James Coleman Explorer of Representations
From June 9th to August 23rd, 2021, the Centre Pompidou is devoting a retrospective to James Coleman, known in particular for his “projected images”. From the mechanisms of visual perception to the narrativity of representations, all deeply nourished by art history, the Irish artist dissects the functioning of the image, its layers of fiction and its temporalities. In three points, Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov, curator of the exhibition, unpicks the threads.
Coleman’s major work is divided into two distinct fields of investigation.The first is that of visual cognition, the functioning of which Coleman has been exploring since his beginnings in the late 1960s. Radicalising the heritage of Minimalism, his works with a laboratory aesthetic activate certain elementary mechanisms of perception so that the viewer, both subject and object of the experience, can become aware of them. Close to the artist Dan Graham, Coleman highlights the central role of memory and language in the perception of images. In Playback For a Daydream (1974), he appropriated the famous “duck-rabbit” drawing reproduced in 1900 by the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow and widely commented on by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ernst Gombrich. In his untitled project for Documenta 9, he proposes a moving form that defies any assignment to a specific object, and challenges the viewer to “try to say”, as Georges DidiHuberman puts it.
Time also occupies a fundamental place in many of these so-called “phenomenological” works. Thus Coleman’s early films, rooted in the legacy of 1960s experimental cinema, ponders the illusion of simulated movement through the use of very simple, effective devices: The Clock (ca. 1970) presents an alarm clock the hands of which remain motionless. The work mimics the fixity of photography with a remarkable economy of means—a clock that no longer makes cinema time pass. One of Coleman’s most recent works, Still Life (2013-16), depicts a
« Retake With Evidence ». 2007. Extrait de film / still image from video. (© DR)
large poppy plant in the manner of a botanical drawing: a single vertical projection, somewhat narrow, and large in scale. It confronts the viewer with the hypnosis of a form with presumed movements: a legacy, along with Playback For a Daydream, of the psychology of form. In the late 1970s, as the art critic Benjamin Buchloh notes, Coleman transgressed modernism’s rejection of narrativity by calling upon the theatre. Coleman’s narratives are in line with an Irish literary tradition of orality and the “holes” in language, between John M. Synge and Samuel Beckett. Like Beckett’s theatre, they make a clear separation between the speech and image of his characters, making the association of a voice with a body uncertain.
LANGUAGE HOLES
The break with the modernist paradigm comes with So Different... and Yet (1979-80). Recorded in Dublin after meticulous preparation, this video work, which makes early use of the background, is marked by meticulous staging and diction. The story intertwines two plots worthy of pulp fiction, built around the theft of a dress that needs to be updated. The same theatricality unfolds in the film Retake With Evidence, produced for Documenta 12 in 2007, which features Hollywood actor Harvey Keitel reciting a translated text by Sophocles in monologue tone, while wandering among archaeological replicas: a profound meditation on power, and more precisely democracy, emerges through this recorded performance, as in many of Coleman’s other works.
PICTURE STORIES
But it is undoubtedly the invention of the “projected image” device so characteristic of Coleman’s work—the invention of a “new medium” in the words of Rosalind Krauss— that decisively guides his approach to narrative. Shown via a visible projector, slides synchronised to a soundtrack follow one another, like a drastically stopped film or a photo-novella adapted to the cinema format. Produced according to scripts written by Coleman and requiring meticulous preparation, including an exacting casting, these “projected images” depict characters in assertive yet suspended poses, as if in waiting. Often tinged with a detached humour, the narratives appropriate certain commonplaces from literature and commercial photography. Different levels of fiction are superimposed in a Pirandellian questioning of the functioning of representation. In fact, in the continuity of Coleman’s early works, the image itself is the main subject of these stories.Thus, Lapsus Exposure, exhibited at Documenta 9 in 1992, features two musical groups belonging to disjointed temporal universes, reflecting the opposition of analogue and digital time. The characters, whose names come from the audiovisual world (Midi or Seiko), query the conditions of voice recording: the theme of playback runs through the work, and through it, Coleman’s obsession with the presence of the past in the present.
Although it operates at the intersection of different disciplines of the mechanical image, the painting, in its broadest sense, remains a constant reference in Coleman’s work, as he is a connoisseur of its history and a great lover of Seurat. In contrast to the modernist programme, Coleman in many respects revives the codes of classical painting, a painting with a literary subject augmented in large “tableaux vivants” by the movement of theatre. As Bernard Blistène reminds us in his contribution to the exhibition catalogue, Coleman thus prolongs a rich tradition that originated in the salons of the 18th century, at a time when Denis Diderot made the painting the meeting point of painting and theatre, one taking its model from the other and vice versa. Coleman takes the contradiction inherent in the tableau vivant—reconciling the immobility of painting and the movement of theatre—to an extreme: he makes it visible through characters rendered ghostly by a double process: the use of photography, which manifests the absence of what it traces, and the adoption of suspended postures, suggesting an absence of oneself. Emblematic of this paradox, the installation INITIALS (1993-94) seems haunted by spectral figures lost in different strata of fiction. The real scandal of these photographic tableaus, it seems, is death...
Translation: Chloé Baker
Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov is a curator at the Musée national d’art moderne-Centre Pompidou and head of the Bibliothèque Kandinsky (library located in the museum).
James Coleman
Né en / born in 1941 à / in Ballaghaderreen (Irlande) Vit et travaille à / lives and works in Dublin et / and Paris Représenté par / represented by galerie
Marian Goodman (New York, Paris, Londres) Expositions personnelles récentes
/ Recent solo shows:
2019 Lapsus Exposure, Mumok, Vienne
2017 Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
2016 Marian Goodman Gallery, Londres
2012 Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid
2011 Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin
Expositions collectives récentes
/ Recent group shows:
2017 Dallas Museum of Art, Texas
2016 Palais de Tokyo, Paris
2014 Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbonne
2012 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
2011 Dublin Contemporary 2011 ; MACBA, Barcelone ; Fondation Antoni Tàpies, Barcelone ; Deichtorhallen Hamburg