Like a quivering of armour by Didier Semin

Like a quivering of armour: Henri Foucault's Satori

Among the works of the sculptor Geoffroy-Dechaume which were recently on show at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, there is a surprising object: a plaster cast of a woman's back, so finely executed that it even bears the imprint of the quivering that came over the model during the pose. This moulded body, frozen into eternal immobility, seems to offer itself up to us. And it does indeed have goose-flesh. The artist has captured and consigned to a safe place for all time, as one might say (with apologies to Rilke ), this modest revolt of the epidermis as a response to real emotions – sentiments born out of cold, fear or desire. A specialist could naturally explain away the phenomenon by pointing out that plaster heats up as it dries, but one may well wonder if the quivering did not have a slightly more "unmentionable" cause. And the imperceptible pattern graven in the moulding is the most provocative of invitations to reach out and touch. Indeed, it took the whole institutional power of the museum, and all the vigilance of the attendants, to prevent the exhibition in which the piece was presented – engagingly entitled A fleur de peau ("Skin-deep") – from turning into a den of shameless excess.
Henri Foucault's Satori are not unrelated to this amazing suspension of a fleeting emotion. Even from afar, one instantly recognises them as photograms (photographs taken without a camera). A body has lain on photosensitive paper, in which (so to speak) it has aroused an emotion without the filter of an optical apparatus, or the action of any intermediary. The image rises from its substrate like heat from a bed one has just left. It radiates. But there is something in the grain of the Satori that does not really belong to the seduction of the photogram, with its particular immediacy. Coming closer, one discovers that the brilliance, which is somehow too intense, is emitted by a myriad of pins stuck in the paper as though by a maniacal acupuncturist. Here too, the skin of the model in the photograph has goose-flesh. But it is goose-flesh in chrome steel: a quivering, and yet it could traverse plates of armour, thus jarringly reminding us that the apparent heat over which we were about to get so worked up just a moment ago is really nothing other than the metallic coldness of silver salts.
What is it that attracts our attention in this caprice – which is patently aberrant, consisting as it does of pins in their thousands pushed into images of women – other than a possible streak of the sadism exhibited by clerks for whom pins are (or were) the tools of their trade, gross after gross? What is it that catches our eye, and, far from merely getting us shrugging our shoulders, pulls us back again to the surface, shimmering and hostile, of these photograms riddled with holes?
We may not be sufficiently aware that in spite of its relatively simple production process, a photogram is an infinitely complex image – something like a modulated shadow, a silhouette in volume combining two types of operation that are meant to be incompatible: one linear, the other pictorial. A body placed on a photosensitive surface appears, in effect, both clear-cut and vague, as if drawn by Dürer and painted by Rembrandt. Within a well-defined outline, the light that insinuates itself inexorably between the body and the medium forms clouds, mists, and halos very like those that Hyppolite Baraduc (and the few mediumistic photographers who were not out-and-out charlatans) sincerely took for images of spirits, or auras. And so the aura, in a photogram, is paradoxically confined to the strict limits of a delineated silhouette, and does not emanate from the body as a sort of aureole, but mysteriously remains a captive of its palpable boundaries; because there is no doubt that in an image it is the clarity of the contour that most surely awakens the memory of touch. It is skin that one caresses, not fog. The contradiction is marvellously illustrated in Corregio's Jupiter and Io, now in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum; and there can be few stranger representations of a kiss than this impossible embrace between a woman and a cloud – except perhaps the spectral photogram of Man Ray kissing Kiki of Montparnasse in 1922. Henri Foucault's manual perforation of his photograms attenuates, in a way, the indistinctness that is inherent in this kind of image, and brings some contour (if I may be pardoned the expression) to the breast of the vaporous being who is in fact the exact opposite, and who holds out so successfully against being captured by drawing. We might also note, in this regard, that to express "even smoke" through lines was proclaimed as a slogan by Ingres.
It might be fair to say that this plethora of pins brings us back to the point. Foucault's seemingly disconcerting action is really a mise au point, in the vocabulary of both the photographer and the sculptor. In sculpture, reference points on the original model (a plaster cast, for example) are marked with tacks. Transferred mechanically onto a block of stone, using a compass, these points allow one to make an approximate copy. Given enough of them, one ends up with a faithful transposition of the model to the stone. And it is always a moving experience to find such marks on a plaster cast in a dusty corner of a studio or a museum: I recall a preliminary model for a Venus which from a distance seemed to be dappled with beauty spots, and this made it even more appealing than the definitive version in polished marble. One forebear of the mise aux points was Leonard da Vinci's famous box with holes bored in its sides, into which pegs could be slid so as to produce a kind of replica of an object placed in the box. This system is complex only in appearance, being very easy to represent, and one can buy a "gadget" (in the sense of something that does not any longer – or not yet – merit the name of "art", though sharing with a work of art the fact of lacking any real utility) which is a successor of Leonardo's device. We have all seen one, in the form of an improvised Christmas present: a wooden board full of holes into which steel rods can be inserted. Pressed against an object (a hand or a face, for example), the play of light on the rods produces an amusing image, curiously simplified. The closer the spacing of the rods, the greater the number of reference points, and thus the more faithful the image. In this summary version, the mise aux points comes out distinctly as what it actually is: a sophisticated version of