The accidental Theorist

“Les vrai paradis sont les paradis que nous avons perdu”, Marcel Proust.

A visual image soon generates thought. The photographer produces something seen and something to be seen. The viewer reflects on what is shown and how it is pictured – on the quality of their own seeing. Independent of its maker, the photograph produces a new space for thinking, a space for thinking through, and a depicted condition to be comprehended: the Photographer – the Accidental Theorist.

The imagery of “The Diminishing Present” is less a set of pictures than a series of moments in which spaces, mechanisms, signs, objects and events in the instrumentalist, modified landscape of the contemporary order have become independent of causation or function. It resembles a set of location shots for unmade films from lost scenarios. It constitutes a landscape without human figures, seen as though composed in the eye of the security camera – a seeing without a subject – of a landscape already arranged for surveillance. It evokes the coda completing Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, with its new residential zones filled by autonomous machines and alien structures, or Doug Aitken’s post-human video landscapes. But it is something more.
This landscape is actual, familiar, always there, and yet imaginary, unseen. It is the other place, which is always this place, in these things; it is there when our backs are turned, while we sleep, or as we drive past in the unconsciousness of speed, in the half-life of routine – it is the landscape that survives our absence. It is there in the geometry and darkness of empty motorways at night; in street lights illuminating only themselves; in a sleeping suburban street which the sleepers will never see; in the encounter with a quietly burning car abandoned among bushes, a rope of black smoke curling up into a white sky, as if part of some half-forgotten ceremony; in the prospect of a dark house with blind windows; of a soccer pitch devoid of players; in unvisited parks with their pearl coloured architectures of mist; in woods of trees from the other side of the planet.

“The Diminishing Present” is a photography of poised turbulence; full of stillness and silence yet haunted by mobility, by a passing that is not registered as speed but as intangibility and uncertainty, marked by referents that are forever unreachable, never arrived at. It passes through a landscape arranged to be passed through. 
The imagery is committed to the beauty of contingencies, to the unexplained occurrence, to small intensities and fortuitous transformations. It offers encounters with a time suspended before or after events; with crepuscular, in-between places and night spaces where things are freed from their daytime uses, when, caught out in the car headlights, functional objects metamorphose momentarily into poetic events. It floats, free of the need to weight itself with purpose or explanation and in this it displays a quality of “lightness” described by Italo Calvino as the calm identification with the fragility and transience at the heart of things, with the recognition that the world continues without us and cannot ultimately be restrained by the meanings we give to it.1
This lightness may be a release from the weight of the world, but it reunites us with the world in other ways. While its imagery is poised on the edge of abstraction, “The Diminishing Present” denotes the presence of something unsettling, a psychological presence in the work: agoraphobia, vulnerability, the possibility of danger, the actuality of solitude, the uncertainty over what is significant in things: that is, it reveals a world as seen by a stranger, an outsider – by Edgar Martins, perhaps, or an authorial position marked as “edgar martins”, the Portuguese photographer losing himself in the English midlands – and for Julia Kristeva, being “lost” is the precondition for poetic production. Think of the similarity with the work of other recent émigré photographers of space: Josef Koudelka’s bleak spaces, Humberto Rivas’ abandoned streets and interiors, the uncanny nightscapes of Rut Blees Luxembourg and Effie Paleologolou. I use the word “uncanny”. Like Martins, all portray the territory of strangerhood, one struck by the psychic condition of das Unheimlich/the uncanny, as much an interior domain as an external one: “the uncanny object or narrative inspires dread not because it forces an encounter with the outside, but rather with the displaced representation of the inside. Hence the unhomely, (the Unheimlich), and the foreigner are the self’s own others…”.2
There is a floating world quality in Martins’ work, both here and in other of his projects. It lies not in the style or structure of the image but in the way “it” looks at things. The delicate strangeness, the way objects and events are seen as if from the point of view of a subject both there and nowhere, a picturing that recalls certain concepts behind visual practices in Chinese and Japanese traditions, such as the Japanese notion of s’unyata, meaning “impermanence”, “blankness’, “nihility”.3 This quality can, I think, be associated with a form of homelessness that does not seek to return home – a dissident type of nostalgia. In the seventeenth century a Swiss doctor dealing with a condition once called, la maladie du pays (homesickness), invented the word nostalgia from two Greek words, nostos (home) and algia (longing). Svetlana Boym proposes that while there is the longing for the return to the absent mythical place, nostos, there is also the longing for longing itself, algia – it is, she says, citing, Susan Stewart, “enamoured of distance, not of the referent itself”.4 It is this kind of desire that is expressed in Martins’ photography through the sense of permanent mobility, the forever distant referent, and the lightness of touch and presence – finally at home nowhere else than in itself and in the process of its own making.

