Should We Put an End to Projection

Should We Put an End to Projection?*

DOMINIQUE PAÏNI

Translated by Rosalind E. Krauss

OCTOBER 110, Fall 2004, pp. 23–48. © 2004 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Should we put an end to projection at the end of this century, at the end ofthis millennium?

The advent of technological innovation both in art and in communication—we must be determined to inscribe these two words in their reciprocal proximityand their irreducibility—suggests such a possibility.

Projection arises from a little known history belonging to the fields ofphysics, of geometry, of optics, of psychology, of pictorial representation, of showbusiness [spectacle]. In its shortest definition, the most ordinary dictionary relaysthe equivocal character of the word: the action of projecting images on a screenand the representation of a volume on a flat surface. Spectacle and geometry,fields of activity far from each other, are mixed in the same word. With the slideor the film, it is nonetheless a matter of a comparable result: a volume transferredto a surface, illusion and geometric codification, mirage and science.

To the word project, common sense associates the words envision, imagine, pre-meditate, foresee, as much as eject, expel, throw, push. Put otherwise, words that evoke theactivities of thought as much as of physical or bodily exertion. However, if we narrowour use of projection, this is tied to the luminous transport of images, and if at thesame time we try to list the greatest possible number of categories of image withoutconsideration of the field of application or their practical or symbolic use, we spon-taneously perceive two great modes of achieving the image: material supports towhich the image indissociable from this support adheres, and luminous projectionslides for which a spotless (or not) screen intercepts ephemerally (or not) the ray.

An Image-Light

For a history of art both real and mythological, technical and philosophical,we know the stakes and the antagonisms. We could make a fiction of a struggle of

* From catalog to the exhibition Projections: Les transports de l’image at Le Fresnoy, Studio nationaldes arts contemporains, Tourcoing, France, November 1997–January 1998 (Paris: Éditions Hazan,1997). For reasons of space, Païni’s discussion of filmmakers Patrick Bokanowski and Pitch,

two enemy goddesses: a noble image at the service of the princes and of their istoriaand a more pedestrian image often associated with saltimbanks and their phantas-magorias. One free to circulate from hand to hand, the other enslaved to themechanical apparatus that embodies it; one infinitely modifiable by the one (or byothers) who gave it birth, the other little susceptible to benefiting from metamor-phosis unless it has been so conceived repetitively (film in the twentieth century);one, finally, which calls for being seen through an ambient light or one directed onit, the other dependent on the light that traverses the transparent veil of its support.

This bipartition divides the beholders, between those for whom the point ofview on the image is not assignable to a particular place and is mandatory in thespace, and those for whom the point of view on the image is marked by the (rela-tive) restraint of being bound to a place inferred by the apparatus of projection. Inother words, visitors and spectators, from whom the contemporary art of the end ofthe twentieth century accepts the command of blurring the respective identitiesand behavior. Film “exhibits itself” by unreeling in loop within the “installation”and, inversely, painting and sculpture are exhibited in museums according toconnections that borrow the principles of montage, of light, and of rhythms appar-ently inherited from the contemporary audiovisual sphere.1 This apparent inversionhas been favored by the video image: the projector and the screen united in thesame miniaturized apparatus. The indissociability of support/image and the lumi-nous ray fuse in the video image—machine for images as much as image-machine.This comfortable bipolarization of the regime of images is thus profoundly troubledby the contemporary images that, suddenly, retroactively provoke doubt about theontological rigidity of the distinction between applied and projected images. Forexample, stained glass in the application of an image indissociable from its supportto which the light necessary for its vision is not reflective but penetrating [transver-sante]. However, for all that, light does not carry the image beyond its transparentsupport. Another example: from the digitization of the givens recorded by the CD-ROM to the video projector, the transported and enlarged image on a screen doesnot emanate from an initial veil-like skin either painted or photographic. Open tointerventions after the fact (interactivity) on its support (the disc, the Net), the digi-tal image is nonetheless projectable.

Whatever, finally, be the blurring of a nice binary rule for categorizingimages, let us agree that the artists who make up the present exhibition manipu-late the travel of luminous images, images irreducibly foreign to the surfaces thatintercept the beam of light, surfaces that however embody them. Of images thatonly exist because they are made of light, being images that are of time. Of imagesthat only exist through the time of their luminous transport.

Time is consubstantial with the projected image. And it is strange that twofounding texts for the projected image have not been retained in a more insistent

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Metamkine, and Jósef Robakowski has been omitted. 1. Roland Recht, “Considerations on the Destination of Museum Space,” Le Débat 81 (September-October 1994), p. 38.

manner from the single point of view of the image in time: Plato’s allegory of thecave2 and the critical commentary by Diderot, in the form of an account of a dreamof a painting by Fragonard.3 One can read these two famous and overinterpretedtexts above all as the tales of projective experience for which the luminous appara-tus is described according to principles of a story, organized by “sequential shots”and narrative intervals. The Platonic allegory is a tale in four moments for whichthe connection and the terms give the feeling of a troubling “foretelling” of whatconcerns modern projective installations. It is obviously the reverse: contemporaryartists return to an “original installation,” one existing only in the philosophical lan-guage of Plato, for which we never sufficiently retain the dramatic duration. Thefirst part of the text describes the “viewers” chained in a cave with their backsturned to a fire, whose light transports the shadows of figurines onto the oppositewall. This first part introduces the confusion between reality and representation.The second part of the narrative description displays the painful pitfalls of the dis-covery of the illusion: the luminous source not only dazzles but prevents conceptualclarity. Then, in a third sequence, Plato is interested in describing the exit from thecave. The discovery of the separation between reality and representation is accom-panied by the discovery of the mimetic objects that gave rise to the ressemblantshadows. At this third, dramatic and initiating stage, the spectators turn toward thesun, source of vital energy and of knowledge as such. Finally, the spectators turnback to the darkness of the cave. Their perceptual unfamiliarity renders themunwanted and gives them the status of victims of light.

The first moment of the journey is a confrontation with images, with thedoubles of real things. The second is a confrontation with things, properly speak-ing. The two other moments oppose themselves to the domain of the visible andform the domain of the ideas, or of mathematical discourse and the concepts.

Jean Starobinski notes that, essentially, the projection of the images ofDiderot’s dream are produced almost as in Plato’s allegory.4 All the more so asDiderot himself admits to having read Plato on the day on which he missed out onthe vision of Fragonard’s painting.5 It is enough to note the shared chaining up ofthe spectators in Diderot and Plato for this very captivity, this motor disability withwhich contemporary artists are obsessed in their installations. The placement andthe mobility of the spectator are not the least torments in the quasi-totality of theexhibited artists. We must still note the character of the producers of the illusionslisted by Diderot: kings, apostles, prophets, theologians, politicians, rogues, char-latans, “subaltern rogues with tokens of the first that give to these shadows theaccents, the discourse, the true voices of their roles.” In other words, it is to the

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2. Plato, The Republic, in Oeuvres complètes, pt. 1, books IV-VII (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1989), p. 144.3. Denis Diderot, “Fragonard no. 176. Le Grand Prêtre Corésus s’immole pour sauver Callirhoé.” Salon of1765 (Paris: Hermann, 1984), p. 253.4. Jean Starobinski, Diderot dans l’espace des peintres, followed by Le Sacrifice en rêve (Paris: RMN, 1991).5. “Media technology is founded on the principle that nothing must be missed” (Atom Egoyan, Trafic10 [Paris: POL, Spring 1994], p. 108).

political, religious field, as well as to spectacle that the projective model [attraction]belongs, those fields that generate imposture.6

