Dr. Cian Quayle-University of Chester
Instants of Fragmentation and Repetition – Reprise
Stream: Repetition and Technology

In his analysis of the anti dramatising and anti-dynamic effect of the archive Benjamin Buchloh (1998: 58) cites the anti-compositional force of series and repetition. Conversely Kierkegaard (1983: 131) defined repetition as a dynamic force and the founding principle of modern philosophy, as opposed to ‘recollection’ or memory. Kierkegaard made this proposition on the almost casual basis that having travelled and visited Berlin once, a return visit would reveal something hitherto undiscovered.

Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. Repetition, therefore, if it is possible makes a person happy, whereas recollection makes him un-happy - assuming, of course, that he gives himself time to live and does not promptly at birth find an excuse to sneak out of life again, for example, that he has forgotten something.

Charles Haxthausen’s essay Reproduction/Repetition: Walter Benjamin/Carl Einstein positions Einstein’s sense of repetition as a bulwark against change as opposed to Benjamin’s concept of repetition and reproducibility as a means of renewal. Whilst both writers were contemporaries neither ever met each other but were allied in their belief in the socially transformative potential of contemporary art practices (Haxthausen 2004: 47). The seemingly contradictory modes of repetition are brought to bear in the following reprise of my recent artworks alongside the impact of the work of other artists, writers and cinema.

Inventory for a Reverse Journey is an ongoing archive of photographic artefacts collected over the last twenty years. The collection includes family snapshots, found photographs, newspaper photographs, photographic postcards, and my own photographs of the same place at different points in time. What started out as a loose collection or inventory of photographic objects have been reconfigured as a metaphorical journey in space and time. The title also describes the act of physically returning to the seaside town, Douglas in the Isle of Man, where I grew up.

Alain Robbe-Grillet’s short story The Beach (1966) describes the journey of three children as they walk along the shoreline ­– their movement relative to a flock of seagulls, moving parallel but in front of them – at the water’s edge. In the repetition of accumulated detail Grillet draws the reader into the story. As a journey without destination, the children move towards the sound of church bells sounding in the distance. The trajectory of my inventory involves the viewer in a similar way in that, it is itself a journey without destination, relative to photography’s facility to manifest processes of memory.

On a Sunday morning in 1984 I shot a single roll of 35 mm black and white film of in Douglas for a school Geography project using a Kodak Retinette. A set of prints were made in the darkroom where my Uncle John Kenny worked for Harold Heaps Ltd. With hindsight they reveal a close up view of a familiar locality, which were unintentionally distanced in their objective role as documentary material. At the same time they are replete with the hidden histories and experiences of my formative years. Since these photographs were taken I have lost the negatives but kept the prints, which have travelled with me from one place to another. In 2000 I rephotographed the original 15 x 20 cm prints, in order to distance the work from its documentary origin in a substitution of the original in place of the copy. I arranged them in the studio in a sequence, which corresponds to my memory as I metaphorically retraced steps already taken. In a return to the present from the past they manifest a rupture in the image, which arises from the changing vernacular architecture of a seaside town.

These photographs show a period of social and economic transition. The Chester Street/Wellington Square area was made up of back-to-back housing. Gradually the residents of this area were relocated to make way for car parking, supermarket and office space development. A photograph uncovered in the Manx Museum Library shows the location prior to demolition, and 23 Colour Photographs (ca. 1970) is a companion series to 35 b&w photographs (fig.1) showing the same area in the late 1970’s when the demolition of the properties was already well under way.

In May 2003 I installed Return Ticket (fig.2) a sequence of twenty, 6 x 8 feet photographs along the boundary wall of the Derby Castle Depot in Douglas in the Isle of Man. The site was previously used to display posters advertising sights of historic and tourist interest, accessible by the trams of the Manx Electric Railway. These were stationed in the tram depot behind the boundary wall, which faces the sea. The sequence of images conforms to the topography of Douglas Bay, the town and its environs. The posters were pasted into each of these hoarding spaces were produced by two firms of signwriters, Chillcott and Son and Howell Robinson. Norman Howell was the father of a friend of mine at school. In conversation Norman told me how each year he hand-painted posters, which were displayed from the beginning of each season in May from 1960 - 1980. Over the course of the year, these images were subject to a gradual deterioration as a result of vandalism and adverse weather conditions as a result of gale-force storms.

The images installed as part of Return Ticket mark a specific juncture where disparate images of the past are returned in the dislocated time of the present. In these photographs the obsolete technologies of tourism and leisure, are pictured through similarly obsolete material variantsß of the photographic medium, as travelled images of the past, of that which is about to, or has already disappeared. At the same time they define a journey, the landmarks of which are irrecoverable as neither destination nor departure. In 2006 the Summerland entertainment complex was demolished.

