photography, sculpted by D.Païni

Photography, sculpedHenri Foucault: photography, sculpted


It is now, already, ancient history: the legitimacy of the photographic initiative lies in the flat, illusionist reconstitution of volumes and reliefs. Thus reduced, photographic necessity and desire are too simple, and at the same time infinitely complex. Still, there is no doubt about it: what we look for, paradoxically, in the photographic representation of bodies and things, both optically and sensorially, is mass rather than outline, substance rather than evanescence, and volumetric modulation rather than diaphanous stretchings of surfaces. The essence of art consists in wanting to see and think the opposite of what a given artistic material permits or promises. And this is the contradiction on the basis of which Henri Foucault's work has developed and flourished.

Between specificity and critical commentary

In the 1990s, Foucault was identified as a sculptor, though I recall having talked about his approach as being both sculptural and photographic. Each, I said, was a metaphor of the other. The variations of the Projections series – small spatial illusions, infinite in their metamorphoses – systematically looked at the polyhedron in all its different forms.
Foucault (who studied with Isabelle Waldberg) learned early on that photography had long been in the service of sculpture. Bayard and his plaster casts, Steichen and Rodin, Brancusi – and Foucault himself – demonstrated that photography in the 20th century often played second fiddle to sculpture; and not only by reproducing models, as it did with painting, but specifically through its apotheosis of marble, bronze, plaster, clay, wood, steel – in a word, anything that could be cut into, scratched, scraped, hammered, moulded, broken, agglomerated, polished, pulled – in order to exalt, and freeze, the ephemeral lighting that heightens or softens, unveils or distorts.
Brancusi took photographic responsibility deep into the art of sculpting. For him (and Foucault very soon arrived at the same conclusion) a photograph of a sculpture was not a mere snapshot, but a new production of the sculpted work. In other words, photography was re-production by other means, even if, at the start of this infinite process of possible dialogue, there had to be a sculptural object in three dimensions.
It has been said that Brancusi (an unexpected friend of Marcel Duchamp) saw photography as a way to make, so to speak, transportable duplications of his sculptures. But it has recently been established that, apart from its ability simply to display works of art, photography, for Brancusi, was as a type of commentary that could emulate the critical perspective: "What is the point of sculpture?… Why write?… Why not simply show photos?", he once said.
Brancusi saw photography as a parallel activity, quasi-epistemological, that had forgotten about aesthetics and fidelity. And Man Ray, in his autobiography, also seemed to suggest as much: "[Brancusi] showed me a print that Stieglitz had sent him… It was one of his marble sculptures, and the lighting and grain were perfect. He said he found the photo very beautiful, but that it didn't represent his work, which only he would know how to photograph." Brancusi asked Man Ray to teach him the basic techniques, and the sculptor then "worked by himself, without consulting me any more. He showed me his prints some time later. They were fuzzy, over-exposed or under-exposed, scratchy and smudged. That, he said, was how his work ought to be reproduced." This distinction – and unification, at the same time – between sculpture and photography, comparable to the relationship between doing and analysing, has been a crucial feature of Henri Foucault's progress towards artistic maturity.

Photography as sculpture

Sculpture and its photographic reproduction were mutually independent – and with good reason – for several millenia, but in the 20th century photography robbed sculpture of its object-quality, while conferring on it "the broadest signification of style that it could assume". As Malraux pointed out: "Photographic reproduction brought us world sculpture." Beyond this photographic Messianism, there was another aesthetic era of substitutions and metaphors: the bicycle wheel or the urinal could easily be copied, but photography also ensured the permanence of their audacity by mnemotechnical means, to the point where it became clear that these "simple objects" could in fact give rise to real, rich complexity through photographic reproduction. And after all (or rather, before all), Duchamp's "ready-made" objects achieved artisticity on the strength of their photographic representation.