Is it from this passage between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thatthe impurity of the art of projection is born? A decisive epoch, for which the cabi-nets de curiosité and the intense activity of the peddlers, of the opticians andvarious physicists, have decisively modified the arts of representation. Epoch ofthe saltimbanks, the phantasmatic political chroniclers (Robertson) who borrowthe luminous transport of images to dazzle, impress, educate, charm, and enter-tain.7 Filmmakers and project ionist art ist s of this end of the twent iethcentury—“bachelor” heirs of Marcel Duchamp, whose imposture in art was one ofthe obsessions of criticism—are they the most recent descendants of Diderot’srogues, equipped “with a provision of little transparent and colored figures and allthe figures being so well made, so well painted, in such great number and varia-tion, that there were enough to furnish the representation with all the comic,tragic, and burlesque scenes of life”?8 “Here is what I see pass at different intervalsthat I combine for brevity’s sake,” Diderot warns, who clearly inscribes the narra-tive, and thus temporal character,9 of his iconographic description of a paintingof which the applied opaque image was denied him and replaced in his dream by aprojected image, by an image-light, an image transported by light, giving rise to nar-rative dramatization and lyrical effusion.10

It is as if the projective apparatus calls up fiction. A third text would thuscomplete the two former founding texts. One by Jean-Luc Godard, equally techni-cal and fictional, closely associates tekné and fabula:11

In a Moscow prison, Jean-Victor Poncelet, army officer of Napoleon,reconstructs without the aid of any notes the geometrical knowledgethat he learned in the courses of Monge and of Carnot. The Treatise ofthe Projective Property of Figures, published in 1822, constructs in generalmethod the principle of projection utilized by Desargue for under-standing the properties of conic sections and put to work by Pascal inhis demonstration of the mystical hexagram. What was then neededwas a revolving prisoner facing a wall for whom the mechanical applica-tion of the idea and the desire to project figures on a screen takes wing

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6. Starobinksi wonders about the status of the painter according to Diderot: “is he also an impostor?”(Starobinski, Diderot, p. 75).7. Laurent Mannoni, Le Grand Art de la lumière et de l’ombre (Paris: Nathan, 1994).8. Diderot, “Fragonard no. 176,” p. 254.9. “Furthermore, let us observe that the history dreamed by Corésus and Callirhoé is built through aseries of well-structured images, strictly separated from each other. The description of each of them willhelp to develop a narrative fabric. The myth will be communicated to us through its supposed spectaculartranscription, itself retranscribed by Diderot as the dramatic program of a possible picture. Narration anddescription become discernable only with difficulty” (Starobinski, Diderot, p. 73). 10. Jacques Aumont, L’Image (Paris: Nathan-Université, 1990), p. 135.11. Jacques Derrida, Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris, Galilée, 1987), pp. 21–22. Quoted by MichelFrizot in “Saint Prométhée, L’inventeur-Créateur au XIX siècle,” Communications 64 (1997), p. 117.

practically speaking with the invention of filmic projection. Let’s equallynote that the instigating wall was rectangular.12

But indeed, can narrative time be exhibited?

A Dialectical Image

Let’s sum up. . . . Given the mythological origins of the invention of paint-ing—cast shadow of a profile on an illuminated surface;13 given the slidesimagined in the seventeenth century by Father Athansius Kircher; given thedream of Diderot, cinematographic before the fact; given the revolutionary phan-tasmagorias of Robertson; given the Lumière brothers; given the installations ofSovietico-Futurist propaganda by Lissitzky; and given, finally, the taste of contem-porary artists for projective installations and performances of light, the presentexhibition suggests a parallel history of art, foreign to the fine arts, more spectac-ular and often confused with the simplicities of charlatans and of “dealers in hopeand dread”:14 a history of art of projecting images, indifferent to “skill” or to themanual virtuosity that characterizes painting and sculpture, the history of an activ-ity of craftsmen of illusions that arises from the mechanical arts, ignorant of theliberal arts.15 In this “other” history, light no longer encounters an image, norbathes it, nor illuminates it. Light penetrates it at first, then transports it, dupli-cates it in dematerializing it,16 sometimes temporalizing and sublimating it. In this“other” history, the image travels. In relation to traditional pictorial or photo-graphic representation, projection constitutes an inflaming of the image, aflourish in the sense of a lyrical transport. It equally has the power to vary its site(size of image, distance traveled by the light beam). But above all, since the pro-jection of an image mixes in a single composite the image and the light necessaryfor its exhibition, it associates representing and exhibiting. Vision equals light andlight is identified with the sense of sight. Is this what the Lumière brothersinferred, the projections of films that are “views”? The luminous transport ofimages evokes the letter of Albertian theory—sight as light beam—but simultane-ously it demonstrates the utopia of it. Further, the projection of the imagemaintains the philosophical debates of antiquity with regard to vision. Whencearises the visual connection? Is it projected from the eyes or from the perceivedimage? For Euclid or Pythagoras, inventors of geometry, it is the eyes that expelthe light striking the image. For Aristotle, the images send their miniaturized


12. Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image, 1974–1991, ed. Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea Bandy (New York:The Museum of Modern Art, 1992), p. 117.13. Pliny the Elder, Histoire naturelle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1997).14. Diderot, “Fragonard no. 176,” p. 254.15. Georges Didi-Huberman makes the same remark with regard to the imprint. See his L’Empreinte(Paris: Centre Georges-Pompidou, 1997), p. 21.16. An entirely relative dematerialization because partly imaginary: light is still matter.

reproductions to the depths of the visual organ. Plato describes the variations ofintensity in the luminous source: the strongest produces black; the weakest, white;color results from a medium. . . .

One can distinguish three large “modern” historical breaks: from themedieval image to the perspectivist vision of the fifteenth century; from themanipulable applied image to the mechanical and optical modernization of spec-tacular representation of the nineteenth century; from the analogical supports tothe creation of images outside all indexation with reality: digitalization, synthesis,virtuality. Projection belongs to the second rupture.

In other words, the image would flow historically from three logics:17

1. formal: that of painting, printmaking, architecture, which concludes with theeighteenth century.2. dialectical: that of photography, of film, and of the film frame during the nine-teenth century.3. paradoxical: that which begins with the invention of video, of the holograph, ofcybernetics. At this end of the twentieth century, the accomplishment of moder-nity seems “marked by the climax18 of a logic of public representation. . . .”19

The projection of the image thus arises from a dialectical logic that con-nects, of course, to the dialectical image described by Walter Benjamin, for whomthe encounter with the urban crowd and with cinema was the decisive quality ofmodernity.20

Projection as dialectical image. . . . This comes down to saying that the lumi-nous transport of the image would be an apparatus favoring the encounter in aflash of Past and Now, a spasmodic image.21 Again, this comes down to saying thatthe apparently least perfect apparatus, its ancient and outmoded look of patched-up archaic machine, is, in a determined historical situation, releaser of flashes, ofconstellations, disturbing the teleological manifestations of the positive and posi-tivist progress of technology. In full cybernetic ebullience the insistent return ofprojection within contemporary art would thus have the value of instigation andcritical emphasis.

The shock delivered by the encounter in the same space of the digital imageprojected by Bill Seaman—whose iconography recalls leisure activity and the pop-ular lotteries of Le Fresnoy—and of the mobile glass - slide lantern of themid-nineteenth century visualizes the critical aims of the exhibition.

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17. Paul Virilio, La Machine de vision (Paris: Galilée, 1988), p. 133.18. Virilio speaks later of a “crisis of public representations.”19. “With the paradoxical logic, in fact, it’s the reality of the presence of the object in real time that isdefinitively resolved, while in the era of dialectical logic of the preceding image, it was only the presence indeferred time, the presence of the past that was durably imprinted on the plates, the emulsions, or thefilms. The paradoxical image thus acquiring a status comparable to that of surprise, or even more precise-ly, of ‘the accident of transfer’” (Virilio, La Machine de vision, p. 134).20. See Blaise Cendrars, ABC du cinéma (1926; Paris: Seguier-Carré d’art, 1995).21. Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Le Livre des passages (Paris: du Cerf, 1989),pp. 478–79.

