Sound as a message

It's getting hard to say if it is the visual conducts the sound in the first place or the sound shapes the visual initially, sound is now recognized as a frontier of art practices. Technology is an obvious reason. There are more tools that are easier and less expensive to use these days. And because of that there is more artistic freedom for those innovative minds.

Sound can be explored in many guises. There can be environments where sound shapes a space, and explorations into how sound affects a viewer’s experience. When we talk about the action and content of recordings, we have to think about the places and spaces that generate different types of sound, like those from abandoned buildings in large cities, flying bats at midnight and a food-processing factory in small town. Since there have to be a source of audio, a vibration of sound waves and a medium to transmit the waves to our ears, sound is filled with evidences and traces of the richness of an environment.

Sound is visual too. There is a straight connection between visual imagery and the recognition of a sound in human perception. Each sound gesture links to a central spot, creating a focal point of weight and intensity. Sound artist can go inside into the old-fashioned standing microphone recording process and rethink about the meaning of hearing and recording, also they can explore the most emerging technology inserted with daily activity and talk about how sound or the awareness of a sound can shape our life.

Moreover, the existence and absence can also be played and investigated by examining sound. Sound can be viewed as prove of existence. However, there would be different kinds of psychical and conceptual delay or disconnection between the sound and visual material of a same existence. Think about the work Lowlands, made by the Scottish artist and Turner Prize winner Susan Philipsz. She has taken the score of a symphony composed for 24 instruments by Pavel Haas in 1943 while he was in a Nazi concentration camp, and reimagined it with just one cello and one viola playing their intermittent parts. When placing three speakers under a passing way beneath a bridge, the artist provide no content for the viewer's eyes about the existence of the singer, however the vocal reminds the audience about the physicality of the song, the writer and the performer.

Also, the repetition of sound can change the content of the hearing. When a familiar word been repeated again and again, it can become a foreign, unfamiliar, nonsense sound. In this situation, the true thing-power or the vital materiality of the object inside the word would start to take place. Think about the sound of a particular language, a certain word, a common parse; and how linguistic limitations narrow the people’s awareness of a certain existence, or the meaning of a thingness.

The exhibition of sound art can go beyond the galleries. Just as the technology of photography changed the ways of looking, the displaying tunes and space would also shape the ways and interpretation of a sound. Think about the situation and places of hearing affect the ways of people understand the emotion and meanings of the sound. Like when put bells ringing in a sculpture garden, people would respond to the imagery and feelings of church bells, cat bells, bicycle bells, and the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange. Together it is possible for them to make up a new assumption about “A Bell for a Meaning”. Therefore the exhibition situation, displaying sites, the already social assumption about the sound's venue can all affect the audience's understanding of the sound. In any gallery space, or an everyday situation, sound is a message sender of a meaning, as well as carrying a message within the format/surface itself.

Pasolini and Photographic Representation

Marilyn Monroe, found footage in La Rabbia

The photographic representation makes it easy for viewers to discover their optical unconscious in an image. With the power of repetitive reproduction, the capability of investigating a crime scene or solve a photographic rebus in analyzing the trace/evidence in a photographic representation have shifted to the masses. According to Henry Bond’s research, people's constant interests in reading evidentiary photography probably link to the popularity of reality TV and people's desire to peel off the cover of privacy and the sacredness of life, and that impulse demonstrates a certain anxiety about reality itself.

Piere Paul Pasolini’s black and white films, especially the La Rabbia, the anger, and The Grim Reaper, could be examined again according to the notion above.

La Rabbia is a great example of artistic rephotography work that established new meanings and significance on collected historical footage and rephotographed news images. The relationship between messages and images can be deconstructed and rebuilt easily by the strategy of rephotographing. The format of this film is a part of its content that inquiring what is anger and what is truth, and wondering about the ambiguity between mediated images/messages and the real world. And that shows a certain anxiety about the reality itself.