The temptation of movement

For many years, Foucault saw no reason to venture outside sculpture. His volumes, made of composites (different metals, industrial materials), were in some ways successors of works from the 1920s – Tatlin's Counter-Reliefs, or Pevsner's geometrical busts – but they also recalled the compact character of certain sculptures by Auguste Herbin, dating from the same period. Recalling the giant spinnning tops, the large tumbler dolls and the circus stools for animal acts, they were not seeking an exogenous raison d'être. And this is why his research at that time might be regarded as an examination of sculptural specificity.
An essential part of his work up to the 1980s was concerned with the relationship between mass and equilibrium. Axe zéro, a column made of piled-up monumental bolts deliberately set at an angle, along with the powerful offsetting force of Circum, formed a splendid ensemble of circus furniture that appeared to be carried away by the tilting, the toppling, the roll, the irreversible instability. But there was nothing exceptional about this way of expressing movement, except for the means employed. Neither Calderian mobiles nor stabiles, nor op art patterns, these sculptures were for a long time drawn towards a type of movement that remained potential. Film held its attractions for the avid moviegoer Foucault, but in the end it was the immobility of the photographic imprint, and thus a sort of petrification within the flow of time, that gave him his decisive orientation. Up to the present time, his interest in the cinema has come out most explicitly in an extraordinary enterprise of inventorying the titles of televised films belonging to the classical pantheon. And it is precisely the most static components of films, i.e. their titles and credits, that motivate Foucault the sculptor – which is significant, because I suspect him of being more interested in light than in movement.

The temptation of light

As a result of his conjugated experiments on light and the plane, Foucault turned his attention to photography. This involved a confrontation – which was difficult to overcome, but at the same time fascinating, to the point of absorption – between two disciplines: the slow fashioning of a volume and the lightning speed of the photographic act. He believed that photography could supply a synthesis of questions relating to space; but at that point new questions came up, regarding time. Using photography, or more precisely "the photographic", he displaced heterogeneity from the materials he worked with to the kinds of time that entered into his work. Polishing, bending, cutting and assembling were operations that involved capturing, developing and printing.
In other words, Foucault fused the very ideas of sculpture and photography to a higher degree than what is generally recognised as their technical and conceptual articulation. There were multiple prints and imprints, the making of points (with the "pinning" method for determining the co-ordinates of volumes by the transfer of reference points), and transitions from the vague to the clear-cut.
But the multiple Photogramme-inox series – with wire held in different configurations against photographic plates, on which it left the luminous trace of its pressure – comprised two events, two contradictory movements from the point of view of their temporality alone: a steady (but delicate) pressure and a short (but harsh) exposure to light. The resulting photogram, enclosed in a multi-metallic casing that suggested a box for storing radioactive material, transcribed the ephemeral volume of the wire, in the form of a spring, into a spiral line, a photonic scrawl; as if the volume, frozen by the speed of the photographic recording, had been subjected, and reduced, to the plane of representation. And thus it is that Foucault might claim to have given the lie to Rodin's maxim: "There are no lines, only reliefs."
It was probably with this series that he took the decisive step towards a still subtler, more indissociable fusion of sculpture and photography.
But I should have said "photography and sculpture", because this was the order in which they occurred in the execution of the imposing and impressive new proposals that went into the making of the Sosein and the Satori.

Sosein

This series was begun in 2000. And it is hard to imagine a better fit between the concepts of photography and sculpture. Better still, it is photographic material, properly speaking, that is sculpted; and it is the plate, imprinted by light, that is attacked by a perforating tool. There is no chisel or gouge, but a tool that makes holes and takes away matter, putting forward a significant alternative to normal sculptural procedure ("per levare", in Michelangelo's legendary term).
The human figures of the Sosein were made by the photogram technique, with the direct imprint of bodies on photosensitive emulsion. There is a double planeness: the photographic plane is overlaid by the shadow of a body without the corrective anamorphosis of a lens that could produce a volumetric illusion. This technique replaces detail by a luminescent field, giving prominence to a halo of grey tones with clearly-defined outlines, and flattening the light-and-shadow modelling into a subtle texture. The choice of technique is not gratuitous; it gives greater legitimacy to the subsequent action, which consists of working on the surface of the photographic paper, making holes in a repetitive pixel-like pattern (reminiscent of Lichtenstein's dilated proportions). After this removal of matter, which has something of the act of sculpting about it, Foucault superimposes strips of the perforated photographic paper with successive small shifts in such a way as to produce a ripple effect, a shimmer, an alternation of shadows (the black background) and light (the whiteness of the bodily impressions), thereby conceptually and visually reconstituting the volumes of the bodies, and their shapes, which had been obliterated by the photographic flattening-out. He does not try to manufacture an illusion of bodies, even though they are reproduced life-size, but he does create, in both the literal and the figurative sense, an illusion of sculpture by cutting into the paper. And as a result of the superimposition process, the surface quivers in the vibration of an epidermis, replicating the trembling of a profile, the agitation of bodily topology. This is photography recalling what sculpture means, as though the former were tapping into the theory of the latter in the same way that the cinema did with the theatre, as Louis Jouvet's famous dictum had it.
The title of this series is semantically elusive. Foucault says he took it from Adorno's writings on the artistic representation of the human body after the Holocaust, and particularly Minima Moralia. The word itself is difficult to translate, but it means something like "being thus" – the enigma, then, of these bodies that appear to take flight, to escape the pull of gravity and the usual equilibrium of the human body freed from a part of its materiality in a way that depicts, paradoxically, its volume. Is this Foucault's comment on an unrepresentable assault against the body, a frankly formalist way of talking about its destruction, an abominable transformation of human flesh into rising clouds, an unthinkable atomisation of the incarnation that photography and sculpture ideally metaphorise in their merging?