“The Diminishing Present” might additionally be regarded as a form of documentation which purchases on a particular location, an undervalued, overlooked and by-passed part of England, a blank region between major cities but not deeply rural, and not exactly suburban and lacking much promotable natural scenery. Yet, criss-crossed by major highways, a million slip roads, covered with light industry, landscaped industrial parks, out of town corporate head offices, new towns and residential estates, out-of-town shopping centres, and scraps of besieged countryside, it exemplifies the global park many of us increasingly live in: the diffused city, formed of stretched in-between-spaces, nature modified by states and corporations, places formed of non-places, terminals rather than centres, interchangeable with so many other places, where there is geography but no history, where place seems to attract no memory, no depth of being – at once provincial and transnational.
But, it goes further than some kind of visual cultural geography. “The Diminishing Present” reveals the condition these places at once embody and symbolise. It is a photographic poetics of space. It refuses to condemn its subject matter, escaping the commonplace dystopic voice by intensifying our engagement in these new environments, which as a consequence requires us to notice, to engage aesthetically and, potentially, morally, in this “underimagined”5 world with its estranging and contradictory beauty.

CARS
In Bogotá, Colombia, a friend of mine attended a private school run by North American priests. One day his year teacher, a Father Gerhard from North Dakota, showed the class a photograph of a car crash in the USA. Inside the mangled wreckage the dead forms of four teenagers, two boys and two girls, were clearly visible. The priest asked them to look long and hard at the picture. Then he told them that these young people had been drinking and perhaps worse when they crashed; and that, although he could not know the mind of God, these four youngsters had most probably died in mortal sin and if so must now be in hell. This then, he said, is almost certainly a photograph of the damned. After the class was over and everybody had gone to lunch my friend walked up to the priest’s desk and looked again at the picture he’d left lying there. After some time peering closely into the photograph he realised that, just faintly but undeniably, all four dead American teenagers were smiling.

THE PARK
The English urban park, a secure public space, a Victorian emblem of civic calm, well-being and certainty. In Antonioni’s 1966 portrait of London, Blow Up, it becomes park sinister – an uncertain place, a place of illusion, where the meaning of what is seen has become unclear. The park was a fragment of a bosky English Eden, a redemptive space in the town. The language of Eden is transparent, needs no translation – what is heard there, what is seen there, is the truth. But this park, the park in Blow Up, park sinister, is a wood full of secrets and furtive assignations where, eros is, unless appearances deceive, undone by thanatos, a place where you are watched, stalked, betrayed, even murdered – a crime scene, where photography, instead of establishing truth, manufactures uncertainty.

HOME
Home defines and encloses an interior spatial and cultural order; it puts a boundary around itself, but as Heidegger, writes, boundaries are places “from which something begins its presenting”. The exterior world, the very thing the home defines itself against, is present within it, haunting it, shaping it; home is in effect preoccupied and in some sense occupied by the outside.
Home is idealised as stable, independent of the tumultuous mobility beyond it. Yet as the routes that travellers construct end and begin in a home, the home is in principle and in reality a point on a journey, it's the idea and the actuality of home that make it possible to define most kinds of travel at all. In this sense the home is always on the “threshold of travel”6 it has part of its being beyond itself as part of travelling. Home, therefore, is a contingency, an effect of the outside; it is a transparent and permeable construction as much as it is an essential and private enclosure.

