Clues, Shadows and Faces
Clues, Shadows and Faces
Interview with Matthew Buckingham
When I called Matthew Buckingham to arrange this interview, he gave me the best directions I ever received in my life. His indications were so precise – ‘You will see a forest, another bus stop and a dead-end street’ – that I had the feeling of déjà-vu on the way to his studio in Berlin’s Grunewald. Our exchange evoked more itineraries – both geographical and historical – which the American artist has traced with the same remarkable precision in his multi-media installations: the story behind a country road in New Hampshire (Amos Fortune Road, 1996); the origin of Samuel Johnson’s English dictionary (Definition, 2000); a fantastic development project for Lower Manhattan (Canal Street Canal, 2002), among others. No element seems to escape his scrutiny, whether the receipts of the slave-turned-entrepreneur Amos Fortune, the room where Johnson purportedly wrote his masterpiece or the odour of the stream that used to run through Canal Street. Mixing history with detective work, Buckingham transforms bening ready-mades into loquacious artefacts, which reveal a web of power relations that then ensnares the spectator. Indeed, his carefully staged film projections illuminate the absent bodies of historical narratives: not the bygone figures but those who produce and consume history, from cameramen to museum visitors. Far from simply mediating the past, Buckingham’s found artefacts create and tell their own stories, as do his meticulous investigations, which are often narrated as voice-overs to the projections. Here, Buckingham relates three film installations: Situation Leading to a Story, 2000, Subcutaneous, 2001 and A Man of the Crowd, 2003.
What is a clue?
‘That’s a great question. When we work to produce meaning we can say “what question am I trying to answer”, or better, “what question am I trying to ask?” Calling an object or thought a “clue” says more about us and our investigations than about the things which we are labelling clues. Anything can become a clue, and there is nothing which is not already some type of clue. A clue is always attached to something else, which is, of course, attached to something else again. Where we decide to limit these relations (the point where we stop seeing clues) reveals the shape of our own desire.
This is at the centre of the work that I’ve been doing; looking at how and why something is moved from its quotidian, everyday location where we expect to find it, to another location where it becomes a clue. The most obvious example in my work is the film installation Situation Leading to a Story (2000). The piece is structured around a set of four 16mm silent home movies made between 1924 and 1933 that I literally found on the street in New York City. The films in themselves are not so surprising. But the combination of films is provocative. Each was labelled with a single word: “garden”, “Peru”, “garage”, and “Guadalajara”, two domestic spaces and two proper-noun place-names. “Garden” shows numerous members of a wealthy white family somewhere in upstate New York walking in their garden and playing lawn-games. The images in Guadalajara were taken at a bull fight. The camera is only turned on at the moment the bull is charging the matador. This creates a series of disjointed shots that seem to mock the so-called moment of truth associated with this sport. “Garage” depicts the addition of a huge four-car garage to the house from the first film-in all, fairly familiar home-movie images. This is at the centre of the work that I’ve been doing; looking at how and why something is moved from its quotidian, everyday location where we expect to find it, to another location where it becomes a clue. The most obvious example in my work is the film installation Situation Leading to a Story (2000). The piece is structured around a set of four 16mm silent home movies made between 1924 and 1933 that I literally found on the street in New York City. The films in themselves are not so surprising. But the combination of films is provocative. Each was labelled with a single word: “garden”, “Peru”, “garage”, and “Guadalajara”, two domestic spaces and two proper-noun place-names. “Garden” shows numerous members of a wealthy white family somewhere in upstate New York walking in their garden and playing lawn-games. The images in Guadalajara were taken at a bull fight. The camera is only turned on at the moment the bull is charging the matador. This creates a series of disjointed shots that seem to mock the so-called moment of truth associated with this sport. “Garage” depicts the addition of a huge four-car garage to the house from the first film-in all, fairly familiar home-movie images.
But film labeled “Peru” changes all of this. Even though this film is also an amateur production, it shows a construction project very different to the one seen in “Garage”. Here Peruvian workers string steel cable up the side of a mountain, and erect enormous towers, all part of a cable tramway system that will bring raw ore out of a massive mining operation at the summit. I discovered that the history of this mine, the Cerro de Pasco Copper Mining Corporation, reads like a text-book case of Latin America’s struggle for governmental sovereignty and control over its own natural resources. But film labeled “Peru” changes all of this. Even though this film is also an amateur production, it shows a construction project very different to the one seen in “Garage”. Here Peruvian workers string steel cable up the side of a mountain, and erect enormous towers, all part of a cable tramway system that will bring raw ore out of a massive mining operation at the summit. I discovered that the history of this mine, the Cerro de Pasco Copper Mining Corporation, reads like a text-book case of Latin America’s struggle for governmental sovereignty and control over its own natural resources.