“The new is not in what is said but in the event of its return,” affirms anddemonstrates Michel Foucault.22 In other words, the modern projection ofimages, born concretely and not only in dream, with the traveling spectacles inEurope organized at mid-seventeenth century by the Dane Thomas Walgensteinand his “fear lantern,” would constitute a remembering present that upsets and ques-tions the image born today by the matrixial apparatus of numbers, the digital.The projection of images belongs to an aesthetic of representation that “resists”an aesthetic of self-definition.23

A Critical Image

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, artists have experienced thetransport of images through luminous projection. Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy,Fernand Léger, Frederick Kiesler, Len Lye; then Norman Mac Laren, MarcelBroodthaers; finally Martial Raysse, Fabio Mauri, Michael Snow, GiovanniAnselmo, Alain Fleischer, Christian Boltanski, Bertrand Lavier. The list of artistswho have borrowed the projection of the fixed or mobile image is impressive.

To realize an image in fully dematerializing it, in other words, to play withthe absent presence of the image, to add another light in the image than theone already represented, to escape the weight of the supports (from the pale-olithic walls to the canvas!) that embody the images of the histor y ofrepresentation, doubtless still other dreams much beyond cinematographic fas-cination, explain the use of projection by the artists of the present century.However, these same ones often persist in laying claim to the liberal arts, paint-ing, or sculpture. Filmmakers can seem more familiar with, even if somewhat“unconscious” of, this experimentation. For to really take hold of a space and tostructure it by a light beam is, in another way than that of making a film, a com-plex enterprise. However, in passing from the staging to this scenography thatliberates the spectator from his captivity to transform him into a mobile visitor,filmmakers have tried in recent years to “exhibit projections”: Chantal Akerman,Raúl Ruiz, Atom Egoyan.24

These filmmakers and the artists present in the exhibition at Le Fresnoy arethe paradoxical contemporary echoes in the museal space of the most advancedfilm of the 1990s, critical of mediatic power. Like this cinema, but with othermeans, the exhibited works privilege the spectator’s sensory acuity—the dilationof time as well as sensation—as against meaning; they belittle, if not aim at breaking


22. Michel Foucault, L’Ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1977).23. Pierre Fédida, “Passé anachronique et présent réminiscent. Epos et puissance, memoriale du lan-gage” (L’ecrit du temps 10; quoted by Didi-Huberman, L’Empreinte, p. 17).24. Chantal Akerman, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1996; Raúl Ruiz, Galerie national duJeu de Paume, Paris, 1991; and Atom Egoyan, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 1996.

the codified boundaries that have separated the image and the viewer ever sinceclassical film.25 Filmmakers such as Michael Haneke, David Lynch, DavidCronenberg, Quentin Tarantino to a lesser degree, but on the other hand AbelFerrara in a more ecstatic way, search for their part in the simultaneously dis-jointed and cyclical stories for a way to spatialize narrative time.26

From this coincidence between the art of the museum and film is born thesequestions: what continuity is there between contemporary images and the formerorganization of the visual, between digital images and those of the age called thatof mechanical reproduction? How does the viewing subject penetrate (what is hisplace?) into the composition of the new apparatuses of the fabrication of images,including and above all those that are not chemico-analogical?27 These questionsare to be taken as more dynamic than “reactionary.” If they manifest suspicion it isless according to the melancholy of Rilke—“we are witnessing the disappearanceof all the visible things that will not be replaced”—than according to theBrechtian skepticism. In 1927, Brecht remarked with an amused detachmentabout radio, the tendency of modernity to overestimate all the things that have hid-den possibilities.

Image-light, image-text, dialectical image:28 projection equally confers onthe image a critical dimension. The spectacle of luminous transport of the imageis correctly called entertainment. This is to say that it is a détour, critical detour, theo-retical detour faced with the future regimes of the image.

An Image-Machine

One could risk writing a history of the projected image from the sole pointof view of the progressive invisibility of the mechanical apparatus of projection: ahistory whose origins would draw on the first magic lantern representations of theseventeenth century, followed by the great “phantasmagorical” spectacles of theeighteenth century, then the optical machines (boxes, turning plates, lenses),which substituted themselves for a time for the apparatuses of projection, prop-erly speaking, in order to efface themselves in their turn before the projectedcinegenesis that the brilliant Emile Reynaud achieved with his optical theater.

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25. Thierry Jousse, “Après la mort du cinéma,” in Jousse and A. de Baecque, Le Retour du cinéma (Paris:Hatier, 1996), p. 50.26. See, for example, Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), Cronenberg’s Crash(1996), Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), and Ferrara’s Black Out (1997).27. Some artists have for some years, in an “opportunistic” way, been caught up in the fashion for pro-jections in the museum space by using sequences of documentary or fiction films. Stan Douglas, DouglasGordon, and Pierre Huyghe, among others, slow, enlarge, copy, or imitate cinematographic images. Thisoften fetishistic usage of cinema calls up thoughts that outrun the project of the present exhibition. SeeStephanie Moisdon, Cinémathèque, 10 (Fall 1996), p. 96.28. In the meaning Walter Benjamin gave to this word; also Paul Virilio and above all, more recently,Georges Didi-Huberman, in La Resemblance informe ou le gai savoir de Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995).

Finally, the twentieth century and the making sedentary of the filmic spectaclethat established itself definitively around 1910. What can we conclude from thisrapid summary? In the first place, the image transported onto the screen was notthe only source of curiosity and fascination. For all through the centuries, the illu-sionist prepossession—to conceal the productive machine of the light beam—isfar from having been respected and even from having been the concern of theartisan of illusions. In second place, and this follows from the first remark, themechanical character of the projection was probably an object of mysterious fixa-tion for the spectators. Before the moment when the image-movement engagedwith reality in a definitive (photography) and constructive (montage) mimeticrelation, by “substituting for the model of the true a power of the becoming,”29

one can easily suppose that the projection machines were as much if not more fas-cinating than the light-image. In fairs or in the great international exhibitions ofscience and technology at the beginning of the century, the visible projectionmachine, the looped films that repeated the moving images, and the brutally het-erogeneous splicings -together of projected sequences, created radicallyanti-illusionist and chaotic conditions that privileged the blurring of spatial land-marks and the feverish wandering of the spectator outside all the stability of anideal point of vision.30 One might add the relative fixity of the image and the fluc-tuating speeds in order to underscore how much the origins of film go back moreto the performances of the “expanded cinema” of a Stan Van der Beek in the1960s than to the history of the classical Hollywood film. Basically, the art of cin-ema could have ceased only in dissimulating the projection machine as thecondition of deviation/abduction of the spectatorial hypnosis toward the singlescreen. Cover this machine that I cannot stand seeing!