In 1919 Sigmund Freud wrote an essay titled The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche), which foreshadows much of the content of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In German heimlich literally translates in English as ‘homely’. The uncanny is usually associated with that which arouses feelings of surprise, dread and horror because it is unfamiliar. This might include a foreign place, somewhere away from home, or in other instances, in its more benign translation, it is usually defined as that which is supernatural or otherworldly. For Freud (1990: 372) the uncanny does not lie in the realm of the supernatural or the folkloric, but in the ‘material reality’ of everyday existence.

Freud’s ruminations on the various translations and meaning of the term reveal a complex series of notions related to that which is known or familiar. These concepts are connected to a Freudian repetition of a decisive or originary experience based upon the child’s differentiation from the mother’s body followed by a recognition of the self as a separate but connected entity. It is the realisation of this originary loss or separation, which is at the basis of Freud’s practice and writng in which, a simultaneous disconnection/connection is represented by the mirror and the double, and then a repetition of that which has been lost or has become distanced (Freud 1990: 356). The transcendence of a ‘primary narcissism’ is followed by an atavistic return to that which has already been seen, but not seen, which in turn leads to an involuntary, inner compulsion to repeat a return perhaps to the same place, object or motif as if seen for the first time.

The linguistic transmutation of heimlich into unheimliche is activated “by something which is familiar or old established in the mind and which has become alienated from it, only through the process of repetition” (Freud 1990: 364). Then something familiar which should have remained hidden, lost or forgotten emerges from memory charged with the uncanny. Heimlich or that which is ‘homely’ becomes increasingly ambivalent to a point of ellipsis as it turns in on itself, and ultimately finds its opposite resurfacing as unheimliche (Freud 1990: 345-347). Freud (1990: 348).  identifies the uncanny with a loss of certainty, context and identity producing a peculiar emotional effect or a latent sensation.

Freud’s discussion of the uncanny and mourning, fused with nostalgia and melancholy are marked by the repetition and return of features or vicissitudes across successive generations as a doubling (or mirroring), dividing, unfolding, inversion and interchanging of the self (Freud 1990: 356). Repetition also serves as an energetic denial of the power of death (Freud 1990: 357) and an act of insurance against the destruction of the ego or that which has been lost. Freud’s concern with ‘material reality’ is linked to the indexicality of the photographic image, a real time/space modified as a figure of reproduction, repetition, and artifice. Photography of all the plastic arts perhaps carries the weight of this discourse.

Sites of the Habitus and the Filmic is an ongoing series of interior and exterior images of London where, until recently, I have lived for the last nine years. As a series they can be viewed as the staging points of ‘micro-journeys’ undertaken on foot, by bus and bicycle. The places seen in these images could almost be anywhere as everyday instances of retail, work and leisure. In one sense they are a collection of ‘found events’, which came about as a result of a combination of chance and familiarity through their daily use, rather than scouting, or actively seeking out their existence. Subsequently they reveal a strategy of repetitive formal and social concerns, which have established a structure for visual recognition.

Formally there are two distinct registers. Each location photographed displays a similar set of characteristics: artificially-lit by mixed lighting, usually fluorescents where night and day are indiscernible (fig.3). These images reflect the process of their formation as the act of looking and moving in these spaces is itself observed and reflected. As areas of communal use and gathering, they are scrutinised by CCTV cameras, rectilinear and convex surveillance mirrors, which strive to expand vision and monitor movement and action. In each image the position of the camera and the viewer is directed from a partial-oblique trajectory, which plunges towards an unseen vanishing point or exit. The subject focus or loci within each image is confused in an overwhelming array of visual detail as perspective-drive is flattened out in a bombardment of information.

These photographs are based upon an initial passing glimpse and further investigation during repeated visits to the same place. This might involve the daily practice of buying a pint of milk, playing a game of pool or going to the laundry. Habitus is a set of principles elaborated by Pierre Borudieu (1990: 56), which generate and organise practices and representations so affecting the disposition of individuals in society. Everyday the repetitive frequency of routine activities and behaviour in familiar surroundings is determined by where we live and work, how leisure time is spent, what we consume and where we buy it. Recent work investigates the semiotic partition between city and landscape: places of grit and struggle and base-line subsistence in the face of processes of regeneration, which relocate or marginalise communities in flux.

The exteriors are concerned with forgotten instances of landscape within the city whilst outside it, which Michel de Certeau (1984) described as ‘outer city’. Any narrative meaning is suspended as a sense of absence and loss of place cuts through.  Absence and place, space and movement, sight and vision are not simply illustrated by sight but by the reflexive process of their formation, which generates a set of relations between image, event and representation, author and viewer, original and copy, familiar and unfamiliar. They reference iconic cinematic set-pieces filmed in London by Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow Up, 1966), and Stanley Kubrick (Clockwork Orange, 1971).

Influenced by Pepys, Dickens and other literature of the city, including a London A – Z Guide Book, Bob Gilbert’s The Green London Way, Rachel Lichtenstein, Ian Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory (1998) and Peter Ackroyd’s London (2001) I decided to embark upon a walking journey taking in Maryon Park, Woolwich in South East London. I prepared for this by making a series of drawings whilst watching Blow-up (1966) of specific points of view in order to replicate the same, seen in the stills represented within the moving image of the film.