Looking at the four films together it’s impossible not to see them as a story about US interest and so called multi-national corporations which were and are extensions of imperialism. For me the material resonated enormously with the present day. But in this case it is the clues themselves (the films) that are the mystery. What is the connection between the mine and the family? The name of the Copper Mine appears in the “Peru” film and this enabled me to learn about the history of the company. But after being unable to discover anything more about the other three films I realized this last question pointed to the only thing that all four films had in common: they were discarded together by one person who no longer wanted them.Looking at the four films together it’s impossible not to see them as a story about US interest and so called multi-national corporations which were and are extensions of imperialism. For me the material resonated enormously with the present day. But in this case it is the clues themselves (the films) that are the mystery. What is the connection between the mine and the family? The name of the Copper Mine appears in the “Peru” film and this enabled me to learn about the history of the company. But after being unable to discover anything more about the other three films I realized this last question pointed to the only thing that all four films had in common: they were discarded together by one person who no longer wanted them.
Anything more was a matter of ‘negotiating between documents’ as Michel Foucault might have said. I find this notion of history from Foucault very useful because it emphasizes that understanding the present through the past is always a dynamic process of negotiation. This is what keeps history operating in the present tense. Or, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, every story about the past is more importantly a story about the present. This suggests that memory functions less as an instrument with which to explore the past and more as a theatre in which we re-stage past events here and now. This re-staging is based on selecting and sequencing: a process of narration that becomes the site of contestation in the debate around the value of past events. For me this is Foucault’s “negotiation between documents” which is also always political.’Anything more was a matter of ‘negotiating between documents’ as Michel Foucault might have said. I find this notion of history from Foucault very useful because it emphasizes that understanding the present through the past is always a dynamic process of negotiation. This is what keeps history operating in the present tense. Or, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, every story about the past is more importantly a story about the present. This suggests that memory functions less as an instrument with which to explore the past and more as a theatre in which we re-stage past events here and now. This re-staging is based on selecting and sequencing: a process of narration that becomes the site of contestation in the debate around the value of past events. For me this is Foucault’s “negotiation between documents” which is also always political.’
On HistoryHegel’s Geist was the first world traveller. Long before the introduction of time zones around 1900, Hegel made the international day a reality in his 1820 lectures on the philosophy of history, which described Geist’s itinerary: from the Orient to Europe, with a few centuries stop-over in Greece and Rome, and then westwards on to America. Equating Geist’s passage with progress, Hegel concluded that Geist had never been to Africa, except maybe in the Maghreb. Given Hegel’s fusion of history, geography and progress, it is not surprising that European explorers and anthropologists experienced their voyages as time travel and believed that the people they encountered – and subsequently colonised – were living in an archaic, uncivilised and outmoded past. H.G. Wells’ 1895 novella The Time Machine, exceptionally, treats linear time as pure fiction. Of course, our international day – which starts and ends in the Pacific – remains true to Geist’s trip and only gives credence to Hegel’s theories. The West, a relative direction, is still used as an absolute marker of cultural and historical difference. Divised by Westerners, the international time zones first facilitated their train trips. As every city had previously existed in its own time zone, train travellers could never know when they were arriving at – and leaving – foreign destinations. Hailed as a historic instance of international collaboration, the time zones went on to facilitate the Great War’s massive mobilization of amunitions and troops, along with their subsequent eradiction at the Front. In one day of fighting at the Somme, over 70,000 soldiers were eliminated, like clockwork. [J.A.]On HistoryHegel’s Geist was the first world traveller. Long before the introduction of time zones around 1900, Hegel made the international day a reality in his 1820 lectures on the philosophy of history, which described Geist’s itinerary: from the Orient to Europe, with a few centuries stop-over in Greece and Rome, and then westwards on to America. Equating Geist’s passage with progress, Hegel concluded that Geist had never been to Africa, except maybe in the Maghreb. Given Hegel’s fusion of history, geography and progress, it is not surprising that European explorers and anthropologists experienced their voyages as time travel and believed that the people they encountered – and subsequently colonised – were living in an archaic, uncivilised and outmoded past. H.G. Wells’ 1895 novella The Time Machine, exceptionally, treats linear time as pure fiction. Of course, our international day – which starts and ends in the Pacific – remains true to Geist’s trip and only gives credence to Hegel’s theories. The West, a relative direction, is still used as an absolute marker of cultural and historical difference. Divised by Westerners, the international time zones first facilitated their train trips. As every city had previously existed in its own time zone, train travellers could never know when they were arriving at – and leaving – foreign destinations. Hailed as a historic instance of international collaboration, the time zones went on to facilitate the Great War’s massive mobilization of amunitions and troops, along with their subsequent eradiction at the Front. In one day of fighting at the Somme, over 70,000 soldiers were eliminated, like clockwork. [J.A.]