This is not a minor question of the theory of the modern arts and more par-ticularly those of the spectacle. In his “Essay on Wagner,” Theodor Adorno notesthis tendency in the mechanical arts “to conceal the production under theappearance of the product.”31 He underscores “the achievement of the appear-ance at the same time as the achievement of the illusionist character of the workof art taken as a specific reality that constitutes itself in the sphere of the absolutephenomenon, without for all that renouncing its power of representation.” Therecourse to projection at the hands of contemporary artists and of certain precur-sors in the 1920s, which is to say the recourse to the apparatus that associatesmachine, transport, and representation of a light-image, demonstrates an anti-illusionist will. In many propositions of the exhibition, it is a matter, in the


29. Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers (Paris: Minuit, 1990), p. 95.30. “The pleasure the cinema extended to its first viewers didn’t reside in their objective interest for aspecific subject, still less in any aesthetic interest in the formal representation of a theme, but in the purepleasure that they felt in seeing things move, whatever they be” (Erwin Panofsky, Three Essays on the Style andMatter of the 7th Art [Paris: Le Promeneur, 1996], p. 109).31. Theodor Adorno, Essai sur Wagner (Paris: Gallimard, 1966; reissued, Paris: Gallimard, coll. NRFEssais, 1993).

manner of Raymond Roussel, to “show the process,”32 in exhibiting the imagestransported by the light, hypnotic by their proximity, blinding by the beam that car-ries them, generative of embryonic stories repeated in loop, indissociably tied bytheir effects and their iconographic content to the machine that projects them. . . .One could say that

the machine repeats the content of the story that it projects forward,outside time and language, according to a system of translation thattriumphs over duration as over words. The system is thus reversible:the story repeats the machine which repeats the story.33

The projected images in the present installation need, for their meaning, thevisibility of the machine that projects them. Mobility of the film and movement ofthe eyes with Egoyan, projector and sun with Bertrand, “pursuit” and mirror-screen with Fleischer, luminous exhaustion and last moment of the century withJugnet, filmic scratching and disappearance of the volumes with Foucault, pene-tration of the image and facingness of the projectors with Snow . . . for theseartists, the machine is not ostensible for “enlarging” the cinematic effect.34 Themachine is present to eject the image outside the figurative, outside its film-effect“window on the world,” even though reversibly a representation as with Foucault andAdorno, strangely united here, say. Projected far in front of the machine that pro-duces it, the image simultaneously continues to stem from it, related by theluminous ray. It is an image-machine as there exists a stained-glass image that can-not be reproduced without the machine. With the difference from the appliedimage whose easy multiplication through reproduction only loses a bit of sharp-ness of the stroke or the colors and gains grain, the projected image depends on acumbersome technical complexity. This image is thus a machine itself in the sensethat the Rousselian written memoir is what the process-works will write, for it isitself process, or more precisely the rebus of one: a machine to make the reproduc-tion of things visible in a linguistic instrument.35

Projective installations and their validation of the machinic presence arecontemporaries of the application of the computer and its screen: return of theblack box from the age of the camera lucida, other linguistic instruments whoseimages began since the language of cybernetics. It is irresistible, in fact, not toremark on this concomitant appearance in the 1970s of projective installations inart and by computers, the luminous expulsion and the coded implosion. A historyof the viewing subject cannot be indifferent to this. Of the immobile and collec-tive viewer (chained up in Plato and Diderot), captive in the film theaters of the

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32. Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel (Paris: Gallimard, coll. NRF Essais, 1993).33. Ibid.34. Dominique Noguez, Une renaissance du cinéma, le cinéma “underground” americain (Paris: Klincksieck,1985), pp. 364–65.35. Foucault, Raymond Roussel, p. 148.

twentieth century, the viewer of a contemporary projection installation onceagain becomes a flaneur, mobile and solitary. The Baudelairian flaneur, thrilled bythe toys in the Tuilleries, makes an unexpected return in the epoch of the solitaryinternaut who, while chained to his chair—it is what there is in common with thespectator at the movies—is nonetheless mobile, or more exactly, interactive,among the metamorphoses of the text-image. But don’t the long evenings of theInternet fanatics recall the family evenings around the “steam praxinoscope” orthe lantern? From the magic lantern to the console of the domestic computer at theend of the twentieth century, it is the spiralled return of the omnipresence of themachine as image.

Above, we pointed to the “return,” in the form of the “reminiscent present”of the projected image within installations. On the one hand the predominanceof the pure pleasure of the movement36 and of the installation’s quality as idealfor exposing film as symbolic form;37 on the other hand, the visibility of the structureof the machinic functioning. What gives us the idea that the artists who transportthe image via light tend to make an issue of the narrative destiny of projectiveimages, aiming to raise a doubt about fiction as the sole model of filmic represen-tation? Put otherwise, luminous sculpture is opposed to the movement of a story,the shot-sequence is a performance, the looped repetition of a sequence becomesa picture decomposable into figures. It is this complex regime of the projection ofan animated image in a museal space that Broodthaers describes in 1968:

I am not a filmmaker. For me film is the prolongation of language. Ibegan with poetry, then visual arts, and finally film, which unites manyelements of art. That’s to say, writing (poetry), the object (sculpture),and image (film). The great difficulty is obviously the harmonybetween these elements . . . an antifilm nonetheless remains a film, theway the antinovel cannot completely escape the frame of the book andof writing; but my film enlarges the frame of an “ordinary” film. It isnot principally or at least not exclusively destined for film theaters.Because to see and to be able to understand the total work that I want-ed to achieve, it is necessary that the film be projected on the imprint-ed screen, but even more that the viewer also possess the text. If youplease, this film relates to “art.” It’s one of these “multiples,” of whichwe’ve spoken for some time as the means of the diffusion of art. It’sbecause it will soon be exhibited in a gallery that forty copies of screensand of books will be produced. Thus it will be exploited as art object, ofwhich each copy will be made up of a film, two screens, and a hugebook. It’s an environment.38


36. Panofsky, Three Essays, p. 109.37. See this happy formulation by Thomas Y. Levin, “Un iconologue au cinéma, la théorie ciné-matographique de Panofsky,” Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne 59 (Spring 1997), p. 58.38. Marcel Broodthaers, Marcel Broodthaers, cinéma, under the direction of Manuel J. Borja and MichaelCompton, in collaboration with Maria Gilissen (Barcelona: Fundacio Antoni Tapies, 1997), p. 59. On this

I retain from these proposals of Broodthaers a meditation on the cinematicas far as that exhibits itself outside of a fictional destiny. Broodthaers weaves theimage of these little films-attractions39 with the texts imprinted on the canvas ofthe screen, thus ruining the documentary or fictional character, the figurative char-acter of the projected images. As Foucault notes in relation to the imaginarymachines of Roussel,40 the projections in the exhibitions of Broodthaers—visibleprojectors, printed screen, numerous potted palms,41 wandering spectators—werefor him comparable rebuses and, he says himself, comparable linguistic instruments.

An ExhibitionAnne Marie Jugnet with the Collaboration of Alain Clairet

It is a matter, then, of “leading the mind toward more verbal regions.”42 Thatis the ambition of Anne Marie Jugnet, whose stubborn enterprise consists ofdrowning the visible and legible. One might consider her banner as a textualeclipse to the principle of which she has been partial for a long while now, deliver-ing “restricted information that, however, says a lot but doesn’t develop.” Her WatchOut Here Comes the Century! doesn’t impress itself like a triumphant slogan but morelike the childish warning Here come the police! Yoking pleasure and fear of the com-ing event, it mixes derision for a new century shared equally by promises ofcomfort and worry. In the futuristic architecture of Le Fresnoy, the banner evokesthe dynamic effects that the Soviet architects, constructors of temporary propa-ganda pagodas, attempted in the 1920s. But Jugnet’s slogan is that of aPost-Futurism that could serve as the title for a hot television “talk show.” Jugnetunderscores this alternating force of meaning by tying together air and light,breath and projection. It is truly a “flicker” effect that this wind rippling her ban-ner produces. As if, at the dawn of the future century, the ambivalence of ourfeelings toward the future had been staged in the most metaphorically contemptu-ous manner possible: gloriously optimistic—a stretched screen that intercepts theluminous message—and limply pessimistic—the screen is hanging at half mast.

