By Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh
As a keen follower of Kelvin Haizel’s art practice since its early days, it is fascinating to see the dimensions to which the artist persistently pushes the boundaries of what began as an interest in imaging vis-à-vis lens-based media. He began by affirming the factographic (or documentary) orientation of photography, and then proceeded to augment it beyond established methods. On the one hand, Haizel’s work breaks down the traditional distance between the image as representation, where the picture refers to a meaning beyond itself or to a transcendent subject matter. On the other hand, the image persists simultaneously as a simulacral surface and a phenomenological object or experience. By transcending any hierarchical relationship of value between the eternal and the here-and-now, Haizel has been able to sustain his iconoclastic experimentation of imaging in order to optimize its affective force; such that his visual language constitutes images not necessarily contrived to the optical pictorial format alone, but inclusive of sound, felt (braille), performative, haptic and other contingent forms of images. In this system the materiality of photography comes to terms with the multiplicity of operations necessary for the production of the image and the encounters they engender as appearances1 in the context of display. In recent work such as Birdcall961: Appendix C, 2020 (Fig. 2) and Ironing Out Difference, 2021 (Fig 1), and incidentally apropos of Jacques Lacan (Lacan 1981: 96)2, the artist reorients the familiar Renaissance-Modernist gaze (where the privileged human spectator casts their eyes onto an artwork, scanning the surface in search of a deeper meaning) such that, while this retinal absorption is happening the co-present artwork is also returning the gaze; intelligently sensing and responding to other objects in proximity to itself (Ohene-Ayeh 2021a: 32-43, Ohene-Ayeh & Haizel 2020).
It is as if the artist is asking the functional question “what can images do?” (Enwezor 2008:11, Ndikung et al, 2019: 25, Deleuze & Guattari 1983: 166-183) rather than focusing on the conventional “what do images mean?”3 The historical dependency on meaning consigns the medium of photography to symbolic signification, privileging a remote ‘over there’ above the material intensities of the here-and-now. To centre the search for meaning in the context of iconography is to presume that the encounter with the image is hollowed of an essence, and that to possess this knowledge brings the experience full circle for the viewer. This further implies that the spectator who lacks knowledge of the referential context for the picture is, in a sense, marginalized as inept. On this account, both the experimental or incomplete picture, which does not conform to this idealist logic, and the spectator who knows nothing of the referential context (much less the one who cares little about learning it) find iconography intolerable. This idealism is hence stultifying as much to the experimental possibilities of a picture (in terms of its open-endedness) as to the dissonant spectator. The success of a picture is therefore not necessarily attached to the fact that it refers to someone or to something beyond itself. (This could also be its failure, and vice versa). In short, to emphasize the photographic image as signifier (marker, bearer, and producer of meaning) is to first of all introduce a politics of exclusion in the experience of such images. And then to tacitly legislate this kind of one-to-one relation between the picture and its referent, through the violent process of suppressing all other determinations, also amounts to the exclusion of politics as such. From this perspective, the question of what photography can do potentially transcends such contrivances and affirms the multiplicity of meaningful, meaningless, and indifferent events since a picture is always an experiment (Deleuze & Guattari 1983: 371); a moment in a productive process; a leap into the unknown, unbounded by truth, “knowing nothing of meanings and aims” (Deleuze & Guattari 1983: 370).
It would be useful at this point to recall Lacan’s three registers of reality topologically ringed such that the moment any one of them is delinked the relationship of necessity between all three is broken (Lacan 1981: 279). Firstly there is what he calls the real, which is the subterranean dimension of reality; the domain of the unconscious that is devoid of meaning and defined by lawlessness, impossibility, violence, disorder, and trauma. Then there is the imaginary: the innenwelt; the pre-conscious virtual or specular dimension of the ego oscillating the subject between the unconscious real and the symbolic domain of the superego. And third is what we have just mentioned, the symbolic: the umwelt, the domain of consciousness, codes, laws, prohibitions, language, and other cultural conventions that regulate the search for meaning and subjectivation4. According to Sigmund Freud, the unconscious is a “latent memory”5 (Freud 1957: 167)— a memory that is present but paradoxically unknown to its subject due to the fact of repression (which functions en route the umwelt, where the superego is dominant and where the negotiation of meaning is happening according to the conventions of the oppressive status quo). The point being made here is that iconography is taking place at the superficial level of the symbolic register and that it is only through mechanisms of repression that the volatile desires and potentialities of the subject take refuge in the real. Taking a cue from Lacan’s non-essentialist extension of Freudian psychoanalysis, as well as from Haizel’s materialist intentions, the following paragraphs will interpret subjectivity beyond its humanist points of reference and apply the aforementioned topology to the photographic images which are the subjects of the artist’s current work.