What is the difference between traces in physical objects versus traces that must be deduced from circumstances?
‘Many of the problems that we encounter in history fit somewhere on a continuum of thought between geology and journalism. At one extreme we are left with mute material “signs” from the distant past, and at the other we are confronted with unstable subjectivities, perspectives or opinions lodged in the present. Regardless of what we investigate (non-representational visual evidence, iconographic symbols, or someone speaking) we are always dealing with problems of interpretation. In every case the position of the investigator must be accounted for. In the practice of archaeology the archaeologist trains to recognize and conserve certain things as ‘evidence’ of the past. But this could also describe our everyday relation to the past. Memory functions as a tool of navigation on so many different scales. Each day we begin piecing things together again. At the same time we re-engage in myriad levels of conscious and unconscious uses of memory which have far ranging implications.’
What is a shadow?
‘A rich metaphor. When I first found the amateur movies that I used in Situation Leading to a Story I showed them to a lot of friends. One of the things I noticed was how everyone seemed to enjoy projecting on to the people appearing in the films. Instantly my friends would make character judgments and invent nick names for these strangers. I think the fact that the films were silent particularly encouraged this type of projection. The experience reminded me that photography and film were developed and used, to different degrees, with this projection-dynamic in mind. And of course there is an echo of this in the way that projected film makes its image by withholding light to form coloured or black and white moving shadows that we engage with as images. Shadows easily become images. This is the really uncanny aspect of the fact that silhouette portraiture in Europe was so popular in the time immediately preceding photography. The craze anticipated and perhaps even encouraged photography. On the one hand these portraits were and are read as being accurate because of their indexical nature (which they directly share with photography) and on the other hand, because they reveal only a detailed outline of their subject, concealing all other information in darkness, they remain mysterious and open to projection.’
On ShadowsIn November 1759, Étienne de Silhouette sat in his castle at Bry-sur-Marne, just east of Paris, in what would soon become the Republic of France. The walls were filled, not with paintings or tapestries, but with profiles which had been drawn around the shadows cast by countless former guests. Silhouette was about to lose his job; his boss Louis XV, le Bien-Aimé, and his patrons were unhappy with his decisions as the Minister of Finance. ‘À la silhouette’ had become a popular expression for his poorly thought out policies and cheaply made things, like the shadow portraits themselves. But by the 1770s, Silhouette’s idle pastime had captured the imagination of an entire generation, who cut the profiles in black paper. The rage was fuelled by Goethe’s 1774 novel Werther, the first European best-seller; its hero Werther addresses a heart-wrenching soliloquy to a silhouette of his beloved Lotte before fatally shooting himself in the head at the stroke of midnight. A silhouette school for girls had opened by 1814, when Chamisso wrote his story about Peter Schlemihl, who sells his shadow to the devil. What lies in these spectres? By obscuring facial features, Silhouette eclipsed mercantilism, where hoarding coins, embossed with the king’s features, was wealth. With Werther’s suicide, Goethe ushered in an autonomous subject who usurps the royal right to decide over life. Chamisso traced this subject’s bodily alienation in a capitalist economy where everything can be exchanged in equivalencies with death. Of course, monarchs gave way to citoyens; absolute values to relative ones; coins to money; silhouettes to daguerreotypes, photography, film, television, video and, recently, biometric portraits. Every human faces its coming oppression by posing for a picture. [J.A.]On ShadowsIn November 1759, Étienne de Silhouette sat in his castle at Bry-sur-Marne, just east of Paris, in what would soon become the Republic of France. The walls were filled, not with paintings or tapestries, but with profiles which had been drawn around the shadows cast by countless former guests. Silhouette was about to lose his job; his boss Louis XV, le Bien-Aimé, and his patrons were unhappy with his decisions as the Minister of Finance. ‘À la silhouette’ had become a popular expression for his poorly thought out policies and cheaply made things, like the shadow portraits themselves. But by the 1770s, Silhouette’s idle pastime had captured the imagination of an entire generation, who cut the profiles in black paper. The rage was fuelled by Goethe’s 1774 novel Werther, the first European best-seller; its hero Werther addresses a heart-wrenching soliloquy to a silhouette of his beloved Lotte before fatally shooting himself in the head at the stroke of midnight. A silhouette school for girls had opened by 1814, when Chamisso wrote his story about Peter Schlemihl, who sells his shadow to the devil. What lies in these spectres? By obscuring facial features, Silhouette eclipsed mercantilism, where hoarding coins, embossed with the king’s features, was wealth. With Werther’s suicide, Goethe ushered in an autonomous subject who usurps the royal right to decide over life. Chamisso traced this subject’s bodily alienation in a capitalist economy where everything can be exchanged in equivalencies with death. Of course, monarchs gave way to citoyens; absolute values to relative ones; coins to money; silhouettes to daguerreotypes, photography, film, television, video and, recently, biometric portraits. Every human faces its coming oppression by posing for a picture. [J.A.]