a moulding technique. It is a way of producing image-traces, or indices, another of whose many forms is, of course, photography. The missing link between Leonardo's box and the "gadget" is perhaps supplied by a curiosity that was invented in the 19th century by the sculptor Frédéric Sauvage: "Le Physionotype mouleur pour reproduction de portraits grandeur naturelle" ("the Physionotype moulding apparatus for the reproduction of life-size portraits"). It is satisfying to think that such a thing should have survived, despite both its impossible name and its consignment to the dustbin of technical history, at the cost of giving up any claim to art… But that is another story. The Satori, in the end, constitute a highly paradoxical mise au point of a hazy surface, not as a photographer would do it but by borrowing the "inappropriate" technique of a sculptor transferring the form of his model. It is admittedly a vain exercise from the practical point of view, though infinitely disturbing in the way it brings to life large expanses of sculptural memory, woven into that of painting and its more recent manifestations, photography and the cinema. For film-lovers, the curiously scintillating surface of Foucault's photograms will recall Alexandr Alexeyev's "screen of pins" effect, which has given animated cinema some of its finest masterpieces, though with Foucault the pins do not emphasise the delicacy of the model or the slanting light. The random nature of their implantation in the Satori produces, rather, a ripple effect, a small maze in which the eye loses its way. And this is also the dominant factor in another of Foucault's series, the Sosein, which can be likened to the abstract part of his work. There is an appeal to the sense of touch, in the first instance; but the tactile appetency that the glossy Braille generates in the fingertips is doomed to disappointment. Seeing and touching are contiguous experiences: neither is wholly independent of the other, and they enrich each other as a string on a musical instrument communicates a little of its own vibration to its neighbour. But it is always with a certain uneasiness that one comes back to the original solidarity of senses that have so long been separated out. Max Nordau, one of those psychiatrists who, at the end of the 19th century, were extremely worried by the upsurge of modernity, regarded the phenomena of sense-confusion that were so exalted in the arts (one example being the coloured hearing in Rimbaud's Sonnet des Voyelles) as a sign that humanity was regressing towards a primitive evolutionary stage of invertebrates comprising a single reactive membrane that would do duty as an organ of both sight, touch, hearing and smell – a very distant ancestor of our own highly-differentiated sense organs… In their apparently modest content, Foucault's Satori display something of this sense-confusion, which is all the more unnerving, and imperious, for the desire and sexuality it implies. The object that is most reminiscent of these pin-punctured images is one of Marcel Duchamp's studies for Etant Donnés, which is intimately linked to the body, and to desire. It is a silhouette traced on a sheet of plexiglass and pierced with a myriad of holes, suggesting the pouncing technique for transferring perforated drawings to a wall by the use of a fine powder, or again an unorthodox, relatively crude system of mise aux points; though in fact it is difficult to tell exactly how Duchamp intended to use it. Arturo Schwartz, who included this sheet of plexiglass as No. 534 in his catalogue raisonné, described it as "a working tool rather than an autonomous work of art" – though indeed much the same could be said of almost every object produced by Duchamp… Whatever its function, in any case, this "study" belongs to the same category as the Satori: that of obsessional images of a female body that is not simply content to remain an enigma, but will fight with perverse thoroughness to literally pierce the veil of secrecy, to pitilessly stake out every inch of it. The erotic, macabre figure in Etant Donnés occupies one side of this terrain, while at the other side there is the bewitched medical imagery that was produced in the Salpêtrière hospital, or again Régnard's irresistible portraits of the young Augustine. And the Satori stand somewhere between these extremes. Like Duchamp's study, they objectify the metaphor of the piercing look within the medium itself. Like Charcot's medical photographs, they contain images of ambiguous bodies that yield themselves up and at the same time hold themselves back, gripped by a trembling that is also a kind of armour. After all, what one calls goose-flesh can also be seen as a miniature hysteria, a simultaneous reflex of defence and flight in response to the idea of a caress, a yes and no murmured in the language of the body alone… As we know, the portraits of the young hysterics in the Salpêtrière gave André Breton a model for what he called "convulsive beauty", which was entirely circumscribed by pairs of antagonistic adjectives: erotic-veiled, exploding-fixed, magical-circumstantial . To talk about convulsions, and the regime of the oxymoron, corresponds exactly to the experience of a contradiction between desire and its negation, which is how the psychiatrists define hysteria. It is up to the individual to decide whether (like the doctors) to look at "madness" as the beauty of hysteria, or (like the surrealists) to look at "beauty" as this same madness… Foucault's superb photographs, with their pins in the shape of arrested fireworks displays, are decidedly of the "exploding-fixed" variety. But they are also unquestionably "erotic-veiled". And there is an undeniable magic in their light as it shines out through the contingency of – the humble pin.
According to Jack Kerouac's definition , the Japanese word "satori" means a "sudden enlightenment", an "abrupt awakening" or a "dazzling of the eye". And one can hardly avoid thinking that it has much in common with photography, especially in the latter's "exploding-fixed" aspect. Foucault did not choose his title at random: these vibrant but inaccessible metal bodies, exacerbatedly nude, and retrenched behind the shimmering that we admire so much, are in a sense the epitome of photography – its blazon, or its emblem. The pins of which they are made join the semantic constellation which, between the mise au point and Roland Barthes's punctum, mysteriously, and as though necessarily, unites photography to the point and the pointed, the pierced – perhaps because, after all, a lens is never any more than a pinhole in a camera obscura…

Didier Semin