“Philosophy is really homesickness”, says Novalis, “it is the urge to be at home everywhere”, Gyorgy Luckacs, The Theory of the Novel.

THE ROAD
“Art is the desire to be elsewhere”, Friedrich Nietzsche.
The road is part of instrumental space, part of the economic order that conveys us, and contains us, liberates us and determines us. The road and the journey are at the same time part of the imaginary – metaphors.
“…the metaphor is homeless, a wanderer. It gathers its strength in a continual process of displacement and transference (metapherein), in always finding its message from without and above… Perpetually alive, incomplete, manifold and alive, the metaphor not only characterizes a movement of thought, it also stands as an analogue for what exists. The metaphor is an analogical expression for the dynamic flow of appearances themselves – what Nietzsche calls the Will to Power”. David B. Allison, in: Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche, MIT Press, 1985

FOREST
“The whole of nature is a metaphor for the human mind”, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The forest carries opposing meanings. The Germanic and Celtic peoples resisted the Romans in the forest and the Romans cleared them without sentiment. In Teutonic/Anglo-Saxon traditions the forest was wilderness, a refuge for outlaws and dangerous animals, a place where one might become lost, find only confusion. And yet early on it was thought to most embody natural beauty and vigour. Mythical Merry England was a lost near-pagan forest utopia held in common but besieged by mythical Norman landowners and later by the entirely real and cold calculations of the early modern state and economy. Soon after the wilderness was more commonly pictured as a “treeless wasteland”. Later the Puritans feared wild, uncultivated nature, then the Romantics revered its “wild sublimity” and a saw in it a domain of spiritual redemption. All leave their traces in the mentality of the present.
The woodland is supposedly part of England’s national patrimony; yet England is a country of vanished forests, its trees depleted for centuries to service naval power, building and industry – England unmade itself to make itself. There is no unmodified nature remaining.
Our view of nature may now be ironic, dystopic, anguished. We might prefer to call it post-nature. These trees are Eucalyptus, native to Australia and as common as Australian soaps – global trees, they grow easily, suck up the moisture and permit little forest floor life. And yet even in these stretches of planned woodland the very loss of meaning attached to nature, and nature’s indifference to human projects, are what makes the forest again a place of refuge where things for a time are free from the burdens of meaning or purpose.

SUBURBIA

1. The city is subdued in the suburb; the country urbanised.
2. Suburbs contain outcrops of nature, a few remnants of the rural world they overtook and absorbed: a lane with a country name, an old church, the landscapes that lie beneath the golf courses.
3. Gradually each suburb is encircled by the city. It moves further out. It fears crime. It craves space and new locks for the door.
4. Of course there is a social history of the suburbs, but they seem to have none; even suburbs 50 years old feel as if suspended in an unchanging present. “Machines for the abolition of time”.
5. Suburbs have strong associations with sleeping: the “sleepy suburb”, “dormitory towns” and so on.
6. They have strong associations with dreams, dreams of consumerism, dreams of leaving, dreams of sexual affairs. They tend towards solipsism.
7. Suburbs are haunted not by the dead but the invisible living.
8. Suburbs and seriality: serial dwellings, serial products, serials on TV, serial monogamy, films about suburban serial killers. They also tend towards conformism.
9. The suburb has triumphed; the suburban shopping mall, cinema multiplex, leisure and sports complexes means the suburb has become its own centre – the city is becoming suburbanised.
10.  ……………………………………………………………………………...

Peter D. Osborne

Threatened Present Boundaries and Myths

To have a body is to live dependent. Hearing, seeing, looking, feeling – are symptoms of the existence of that body. It explains to us, assuredly, that death is the limit – the limit that is the contour and content of the externalized instinct that represents everything that man does not contain, morals, the old, long, inestimable narratives of man, always put into utopian and indefinable perspective, dangerous and radical ethical morals of the limit.

