beTWeen WORds And iMAges: siMulATiOn, deCOnsTRuCTiOn ... - Core

Paul Jobling

BETWEEN WORDS AND IMAGES: SIMULATION, DECONSTRUCTION AND POSTMODERN PHOTOGRAPHY

pomo2027 Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #2, 1977. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the artist, Sprüth Magers Berlin London, and Metro Pictures

pomo2030 The Face no. 34, Neville Brody, 1983

Between Words and Images

‘Today there is a whole pornography of information and communication’.1 It was in these terms that Jean Baudrillard framed a general debate about postmodern mass media and hyperreality, insisting that in a world over-saturated with images we no longer have the ability to tell representation and reality apart. In ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ he took things further still, arguing that we take flight from the real world by reproducing images based on other images, that is to say simulacra, which are based on the revival of the Platonic idea that a copy is made of an original which never really existed in the first place: ‘It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real’.2 We can discern this kind of simulation in Cindy Sherman’s series of performative masquerades, Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) (pl. pomo2027). In 1977 Sherman began to use photography to explore the ambiguity of female/feminine identities. In her posed images, we observe any number of ‘Cindys’ playing out an array of stereotypical cinematic roles, from feisty film noir heroine to vulnerable career girl. Although we might claim to have some recollection of the actual movie characters upon which such images are based, as Judith Williamson, an early feminist writer on Sherman, observed, her photographic personae are not straightforward cribs of specific movie stills at all. They are fictions in their own right: representations of cinematic heroines who never even ‘existed’, who we never really saw in the first place. Thus we are left to ponder their fate in the putative narratives of Sherman’s non-sequential photographs.3 Baudrillard traced the origins of hyperreality and simulation back to the religious iconography of the sixteenth century, calling the Jesuits ‘the most modern minds’, since in their veneration of the image of God they were enacting the

death or disappearance of God himself: ‘Deep down God never existed . . . only the simulacrum ever existed, even . . . God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum’.4 Likewise, he contended that postmodern hyperreality is symbolic of a society in crisis for which, following the trauma of the Holocaust, history no longer seemed to be unfolding according to any positive purpose or master narratives (what JeanFrançois Lyotard called the grands récits in The Postmodern Condition, 1979). Hence, people began to take refuge from reality in consumerism and mass media images so as to mourn the loss of concepts such as ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ that were once regarded the basis of a meaningful, truthful reality. Taking his cue from Baudrillard, Dick Hebdige also mounted an attack on the hollowness of hyperreality, impugning the ludic form and content of The Face, a youth culture title launched by Nick Logan in 1980, out of his publishing house Wagadon, for which Neville Brody coined a distinctive graphic style between 1981 and 1986 (pl. pomo2030). In Hebdige’s telling criticism, The Face was the archetypal postmodern magazine, since it embodied the shift from a history based on the word and writing to one in which ‘Truth – insofar as it exists at all – is first and foremost pictured’.5 Furthermore, much like Baudrillard, he argued that hyperreality is often based on a nostalgic impulse through which ‘The past is played and replayed as an amusing range of styles, genres, signifying practices to be combined and recombined at will . . . Advertising – the eidos of the marketplace – is pressed into the very pores of The Face’.6 Certainly, there are many instances of this kind of pastiche in postmodern advertising: from the cannibalization of surrealism in publicity for Benson & Hedges and Van Heusen

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shirts in the 1970s, to the retro-styled campaigns for Levis 501 or Brylcreem in the 1980s (pl. pomo2029). Must we take such images at face value, however? Must we agree with Baudrillard and Hebdige that the constant rehashing of images signifies that ‘reality is as thin as the paper it is printed on’?7 After all, not every hyperreal text is devoid of politics. Thus, in sloganized photographic silkscreens like Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am), Barbara Kruger co-opted the strategies of advertising rhetoric (which she learnt in her early career as a graphic designer for Condé Nast’s Mademoiselle) in order to

