Still (and all) Eileen Cowin, Work 1971-1998
The Impossibility of Expression
by Sue Spaid
Contrary to what is suggested by the humanist claims made for
photography, the camera’s ability to transform reality into something
beautiful derives from
its relative weakness as a means of conveying the truth.*1
Set Up to Look Set Up
Film’s well-documented influence on art and the development
of computer
imaging has placed “set-up” photography
(a.k.a. mise-en-scene) at the center
of the medium. However, it was an unfamiliar genre only twenty years ago, even
though 19th century photographs such as Julia Margaret Cameron dressed
and composed their sitters. In 1979, a San Francisco gallery director
was left quite baffled after a conversation with Eileen Cowin; the director
thought photographs were supposed to look believable not “set up
to look set up.” Susan
Sontag’s 1977 book On Photography, a compilation of earlier
essays, publicly
challenged photography’s veracity and thus paved the way
for Postmodernism’s
full-scale analysis of photography’s ability to feign truthfulness.
Her assertion
that “the consequences of lying have to be more central
for photography than
they ever can be for painting, because the flat, usually rectangle images which
are photographs make a claim to be true that paintings can never make”*2 must
have sounded earth-shattering in the early 1970s. Prior to On Photography,
only a handful of known photographers, such as Minor White, Ralph Gibson,
Duane Michals and Robert Heinecken, readily challenged photography’s
epistemic
claims, though dozens of Southern Californian artists were contesting “the
conventional distinction between lie and truth”*3 implicit
in photography.
Given the inherent sincerity of 60’s and 70’s
aesthetics (Greenberg’s
truth to materials, Minimalism’s specific objects, pop art’s
quotidian
references or Fluxus’ live happenings/events), it’s
not surprising that concurrent
photographers sought a gritty reality. Photographers like Diane Arbus, Larry
Clark, Elliott Erwitt, Robert Frank, Richard Misrach, Nicholas Nixon, Bill
Owens
and Garry Winnogrand tended to document the extraordinary hidden in everyday
life. The next generation examined photography’s potential
for artifice
mostly by simulating reality, and a handful—James Casebere,
Eileen Cowin, Cindy
Sherman and Jeff Wall—froze fantastic scenarios to perpetuate
new realities. As
photographers forged reality from fiction, viewers abandoned their faith in
truthfulness, and began to experience boundlessness previously reserved for
painting and cinema.
Still (and all)
Since 1995, the genre known as mise-en-scene (French for setting
a stage)
has exploded into proto-cinematic photography. Dozens of photo-based artists
from Meghan Boody, Jenny Gage, Anna Gaskell, Alexei Hay, Dana Hoey, Hubbard &
Birchler, Sarah Jones, Justine Kurland, Sharon Lockhart, Chantal Michel, Liza
May Post, and Vibeke Tandberg to Sam Taylor-Wood yearn to capture film’s
duration and event simultaneity within a single static frame. Mise-en-scene
facilitates an illusion akin to film, thus upending the conventional distinction
between the still and moving image, whereby “the still
photograph is evidence;
the moving photograph, illusion.”*4 Sharing Eileen Cowin’s
earlier quest for
fantasy (the gum prints (1973-75), One Night Stand (1977-78), Lady Killer
(1977-78) and Family Docudrama (1980-83) series), this newest generation revitalized
mise-en-scene to explore and cultivate new realities.
On viewing proto-cinematic photographs, suspension builds as the
contemplative spectator selects an image’s primary event
and then conjectures before,
during and after events from the surrounding clues.*5 Thus, the spectator
supplements each work’s creation via interpretation affirming
Duchamp’s aphorism:
“It’s the viewers who make the pictures.” By
contrast, Cowin’s concurrent
ineffable strings of straightforward stills (Don’t Ever
Lie to Me (1994),
Match (1995), Small Intimacies (1995), White Heat (1995-96), Through No Fault
of
Her Own (1997) and I’ll Give You Something to Cry About
(1998) confound the
direction of time rather than sketch it, baffling those who enjoy constructing
scripts. Comprised of strips of seemingly unrelated images, they seem nonsequential
rather than sequential (left to right), though they reference a mode of
storytelling that originated with Christian altarpieces. In this respect,
Cowin’s nonlinear structures parallel the development of recent films such
as Pulp Fiction or Out of Sight, which popularized nonsequential flashbacks.
One’s response often resembles the refrain from Cowin’s favorite
Kurosawa film,
Rashomon: “I can’t understand it.”