What is the difference between producing and consuming history?
‘It depends very much on how you define history. When you ask the question like that it almost suggests an interchangeability of the production and consumption of history, of combining the two so that producers consume and consumers produce. This could be another way to see history as a dynamic process where social and political conditions are not considered fixed, but open as possibilities of transformation. In this model production and consumption would be mediated, critical. On the other hand to talk about producing and consuming history could refer older models of history as objective, universal, producing a single flow of time leading toward progress. I would always try to disrupt this model.’
While history is always collective, the investigator usually works alone, which gives the historical narrative a unity. An individual point of view. How do you understand this process of compression? Are you someone who tries to collect others’ stories, like the narrator in Edgar Alan Poe’s story The Man of the Crowd which you used as the basis for another project?
‘In Poe’s tale the unity of the lone investigator’s narrative fails. He sits alone in a café watching through the window as crowds of people pass by outside. He begins to “physiognomize”, trying to classify people into types, revealing familiar prejudices of sexism, racism, and xenophobia. And then an older man appears who the narrator cannot categorize. He jumps up resolving to follow him secretly in order to learn something about him. After twenty-four hours he gives up having learned nothing. Whether Poe meant it or not, this can be read as a critique of distant-observation as a mode of investigation. This was why I wanted to borrow the structure of this story and adapt it to moving images where I thought it would resonate with and further question documentary practice. Here we encounter the ambivalence of clues again. Poe’s narrator looks for clues to the identity of the man he follows. This is because he has already decided that the old man himself is a mystery. The narrator also seems to think that the man he follows might be a clue to solving a bigger mystery about the nature of society. But shifting the man he finds in the crowd to the category of clue reveals more about Poe’s narrator than about the old man he investigates. His quest is driven by desire that, in Freudian terms, borders on the Death-Drive and on the Uncanny.’
When the spectator enters your work, what kind of community are they joining?
‘I’m not sure they are joining a community. The exhibition space can refer to a huge range of sensory and cultural experiences I think this is almost unique to the exhibition context. Reading and cinema function very well when we forget our own physical presence. Working in real space one has the opportunity and, at some level, the obligation to work with the physical presence of the viewer in relation to the meanings of the project they are there to see. Someone said that museums teach, and what they teach visitors is how to behave in museums. I think this creates a certain tension in the social space of the museum or gallery and I’m interested in playing with this.
Overall this dimension is central in each of the three projects we’ve been talking about. In Situation Leading to a Story the floor plan of the installation is arranged so that the viewer first encounters a recorded voice. Next they see a 16mm film projector which is playing back the recorded voice and the films themselves. But the films are not visible, they are projected through a small opening in the wall into another space. When the spectator finally enters this room the image and sound come together. The visitor experiences a one-way traffic flow that must be reversed when they leave. Structurally I wanted to relate the experience of the architecture to a linear notion of narration.Overall this dimension is central in each of the three projects we’ve been talking about. In Situation Leading to a Story the floor plan of the installation is arranged so that the viewer first encounters a recorded voice. Next they see a 16mm film projector which is playing back the recorded voice and the films themselves. But the films are not visible, they are projected through a small opening in the wall into another space. When the spectator finally enters this room the image and sound come together. The visitor experiences a one-way traffic flow that must be reversed when they leave. Structurally I wanted to relate the experience of the architecture to a linear notion of narration.
