Herve Guibert, Ghost Image

Herve Guibert's L'Image fantome was published initially in 1982. The English translation, Ghost Image (Green Integer), by Robert Bononno, I have came out in 1996, from Sun & Moon Press, and is available currently from Green Integer Press. The book is comprised of short written pieces which were published originally in Le Monde. A posthumous volume, La Photo, inéluctablement, was published in 1999, which has not yet appeared in English.

Guibert, known primarily for his books, also photographed. Several years ago I saw an exhibition of his photos at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, on upper Fifth Ave., just below the Met, & I have a book published by Schirmer/Mosel. From 1993! (It seems so not so long ago).

The pieces in Ghost Image are short, some the length of a paragraph. Although notable photographers are mentioned (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, August Sander), the pieces discuss photography in the everyday: Family photos, identity photos, album covers, film stills, etc., as well as the acts of photographing, the tensions & disappointments of it. I enjoyed particularly an account of an adolescent infatuation with a still of Terence Stamp in the Fellini film Toby Dammit (in which Guibert mistakenly refers to the Stamp character as the devil, when in fact Stamp is more a Swinging London version of Faust, who has sold his soul). There is a diaristic aspect to the writing - family episodes are recounted, memory is intertwined with photography - and it is public and brief, in a form that is perhaps more familiar to blog readers of today. Truly, it seems prescient of so much web writing now, although with a much more delirious perversity and greater powers of observation:

. . . I recall an incident that made a great impression on me when I was 8 or 9 years old. My sister was 12 or 13 at the time, and her breasts were just beginning to develop; high and firm, we had already seen them at the beach the year before, but that was the last time, because the following year they were covered up by a bra. That morning, it must have been a Sunday, my sister was locked in the bathroom. My father was at the door, camera in hand, trying to get in. He said, without hiding his intention, that he wanted to photograph his daughter's breasts, because at that age, the moment of their initial formation, they are at the height of their beauty, and if they weren't photographed then, that state of perfection would be lost. That was the extent of his argument. At the time, he sadly renounced his failed attempt at appropriation through the image and fought against that limit; he wanted to push back by a notch the phase of abandonment, of renunciation and at the same time, extend his role as a father in order to assume that of a lover within the conventions of voyeurism, for between the father and the lover, desire was probably not very different. . . "Inventory of a Box of Photographs"

Photography, in Guibert's book, is a multiplicity of effects. It is a technological reinforcement of morbid curiosities, it facilitates social controls, it supplants memories, dreams and perceptions, replacing them with its own mediated Olympus of illusions.In "Photographic Writing" Guibert finds photographic aspects in descriptive writings by Goethe and Kafka - looking backward from the perspective of the technological present to a pre-photography concealed in language. Without any direct quotations, I find traces of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Roland Barthes in Guibert's considerations of the social aspects of photography. Barthes makes an appearance as "R.B." in "The Photograph, As Close to Death as Possible" which is an account of Guibert approaching R.B. to photograph him with his ailing mother, who in the interim, died. Guibert presents his own lust for photographing in equivocal terms: it is morbid, it is fetishistic, it is selfish. & the compulsion can be sweet as well.

Written with almost aphoristic brevity, these episodes of photography seem both exceedingly particular & also informed with much larger ideas. To continue with photographic metaphors, these vignettes are like snapshots, fragments which indicate a much larger whole. I last read the book in what must have been 1996-1997, when the translation was published. Rereading it has been as stimulating as I can recall it to have been, with what seems new finds:

A Japanese dancer from the Sankai Juku group dances with a peacock. His entire body is very white, powdered with white clay, and his head is shaved. He wears nothing but a plain linen loincloth tied around his waist and stands out in relief against a wooden backdrop to which varnished fishtails and enormous fins from some cetacean have been attached. He embraces the peacock like a woman in a swoon, and the pattern on the bird's plumage extends his loincloth with a gold-flecked train. We can see that the peacock's thighs and feet are very muscular, like an ostrich, but the dancer keeps them bent, broken at the joints, and immobilized in his left hand, pressed against his side. His right hand encircles the peacock's neck, stretches it, plays with it as if it were a delicate instrument, squeezes it almost to the point of strangling it. Everything is limited to a few contractions, and to the flow of blood, which he must feel and control with his palm: the Japanese dances a kind of slow-motion tango with the peacock, he dances with the peacock's fear, with its vital fear of death. It really is an extraordinary moment, one of great tension, great beauty. But when the dancer releases the terrified peacock, we no longer know where to look, and our eye, which wanders between the dancer and the bird, loses its orientation. The peacock is nothing but a big terrified fowl who scratches around stupidly and snares itself in the cord that restrains its feet. The dancer is nothing but a dancer gesturing slowly. Our fascination has worn off, and rather than be deceived, we prefer to divert our gaze to the empty space between them, where the magic was created, the site of a latent photograph. Morever, when the Sankai Juko group came to Paris, many people, many photographers, returned to the performance with their cameras mounted on tripods. They bought seats in the front row and waited for the appearance of the peacock. They fired away - they were guaranteed beauty. That eminently photographic image, however, doesn't belong to them (what is it that eludes photography here, except the infintesimal movements of contraction of the peacock's neck, which are essential to the dance?), it belongs to the dancer, and he has decided that this will be a dance and not a photograph. And we might reiterate that beauty, like theater, is tied to the ephemeral, and to loss, and can't be captured. Only I would prefer that photographers put more dance (or theater, or cinema) into their pictures, just as the dancer had put photography into his dance. - "Dance"