Haizel’s residency at the ethnological Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt (MARKK), where he is producing work for the exhibition titled Archive of Experiences6,specifically engages a selection of photos in the albumen print photo album7 initially owned by a prominent merchant family from Hamburg in the late nineteenth century, and later gifted to the MARKK’s photo collection. The photographs include studio portraits, landscapes, monuments, and buildings taken in Singapore and other places within the Malay region. “The starting point of engaging with the album”, Haizel claims, “is all material and not cultural or iconographic”8. The artist’s skepticism of the latter emerges from the classic anthropological gaze cast upon its depicted subjects structured by systems of classification, identification, pseudo-science, and social control during the nineteenth century, of which much of early photography was complicit. Particularly in the context of the archive, photographic documentation was instrumentalized for the ethnographic passions of its time, regarded as an inert repository that indexes, as well as countenances, unique historical facts or events (Enwezor 2008: 11). Because of this tendency, Okwui Enwezor observes that every photograph is a priori an archival object, and that the “the camera is literally an archiving machine” (Enwezor 2008: 12).
With his iconoclastic intentions, Haizel is motivated to intervene in the historical alienation of the photographic document from its own unconscious libidinal economy. He confronts the imperialist center-periphery logic inherent in the materiality of the archives— and in its transition from private property to being donated to the museum— altering it with an immanent (inclusive) dynamic noticeable in four bodies of work.
In the first place, Haizel inaugurates his intentions by scanning the pre-digital black-and-white photographs in the original album (which, by the way, enjoy restricted access in the museum, encased within the central showcase in the exhibition hall) to create “operational doubles” which can be flipped through as digital files distributed between two screens. This process of othering or of “genetic miniaturization” (Baudrillard 1994: 2) submerges the images into the specular pre-conscious and from there emancipates the archives into functioning as metastatic machines sending them into hitherto impossible dimensions. This schizoid9 process also short circuits the erstwhile over-reliance on meaning by permitting the creation of what the artist has called a “negative album”10 (Figs 3 & 4). In my reading, negativity is here used as a double entendre; firstly to refer to an imaging strategy that accounts for process and form, beginning from the virtual space of the imaginary (distinct from the cultural or factographic), and secondly to point to the unbegriff of the photographic real, which is characterized by desire— i.e. lack, return, and “want-to-be” (Lacan 1981: 29) . (We shall see the latter more tangibly at play in the next paragraph.) The simulacra of enlarged negatives encountered in the exhibition of this body of work are displayed around the central showcase inside the exhibition space as if in a darkroom. This approach engenders a number of mutations: from autonomous/self-important photographs to contingent/disjointed images; from positive image to negative counter-image; from representational prints (passive picture) to phenomenological/affective image; from museum space to museum-as-darkroom; from photographic print to photography as decoy; transgressing the discriminatory symbolic into exposing the photographic real; and so forth. It is no longer a matter of duplication as such. Neither is it an issue of banally obtaining the faithful copy of a document where the scans are concerned. But more urgently it is about submerging the muted album into the ominous recesses of its own unconscious which had been effectively tamed by vicissitudes of the symbolic and flattened to representations on its surface. It is on this principle that the artist’s subsequent manipulations of the archive will be based.
The second use the artist makes of the photographic archives is a forensic one which deploys macrophotography and rephotographing— a process of imaging achieved by mounting a camera onto a microscope to reveal fossilized presences in the photographic paper otherwise impossible to perceive with the human eye. This scientific approach reestablishes the machinic operations or connective processes always at play in photography, and affirms the classical operations— in this case, between camera, light, photographic paper, the egg white and silver nitrate coating— while exceeding them at the same time. Haizel’s surgical approach results in the series titled Breaking Eggs in Vietman and The Albumen Story11 which simultaneously excavate and image deeper presences such as spills, accidents, cracks, ruptures, micro-activities from bacteria and fungi, and so on, accumulated on the sensitive paper over time. The artist, so to speak, takes a realist (albeit virtual) excursion into the unconscious of these classical albumen prints (specific to the periods between 1850 and 1868) to reveal the memories always and already latent in the photographs, and revitalizes them within a micrological network with newer technologies more than a century and half later. What the photographic archives become are new things emerging from the speculative process of transmuting a molecular image within its own spatial, temporal, and ontological memories (Figs. 5 & 6). In this sense Haizel takes the surface of the archival photographic prints as the site of intervention and attempts to desymbolize it by staging a politics of “traumatic realism”12 (Foster 1996: 130-136). First, the immanent rephotographed counter-image mottles the picture— amorphous golden-brown opaque blotches, initially subjacent to the original picture, emerge to obscure sections of the pictorial compositions; making all or part of the portraits unintelligible from an iconographic standpoint. Then the “anamorphic stain”13 sublimates the picture into a new spectacle (seid’ou & Bouwhuis 2014: 115-116, Lacan 1981: 79-116). Macrophotography is here employed as dompte-regard14— as the lure, or the imaging technique— used to tame the gaze while exposing the meaningless, unsymbolized, vertiginous photographic real.