In Subcutaneous the viewer is more actively physically confronted by other viewers. The piece consists of a double 16mm projection with sound. The two images are projected onto two short wide walls. The visitor must pass through an opening between these walls as they enter the viewing space. In doing so they first encounter other viewers facing them, watching the films on either side of them. In turn the spectators entering and leaving the space become part of the image and the whole dynamic of the room echoes the concerns of social navigation and projection onto the body that is the subject of the project. In Subcutaneous the viewer is more actively physically confronted by other viewers. The piece consists of a double 16mm projection with sound. The two images are projected onto two short wide walls. The visitor must pass through an opening between these walls as they enter the viewing space. In doing so they first encounter other viewers facing them, watching the films on either side of them. In turn the spectators entering and leaving the space become part of the image and the whole dynamic of the room echoes the concerns of social navigation and projection onto the body that is the subject of the project.
In the last piece, A Man of the Crowd, the visitor is even more physically integrated into the viewing experience and (literally) into the image in several ways. The film is projected through a small opening in the gallery wall and then into a freestanding piece of semi-reflective glass. The glass, which echoes the café window from the story, then reflects half of the light, focusing an image on the wall in front of the film projector, while letting half of the light pass through, focusing a second image on the opposite wall. This makes a double-projection out a single image. The glass in the centre of the room also reflects the viewer’s image and other spectators in the room. In addition the open floor plan encourages the viewer to circulate freely, passing through the projector’s light-beam. This casts the spectator’s shadow and reflections of the spectator’s shadow onto the two images. These shadows appear more or less at the same size and scale as the figures of the “follower” and “followed” in the film. Formerly clear dichotomies of subject and object are skewed by the viewer’s experience.’In the last piece, A Man of the Crowd, the visitor is even more physically integrated into the viewing experience and (literally) into the image in several ways. The film is projected through a small opening in the gallery wall and then into a freestanding piece of semi-reflective glass. The glass, which echoes the café window from the story, then reflects half of the light, focusing an image on the wall in front of the film projector, while letting half of the light pass through, focusing a second image on the opposite wall. This makes a double-projection out a single image. The glass in the centre of the room also reflects the viewer’s image and other spectators in the room. In addition the open floor plan encourages the viewer to circulate freely, passing through the projector’s light-beam. This casts the spectator’s shadow and reflections of the spectator’s shadow onto the two images. These shadows appear more or less at the same size and scale as the figures of the “follower” and “followed” in the film. Formerly clear dichotomies of subject and object are skewed by the viewer’s experience.’
On Amateur FilmmakingKodak’s first home-movie camera, the Model A, appeared in 1922, five years before Henry Ford’s automobile with the same name. It was sold only as part of a complete package which also included a tripod, projector, screen and splicer costing $325, only $70 less than Ford’s Model A car. Despite the relatively high price, there were 500,000 home-movie makers in the United States, six years after the camera was introduced. As a guide and inspiration to these new hobbyists Kodak published a book titled How to Make Good Movies. The book says that exposing motion picture film will become as automatic to the enthusiast as driving a car. Particular emphasis is placed on using the splicer to improve home movies through editing. The book also advises the reader to ‘make your movie camera the family historian’, and later makes this enigmatic warning to filmmakers: ‘your movie camera exists to preserve life, not to destroy it’. In 1916 Eastman Kodak began putting date-codes on the motion picture film stock it manufactured. This consisted of a short sequence of circles, squares, triangles or ‘plus-signs’ located in the black emulsion along the edge of the film. The order of the shapes’ appearance corresponded to the year of manufacture. The codes repeated on a twenty year cycle until 1982 when they were replaced by another system. [M.B.]On Amateur FilmmakingKodak’s first home-movie camera, the Model A, appeared in 1922, five years before Henry Ford’s automobile with the same name. It was sold only as part of a complete package which also included a tripod, projector, screen and splicer costing $325, only $70 less than Ford’s Model A car. Despite the relatively high price, there were 500,000 home-movie makers in the United States, six years after the camera was introduced. As a guide and inspiration to these new hobbyists Kodak published a book titled How to Make Good Movies. The book says that exposing motion picture film will become as automatic to the enthusiast as driving a car. Particular emphasis is placed on using the splicer to improve home movies through editing. The book also advises the reader to ‘make your movie camera the family historian’, and later makes this enigmatic warning to filmmakers: ‘your movie camera exists to preserve life, not to destroy it’. In 1916 Eastman Kodak began putting date-codes on the motion picture film stock it manufactured. This consisted of a short sequence of circles, squares, triangles or ‘plus-signs’ located in the black emulsion along the edge of the film. The order of the shapes’ appearance corresponded to the year of manufacture. The codes repeated on a twenty year cycle until 1982 when they were replaced by another system. [M.B.]
Jennifer Allen