In the exhibition, Jugnet shares with Pitch (Christophe Cardoen) this work onthe pleated/unpleated screen, attracting the spectator’s attention to the contradic-tory status of the surface intercepting the light that carries the image: indispensable

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occasion I am anxious to thank M. J. Borja for the detailed visit to the exhibition he allowed me to make inthe last day of June 1997. Probably the first exhibition devoted to the Belgian artist that lived up to histhought, indissociable from the filmic installations remarkably reconstituted in Barcelona.39. Le Corbeau et le Renard (1967), La Pluie (1969), Une discussion inaugurale (1968), Un voyage à Waterloo(1969), Un film de Charles Baudelaire (1970). . . . This last title is obviously not by chance in relation to thestatus of the spectator-flaneur.40. The Roussel-Broodthaers connection by means of Magritte is, I believe, convincing. This little-known heritage still needs to be described in iconographic and intellectual detail.41. Vegetation coded with the exoticism that once again recalls Roussel and his Impressions d’Afrique.42. According to the “grinder” and the “delay in painting” of Marcel Duchamp. The bicycle wheel isobviously not there for nothing.

for the image to be achieved, the screen is no less “indifferent” to what it almost fugi-tively reveals. The screen that receives the light-image would basically be a type ofstrange shroud that retains not the slightest trace of the “encounter,” a “Veronica’sveil” without the power of iconic absorption. Jugnet’s contribution principallystresses the mirroring character of all projection. If, customarily, the unstable parti-cles of the light are not perceivable by the naked eye, if the passage of the film framesis deliberately masked to increase the illusion of restored reality, the fluttering of theblown screen and the alternation between the flapping and the fall to half-mast hereparadigmatically reinscribes the luminous beat at work in vision itself. Illuminatedand blown, that is the paradigm from which other substitutions or simple meaningfulopposit ions develop: the discont inuity of vision and the oscillat ion ofinhalation/exhalation of breathing, the appearance and retreat of the image thatalternates in filmic projection.

Henri Foucault

Projective geometry, Henri Foucault knows it as—I dare to use this simplisticword—a ray. The monumentality of his work is only apparent since everything atstake in it resides in its volumetric foaming, its perceptual fading. Also it is necessarythat Foucault not rest at constructing a film, at digitizing the frames of it, at projectingthe result on a screen of opaque and reflective facets and finally at broadcasting a syn-thesis of the whole at the end of the it inerary. Because, in order that theflaneur-spectator perceive such a process, it must be architected. It is necessary in allsimplicity that Foucault construct . . . a film theater! In other words, a theatrical vol-ume for the representation of a “geometrical fiction.” Perhaps the cinematographicspectacle is that after all: amorous geometry instead of simply intuitive volumes andlines that fuse, a bonding between the room and the light beam of projection.

Our experience as spectator has made us live this experience many times.The ray, translucent and inflamed, metamorphoses the theatrical space in makingthe slight motes of dust dance, the fiction makes one forget the spectacle, thefilmic narrative makes us forget the room. The beam strikes the screen, coveringit by volumes of illusory thickness. But, on the other hand, it structures the dis-tance of the representation, luminously materializing the perspective of thecollective gaze of a public. The projection for the cinema is what the ramp is forthe theater, but a non-frontal ramp that “comes from behind,” which doesn’t con-front the gaze of the spectator. A ramp parallel to the gaze that no longer blinds theactors—already lighted a first time during the filming—but threatens to dazzle theimprudent and incredulous spectator who turns around to “know where the imagescome from.” We will see a little later that it is this dazzlement that greatly interestsJean-Pierre Bertrand.

Nonetheless Foucault has returned to this ramp. By means of the mirror-planesthat make up the screen, he turns the projective ramp around against the gaze of the


flaneur who visits this great volume, a sort ofaccelerator of particles of light, a sort of “tube,”as one speaks of the cathode ray tube. The “ter-minal” image of the installation is nonethelessan image on terminals of the same name. Butdoes this turning of the light around at the spec-tator’s gaze suffice? To what does it give rise? Acomplete deconstruction of the volume, theerasure of an overstructured space, a fading outof the boundaries of this space. The volumeloses its skeleton, its angles, its perceptible andmeasurable geometry: it becomes formless.Basically the project ion is experienced byFoucault as a luminous geometry dissolving thespatially concrete geometry, the one actualizedarchitecturally. As such, it is really “of cinema”that Foucault speaks: the place and the illusion,the building and the spectacle, mixed together.

Given that, what does the artist show?Does he exhibit a light beam without images? Infact Foucault invites us to a truly technologicaltrip that identifies itself with a telescoped his-tory of the regimes of the image: from thescratched film strip, mythico-anthropological and archeological gesture that it is, andmatrix of all the other projected and broadcast images in the scenographic tube, upto the cybernetic programmation. From the hand that damages to the hand thatclicks.

But how does scratching the image, streaking the screen, concern cinemamore than video? Don’t these two machines entertain “incestuous” relations?

Atom Egoyan

The family is the subject dear to Atom Egoyan through many full-length films:Family Viewing, Calendar, The Adjuster, Fine Tomorrows, the latter film featured in 1997 atthe Cannes Film Festival. Exotica, in a way even more troubling and through whichincest roams. . . . The family and what it breeds, its conformisms, its secrets, itsshames, its cultural and genetic patrimony, the children. For Egoyan the family is abeginning stage for the stages, truly original, doubtless to the extent of what it repre-sents for the Armenian who has never passed a night there. Primal scene equally forcontemporary audiovisuality, from familial televisual sitcoms to “domestic video.”

“Insomuch as my generation looked at films and baby photos with a naivecuriosity, I imagine that the following generation will be overwhelmed by

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Henri Foucault. Tada Ima. 1997.

a mass of video documents on each key moment of its development.Birth, the first smile, the first word. All these events will be archived andeasy to watch in private,” the filmmaker recently noted, adding: “I alwaysam astonished by how, despite their frenzy to record, people rarely look attheir material. The phenomenon of private video archives seems to havemore meaning through its very existence than through its function asrepertory of information. To know that such a thing is preserved on avideo cassette can be calming. One feels relieved of the tension one expe-riences in consigning an event to one’s memory.”43

On the one hand Egoyan’s installation is a development of this pointed com-mentary. Its origin in a short “home movie” (an extract?) dedicated to Arshile,Egoyan’s young son: first smiles, first words, first curiosities, first seduction, firstspankings. The shot is framed as close as possible to the face, and closer to the eyeswhose intermittent agitation evokes something mechanical. The video image is trans-ferred to the filmstrip. This is projected on a screen achieving, like a childish toytrain, a voyage in the space, materializing its repetitive duration by looping.44 Thefilmstrip passes in front of the screen, struck by the very image with which it isprinted; “the projection of the image on its very support,” one wants to paraphrasein thinking of another famous ensemble that conjugates transparency and time (thedelay) in painting.45 A “monadic film” of a single shot submitted to “repetition andvariation,” showing “at the same time the transparency of monadological perceptionand its essential opacity,” the infinite play of “little unfeeling perceptions and otherlightning flashes in a mirror.”46 The mobility of the film-strip “plays” with the active-ness of Arshile’s eyes. And suddenly we think that cinema is the gaze which followsthe images and which loses sight of their passage to the profit of the illusion of thereproduced reality. The gaze on the film is thus a delay, Egoyan thus shows in his filmdeployed in the space of an architecture, which, suddenly, resolves the other questionraised above: what to do with the family archive?