Today the cult of the body is institutionalized. An object to conserve to be better involved in a free and autistic hedonism, but connected with the imaginary clans that multiply in globalized society. And the symbols of group remain, the identifications of genus, gang or ethnic group – that which we manage to identify most closely with as a species.

In the interior of minute codification, the body is not possessed, is not dominated, is not owned; and its resurrection, in lifting or in clothing, in art or in pleasure, does not eliminate vulnerability, sickness or announced death, because these things are inherent to the species.

Contemporary desertification is the place of the body, the non-places of the electronic communication culture, the fear of contamination and space, that extremely personal virtual space where the body is duplicated, simulated.

But it is with the body (when it is diffused in images and mediums) that these photographs are made, that this project is constructed. What is left of art, as a process without function or just as a process, what is left of life and ambling along its paths, results, as we well know, from desire – that desire that intervening learning tries to control, that modern indifference insists on declassifying.

But here, with the hermeneutics of the image, we are still in the universe of desire. We face a laborious narrative of simulation, laboratory planning that represents the desired world; so desired that it requires an accommodation – a science, a technique, a myth or alchemy. And nothing better than photography to assume those responsibilities of dominion.

It may even represent a categorical denial of the world and of desire; an escape to the desert, where the sensitive simulation of which we are made impels us to navigate in the chimera or the hyperspace seesaw of the heavens’ conquest. It is suspended, maintained in what Perniola, interpreting Derrida, calls cryptic suspension, that unconscious grotto where we guard what we truly are and what we desire, while consciously and paradoxically we plunge into all the criticisms of current theories.

Which takes us back to the armed mechanisms of desire, machines, exercises of power, colonialism, sciences of man and codes of conduct. Or knowledge through myth. In his diurnal series Edgar Martins models the mists of an Avalon that is as eternal as it is indeterminate, forever banished in a parallel world of belief or imagination, but simultaneously as ephemeral and fragile as a representation. It is about the hours and days of a habitual space, as well known as they are forgotten, that gain the significance of a myth upon being – at the same time and contrary to the logic to which we are accustomed – and that otherness that we recognize in the world of desire. These peripheral places, manipulated in color and consistency, are still the periphery of our fears and evocations; without time and space, without age and denomination, they are a human landscape where the cultural will of the photographer’s otherness is exercised. It is these places, which are also others, that gain meaning in a group, letting one in through posters of the new anthropology: indications of a third group, just as roadside billboards indicate that a world (primordial, reduced to a sign) exists out there in the space of self-consuming communication.

Man is all this – nature and culture – where a fantasy world is recreated; body and language that negate nature, symbolizing it, making of it an allegory for greater substitution. On the highway of abstraction and symbolism, in language the steps of that cultural growth are immutably conserved: the Paleolithic knife and machete of invincible functional beauty, the figurative and abstract art of grottos or erratic stones, minute agriculture that we employ in a rose garden, on the ground floor of these still-gregarious houses, metal alloys or Roman Law. Man accumulates the periods of his civilization, but he also knows of e-books and cloning, he makes maps of the genetic helixes that determined, at the origin of species, that to live is to simulate the world and man, to simulate death and life, to simulate these irreal landscapes that we recognize as being oneiric and hyper-real, but that lead, now and always, to a vague nature that faces us.

And Edgar Martins, in these three series of threatened present, precisely states the question. The theme isn’t that thing that we identify and see altered from night to day, as in the most ancestral nightmares. The theme of this work is the limits of interpretation.

The photographer also accumulates strategies for presentation, or the world in progress, recognizable and known as a phenomenon, where the universe seems to have been created for the understanding of our species – that old belief in auspicious Modernity – or a world of disbelief in the senses and the structure of reason, built from negation of evidence, optimism and hope.