afternoons in Chelsea (NY)

When I moved to NYC in 1981 the majority of contemporary art galleries were in SoHo. At that time it felt rather bourgeois - large industrial spaces had been stripped - brick walls, new blank walls of drywall, white walls & polished wood floors. High ceilings. Victorian accents (moldings, etc.), tall windows. The not-so-past epoch of an artists district seemed long-gone. I must confess that my 2 earliest artistic encounters in SoHo were 1) going to an opening of faux Pre-Raphaelite paintings (mostly self-portraits I believe) by Norris Church, i.e. Mrs. Norman Mailer, which was high society but not necessarily high art by any means, on West Broadway, & 2) being taken by a friend from Ann Arbor, who had come to NYC the year before, to a loft presided over by (although this meant nothing at the time) Hannah Wilke. All I recall is we had to chew gum & give it back & my friend Deborah later laughed, "she thinks all women are goddesses!" which may or may not have much of anything to it. I thought the paintings of Norris Church rather tacky & I had no sense of Hannah Wilke as a great radical artist. In terms of the latter: my loss!

I bring this up, for if anything, SoHo in 1981 looked remarkably store-bought & fancy & it had the highest concentration of contemporary art galleries in NYC at the time, distinct from the more staid galleries of 57th St., or the Upper East Side (perhaps most vivid fictionally in the film of Portrait of Jenny - an elegant walk-up presided over by Ethel Barrymore - if only it were really like that) - large, flashy, carved out of an industrial past. If anything, my sense of this in terms of scale has nothing to do w/ the excesses of mercantilism which were to follow.

Chelsea followed, like any urban sprawl, further out & bigger, better. Huge galleries became bigger. Some of the area was quite abject & the development of the area included the closure of the 2 leather bars in the city - The Spike & The Eagle, otherwise louche destinations facing the West Side Highway & the Hudson river. One could be edified rather than hit on. The distance from the subway & the distance from most other things are both a hindrance in terms of getting there conveniently & a mark of exclusivity.

W/ a few day off this past week I went to a few shows in Chelsea. The most interesting one was the Thomas Hirschhorn installation "Universal Gym" at the Barbara Gladstone gallery on 21st st. In his customary use of mass-produced generic materials, corrugated cardbord & packing tape, Hirschhorn made the gallery a sick simulacrum of a gym - mirrors, weights, machines - a factory of bodies, fitness, health, sociability. This is quite dark & critical. I also admire Hirschhorn for using thoroughly temporal materials - this is a conservator's nightmare yet o so vivid. I can't help but make a correlation between Hirschhorn's materials & the Wanda Jackson song "The Box It Came Home In" which will be "all satin-lined" - this is about death in life, a pre-purchased lot of nothingness, mass-produced. Existence as nullification.

At Andrew Kreps, a group photo show, w/ a lousy premise/statement, nevertheless had 2 bodies of work which stood out. 1) a print by Liz Deschenes - Liz is one of the great artists working today & her photographs, which confront photographic technologies & visual culture, have so much to say about our interactions with images & the experiences, both physical & historical, & how that occurs. Somewhere I recall reading a statement by Susan Sontag to the effect that the essence of thinking is the word "but" - which is what I think of when I see Liz's photographs. To describe her images does not address their visceral quality - their presence.

The other curious body of work in the show is by Annette Kelm, a triptych of Herbert Tobias album covers. This brings to mind an essay by the late Herve Guibert about record album covers, their tactility & resonance as sensuous objects & their primacy as aethetic experiences. Herbert Tobias was a great German gay photographer in the 1950s & 1960s. His commercial work for Deutsche Grammophon is both kitsch & trendy & meant to be ephemeral, a kind of post-WWII modernism - the subjective photography of Otto Steinert, applied in a commercial field. Kelm's use of the images invokes a historical recovery in seemingly trivial work to reveal a worldview of myth, culture & longing.