The act of filming Arshile’s birth was accompanied by a tension thatwas not unfamiliar to me. Often, when I shoot my own films, I am over-taken by panic in wondering how something will be interpreted, ormost often, misinterpreted. And there, in shooting a very intimate sub-ject, I felt the same anxiety. But who goes to see a document? Who isthe source of the pressure?47


43. Egoyan, Trafic 10, p. 10844. The filmic eternity is a function of the inexhaustible mechanics and the semi-eternality of the repe-tition: the always identical “new” and this relation to death that hides there: repetition compulsion.Youssef Ishaghpour, L’Ange, Cinéma contemporain, de ce coté du miroir (Paris: La Différance, 1986), p. 323. 45. This is Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare, which he called a “delay in glass.” Trans.46. Christine Buci-Glucksman, “Drôle de pensée touchant Leibniz et le cinéma,” Trafic 8 (Fall 1993),pp. 76–77. “The shot puts together what Leibniz dreamed of in his shadow theater: the vision and thevoice, the image and the rhythm, a little like those Proustian shots where the event crosses and lacestogether visual and temporal series in concentric circles or in spirals.”47. Egoyan, Trafic 10, p. 108.

The reply is carried by thepresent installat ion: thepressure comes from thespectator-visitors, the musealflaneurs who will discoverthe staged exhibition of thefamilial document, its projec-t ion in the public space.Thus the projection is whatgives meaning to what wasnothing but “private docu-mentation,” as Egoyan stillsays, in becoming at thesame time “a projection ofsocial behavior of my son’s

generation in relation to the ritual of that very private documentation.”Which is to say that the filming of his child, “the natural desire to film one’s

family,” is basically not so natural and innocent an act as it seems. Egoyanremarked once again in the same gripping text:

Just as the largest part of the process of psychoanalysis consists in tryingto recover certain events of one’s personal history, perhaps in a rathernear future, one will turn toward an epoch where a type of entirely newanalysis will become current. Will we examine videocassettes lookingfor traces that will say more than is apparently shown? It is not incon-ceivable that the way in which these basic moments of family life arerecorded be submitted to the same deepened aesthetic analysis as thescene conceived by professionals.

Beyond the passage of domestic video to the public world, from amateurismto professionalism, from archive to fiction, something else is at stake that we couldcharacterize as a choreographic approach of the ego, as Rosalind Krauss says in relationto the works of Bruce Nauman, which she described as an interminable distantia-tion of the ego that, however, never escapes from it.48 We could thus interpret theEgoyan installation Early Development: the body of the spectator is absorbed by thetriple effect of darkness, by the perspective drawn by the film strip hung in theroom that redoubles the light beam of projection, and finally, by the strip itselfthat passes by as close as possible to the screen, forcing the visitor-spectator todraw near to the screen. But the absolute mystery remains, the precision of thefacial features of the child—the ego at the source—is distanced because of thevideo grain seen close-up as a result of the attention devoted to the passage of the

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48. Rosalind Krauss, “Nouvelles technologies, enjeux et perspectives,” Parachute 84 (October-November1996), p. 52.

Above and facing page: Atom Egoyan. Early Development. 1997.

single strip fogging the vision of the largescreen.

Moreover, the strip redoubles against thescreen the striations of the surface of the cath-ode-screen. The video web, “distanced” by itstransfer to film, makes its metaphorical returnagainst the web of the str ip “zig zagging”before the screen, additional cause of the con-stant distancing that the visitor-spectator, likethe artist, doesn’t reduce despite “his noseglued to the screen.”

Jean-Pierre Bertrand

To close in on the image is a current fan-tasy of film lovers. Aren’t they familiar with thefront rows of film theaters? To be in the image,to lose oneself in it, to be surrounded by it, isnot a desire foreign to the incarceration, tothe forgetting of the world: to substituting forthis latter its illusion. In Les Carabiniers (1963),Jean-Luc Godard gives life to the brutal experi-ence of one of his two heroes, Michel-Ange.For wanting to see too much on and in theimage, the choreographic approach of the egoof the Carabinier ends in the depths of anorchestra pit . Haggard, shaken, andexhausted, Michel-Ange then turns around, hisbody become the opaque screen for theimages of the film that continues to run. Therewas the very painful test of confronting the

luminous source of projection “at the risk of vision,” as Hubert Damisch said oneday in prefacing a fine exhibition in Marseille.49 For Damisch, the cinema hasbeen, biographically, a violence against vision. In his installation, Jean-PierreBertrand takes this violence literally. For him as well, “vision never proceeds with-out risk” and “its operation could eventually turn around against itself.” Moreover,“the new and multiplied ways that film has opened for the scopic drive have onlybeen (and haven’t been able to be) a risk of blindness.”50 To film the sun, to look


49. Peinture, cinéma, peinture, ed. Germain Viatte (Paris: Hazan, Musées de Marseille, 1990). HubertDamisch thus introduces projection as a structural tie between cinema and painting (p. 25).50. Ibid., p. 26.

at the projector, to confront the sun—machines well before the invention of thecinema, since the thirteenth century were conceived to observe the sun. BeforeRoger Bacon (1214–1294), astronomers underwent the burning experience ofnot guarding against the sun in wanting to observe it. This monk imagined ascreen on which to project the light rays in order to study them without fear.51

Bertand has conceived a machine worthy of these very sophisticated arrange-ments of the Renaissance scholars, as if they had been gifted with contemporarytechnology. But the technological difference is not the major one. Bertrand’s“tower” is imaginatively and symbolically a “Leonardesque” machine that orga-nizes the encounter of vision and sun as if the artist wanted to verify thiscertainty of Rodin: “Beauty quickly changes, almost like a landscape that cease-lessly modifies the setting of the sun.”

Through this unexpected version of a “Kaiser-panorama,” which forces onthe spectator a seated, immobile, and uncomfortable viewing position (always thismemory of Plato and Diderot) and to which is added the dazzle of a facing projec-tor that upsets the perception of the images, Bertrand offers a paradoxical filmedperformance: to film “handheld,” to achieve in walking the panoramic views (fromwhich the nature of the installation that evokes certain optical curiosities of thenineteenth century), to encounter one’s shadow, to confront the sun which is thecause of it, to show the world as installation. Thing, lights, and shows will alreadybe filmed images and the sun will be the primordial projector of them. The worldnot filmable but already filmed, already representation, already projection.Bertrand’s “tower,” paradoxical lighthouse whose beams spend their energy at theinside of its column, achieves another dream, this one modern, well distancedfrom Diderot’s pictorial fantasy but as upsetting, the photo-projective ecstasy ofRobert Smithson:

The sun’s light filmed the site, making the bridge and the river an over-exposed image. When I photographed it with an Instamatic 400, thiswas as if I photographed a photograph. The sun became a monstrousbulb that projected a series of st ill images detached against myInstamatic until inside my eye. When I passed over the bridge, it was asif I walked on an enormous photograph made of wood and steel, andabove the river there was like an enormous film that only showed anempty image.52

Projection is a form of hypnosis. Conceptual artists such as Smithson,Bertrand, or, in a way still different and at the same time related, James Turrell,exhibit the maladjustments of vision, in the sense of “having a vision.” WouldBertrand then suggest another transport, forgotten until now, escaping fromreason, toward unknown regions of the sensory-motor rupture that Bertrand’s

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51. Mannoni, Le Grand Art, p. 17.52. In Régis Durand, Le Temps de l’image (Paris: La Différance, 1995), p. 164.

projective incarceration translates: “the mental dazzlement,” hallucination, madblinding?