Satori

"Per levare… aggiungere adesso". The Satori are the most recent works; they are close to (and yet opposed to) the previous series. The main action does not involve substraction, removal or lightening, but addition, overload, accumulation. It is not a matter of carving or cutting, but of filling, covering, expanding.
Photograms of bodies pictured (more deliberately than ever) as levitating provide the initial image-material for an act that is clearly sculptural. Foucault launches thousands of small, shiny pins into an invasion of the light-matt photographic surface. The photographed bodies, reduced to opaque white shadows, capture light and regain their shapes thanks to luminous tremors undulating over the surface of the metallically erectile epidermis that glistens in the rays of light and the moving eye of the viewer. The matt quality of the photographic paper contrasts with the brightness of the steel points. And it is curious to think that sculpture and needlework should have something in common – a mutual interest in assemblages, of course, but more essentially the act of pinning. Polishing and "un-polishing", making matt and smooth: such operations are carried out both on stone (or metal) and on fabrics.

Constructing, conceptualising

The chapter on sculpture in Diderot's Encyclopédie was written by Etienne-Maurice Falconet, who ruefully remarked that the relationship of sculpture to light was insufficiently recognised. But he also insisted, and with a certain euphoria, on the metamorphoses of matter under the changing action of light, and on the way in which solid forms, definitively determined, reacted to the free play of light. This is also Foucault's conviction, and he has demonstrated that sculpture, just as much as the phenomenon (and the art) of photography, is produced by light. His thousands of steel pins naturally recall the previously-stated idea about making points, and pinning. And it is possible to see them as a forest of points, analogous to dots in a photographic reproduction. This would also fit in with the title of the series, Satori, which Roland Barthes took from Zen culture, and which denotes an illumination of consciousness, a shaking-up of certainties, a shock of lucidity. Illumination, shaking-up, shock: this is the test to which photographic matter submits when it places itself at the risk of sculpture. But the result keeps alive the memory of light tattooed on sensitive skin, in other words a surface of sculpted film.

This presentation of Henri Foucault's recent work will conclude with the question: What is its central issue? For some thirty years, the conceptual project of art has taken precedence over any other ambition, playing down the actions of the hand, physical procedures, or material elaboration. I am tempted to sum up the debates that agitate the world of contemporary creative activity by suggesting (in reductivist fashion) that the "gaseous state" of art has won out over the "skill" aspect. Foucault's works assert themselves forcefully in constructivist actuality, untainted by any suspicion of disdain for workmanlike skills, but also technically adroit, with no fear of formalist delectation, and above all strongly sustained by conceptual clarity with regard to the joint practice of sculpture and photography.
This oeuvre, which is now reaching a mature phase, constitutes a response to the discouragement of lassitude and derision, cynicism, and sacrifice to facile, passing fads. As an integral part of art history, it exposes conflicts of reason between the depths of things and the illusionist surface of representation. Physically unsettled by the real world, it brings together stability and weightlessness. Supremely reflective, it alternates labour and reverie.

D.Païni