At the request of Les Cahiers du musée national d'art moderne, Pompidou, I invited poet, critic and founder of Ubuweb, Kenneth Goldsmith to chat about the acquisition of my recent work, Discrete Channel with Noise. This took place during the Covid lockdown of 2020. Click through to read.
Clare Strand / Kenneth Goldsmith
Kenneth Goldsmith: I’m both fascinated and perplexed by the relationship between digital and physical imagery. At a time when most images are constructed, distributed, and shared using digital means, why do we still have categories regarding plastic mediums. Why not, say, call all art today, “digital art?” Perhaps you could flesh out these ideas using your series “The Discrete Channel with Noise” as an object lesson?
Clare Strand: The explosion of digital photography and new technologies has affected how the photographic medium is used, understood and discussed. The once-held assertion that the photograph is an authentic and credible replication of reality has long- been shelved. This, plus the proliferation of photographic imagery shared, compressed, posted, invented, pasted, plucked etc. has thrown the act of photography into analysing, re-inventing and questioning how the photographic image operates within the arts, on the screen and within society in general. This can perhaps be identified by the shift in artists looking to the materiality of photography by inverting the ‘visual intention’ and being more concerned with what a photograph is than what it shows.
I’ve never seen the image as something fixed; more that it has a shape-shifting potential and its value depends on the surrounding variables. I am also skeptical of the generally accepted categorisations of the arts. However, the opportunity to challenge fixed taxonomies is interesting to me.
The Discrete Channel with Noise I hope works across analogue and digital platforms in a number of ways. The work is an analogue response to the digital condition in regard to the act of distributing, circulating and the actual ‘stuff’ of transmitting information, in this case a photograph. This is done through dividing an ‘analogue’ image into a coding system using numbers 1-10 to signify 10 tonal paints between black and white. This code is allocated to 10 images chosen from my archive and read over the phone to me by my husband, whilst I painted each numbered tone onto a large piece of paper with a matching grid applied to it. The results are large scale paintings made by hand. There is evidence of my human fallibility - I have made mistakes, my fingerprints can be seen, my hair has
been caught in the acrylic, I’ve painted over lines and they are far from perfect. To understand this element of the work the painting needs to be physically experienced and those that visit the work can see and identify this - it’s important that the process is experienced. However the paintings also have an alternate presence when viewed on the screen - they become a different work. The paintings are compressed by the lens of the camera when making the installation shot. The paintings are rendered smooth, the painted squares look accomplished and sanitised. The works look like ‘real art and real painting’. They have the appearance of sophistication unlike their analogue counterparts. The works’ ontology is gone - the process is flattened and wiped clean.
I was asked which I preferred - the analogue painting or its digital representation - and I couldn’t quite make up my mind, as the same work was operating in two entirely different ways, both of which I quite enjoy for their own expression of or take on a process. In the case of The Discrete Channel with Noise I am directly concerned with the mechanics of image transmission but the process is also key. I think to ignore or marginalise the production and process of a work, whether analogue or digital in its manufacture, placing sole emphasis on its digitalisation is a mistake. Most things are not entirely digital or entirely physical - if we name everything digital then nothing is not - so would there be a point to name it at all? Perhaps, as I hope in The Discrete Channel with Noise, it could be that works can coexist in both the analogue and the digital and inform each other, whilst being experienced and explored in equally compelling but different ways?
KG: I love the way you describe the photographing of the installation whereby the paintings that were once photos become photos/digital artefacts once again. Did you ever want to rephotograph the paintings and present them as photographs, a proverbial game of telephone, referencing the method in which the numbers were transmitted via the “telephone” by your husband?
CS: It is not until I get somewhere solid with an idea that I can understand whether the work either continues or takes a different path. To rephotograph was an option when I looked at the paintings, however when the work was exhibited I realised that the audience
was making this next iteration for me by making the photographs, primarily with their phones, and posting them online. You will see that in this publication the paintings are produced as photographs - not taken by me but by a in-house installation photographer. So there is no need for me to do anything, as the institution and audience completed this possibility for the work as part of the process of cataloguing and sharing. It was an unexpected, or as Claude Shannon would have it a ‘surprise’ outcome, which one could assume from any displayed artwork nowadays, but which took on added significance with this piece.
Another by product or ‘surprise’ was the rhythm of making the work. Whilst painting I was working to a beat in my head - 444,3,6,1,555,etc - corresponding to the tone I was painting. Photographs turned into paintings turned into music. This is an attractive proposition for me, taking the work to an unexpected union of sound-colour synesthesia, chance and poetry.
KG: If I can extend what you’re saying then, could we say that the continual documentation of everything by everyone changes the nature of the artistic gesture? Perhaps if your audience is doing the work for you, then there’s not much reason for you to continue doing it. Or is your initial gesture, then a kickstarter for a chain of artistic/ extra-artistic gestures? In a sense the question is Duchampian: can works of art be made which are not of art? And isn’t this really getting at one of the core questions that has haunted reproducible media from Gutenberg to photography to the digital? This question also brings to mind the 80s consumerist photographs like Sherrie Levine or Allan McCollum who used rephotography as a way of questioning the infinite reproducibility as it relates to both the medium of photography (they worked in the analog space) as well as the accrual and circulation of capital. It seems like your work is a 21st century response to those gestures.