On the other hand, the concept of repetition is well explained in the cinematography of The Grim Reaper. For instance, it repeatedly shows a rainy window view outside the hotel where the prostitute was; and also the use of dramatic lighting when the police was questioning different suspects again and again. With the question of who is the real killer in minds, audience will curiously examine every detail inside the b/w frames, trying to find out the answer by investigating those repetitive, filtered, manipulated visual elements. Any subject can be an important trace or evidence to unlock the key. The essentiality of trace or similar visual elements in evidentiary photography is demonstrated by itself.

Rephotographed Fragments

When we talk about what media are and what the reality is, we will be easily confused and lost in a loop filled with glasses, mirrors, and lenses, which can transparently show real life images, reflect or distort the visible and invisibles, as well as recreate newly generated pictures at the same time. We are living in a world that constructed by multiply layers of seeing, various forms of mediated images, different levels of filtered repetition, reproduction and representation.

Technical development in photography makes it possible for people to enlarge a detail, to pause a motion, and to deconstruct a still image. We have thousands of methods and reasons to photograph a photograph. We make pictures of pictures every day in our life. Rephotographed fragments can be found everywhere in reality as well as in media. The fundamental signification implicit in the use of rephotograph technique is that there is an emphasis placed upon the materiality and processes of photography as media/medium.

Photography with its capability in rephotographing/reproduction is only one part of the big loop of contemporary media practice. Charlie Gere's argument on what today's media are is quite supportive, that is media are the production and product of digitalized endless repetition. Media are working like a big archive of represented, mediated, and filtered life-images and reality pieces. We are a part of the repetition and reproduction. We are so close to the rephotographed fragments, but somehow so remote from reality itself.

Indeed, it seems not only elementary but also essential that an inquiry into the nature of photographic representation is actually enriched through an a priori acceptance of the photographer's alienation from their subject. And it is alienation, which begins within the lens itself, for Lacan, implicit to the imposition of language, the fundamental consequence of the subject's entry into the Symbolic Order. We struggle to convey intimacy in language: it is already pulverized. We can only get to the real feeling through the artificial. Same thing happens in today's media age. We struggle to reveal the secret of life, the mysterious sacredness of reality; however the reality is already pulverized, separated, distorted into millions of layers, pieces, and various dimensions of images. We can now only try to get the sense of reality through the media world that built with repetition, representation and reflection.

"Rephotography may be conceptualized/recognized as a useful means with which to emphasize the fundamentally mediated quality of subjectivity itself." The more we want to know about the reality itself, the more repetition we make to get a sense of the original. We are in such a dilemma that we have to use the repetition/artificial as an entry way for understanding something, however making us even further away from the true materiality/objectivity itself.

This phenomenon can be explained by Jacqueline Rose, an overly Freudian perspective, in a way that repetition is an insistence, that is, as the constant pressure of something hidden but not forgotten. In her interpretations of rephotographing activities, "repetition actually becomes a valuable tool that can act to intensify and illuminate precisely through representation/pressure, which returns the reader/viewer to some element that has been repressed, removed, rejected."

Optical Unconscious

Photography as a form of art work can be so different by the ways people talk about it, make use of it, and also by the certain ideology people view the function of it. Similar to the different meanings and functions that people articulate the action of talking photographs, the significance of images can be so various according to the different purposes and methods that people use to examine them. 

Evidentiary photography can be identified by the use of a camera working as a tool to decode, explore and investigate the traces - evidence inside a picture frame. In 1924, the Hungarian photographer and writer Laszlo Moholy- Nagy noted how the photographic camera "makes visible existences which cannot be perceived or taken in by our optical instrument, the eye." Camera lens, as a mechanism optical instrument, can make the unconscious existences in human eyes visible within the development of science and technology. Walter Benjamin also commented on that point that "photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis." 

We view things with our optical unconscious everyday. That unconsciousness would also be included inside the images we take. When photography is used/operated as an examiner, an enlarger, or a recorder, the traces/ evidence of the unconscious are not wholly imperceptible. Photography functions in reveal the secret of an image, the secret of seeing, the secret of reality, especially the reality that used to be ignored or unconsciously overlooked by our naked eyes. 