The assumptions of our humanity were anchored in Modernity, optimism in a future built on the common sense of the past tense, of sovereign reason, on the evolution of things and of man. And if post-modern critical and pragmatic skepticism is intellectually supported by the principles of global communication, virtuality and the value of the real, the mission to which it is self-condemned still cannot eliminate the subliminal and powerful vestiges of metaphysical obsession, even when interpretation theory is dedicated primarily to dismantling the metaphysical object, and not forgetting that the history of aesthetics is reduced to the history of interpretation theories.

The interpreter is naturally in the middle of all this with his cortege of learning, rhetoric, sensibilities altered by the root of the times, and communication theories or, in reaction to this, reception theories.

Let us look at these series and the process of organizing the image sequences: the first two sequences may insinuate states of spirit and actual states of theory; there is a refusal to believe in truth as it corresponds to reality, photographic hyper-realism enhanced by irreal colors, the photographic opacity that the mist accentuates; and also the portal of the myth, opening evocations and fears. Here and there a quote from the third party, which is, still, a citation of lost nature, the forest, non-culture.

It is, naturally, rhetoric built with metaphors that develop the argumentative discourse of the present moment’s presentation of assumptions, and it returns by sense, without losing the discourse of causality, to a utopian past where time is not reversible.

In images we encounter an enchanting perception of repetition, but the photographs are not just elements of a series, they denounce a system. Because there are group rather than individual metaphors in a discourse that seems alchemic, the rationality of serial causality is altered, because pre-logic is polysemous, the diverse is also synonymous. In alchemy, as is also the tendency in science today, everything is really everything, he and the other.

And appearances (we know him as Kevin Robins) are like prophecies; they insinuate more than they represent. Their reading depends on the expectations of who sees them, and the images are ours to the extent to which we identify times and places of the unconscious with them.

But to have a body is also to suffer contingency, it is to have been there, to be connected, although one escapes and the information arms itself.

These images are notations of a thesis. They make a theoretical moment of crisis relevant, from a conception of the world and art to other intentions and other deceptions. In this time of strict information, information is our context; it is and always was the phenomenon of life; life of tribal intensity in which emotion – instinct and immediateness, consequences of new technological equipment – created an unexpected sensorial involvement. And through this same daytime universe of the screen, of the aquarium, is this codification of detached memories, where the danger of passage to the land of nothing is clear; or the nocturnal memories, horizontal with fear, where artificial light is understood as a catalyst of many terrors, of much vulnerability. Infrared is already the reign of difference, the vision of maximum alert. Like a Nintendo game, it is a closed universe with consolation prizes. It is good not for understanding, but for feeling. Sensology is the new practice of relation and the moral law of our time.

This is very much post-modern reality, fragmented, suffering the intervals of absence, where the daily is accepted when referenced as actual, as present; where things cease to be, and change into signs and represent themselves as icons of pirate-houses. Photographs, these photographs, bring these things with them, these images of things, a material charge of an operating past. To bring back the feeling of the present is to remove their identity, but at the same time, to refuse nostalgia for the thing. This space they represent is a transformed space, lost although that place may be, and perhaps it is still lost for the one who does not look at it in the same way. It is a destroyed past in a threatened present and without meaning. It is thus we see it, when we truly look.

And the utopia of the forest… The forest, dense vegetation, impervious, untouched, our transformation of Nature. The present is in the interval, because the past is recovered in a present where sense and being are lost. The future has not yet occurred; the forest, today, tomorrow, is a utopia.

This present is the desert of our circumstance, like that white cart that goes along in the darkness of the unknown with one certainty stamped on its plates: “reality”.

It isn’t about post-modern fetishism. Reality doesn’t dilute itself; it is just something else. Maybe it is because a very modern enclave of that reality remains in the unconscious, as a blocked pleasure, as a feeling of profoundly missing the world.

There is not melancholy here. But neither is art in mourning.

Maria do Carmo Serén
Centro Português de Fotografia (Portuguese Center of Photography) 2001