1-Year Plan
Post 25: 2/11/06
The Anecdote of Photography:
Lucien Samaha and Experience
Gut ist was gefällt [Good Is What Pleases], photographic and documentary installations by Hans-Peter Feldmann, Lucien Samaha, and Wolfgang Tillmans, Museum der Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 15 January–12 February 2006.
Stopping through Frankfurt on my way to Göttingen, I planned to spend several hours at the Museum of Modern Art with the purpose of rephotographing its continuing show, Spinnwebzeit: Die EBay-Vernetzung (Spinning the Web: The E-Bay Connection), which juxtaposed work from contemporary artists in its collection (from historical to neo-avant-garde) with items acquired on E-Bay. I had seen the show in December during a brief stopover between Mainz and Tübingen, but there had been no catalogue—only a pocket guide to the show that linked the "acquisitions history" of items to their display numbers, with brief narratives if they were available. One could also buy a set of postcards of the E-Bay items (but not the work from the collection), along with the guides in German and English, at the front desk. This was not satisfactory, as the show's interest was the conceptual framing and disjunctions between works of art, often involving appropriations strategies, and objects designated as art for however long they were in the museum. (I heard, in fact, that once the show is concluded that the items will be de-accessioned, sold on E-Bay—at which point there will be an interesting record of what months of museum display will do to increase the value of a collectible.) Going through the show, which I will discuss later on its own terms, I found that the room in which the provocative juxtaposition of Japanese conceptualist On Kawara's date paintings (in which he simply paints a date, such as "Feb. 26, 1973," on a canvas in white on a dark background) with a cover of Time magazine from August 1945, propaganda for the dropping of a second atom bomb on Nagasaki, had been reinstalled. Also revelatory in the original installation was a second room, behind the display of On Kawara's familiar date pieces, of a series of drawings of radiation victims from the 1950s—before his turn to conceptualism in the 1960s. On Kawara is an incredible draftsman—I had not known this. Presumably, he abandoned the aesthetic immediacies of hand-drawn work, and their expressive content, for a series of procedures that entirely erase both skill and immediacy. "I awoke today at 8:23 A.M.," for example, is an example of what On Kawara would send around on numerous daily postcards (see Lucy Lippard's Six Years; or, The Dematerialization of the Art Object . . . for documentation of these.) The E-Bay show made the point, through its use of the net to acquire the Time cover, that On Kawara's "horizon shift" from graphic to conceptual artist may have had something to do with the canceling of Japan's imperial sun by the catastrophic negativity of American global power.
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What replaced this gallery of the E-Bay show was no less interesting: a one-month exhibition titled Gut ist was gefällt (Good Is What Pleases), which was showing time-based projects by three conceptual photographers: Hans-Peter Feldmann, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Lucien Samaha. I had seen a documentary photographic installation by Feldmann in Berlin (Frauen im Gefängnis [Women in Prison], Barbara Wien Gallery), and had stumbled across, with much interest, the public fête for Tillmans's exhibition at the Volksbühne; Samaha's work I did not know. Feldmann's project, evidently, was a series of placards advertising the show's somewhat irritating rubric, that the "good" is merely what "pleases"—a notion I can hardly take seriously. It would seem his strategy was to create a kind of counter-campaign for this kitschy art slogan. Tillmans, being the current rage of the photography world, showed pieces he had developed with students of the Städelschule in Frankfurt; the traces of personality (definitely an issue in his work) thus were erased in a collective installation that was, due its distributed intentions, somewhat hard to read. In fact, I felt I did not have enough time to figure it out, so I headed for the back room, where earlier On Kawara's drawings had been. I was more than a little taken aback to find the artist, Lucien Samaha, at work at a desk in this room, surrounded by computer, printer, files of images, and various documents he was working on. The images were a series of digital prints of ephemeral subjects that moved quickly through a series of disconnected postmodern spaces, loosely held in place by office-supply magnets. There is an art to this aspect of photography that I am extremely interested in: not only how to be at the right place at the right time, but how to make complicated intentional statements out of the contingencies of location and timing. This seems to be Samaha's forté; in my quick scan of the work, I saw "location," "people," "movement," and frequently, "erotic interest." The connection of the latter to the presence of the artist was indeed interesting, as he was either watching or not watching for my response. I was, it turned out, already a part of the piece, and when I read the small printed sign inviting me to take one of the photos—but only in the presence of the artist—I knew what my role should be. Considering, I selected a black and white image (when many more colorful ones were available) of what looked like a male model posing on top of a gasoline tank truck mired in the mud, in front of a half-finished building that, in turn, partly obscured the twin towers of the World Trade Center behind them. Plenty of allegory could be built on this site, and in the spirit of seeking its disclosure I chose that work, bringing it to the artist at his desk. In return, I was given a sheet of instructions asking me, within two weeks, to send Lucien Samaha a photograph in which I rephotographed his image at another site. I would then be given a password to a website where the image and a narrative of its occasion could be found. In addition, I was photographed by Samaha holding the print; its number was recorded; he printed another one out from his computer; and we exchanged a few pleasantries. I had thought for some reason that he was Brazilian (due to several photos that used Brazil as a location), but no, he told me, he is originally Lebanese and living in New York. I took the image and returned my scanning of Spinnwebzeit; after a little more looking around Frankfurt, in two hours I was on a train to Göttingen.