Actually, there has always been an interest in seeing evidentiary photography, such as police pictures and crime photography. Discovery the trace/evidence in a still picture with the possibility of enlargement, pause, repetitive examination, and people are attracted by the capability of revealing hidden existence, lies, and secrets. This phenomenon probably links to the popularity of reality TV and other media formats that function in showing the private parts in others' lives. People's desire to peel off the cover of privacy and the secrets of daily life when viewing a photograph demonstrates a certain anxiety about reality itself. Some people find the crime photography is beautiful and compelling because of their fascination about the sacredness of violent death. Privacy, anxiety, and the mysterious sacredness of life, all of these old taboos are now released by the power of media and capability of techniques. 

On the other hand, people examine images differently. What kinds of visual elements can be read as traces/evidence to the viewers are decided by their own understandings. The relationships between traces/evidence and meanings are different according to their cultural backgrounds, ideologies, and social norm systems. Actually, there is even a distinction between traces and evidence to some audience. People connect their personal experiences and understandings to the visual elements inside a picture frame, and then personalize their own interpretation of a pictorial investigation. These personalized reading/editing of a photograph can be done consciously and unconsciously. 

Different readers can interpret a same picture into thousands of meanings. The meanings of visual arts, just like any other kinds of existing such as politics, religions, and value systems, is forever shifting. Every picture reader is like a gatekeeper. The transition of meanings from people to people, generation to generation, culture to culture is activated by the establishment of new relationship between trace/evidence and significance. The shifting of meanings and its following reproduction are performed by new discoveries of relations and how different viewers translate those links between trace/evidence into content. 

Photographic Tableaux

Royal Blood, photographed by Erwin Olaf. 

Jean-François Chevrier was the first to coin the term Tableau in relation to a form of art photography, which began in the 1970s and 80s in an essay titled The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photography in 1989. According to dictionary, the word Tableau means:

1. A vivid or graphic description;

2. A striking incidental scene, as of a picturesque group of people: "New public figures suddenly abound in the hitherto faceless totalitarian tableaux" (John McLaughlin).

3. An interlude during a scene when all the performers on stage freeze in position and then resume action as before.

There is no direct translation into English for the French word Tableau, which nowadays can be understood as living picture by the term of Tableaux Vivian. The initial translator, Michael Fried held the belief that, picture is similar, however "…it lacks the connotations of construction, of being the product of an intellectual act that the French word carries."

A photographic tableau has strong relation to the notion of Western Picture. Starting by using the format of photograph to reproduce another kind of art picture, mainly Western paintings, the tableau pictures grow roots in the so-called pictorialist photography. Good examples can be found in the photographs made by Alfred Stieglitz. Pictorialism, according to Jeff Wall could be seen as an attempt by photographers to unsuccessfully imitate painting. "Pictorialist photography was dazzled by the spectacle of Western painting and attempted, to some extent, to imitate it in acts of pure composition. Lacking the means to make the surface of its pictures unpredictable and important, the first phase of Pictorialism, Stieglitz's phase, emulated the fine graphic arts, reinvented the beautiful look, set standards for gorgeousness of composition, and faded."

The first key characteristic of the contemporary photographic tableau, according to Chevrier, is that the pictures are designed and produced for the wall. Summoning a confrontational experience on the part of the spectator that sharply contrasts with the habitual processes of appropriation and projection whereby photographic images are normally received and "consumed" in books and magazines.  

By this, the second characteristic of photographic tableau is its large scale and size. The relatively larger size for the photographs has another function besides the purpose for showing on walls; it distances the audience from the object. It makes you stand back from the picture to take it all in. This confrontational experience, Fried notes, is actually quite a large break from the conventional reception of photography, which up to that point was often consumed in other media formats.

Following the processes as quotation, excerption, framing, and staging, the imagery content for photographic tableau is emphasizing the construction of nature, a normal setting for a daily scene. As a production of intellectual acts, these photographs are trying to explore the inherent capabilities of the cameras. Jeff Wall argues that "by divesting itself of the encumbrances and advantages inherited from older art forms, reportage, or the spontaneous fleeting aspect of the photographic image pushes toward a discovery of qualities apparently intrinsic to the medium, qualities that must necessarily distinguish the medium from others and through the self-examination of which it can emerge as a modernist art on a plane with others.”