Three dialectical inversions: images and afterimages of Artists Anonymous
J. J. Charlesworth © 2008
SHOCK TOLERANCE. Contemporary art is nothing without
its ‘art world’; that complex and mobile interaction of participants,
makers, audiences, institutions, media, curators, collectors, galleries,
museums, ‘alternative’ spaces, critics, theorists, academies and
discourses which give visibility to the work of art that operates in its
midst. And one of the most vivid features of the contemporary art world is
the diversity of practices that are now tolerated within its circuits of
circulation and exchange – tolerated and encouraged, by a cultural system
that is now open to anything, by anyone, from anywhere. This is not the
age of the modernist avant-gardes, no longer the epoch of conservative
order of art, to which and against which those avant-gardes raised their
questions and their objections. Questions such as, why painting? Why not
photography? Why realism? Why not abstraction? Why the artist as
individual? Why not art as a collective practice? Why skill and craft? Why
not technology? Why refinement? Why not mass culture? Why the material
object? Why not art as idea? In their time, all these questions were
direct challenges to the self-preserving definitions that art had made for
itself. And while, if we look back, the outrage provoked by these
questions now seems quaint to us, it’s important to note that in their
first instance, these were shocking events, which challenged art’s
aesthetic, cultural and social legitimacy. Today, the idea that art can
and should produce strong reactions, that it should transgress the
limitation of normative culture, is treated with caution and ambiguity. It
is easy to know how to shock, and who to shock. Harder to know why to
shock…
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Image/Afterimage
Nietzsche’s theory of binary opposition, first argued in The Birth of
Tragedy, contended that human nature represents the unification of polar
opposites, as personified by the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus, widely
accepted codes for reason and its antithesis. This notion of binary
opposition also encompasses additional pairings, ever-present in the
prevailing human and social condition, such as order/chaos, culture/nature,
male/female, and, of course, light/dark.
This final duality of light/dark serves as the abstract term for its
more specific permutations and, for the purpose of this essay, will be
visually expressed as positive/negative. As the aesthetic translation of
Nietzsche’s binary thesis, it is precisely this relationship between the
positive and its negative counterpart that forms the basis for Artists
Anonymous’ core artistic practice, exemplified through their ongoing
series of images and subsequent “afterimages”.
Technically, Artists Anonymous achieve this unification of the
positive/negative binary by beginning with a painting rendered in a
negative palette. The painting is then photographed and its negative
image transferred to a positive slide, which is then printed on negative
photographic paper, inverting both the colors and the composition to
their positive conclusion. When positioned next to each other, the
resulting works are tangible proof of this philosophy’s foremost
argument, that all things embody their absolute “other.” In this case,
the positive subject, a “negative” painting, reveals its opposite when
exposed by analog photography, resulting in the inverted, hence
“positive,” photograph.
By exposing the positive inverse of their negative paintings, Artists
Anonymous also substantiate elements of the original work that may have
eluded the viewer’s initial reading. Positive forms, which appeared
abstract in the negative composition, become recognizable in the
photograph, giving meaning to otherwise ambiguous shapes. Through this
process, Artists Anonymous are also asserting the impossibility of
objective perception, in that the afterimage unveils figurative or
representational forms latent in the original canvas that may have
escaped the viewer’s immediate comprehension.
This process of creating afterimages also asserts the profound effect of
light on sensory empiricism in general. Every painting posses an
infinite number of photographic reproductions, based on the varied
degree of light exposure. Furthermore, the original work’s appearance is
contingent on the light under which it is presented—simply stated, light
affects and informs our perception—manipulate the light and both the
work and the viewer’s perception thereof will be inherently altered as
well.
Artists Anonymous work in multi-media—painting, photography, performance,
video, sculpture and installation—to arrive at what philosophers Claude
Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida termed “bricolage.” Bricolage is a form
of deconstruction, and thus a fundamentally postmodern practice, in
which elements of a system deemed illusionary or flawed are nonetheless
employed to criticize the very system they represent. Derrida argued
that language itself a flawed structure, insofar as it misrepresents the
concepts to which it is attributed. Here, Artists Anonymous employ
visual language to deconstruct the supposed authority of perception, and
allow the image and its afterimage to behave as evidence of the
existence of unified binaries in our material world, as well as the
larger, metaphysical universe.
Emilie Trice