Alain Fleischer

This artist, pedagogical formulator of the National Studio of ContemporaryArts—as it was habitual in the 1930s to confer the places of training to artists—hasexperimented since the end of the 1970s with projective films, ideally conceived asrebuses and linguistic instruments, to adopt once more the expression of MichelFoucault.53

Fleischer and his Golden Prisons is in a dialogue with Bertrand. In another“hallucinating” manner, Fleischer attracts the spectator-flaneur into a labyrinth.At the fairs, it is the mirror reflect ions that mult iply the dead ends of alabyrinth, often called a galerie des glaces. With Fleischer, it is the projections thatdistract the gaze and the understanding. Many films are projected onto screensthat bear mirrors on part of their surface, thus sending part of the projectedimage onto other screens. It is to say in this way “the exchangism” that sets inbetween the narrative of the films, true extractions and incrustations thatFleischer operates at the end stage of the representation and not at the initialstage of the recording, the shooting. Very canny the character who dreamedhimself as definitively belonging to his film! Projection surpasses its passive roleof transporting the image; it doesn’t only set forth images, it sets them up. As aresult, the embryonic stories are “ruined” because of the paradoxical fact of toomuch narrativity—which results from the intrusion of images from one film intoanother, but which on the other hand confers on each of them too narrow a fic-t ional quality. The filmic fragment sent back to the space reserved for it sreception in the frame of another film makes one suddenly conscious of the nar-rative incarceration of ordinary fictions.

“This crossover of stories, this undermining of the rule of editing and of thenarrative limit” (Fleischer) results from catoptric procedures whose origins onecould rediscover very exactly in the theories of Renaissance physicists. In hisMagiae naturalis, the Italian physicist Giovanni Battista Della Porta (1540–1615)describes the experience that consists of making an “image hanging in the air bymeans of a mirror” appear.54 The apparatus imagined by Della Porta is a touchingancestor of Fleischer’s “pursuit of images”: darkroom, tilted mirrors, imagepainted on translucent paper lit from behind by the sun or by a fire, throwbacks ofthe image, optical “billiard”. . . : The image is “thrown into the air and separatedfrom everything,” Della Porta concludes. Fleischer’s installation is programmed by


53. In 1980, at the Paris Biennale, Fleischer presented installations conceived throughout the 1970s:Gone with the Wind, and yet it still moves, the projected image of a filmed projector.54. Mannoni, Le Grand Art, p. 29.

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an ancient history of representation. But it is even more a true hinge between pastand present. How is one not to dream, in staring at these fictional transfers of animage however finished in appearance to another image—transfer of characters,transfer of bodies extracted from their setting, reversed in the film as this happensin printing—how is one not to dream of video incrustation, of digital metamor-phoses of the images of contemporary fict ion, of morphing and othersimulations? No cybernetics, no software, nor numerical matrix with Fleischer;only the very archaic catoptric procedure. The present is spoken by the past. Noeternal return, but rather, again, this haunting “constellation,” described byBenjamin, of Past and Now.

This structural homology of procedures, between catoptics and cybernetics,doesn’t only affect the images. It “computes” all the communication of messagestoday. Something in Fleischer’s installation asks me to define it as a “hyper-film,”as we say a “hyper-text,” which is to say a film exposed to constant deformation, topermanent rectification, to continual addition, to the accumulating weaving ofimages, in the way the Internet weaves and accumulates data.

A projecting film the vision of which would be the projection, the way thereading of a text on a Web site consists above all of a written intervention thatenriches it. An act of vision that would be an act of projection the way an act of read-ing in “the Net” today is an act of writing. A hybrid film submitted to a continualmechanization, so much does its memory—the images recorded on the film—exhibit itself to reception, within a reserve negotiated in the frame in effect of images

Alain Fleischer. Golden Prisons.1997.

belonging to other films. Jean-Louis Boissier noticed one day how interactivity wasmore a new means for artists to manipulate the public than an increase in its partici-pation in a spectacle. In this sense, the films installed by Fleischer are interactive.55

Technical information will not grant mastery and freedom with regard tonew technologies of communication. On the other hand, projection conceivedwith a poetic and “critical” apparatus grants artists with a political responsibility.This is the obvious “message” of Fleischer’s Golden Prisons.

Fleischer and Snow are the only two artists who, in the exhibition, minimizethe machine. And by contrast to the other installations, one has the right to won-der where the projection machines have gone with Fleischer, to such an extent isthe customary bias of modern artists, as we have seen, to “show the process.” Infact, it is the whole installation that is a projector, generalized to the full scale ofthe room and of the representation. In the apparatus put to work by Fleischer themirrors receive a “delegation” on behalf of the projectors and prolong the lumi-nous action. In these Golden Prisons, projection becomes fallacy and aberration. Itis not surprising that in fact it was invented in a prison.56 Reflections become pro-jections; the film theater is the projector, and the spectator revolves inside it.

Recently, Jean-Louis Schefer questioned the absence of representation ofthe human body in the cave paintings of paleolithic art.57 Other darkrooms, otherprojections. . . . Schefer hypothesized that the cave is the human body that framesthe group of the figures; the human body is the interpretant by exceeding its solefigurative function. “Humanization is not in the approximative human figures; itis not of a graphic but of a topographic kind,” Schefer says.58 Fleischer’s installa-tion, another cave,59 decidedly deserves its name: the spectator is imprisoned withthe images, at the very interior of a projection machine, amid its mirrors and itsfires, “development and interior of a huge body [of a huge apparatus] whichframes, contains, multiplies and ‘interprets’ all the possible figurations.”60 ForFleischer, the projection of images thus creates an interpretant space.

Michael Snow

As in the projective cave of Alain Fleischer, the presence of projectors isnot a priority in Michael Snow’s work. Two Sides to Every Story (TSES) (1974) is a


55. Third Lyon Biennale, 1995.56. See above, the text by Jean-Luc Godard.57. Jean-Louis Schefer, Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, p. 5. This text is the development of afirst approach in Trafic 3 (Summer 1992).58. This hypothesis is drawn from the work of the structuralist ethnographer Jean-Louis Gourhan. Seetranslator’s note.59. Flashes of images, escaping and weaving, outside the frames set up to receive the images, the wallsof the scenographic cube containing the installation.60. J.-L. Schefer, Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, pp. 28–29.

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61. Except for Michael Snow and Jozef Robakowski, the artists have suggested original works (pro-duced by the National Studio of Contemporary Art in Le Fresnoy), based on the “mandatory” theme ofthe exhibition. The artists have been chosen based on knowledge of their earlier work, which led to theirbeing invited to participate in the exhibition.62. Pierre Théberge, Michael Snow (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1978), p. 9.63. At the end of the 1960s, a series of urban, sculptural, and photographic interventions consisted ofsetting in the street a stylized profile of a walking woman.64. Painting plays an important role in Snow’s performance—installation: bombast, painted target.

historical installation, the oldest of the projects of this exhibition.61 Snow shareswith Fleischer a precedent status in contemporary art from the point of view ofthe use of projected light within museum space. To clarify my thinking andavoid provoking envious retorts, I want to designate a certain type of projectiveinstallation, midway between fiction, visual figuration, and language, defined inthe first part of this essay.