Consequently Haizel’s montages— by dialecticizing the interplay between meaning and function, foreground and background— defy conventions of signification and engender new approaches to meaning-making. He describes this historical materialist15 (Benjamin 1969) process of screening the real, or countenancing it, as “reach[ing] back into time [and] using the medium’s future technologies to excavate its past manifest[ing] in the present”16. Walter Benjamin is known to have distinguished between two kinds of historical outlooks; historical materialism and historicism. The historical materialist politicizes history whereas the historicist conforms to the cause and effect structure of the past-present-future teleology. The historical materialist, in the context that Benjamin surmises, “regards it as his task to brush history against the grain” (Benjamin 1969: 257).
The third installation, titled An Imperial Gift (fig. 7), is a composition of albumen prints (reproduced from the scanned albumen prints) mounted on a wall surface. The prints are animated and connected to a series of illuminated ‘drawings’ that attempt to recreate trade routes between Southeast Asia and Europe prior to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869— channels via which the photo album travelled from Singapore to Germany, passed on from one sibling to another. The patterns of the light drawings are based on a map depicting imperialist and colonialist conquests of the Dutch and English in Southeast Asian territories as well as trade routes used between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The reproduced prints depict monuments, landscapes, and buildings sourced from the album.
The fourth archival activation method, the installation titled Sound and Theatricality (fig. 8), stages an isolation of four photographs printed on thin fabric— two of which depict what seems to be Singaporean folk ensembles or subjects who have been pictured posing with musical instruments; one showing a trio frozen in performance, and the other a quartet of costumed figures in carnivalesque apparels. The trio of performers is suspended over sitting fans softly blowing air onto the image object and causing it to ‘dance’ in dynamic ways while the other three prints have been sculpturally mounted on the walls. Haizel’s fascination with creating these sculptural-kinetic images could in part be interpreted as a way of retroactively introducing motion into early photography; bringing the dynamic force back in to the frozen gesture.
The artist as historical materialist urgently cites the past not merely because they take it for granted, but in order to use it, dialectically undermining the linearity of history, charging it with the now and the ‘to come’—in a sense, to redeem it (Benjamin 1969: 261). They perceive, even in the mutest of objects, class relations buried within and are skeptical of triumphalist tales because on the one hand, “without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror”, and on the other hand, “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism … [subsequently tainted by] the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another” (Benjamin 1969: 256). It is precisely this underbelly of the symbolic that Kelvin Haizel’s exhibition is screening for its public.
The question about function is, strictly speaking, an ethnological one. For ethnology not only asks what a symbol means but also what it does and how it works in terms of usage17. Therefore the artist as historical materialist has not strayed from his ethnological duties. He is rather the one strengthening the potentiality of “retroactive redemption”18 as far as using difference, time, materiality, and formal plasticity (Ohene-Ayeh 2021b: III) in a political context are concerned. He is the one delving into the ethnographic archives and unearthing the critical transactions necessary for “opening up new pictorial and historiographic experiences against the exactitude of the photographic trace” (Enwezor 2008: 11). He is the one reinvesting politics into iconography (which, as mentioned earlier, inheres both a politics of exclusion and the exclusion of politics). And he is also the one posing the intersubjective question of the ethnographic album returning the gaze, and finding productive ways through which to image this indifference to the cult of memory.
The question about function is also about form (beyond the modernist teleology of form-follows-function). The formal plasticity therefore unleashed as a consequence of this emancipatory process and radical system of equivalences, appearances, and adjacencies richly contributes to the aesthetic field of intersubjectivity.
—Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh is a curator and critic based in Kumasi, Ghana. He is a lecturer at the Department of Painting & Sculpture at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).
