The aim of this book is to explain the aesthetic and political affordances, functions, and affects of a range of artistic expressions that are marked by illegibility or semi-legibility. Rethinking Art and Visual Culture: The Poetics of Opacity provides answers to the following questions: what are the epistemological, ethical, and cultural values of indeterminate, blurry, distorted, degraded, indefinite, or indistinct works of art? What might such broken or informationally compromised representations or post-representations have in common? What would be some of the key instances of a poetics of opacity? What are their place and purpose in the firmament of aesthetic history? How do precarious forms of art address or reflect problems of knowledge, mediation, information, and data? While examples of opaque images and sounds abound in our audiovisual culture, this is the first book to map out a coherent theory of indistinct art. It is also, moreover, the first attempt to consider work by artists as diverse as Ernie Gehr, John Akomfrah, David Lynch, Matt Saunders, Trevor Paglen, Zach Blas, and Low together and in the context of a poetics of opacity. The research aims to intervene in current debates around regimes of visibility and surveillance by showing how indistinct aesthetics may offer a critique of the positivist impulse informing these regimes.
This book is both a contribution to the field of media theory and a rigorous engagement with, and critique of, what I propose to name a politics of transparency. Encompassing photography, film, video, television, and music, the study is also a multidisciplinary intervention that spans the fields of visual culture, cinema and television, and sound studies. Its fundamental objective is to determine the artistic, ethical, and epistemological values of materially compromised forms of art, advancing a notion of opacity as a corrective to the political and social investment in an increasingly belligerent brand of positivism. The observation upon which the study is premised is this: visual culture and its multifarious objects and operations orbit around a set of tacit presuppositions. These assumptions and beliefs are, for instance, that the image be completely legible, that in principle anything can be visualized, that our screens will always grow incrementally brighter, and that vision and light are phenomena that are intrinsically good. From mainstream cinema’s historical predilection for unobtrusive staging to porn’s axiomatic appropriation of maximum visibility, the medium of film has favored what could be seen as a poetics of transparency. From a technological point of view, the history of the image is the story of ever more sophisticated machines for the production of sharpness.1 A dream of optimal transparency seems to drive both the image industries and the expectations of the consumer-viewer. In this deification of high definition, what has gone largely unnoticed in the various critical engagements with images and the visual world is the place of the seeming adversary of vision that nevertheless constitutes its inextricable counterpart. Some images are not bright and shiny. Some images are not easy on the eyes. Some images are not transparent. Some images are not presented for maximum visibility. Some images are not immediately codifiable. Such objects cause representational problems. They are an affront to hermeneutic efficacy. Co-existing with all the flawless images that populate our various screens, this complementary image ecology is rife with objects and practices that gravitate toward various forms of what some would see as visual imperfection. Found across a heterogeneity of contemporary audiovisual media and genres—photography, documentary, fiction films, television news, music, the social web—this aesthetic is easily recognizable through its reliance on a set of recurring properties: fuzzy graphics, motion blurs, out-of-focus or grainy images, discolorations, wobbly cameras, elliptical editing, intrusion of “noise” either from the environment or the recording apparatus itself, technical glitches, and material decay (nitrate film).
This aesthetics of illegibility, along with its philosophical implications, constitutes the core of this book. We do not yet have an art history of the ruined or opaque image, and while that history is beyond the grasp of this project, I want to scrutinize forms and examples that might merit inclusion in such a history. But more important than references to particular works, for this undertaking, are the kinds of epistemological and ethical matters that pertain to indecipherable visualities. My assumption is that a critique not of visibility per se but of the qualities of sharpness and of clarity as an unproblematically teleological desire needs to be undertaken from within the field of media theory. This book aims to examine a selection of images (and, in one instance, sounds) that are dense and even sometimes impenetrable. Thus, its subject matter and empirical reach extend to artworks that are damaged and materially compromised, broken—in short, artworks that are steeped in opacity. On the fringes of the paradigm of transparency, then, there is another style of audiovisual representation that increasingly has come to the fore in contemporary media culture. To provide an incisive account of this style is the overriding concern of this book.
To that end, the analysis is divided up into a preliminary chapter, dedicated to an expansive examination of opacity as a concept both in media theory and in artistic practice, and seven case studies. These chapters zero in on a quite diverse body of work that in one way or another manifests or thematizes the subject of opacity: the experimental films of the American avant-garde practitioner Ernie Gehr (and, to a lesser extent, those of Bill Morrison), the essay films and installations of the British artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah, the hybrid projects of the American artist Matt Saunders, one singular episode from the television work of the American director David Lynch, the photographic interventions of the American artist Trevor Paglen, the facial masks of the American artist and writer Zach Blas, and, finally, the experiment with static and noise by the minimalist and so-called slowcore Minnesota ensemble Low. These works are evidently a mere selection from a much larger pool of possible cases, some of which are cited throughout this book. While as aesthetic effect or technique opacity extends across many different media and genres, the proclivity for employing it in a sustained manner seems higher in the experimental arts. The current range of cases is thus a reflection of this state of affairs. My choice of material is by no means haphazard and has developed organically as the research progressed. In chronological terms, works by Ernie Gehr and John Akomfrah constitute the kernel of the research, but my awareness of, and interest in, the projects of Trevor Paglen and Zach Blas with regard to the opaque informed my approach from an early stage. The heterogeneity of the cases is at least in part engineered, as what I was after was a mix of perhaps less widely known and maybe even unexpected works, on the one hand, and, on the other, more obvious and “canonical” examples. Likewise intentional was the gamut of aesthetic forms, from cinema and video to photography, television, and album covers.