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subvert the superficial consumerism of postmodern society (pomo2082). Yet even The Face did not unequivocally side with the prevailing style culture of the 1980s. Hebdige conveniently overlooks the fact, but witness ‘Strategies for the Unemployed’, with photographs by Steve Pyke, which explored the impact of youth unemployment in Thatcher’s Britain just as photo-essays in Picture Post had depicted working-class communities during the Depression.8 Clearly, the iconography of Kruger and The Face is embedded in commercial culture and the mass media; yet it still has the potential to make us think about wider issues. In insisting that we now live in a world based on simulacra and spectacle, both Baudrillard and Hebdige capsized the correspondence between words and images. It is precisely such matters that are pivotal to deconstruction and the writing of Jacques Derrida, who, rather than espousing hyperreality, set out to interrogate the relationship between reality and representation.9 Thus he refuted the system of binary oppositions – for instance, modernism versus postmodernism, high versus low culture, original versus copy, signifier versus signified, and word versus image – and instead wrote of the interrelationship of one concept with another. His philosophical contribution has been to encourage us not just to invert such oppositions, so that one term is always in a position of superiority over another, but also to think about the ‘gaps’ or ‘spaces’ between each term. Thus he coined the neologism différance, connoting the joint idea of difference and deferral, as a means to ponder the nexus between ostensible binary concepts and to realise that there are multiple readings or layers of interpretation involved in any given text: ‘Différance: is a structure and a movement that cannot be conceived on the basis of the opposition presence/absence. Différance is the systematic play of differences, of traces of differences, of the spacing by which elements relate to one another.’10 Principally, Derrida was concerned with seeking out the blind spots of spoken and written language.11 Speech, he argued, should not be regarded as being superior – or even anterior – to writing but as dependent on, or qualified, by it, and vice versa. His deconstructivist methodology, however, is not without relevance to thinking through the gaps and/ or spaces in other systems of representation. Accordingly, many of the features and fashion spreads in The Face raise the question: What is at stake prioritizing words over images or arguing for their interdependence? A pivotal example is ‘Who’s Shooting Who? – In Beirut It Pays to Know Your Terrorist’, with photographs by Oliver Maxwell and styled by Elaine Jones (it appeared in the July 1986 issue). Here the images, if taken literally at ‘face’ value, connote a parodic ornamental fashion parade of army uniforms. But, when we consider them alongside the accompanying text, which grafts together a potted history of the particular factions involved in the Civil War between Muslims and Christians and specific details of the uniforms the soldiers wear, the piece suggests a more complex imbrication of the ‘serious business’ of warfare and ideas concerning the decorum and power of military dress. Looking at things this way, we can also begin to explore Sherman’s Film Stills beyond their immediate simulacral dimension. For, without exception, she is actor and

producer, subject and object, in relation to her photographs, a performative method that elides the difference between impersonation (this is a part I am playing to try to convince you who I am) and personification (this is who I am beneath the surface, outside the photograph). While Sherman has claimed, ‘I don’t realise what I’ve done until I read what someone has written about me’, nonetheless she was one of a generation of American photographers, including Robert Mapplethorpe, who embarked on their careers at a time when the politics of liberation, artistic experimentation, and living on the edge had become the norm.12 Consequently, the confounding of subject and object positions became a central concern for these photographers, whose approach to identities seems to betray an intense preoccupation with the deconstructive sensibility for double-dealing, breaking rules and blurring boundaries. Indeed, in simultaneously adopting the roles of producer and actor, Sherman’s work is a trenchant deconstruction of Michel Foucault’s premise that the human body is a crucial site for the exercise and regulation of power, involving those who see yet

pomo2029 John Hegarty, Levis 501 Launderette television advertisement featuring Nick Kamen, 1985. Film still

Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970 – 1990

are not scrutinized (photographers, spectators), and those who are seen and impelled to ‘a principle of compulsory visibility’ (in Sherman’s case, herself and other women).13 Deconstruction is a challenging, and often perplexing, theory because it does away with traditional modes of classifying and thinking about culture, and Derrida has often been accused of causing confusion and of encouraging indeterminacy. However, it is undecidability, not indeterminacy, that Derrida affirms is at the heart of deconstruction – that is, we can no longer decide things according to pre-existing, universal laws.14 Instead, what binds us together is a form of collective uncertainty. We should expect to entertain endless possibilities as to how things can be resolved. Yet for all this, deconstruction is an instructive supplement to the aesthetic of simulation and a useful paradigm for exploring not just the differences and correspondences between different kinds of photography, but also the mediation of pictures through words.

pomo2082 Barbara Kruger, Vinçon carrier bag, ca. 1993. V&A: E.2830–1995

Between Words and Images

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