The film presents a set of reversals, which trace an elliptical journey, whereby the protagonist and viewer gradually uncover the scene of a crime – an event of which the photographer Thomas played by David Hemmings is unwittingly and ultimately the sole witness. In a re-enactment of the cinematic event, each still image corresponds to my own journey, which retraced the journey in a search for the location where the denouement of the film takes places in an enclosed wooded clearing within the city (fig.4). The photographer is then taken on a journey as he is carried forth into a previously unseen realm of information as he develops the prints in the darkroom and scrutinises the enlarged images on the studio wall. Thomas is then compelled to return to the same place to observe the ‘truth’ of what he has documented at a distance.

In Roland Barthes (1977: 64) essay The Third Meaning the memory of black and white stills displayed outside cinemas leads to his concept of the filmic, an ‘imperishable signature’, which operates as a ‘field of displacement’. The filmic is described not as a sample but rather ‘the trace of a superior distribution of traits’ (Barthes 1977: 67). A singular image isolated from a sequence suggests a simultaneous condensation and negation of narrative as it immobilises its own formation. The photographs, which comprise the series Maryon Park 1 - 14, are a step further removed from their precursor in Blow Up.

All of Antonioni’s films feature a return to places once inhabited or a location where an event has taken place, which are now empty except for the presence of that emptiness (Rohdie 1990: 172). This is accentuated in the film by the trace and feel of that absence and the disappearance of the photographer at the end of the film when he returns to the park for the final time. This loss of context is also prescient in Antonioni’s other films Red Dessert (1964) and The Passenger (1975).

These images reveal the time and space of their production as a sequence of images set apart from the film as the camera plots its own movement and stasis in a shift from what is ‘seen’ to the act of ‘seeing’ itself (Rohdie 1990:152). At a point of rupture the event and its object, or copy form a set of displaced relations. Barthes (1977: 64) notion of the filmic refers to ‘the inside of the fragment’, which cannot easily be described in language, the representation of that which cannot be represented.

Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork Orange is based upon Anthony Burgess’s dystopian vision of the future, and like Blow-up is concerned with what de Certeau  (1984) described as the ‘tyranny of vision’. In the film Alex played by Malcolm McDowell is a juvenile delinquent who undergoes a psychological transformation whereby he is returned to a point of departure similar to the photographer in Blow Up. Early in the film Alex is engaged in a power struggle with his fellow droogs, a situation, the outcome of which occurs along the walkway near to Alex’s home, Municipal Flatblock 18A Linear North where he lives with his parents. The location used in the film is Thamesmead Estate in South East London to which I returned to make these images along Brindley Walk situated beside Southmere Lake. In my photographs the spectrum of reality is deflected by the documentary graphic qualities of a black and white photographic image, reminiscent of the utopian architectural aspirations behind this development, which began in 1962.

In these images the city becomes an immersive social experience of lacking a place. These images mark a changeover of ‘place’ to ‘space’ measured by perspective driven ‘vectors of direction, velocity and time variables’ (de Certeau 1984: 117). In these images there is a sense of timelessness and dislocation exaggerated by the chromatic illumination of artificially lit interiors presented in lightboxes, and the graphic intensity of the black and white chemical printing. Each set of images, as both series and sequence, elucidate an exercise in repetition which stretch the modalities of vision until communication itself becomes a visual journey. De Certeau was concerned with the status of individuals in technical systems, detached yet unable to escape. The contemporary significance of both films is the psychological and moral issues at stake, which remain current and unresolved. The silence of these spaces suggests an elsewhere as they evoke memories of other places either real, dreamed of or secondary images and representations dislocated from an original home – interchangeable in their repetition as either Sites of the Habitus and the filmic.

References

Barthes, R. (1977) The Third Meaning. In: Image Music Text. Ed. & trans. C.S. Heath, London: Fontana Press.

Blow Up, 1966. 35 mm film, Eastman Colour, 125 mins. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Great Britain: MGM/ Carlo Ponti.

Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Buchloh, B.H.D. (1998) Atlas, Warburg’s Paragon? The End of Collage and Photomontage in Postwar Europe. In: I. Schaffner & M. Winzen, eds. Deep Storage – Collecting Storing, and Archiving in Art, New York: Prestel.

Certeau, M. de (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Clockwork Orange, 1971.  35mm film, colour, 136 mins. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Great Britain: Warner/Polaris (Bernard Williams)

Haxthausen, C.W. (2004) Reproduction/Repetition: Walter Benjamin/Carl Einstein. October 107, Winter, pp.47-74.

Kierkegaard, S. (1983) Fear and Trembling Repetition – An Adventure in Experimental Psychology. Ed. Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Robbe-Grillet, A. (1966) The Beach. In: P. Lyon, ed. French Short Stories, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd.

Rohdie, S. (1990) Antonioni, London: BFI