**This essay is due to be published in the forthcoming catalogue for Kelvin Haizel’s solo exhibition titled Archive of Experiences at the Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt (MARKK). Archive of Experiences is edited by Martha Kazungu and Gabriel Schimmeroth, with contributions by Rasha Salti, Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, Barbara Plankensteiner, Martha Kazungu, and Gabriel Schimmeroth.
List of references:
Baudrillard, Jean (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press
Benjamin, Walter (1969). “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. Walter Benjamin Illuminations Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books.
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Enwezor, Okwui (2008). Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. International Center of Photography, New York, and Steidl Publishers, Göttingen.
Foster, Hal (1996). “The Return of the Real”. The Return of the Real. London: The MIT Press.
Freud, Sigmund (1957). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychology Works of Sigmund Freud. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Lacan, Jacques (1981). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XI The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Ohene-Ayeh, Kwasi (2021a). “Indeterminate Images: Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh reflects on the practice of Kelvin Haizel”. Over Journal, issue 2. Ireland: Photo Ireland.
Ndikung, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng, Harmel, Aziza, Lepoultier, Astrid Sokona and Ohene-Ayeh, Kwasi. 2019. Streams of Consciousness: A Concatenation of Dividuals, Bamako, Nov. 30, 2019-January 31, 2020. [Biennale reader]. Berlin: Archive Books, Editions Balani’s.
Ohene-Ayeh, Kwasi (2021b). “Tracing the Aesthetic Queerness of the Photographic Form via Wolfgang Tillmans’s Artistic Objects” (extra sheet: Accra, 2021, p. I-IV), in Wolfgang Tillmans: Fragile, exh. cat. (2018). Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V. (ifa), Stuttgart, Germany.
Ohene-Ayeh, Kwasi & Haizel, Kelvin (2020). “In Conversation with Kelvin Haizel”. I.U.B… https://iubeezy.wordpress.com/conversations/kelvinhaizel/, last accessed on 10.04.2022.
seid’ou, kąrî’kạchä & Bouwhuis, Jelle (2014). “Silent parodies: kąrî’kạchä seid’ou in conversation with Jelle Bouwhuis,” in Project 1975: Contemporary Art and the Postcolonial Unconscious. Amsterdam and London: SMBA and Black Dog Publishing.
Shandy, Diana (2017). “Ethnology and Ethnography in Anthropology”. Human Relations Area Files, Cultural Information for Education and Research. https://hraf.yale.edu/teach-ehraf/ethnology-and-ethnography-in-anthropology/#citing-ehraf-documents, last accessed on 10.04.2022.
Endnotes:
1 I use this term in the humanist phenomenological context; in the way things appear to our senses— retinal, aural, olfaction, haptic, taste, and so on…
2 According to Lacan, “I am not simply that punctiform being located at the geometric point from which the perspective is grasped. No doubt, in the depths of my eye, the picture is painted. The picture, certainly, is in my eye. But I, I am in the picture.” (Lacan 1981: 96).
3 I borrow the distinction between meaning and function from the sentiments expressed by Okwui Enwezor who curated the exhibition in 2008 titled Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art which emphasized artistic uses of documents hitherto perceived as “inert”. For Enwezor, “Archive Fever explores the ways in which artists have appropriated, interpreted, reconfigured, and interrogated archival structures and archival materials” (Enwezor 2008: 11). I also rely on Deleuze & Guattari’s distinction between meaning and function in their book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (See Deleuze & Guattari 1983). Also see note ix. Bonaventure Soh Bejend Ndikung also mused over the question of what photography can do for the 12th edition of the Bamako Encounters, African Biennale of Photography (2019-2020) See Ndikung et al, 2019.
4 Also see how Hal Foster uses Lacanian ideas in The Return of the Real (Foster 1996: 127-170).
5 “Everything that is repressed must remain unconsious […] The unconscious has the greater compass: the repressed is a part of the unconscious.” (Freud 1957: 166)