If a still offers evidence, then the “still” segment
of Cowin’s
exhibition title connotes Roland Barthes’s notion of the
classic text, which has
“nothing more to say than what it says.”*6Thus,
one can attribute the “and all” portion of her title to everything the photograph
shows but does not specifically express.*7 For Barthes, “the
classic text is pensive...replete with
meaning...yet it still keeps in reserve some ultimate meaning, this zero degree
of
meaning...this supplementary...signifier of the inexpressible, not of the
unexpressed.”*8 The treacherous gulf lying between what
the viewer perceives as
inexpressible (the pensive) and as utterable recalls Duchamp’s “art
coefficient,” his distinction between the “unexpressed
but intended and the
unintentionally expressed.”*9
Still (and all) denotes a literal translation of some static and
self-evident component (expressible) engulfed by a dynamic and inscrutable
everything
else (inexpressible). Paradoxically, still and all means “nonetheless” of
“even with everything considered,”*10 which actually
contributes more skepticism regarding photography’s veracity. While the trendy
proto-cinematic generation
injects movement into the still, Cowin is saturating video with stillness (A
Form of Ecstasy (1994) and It Goes Without Saying (1996)), thus further
twisting the typical storyboard format’s narrative. By magnifying the zero
degree of meaning and the length of duration present in an otherwise static
still, Cowin’s mid-career survey, Still (and all) exposes the general
problems of
expression.
L’Impossibility du Fer
Eileen Cowin has often remarked, “I have been involved
in the study of
relationships.” An identical twin, she entered into an
unusual long-term
relationship at birth. Many other kinds of relationships recur in her work,
including word/image, family/lovers, cause/effect, duration/activity,
surveillance/voyeurism, stimulus/response, victim/persecutor, observer/observed,
reality/fiction, subject/object, and director/cast member. Family Facing Camera
(1984)
captures a nuclear family reproducing itself in its own image; thus their
fraudulence is forever framed as real. The ultimate voyeur, the camera carelessly
renders each subject an object.
One of Cowin’s earliest projects (1978) presented
two different images
side-by-side that correspond to same-sounding words as Sink, Bound or Feet.
Although she never visually depicted the homonyms associated with the word
“impression,” the twin meanings of the
word “impression”—an
imprint made on a
surface by pressure and the effect produced on the mind—has
long intrigued her.
Theoretically, homonyms multiply the potential number of relationships between
words and images. Any visual exploration of homonyms initiates an unfolding
chain. If one word evokes two images, then each image might yield two new words
(four words), potentially engendering two new images (eight unrelated
pictures), etc. Maybe Cowin’s recent multi-panel works bloom
from such a process,
only now the homonyms go unnamed.
Not surprisingly, the punning Duchamp toyed with homonyms. When asked
to
define genius, Duchamp replied, “l’impossibility du
fer (the impossibility of
iron),” which is homophonous with “l’impossibility du
faire (the
impossibility of making),” which is synonymous with both
the uselessness of making
(grinding one’s pigments vs. buying a tube of paint) and
the impossibility of
choosing a particular object or color. By expanding words into a cascade of
images,
Cowin thwarts the reader’s urge to collapse a picture into
its linguistic
equivalent.*11 “Indeed, it is the direction of meaning which
determines the two
major management functions of the classic text: the author is always supposed
to go from signified to signifier, from content to form, from idea to text,
from passion to expression; and in contrast the critic goes in the other
direction.”*12
Even as viewers become familiar with Cowin’s repeated
imagery, her motifs
resist translation, particularly as some pictographic language, since each
picture’s interpretation is hardly stable. The seeming unrelatedness
of
Cowin’s multi-panel imagery recalls Duchamp’s
literal nominalism, the grouping of
several words without significance, such as cheek, amyl and phaedra, to yield
pictures independent of each reader’s interpretation. “The reproducer presents
...without interpretation, the group of words and finally no longer expresses
a work of art (poem, painting, or music).”*13
For Cowin, the impossibility of making is simply the impossibility of
expression or authorship. Thus, Cowin’s work is central to any characterization
of an anti-representational theory of art in which no linguistic items
can represent non-linguistic items.*14 Artists who refuse
the real are free to introduce fresh experiences, novel concepts and emotional
depth akin to Socrates’ first Form (or pure idea). Pictorial terms without
precedent (novel concepts) avoid Socrates’ critique that representations
don’t tell us anything about the
reality that exists in the notion of things.*15 While the
images comprising Family Docudrama (1980-83) appear to depict some actual family,
