauss, ibid., pp.. 205-206.

(12.) It seems to me that the invention of the Readymade was the invention of reality. It was the crucial discovery that what counts is reality, not any world-view whatever," Gerhard Richter, "Notes 1990" in Hans-Ulrich Obrist, led., The Daily Practice of Painting (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), p. 218.

(13.) Ibid.