In general, Snow doesn’t display particular fascination for the mechanico-machinic aspects within his installations. TSES was thus described in 1978:“simultaneous projection of two films on two sides of a screen hung in the midstof a room making use of the simultaneously opaque and transparent nature of thefilmic material in a series of variations on reality and illusion of a representedspace.”62 Undeniably correct description, precise and above all complete, whichnonetheless displaces, in allgood faith, the exact point onwhich Snow works, because itis the screen, essent ially thescreen, more than an abstractfilmic mater ial, which isSnow’s burden. The screenhowever being, in short, noth-ing but the sur face of anapparatus, of a fleet ingimpression. But a screen thatfinally permits here, in thisinst allat ion, to sat isfy thecuriosity of the Carabinier Michel-Ange: to cross and see behind the screen, totake literally (“au pied de l’oeil,” we should say) the perspectivist illusion of thephotocinematographic image, to cross the screen so as to penetrate the depthbeyond the screen and tear it if necessary. And it is necessary! It is this that Snowinvites in granting as an “actress” to us another walking woman,63 to achieve,according to many illusionistic experiences between reality and representationand some rituals that recall those of Robert Morris, the decisive and cutting act ofLucio Fontana: to slice the screen-fabric, to show the absence beyond what theillusionistic strengths of painting dissimulate.64 But Snow’s aim is obviously slyer. Itis less to deconstruct or disillusion that interests him. An earlier modernity—Mondrian, Pollock, Newman, Fontana, “minimal” art—are already at work on

Above and facing page: Michael Snow.Two Sides to Every Story. 1974.

that. With Snow, one “lost illusion” may start up another. After the “actress” hastorn the screen, she reappears from the other side; a second fiction projected onthe reverse of the screen takes up the relay, in the most athletic sense of the word.Suddenly, the spectator is led to move past his supposed “knowledge” about thefilmic illusion. As imprisoned and frozen [médusé] as the Carabinier Michel-Ange,he leaps to the other side of the screen and, filled by this unwonted transgressionof the laws of representation, the screen not melting away as in Godard’s film, helinks up, he ascends a narrative and spatial becoming that substitutes itself for hisdesires. The illusion continues behind the screen. The story continues after theword “End.” The spectator joins, ascends by passing from the front to the backside of the screen. The filmic material is thus sent in its totality to the screen. Theediting that organizes this material for the main part is no longer the result of a

succession that unreels from anend-to -end juncture of twofilmic and temporalsegments.65 The editing hereis a matter of simultaneity, ofthe synchronism of indepen-dent temporal sequences,projected outside of all collage.It is in space that this simul-t aneit y operates, withdifficulty by the way, so muchmust the spectator actpromptly to solder the end of

the right-side sequence to the opening of the reverse-side sequence. It is a tempo-ral as much as spatial connection. It is the screen, its hair-fine thickness that is theseal. A seal that one could define dialectically: optical opacity—the screen is nottransparent—and fictive transparency—the two sequences join up. It is by thisputting the screen to the test insofar as it is a second machine for the projected image,complementary to the projector, that Snow joins up with Fleischer, but accordingto a more conceptual than poetical project. TSES is central within the work of theCanadian artist. Before I evoked the hair-fine thickness of the screen on which itinvited the spectator to meditate, but I must add that a large part of this work isattached to the question of illusionism in art.66 In 1979 Snow summarized this asfollows:

Two Sides to Every Story implies a visual skepticism. I compared the thin-ness of the filmic image of light on a surface to that of painting or of


65. “A film is truly linear,” Snow said in 1979, in a fatalistic but not resigned manner (Michael Snow, p.43).66. From the crushed breakfast table (Table Top Dolly, 1972–76) to the holograms and to his master-piece, Wavelength (l966–67).

ink. Its lack of substance moves me because it re-creates our way of see-ing when light strikes a surface. I try to underscore this thinness thatresults from the compression of three-dimensional objects, of individu-als, etc., onto a two-sided object. I examine there as much the mysteryof the light as the reduction of illusion of the depth that can be strongif one faces the image but weakens as soon as one shifts position andchanges one’s point of view. Viewed from the side, the image becomesmore and more flat, more and more thin and one sees the illusionthere more than the realism.67

It is the illusion of the world for which Snow is passionate, more than for theworld itself. That being said, this latter can benefit, to be better understood, fromsuch an entertainment.

Two Sides to Every Story is a piece that takes on another aspect of projectionand its effects.

The transport of the image barely preoccupies Snow. For him the projectiveinstallation constitutes instead a privileged apparatus to upset the metonymic fateof the story made up of moving images.68 This is what Pierre Théberge cannilynoticed in one of his questions put to Snow: representation of simultaneous tem-poral states or clearly narrative contents?69 The filmmaker of La Région centraledeliberately took the side of simultaneity against succession, if one can thus placeand schematize an aesthetic for which the dialectic ambition is not the least fea-ture. But I make this over-crude hypothesis in order to suggest a stake thatexceeds this contradiction, this latter being able, however, itself alone, to justifythe best of experimental film aesthetically.

This stake opens onto the nature of the time to which the projected movingimage gives rise and which Snow’s installation tried precociously to translate thecrystalline complexity within it, at the very moment when Gilles Deleuze was think-ing this same temporality turned into image. In this sense, one can consider thatsimultaneity/successivity contradiction that forms the unity of Two Sides to EveryStory, equivalent to the unity formed by the actual image and “its” virtual image inDeleuze. Snow in fact looks, beyond the ordinary simultaneity of sound-image, fora more mental simultaneity:

The memory of a past thing put in the mind of the spectator can offeranother kind of simultaneity. That also applies to Rameau’s Nephew . . .within which each section is so different from every other that theapprehension or the comprehension of the past moment can be modi-fied by the one where you find yourself and the one you have just left.It produces in the mind a layering of individual things.70

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67. Michael Snow, p. 40.68. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Paris: Gallimard, 1981).69. Michael Snow, p. 43.70. Ibid.

A remark that draws its full force if we associate it with the precedent whereSnow insisted on the real and imaginary thinness of his double-faced screen. Aremark that takes on still another force, if we relate it to this quote from Bergsonto which Deleuze has recourse for the analysis of his crystals of t ime : “Everymoment of our life thus offers two aspects: it is real and virtual, perception of oneside and memory of the other.”71

The spectator of Two Sides to Every Story basically conjugates simultaneity andsuccession, the recent past of a temporal segment interrupted on the reverse sideand the present of a repeat of another segment on the front. Snow sets this“exchange between an actual image and a virtual image, the virtual becomesactual and conversely; and also there is exchange between the limpid and theopaque, the opaque becoming limpid and conversely; finally there is exchangebetween a seed and a context. I believe that the imaginary is this ensemble. Theimaginary is the crystal image.”72

If before I argued that Snow was little concerned with the transport ofimages, this is because, for him, this transport arises less from the spatial domainthan from a temporal disquiet. The image projected in TSES forms an apparatusthat unites the linkage and the reversibility, perception of one side and memory of theother, which is to say a transport of which the time leans toward its shortest possibleduration, this having the thickness of the screen-cloth. Put otherwise, no longer aluminous transport, but a luminous virtual interface:

. . . the virtual image in its pure state is not defined in function of a newpresent in relation to which it will be (relatively) past, but in functionof the actual present “of which” it is the past, absolutely and simultane-ously: particular, it is nonetheless “past in general,” in the sense that ithas not yet received a date. Pure virtuality, it has only to actualize itself,since it is rigorously correlative of the actual image with which it formsthe smallest possible circuit which serves as the base or the summit forall the others. It is the virtual image that corresponds to such and suchactual image, instead of actualizing itself, to have to actualize itself in“another” actual image. It’s a circuit walking an actual-virtual line, andnot an actualization of the virtual in function of a shifting actual. It’san image-crystal, and not an organic image.73

From images that only exist because they are made of light, therefore imagesthat are made of time: it was my opening hypothesis whose first stage of “verifica-tion” was of a literary nature. Michael Snow offers experience in visual andscenographic acts, performance as well to the initiative of the spectator-flaneur, ofthe relative, dialectic temporality, of the projected image, “critical” balcony of the


71. Henri Bergson, quoted by Gilles Deleuze, L’Image-temps, p. 106.72. Deleuze, L’Image-temps, pp. 106–07.73. Ibid., p. 106

future regimes of the image. Final illustration, if there is still need for one at theend of this visit, of the fact that the artists, if they don’t prefigure the future—theyare no more divine than other human beings—speak of future worlds beforethese arise. Why not call this statement, paradoxically both outmoded andutopian, a projection, a dreamy and poetic transport toward the future?

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Should We Put an End to Projection