this series actually anticipated heated debates in the 1980s concerning “the
mommy track,” “working women” and “stay-at-home
moms.” Set up to look set up, there is
nothing real about them. “[T]here are no people, only characters;
there are no
events, only performances. Daily life thus presents itself as an impenetrable
network of social relations; reality and role playing are indistinguishable.”*16
Emotional Depth
As director, script writer, cinematographer and editor all rolled into
one, Cowin is wholly responsible for developing each character’s emotional
depth and inspiring her actors to evoke relevant responses. Like a Mike
Leigh film, Cowin’s intense works engage the viewer in temporal
explosions of anxiety,
bitterness, dread, terror, intrigue, danger, boredom, ecstasy, affection,
displeasure, betrayal, confusion, grief, pity, panic, regret, nostalgia, disdain,
contempt, gratitude, pride, remorse, indignation, resignation, eros, desolation,
dejection, lament or anticipation. While the list of emotions seems endless,
the number of photographers who dare to explore emotions (seemingly only
Cowin, Taylor-Wood and Bill Viola) is quite short. Interpreting one’s own
emotions, let alone capturing another’s, is quite tricky, especially since
so few emotions are directly observable, unlike a pinch, a pimple or purple
hair.*17
From the onset, Cowin has explored emotions, yet her images still espouse
the difficulty of clearly articulating either an emotion’s
cause or its
interpretation. Dozens of early works engender sensual delight—Untitled
(taking off
shirt) 1971), Untitled(woman’s skirt/nude couple) (1971),
the Genuine
Delicious series (1973) and The Hand is Quicker series (1974). As cheeky, erotic
and
playful prints, their motives are never clear, but the response belongs as
much to the viewer as to each image’s subject. Although
Three Women (1987)
float, they seem exhausted, delirious, and almost disappointed. Potentially
a
post-party round-up, they appear engaged in a bit of self-reflection. With
their
backs facing the viewers, Three Men (1987) seem emotionally unavailable and
rather unconcerned with introspection.
The overly bleak nature of the bleached out One Night Stand series sets
it apart as rather emptied of emotion, as if the subjects are too drained to
feel. Given their miniature night stands, casually displayed self-portraits
and
decentered croppings, they hardly seem matter of fact. These situations are
charged by the absence of inhabitants. The subjects in the Lady Killer series
are also missing, yet each picture’s aggressive overtone
clarifies some of
the underlying emotions.
The works in Still (and all) run the emotional gamut. One soon discovers
contradictory emotions peering through sensuous surfaces. “Many emotions...come
in networks of relations, from which no single one could with integrity
be abstracted.”*18 While the gap between the still and all,
or expressed and
shown, may never disappear, Cowin’s images provoke experiences
that enhance
one’s awareness of the complex range of emotions present.
*END NOTES
1. Sontag, Susan, On Photography (1977), p. 100.
2. Ibid., p. 78.
3. Desmarais, Charles, Proof: Los Angeles Art and the Photograph
1960-1980 (1992), p. 12. Proof, an exhibit which Desmarais originated at
the Laguna Beach Museum of Art, assembled photographic works by 45 artists,
including Cowin,
who had lived and worked in Southern California between 1960 and 1980. Proof
demonstrated how many works produced during this fertile era anticipated
theories that Postmodernists later articulated.
4. Desmarais, p. 13.
5. DeDuve, Thierry, Kant After Duchamp (1996), p. 122.
6. Barthes, Roland,
SIZ (1974), p. 216. This phrase recalls Frank Stella’s
“what you see is what you see.” 7. Sircello, Guy, Mind & Art (1972), p. 239, Sircello demarcates showing
from expressions and signs. “F shows in the expressions.” Thus,
one need not
verbally express one’s disappointment to show it.
8. Barthes, p. 216.
9. Tompkins, Calvin, Duchamp, a Biography (1996), Appendix,
p. 510.
10. Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Second
Edition, 1998.
11. Barthes, p. 171. In SIZ, Roland Barthes mentions that
meaning typically moves away from the signified (meaning) into a sea of signifiers
(sound-images), from a particular to a generality, in order to locate some
profound truth (the still as evidence). Cowin’s opacity stems from her
work’s moving in the
opposite direction, when it resists translation.
12. Ibid., p. 174.
13. Marcel Duchamp, Notes from the White Box (1914).
14. Rorty, Richard, Objectivity,
Relativity and Truth (1992), p. 2.
15. Plato, The Republic, Book X, p. 327.
16. Dana Asbury, 1983, quoted in Mark
Johnstone, Four Photographers by Four
Writers, “A Prospectus for Some Conditions, Some Criticisms
and the Critical
Condition of Eileen Cowin’s Work” (University
of Colorado at Boulder, 1987), p.
8.
17. Ekman, Paul, “Movement in Expression of Emotion,” Explaining
Emotions
(ed. Amelie O. Rorty, 1980), p. 81.
18. Rey, Georges, “Functionalism and Emotions,” Ibid.,
p. 184. |
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