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Back in Detroit, I considered my next move. It was to bring my print down to Wayne State at the next opportunity, a Wednesday afternoon before my seminar. I posed the photograph, first, against the skyline of Detroit visible out my office window, and then in relation to two other visual frames: the computer where I had been reading seminar posts, and a tourist reprint, bought in the Upper Peninsula, of the launching of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Anyone who lives near the Great Lakes or knows Gordon Lightfoot's song may sense the tremendous affect that is organized around the catastrophic sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald; for the 1970s, and particularly for the distressed mining regions of the U.P., it had an impact similar to 9/11. In Detroit, one meditates frequently on destruction; there it is, visible out the window (with the new stadiums of Ford Field and Comerica Park also in evidence). In any case, my triangulation of the WTC with Detroit and Edmund Fitzgerald seemed lacking in human scale; hence the photo of the computer screen and of my seminar later that night, where I asked the class to pose for a brief moment of rephotography. Then, following instructions, I processed my images and sent them on to Lucien Samaha, receiving in a couple of days the link to his site where his image archive was housed, and the story of the photograph could be told. I learned that the man I took to be a male model or photogenic construction worker was in fact a fabulous dancer Samaha had encountered in a West Village bar; the shot was posed, and now combines a meditation on destruction with what is an evidently erotic alternative. Looking further into Lucien's oeuvre, I found that he is fact quite the party animal; on his home page are hundreds of social photographs of very fashionable looking people, occasionally in extreme make-up or drag, at birthdays, openings, and other venues. At "thanksgiving at dean and mark's, brooklyn, new york - 24 november 2005," one is dealt, through the pix-display interface, a handful of images of real-enough looking people having a pretty good time. I reflect, then, on the relation of this social practice of photographing people all the time to the kinds of images Samaha selected for his show. Clearly, he shoots first and goes through the results later; his entire practice of photography is built up, it seems to me, on the basis of a nonstop, social immersion in images. What results, however, is a heightened sense of contingency of the selected image, yielding a kind of Whitmanian "adhesiveness" that projects through them. Hence the interface of the Frankfurt show and its result: I felt I was, in a way, getting to know these people.
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It is indeed odd how one can live in a social space that is simultaneously full of human potential, as evident in my class, and devastatingly empty, as often in Detroit. There are people, it seems, and there are distances. Part of the distance traveled to Frankfurt, it turned out, involved finding out about some parties in Brooklyn or São Paulo. The question bears on that important distinction between Erlebnis (merely what happens) and Erfahrung (meaningful experience) that organized so much of Walter Benjamin's thinking. I do not want to sentimentalize "experience" as the fullness against which the surfaces of the distantiated world are a mere negation, no. The exercise given by Lucien Samaha, and the previous context of the E-Bay Show, is precisely how to negotiate one in terms of the other. What merely happens, let's say, can also be a "finding aid" for an experience yet to come. It is in the space of renegotiation of those distances that the ghost of our dispersed social being may be realized.
[Text and photos by Barrett Watten copyright © 2006. Not to be reprinted without permission, except in short excerpts in electronic media.]