6 The exhibition opens from 20th May-16th October and is under the auspices of the 8th Photo Triennial of Hamburg.
7 According to the wall text in the exhibition hall: “The albu at the centre of the “Archive of Experiences” exhibition refers to Singapore in 1868. It begins with a dedication by Egmont Hagedorn to his sister Jenny Hagedorn and his brother-in-law Georg Duncker (1841-1894). At first glance, the album appears to be a family album. But against expectations, it does not contain family memories in the form of pictures of the persons who appear in the dedication. Rather, it is a compilation of photographs of people, landscapes and architecture in Singapore and Southeast Asia. On 50 double-page spreads, the album features 352 photographs taken between 1861 and 1868. In the 1860s, the vibrant metropolis of Singapore was the ideal place to buy, collect and trade photographs from around the region— they became currency in the globalized trade. Thus, the supposed family album is a valuable gift from a transnational Hamburg family. Johann Emil Egmont von Hagedorn, who was born in Singapore on May 2, 1845, gave the album to his sister Jenny Hagedorn. Georg Duncker came from a large insurance dynasty that was one of the most important insurance companiies for so-called overseas trade in the mid-19th century and also played a leading economic role in Hamburg’s trade in Southeast Asia. Indeed, Jenny and Georg Duncker’s first-born son Paul Georg Egmont Duncker participated in the 1908-1910 Hamburg South Seas Expedition. The niece of an adopted daughter of Georg Duncker, Ursula Camrath donated the album to the then Museum für Völkerkunde (today MARKK) in 1984.”
8 From the author’s communications with Kelvin Haizel.
9 I borrow this term from Deleuze and Guattari who counter-pose what they call “schizoanalysis” to the psychoanalytic process of subjectivation trapped or encircled by Oedipal structures within the symbolic. For Deleuze and Guattari “The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely problems of use. The question posed by desire is not “What does it mean?” but rather “How does it work?” How do these machines, these desiring-machines, work—yours and mine? With what sort of breakdowns as a part of their functioning? How do they pass from one body to another?” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 108). In this regard I find correlates of both negativity (psychoanalysis) and affirmation (schizoanalysis) within Haizel’s attitude, process, and work.
10 From the author’s communications with Kelvin Haizel.
11 According to the captions in the exhibition hall Breaking Eggs in Vietnam “features digital collages of portraits with blown up microscopic details of blemishes, accidents, and deteriorations of the albumen prints superimposed on the photographs from the album. [And] is focusing on a visual experiences of the materiality”. Whiles The Albumen Story highlights “the immersive quality [of the reproductions]. Printed on fabric they are material in itself and not just pictures”.
12 Foster theorizes traumatic realism as a subversive ‘third way’ of critiquing the binary models of simulacral vs referential readings by mid-century critics on late modernist realist movements such as pop art and appropriation art. Traumatic realism is a surrealist reading of these genres that look at the eruption of the real. See Foster 1996: 130-136.
13 Lacan relies on Jurgis Baltrušaitis’s ideas on anamorphism published in the book titled Anamorphoses ou Magie artificielle des effets merveilleux in 1969 to theorize his conception of the gaze, how it relates to the picture, and the complexities of subjectivation in this regard (see Lacan 1981: 79-116). seid’ou applies this concept of the anamorphic stain politically when he describes the revolutionary changes that his anarchist pedagogic art practice inspired in Ghana in the early 2000s that “what we hope to advance in Kumasi is a field of “general intellect” which encourages student artists and other young artists to work in the spirit of finding alternatives to the bigger picture which excluded their voices but paradoxically by first becoming an anamorphic stain in the bigger picture itself. This way, the stain instigates a new vision, which requires a necessary shift in the spectator’s perspective. And this shift in perspective leaves the older picture as a stain in the new picture.” (seid’ou & Bouwhuis 2014: 115-116).
14 For Lacan the gaze is to the real as the eye (or to look) is to the symbolic. The gaze preexists the subject, it is in the world. “It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which —if you will allow me to use a word, as I often do, in a fragmented form— I am photo-graphed” (Lacan 1981: 106). Hal Foster remarks that “Lacan imagines the gaze not only as maleficent but as violent, a force that can arrest, even kill, if it is not disarmed first [with the veil or the screen]” (Foster 1996: 140).
15 For Benjamin “[t]o articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was”. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.” (Benjamin 1969: 255)
16 From the author’s communications with Kelvin Haizel. I find the artist’s disposition consistent with the spirit of Benjamin’s historical materialism.
17 Diana Shandy puts it this way: “Anthropologists are engaged in both ethnographic and ethnological study. Ethnography is the in depth study of a particular cultural group, while ethnology is the comparative study of ethnographic data, society and culture.” (Shandy 2017).
18 “Retroactive redemption” is kąrî’kạchä seid’ou’s term for a speculative time concept that combines insights from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s and Slavoj Žižek’s “Absolute Recoil”, the Calvinist “predestination”, Walter Benjamin’s “messianism” and Phillip Gosse’s “omphalos” thesis. It is an emancipatory event that posits its own presupposition(s) or an effect that posits its own cause(s).
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