In this introductory part, I lay bare the premises for the study. Two observations are paramount in this regard. One is the awareness that contemporary culture is doused in a pervasive yet largely unquestioned faith in the preeminence of transparency, of total illumination. The other is the discovery of a vital yet mostly uncharted propensity for non-transparency, for lack of clarity in both a material and a conceptual sense, in works of art across the various disciplines. Tying these observations together, the chapter places the notion of opaque art in the context of a precarious aesthetics, the inscription of vulnerability into the formal affordances of the work itself. Acknowledging that an interrogation of ostensibly unchallengeable qualities such as transparency and clarity might represent a provocation, the chapter proposes an argument for the ethical and political values of a poetics of opacity. Important interlocutors in this chapter are Édouard Glissant, Emmanuel Levinas, Judith Butler, and Jonathan Crary.
The ambition of Chap. 2, On the Concept of Opacity in Art and Theory, is to survey an array of works that in various ways adopt (partial) illegibility as a poetic device and, more substantially, to chart the critical genealogies of the present attempt at theorizing opacity. Identifying a possible origin for the thesis that the photographic/filmic image is essentially opaque in the anti-mimetic criticism of early film theorists such as Ricciotto Canudo, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, and Rudolf Arnheim, the chapter connects their ideas with the theoretical writings of later, post-classical thinkers such as Jean-Paul Fargier, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, Jean-François Lyotard, Louis Marin, Paul Virilio, and Trinh Minh-ha. These two historically circumscribed streams of thought are then linked to more ongoing debates about indistinct art, blurry images, low definition, and visual noise in a compendium of theorists, from Hito Steyerl and Laura U. Marks to J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Martine Beugnet, Arild Fetveit, Erika Balsom, Gottfried Boehm, Hans Belting, and Christine Ross. The chapter is intended as a compressed history of ideas around the notions of what I have elsewhere termed amimetic art as well as the transparency-opacity spectrum.2 Especially significant for this discussion is the theory of the constitutive thickness of the image, the hypothesis that the transparency of the image is an illusion because the figurations captured on it are akin to a kind of semiotic crust whose inevitable presence always makes the content of the image generative rather than reflective.
What kind of document, if any, is an image that exists, precariously one might say, on the fringes of the discernible? This is the question that the next chapter tries to resolve. The subject of opaque art readily invokes matters of mediality, and this is the point of departure for Chap. 3, Boundaries of Discernibility. Here, I examine the strange and optically regenerative practices by which materially impaired images exploit their own opacity to attain a new modality of existing as a visual artifact. In order to do this, I turn toward American avant-garde cinema, in particular works by Bill Morrison and Ernie Gehr. With reference to Kazimir Malevich’s notion of “cinema as such,” the chapter argues that the use of indefinite or decaying images in films like Decasia, Dawson City: Frozen Time, Abracadabra, and the Auto-Collider series may be considered spectral in the sense suggested by Aby Warburg and Giorgio Agamben. The bulk of the chapter however is committed to an analysis of Gehr’s work and the materialization throughout his oeuvre of a poetics of opacity. The claim is put forth that this work has produced a set of recurring stylistic and thematic concerns that together come to constitute a particular aesthetic imaginary . An artist whose work spans half a century of filmmaking, Gehr has consistently been drawn toward problems involving, among other things, the materiality of the medium, visual opacity, the perception of space, urban sites, and the apparitional. Gehr’s aesthetic—equally entrancing and mystifying, rigorous yet sensual, constricting yet invigorating—embodies, the chapter claims, a post-representational mode of image-making that in existential terms is generative rather than reflective. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of the imaginary as “games of mirroring, of duplication, of reversed identification and projection,”3 the chapter shows how the aesthetic imaginary in Gehr’s cinema is perhaps most prominently figured in the phenomenon that Jacques Derrida calls phantomality.4 Examining how Gehr’s films enact a process of spatial defamiliarization, the article also ties this preoccupation with spectrality to an older art historical tradition in which the image and the ghost keep close company.
Ernie Gehr’s spectral re-animation of scraps of old silent films produces a form of opacity organized around the figure of the ruin. His filmmaking practice thus inscribes itself into a longer and deeply melancholic artistic tradition which foregrounds the poetic intensity of the fragment and of various states of degeneration. In Chap. 4, Archival Ghosts, or, the Elsewhere of the Image, we will see that in the work of the British filmmaker artist, filmmaker, and collagist John Akomfrah the trope of the ruin takes on a new guise, which is that of intertextuality. In a historical context, the intertextual fragment embodies another manifestation of the aesthetics of decay, of the ruin as an object of philosophical contemplation. In a work like The Nine Muses (2010), the ruin is no longer a natural or constr...