CS: The ‘human machine’ performed between my husband and myself started the process, opening the chain of possibilities and realisations that have been both experienced and imagined along the way. The process does, to me, have some relationship to Duchamp, in particular his suggestion of the 'Art Coefficient’ but could
also relate to 'Shannon Entropy’. I find it compelling that Shannon’s mathematical equations on communication theory and entropy (from The Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1947) compares with Duchamp’s ‘Art Coefficient’ (from The Creative Act, 1957). Both use or suggest arithmetical formulae to convey their findings. I enjoy their differences also, as communication theory (later re-termed information theory) deals with the ‘stuff and bulk’ of information transmission rather than meaning - whereas the ‘Art Coefficient’, to my mind, does this in reverse.
I am far from being a mathematician, but I do appreciate works that boil the world down to communicate an idea in its purest form. Artists’ intentions are refracted (for good or for bad) when works are introduced to flatland (the screen) - paintings become clean, sculpture becomes two-dimensional, smell disappears. The only medium that arguably doesn’t go through an instant metamorphosis is photography (in its ‘conventional’ form) as it was already a resident of flatland, keeps a clean surface and remains odourless. Photography is a complex medium, with its innate reproduction attributes and its seemingly ‘jack of all trades’ qualities. Whilst it represents itself as an art form, it is also used to document and represent other artistic practices, and can be an accomplice to their rapid entropy. A conventional photographic image in translation doesn’t suffer the instant entropy that other mediums do. However, once it is shared online or recorded digitally the photograph (made as an artistic statement in its own right) joins with the photographs of paintings, sculpture, performance, etc. where their artistic gestures can indeed be changed a million times by the digital audience. Works can become memes, personalised, mis-credited or disfigured - even Duchamp’s urinal could be convincingly photoshopped into a pub toilet. The conversation around reproducibility is implicit in The Discrete Channel with Noise, also authorship and ownership. It is also a question of how photography operates, which Levine’s work so clearly demonstrates in the ‘After’ series, and continues to do so, in its subsequent digitised form.
KG: Can you now move to another body of work that deals with similar issues of reproducibility and transmedia? I get the sense that this is something — the materiality of photography in the digital age — that’s too little discussed.
CS: Referring back to Duchamp: ‘You know exactly how I feel about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable”.
And here we are… digital technologies have done just this with photography.
The last analogue photographic series I made was a work called Skirts (2011). The series is suitably reductive, absurd and purposely analogue in its making and reference. Since then I haven’t made a photograph but have taken many. Soon after this, I exhibited Flatland/Spaceland - referencing Edwins Abbott Abbott’s writing about dimensional travel, and the narrator, a square, transforming into a cube. I felt the story was so apt for photography and the anxieties around digital technologies. The work is made up of ten small shapes, which are made out of digitally toned photographic papers, laser cut and then hand constructed to make each 3D shape. The 2D template (or the by-product) is also exhibited alongside the cabinet of shapes, hence the title Flatland/Spaceland.
Not being what is termed a ‘digital native’, I have experience of both the digital and the analogue possibilities. This has resulted in a knowingly hybrid practice.
Not all shapes are platonic but, for me, these small objects felt like a rebuilding of the shapes and blocks of photography. Separating it from the pictorial surface and embracing the changing nature and the mutability of the medium.
The ongoing concern for photographic materiality, so prevalent within the field, has been a reaction or a resistance towards the dominance of the digital image and has led to the importance being re-placed on the photograph as object. For me, however, this hasn’t meant returning to being elbow-deep in old processes and chemicals. This just seems too easy and verges on the sentimental.
I am more interested in a different materiality. The digital image is full of material information, full of code, which can tell you where it has been and how it is operating - between human and machine or from machine to machine or from machine to human. This can be discussed in very tangible ways, and The Discrete Channel with Noise is the way I have tried to go about it.
KG: Duchamp was really interested in the fourth dimension, which I read as his attempt to demonstrate a concrete way of imagining the impossible. What we’re experiencing in the twenty-first century is a concrete realization of the previously impossible. Something as simple as sending someone an LP, film, or book was an unimaginable concept thirty years ago. If you told someone in 1985 that you’d be paying with your phone, they’d look at you like you were crazy. So in a way, Duchamp and Abbott’s utopianism has been realized in the fourth-dimensional space of the digital. Another example is Lippard’s dematerialization of the art object, which in theory should be where we’re at. But somehow, in a time where the more of something there is–I’m thinking of distribution–the more powerful it is, the art world still values the unique and the singular artefact. It really feels at odds with contemporary culture. How do you, as someone that works in reproducible media, navigate these waters?
CS: Your question makes me think about the early days of photography in the mid-19th century and, despite its reputation for delivering a mirror image, as the Camera Obscura, the power and wonderment it subsequently enforced upon the world were unexpected. The reality, as was generally understood, started to be mediated via a new technology. This ‘reality’ included phenomena that exceeded ordinary perception. Photography presented the apparatus to facilitate the unseen and hidden materiality of the world; summoning spirits, ghosts, emanations, mental projections and radiant forces seemingly drawn from other dimensions. This must have felt like a new (im)possibility, similar to how we are experiencing the rapidly unfolding digital world. Here however, as in Spirit photography, it is as well to remember that someone is always pulling the strings. Maybe, as you suggest, we, in our 3D form, are the Duchampian shadow of the digital space. Perhaps the 4th dimension is not the impossible but the possible. A dimension that keeps changing and eternally progressing, being just out of reach, frustrating and inspiring each subsequent generation.
In my own practice, I use different mechanisms and outputs that connect with the core concept of the work. In reference to your citation of Lippard’s Dematerialisation of the Art Object, it might be appropriate to mention The Entropy Pendulum (2015), which, every day of exhibit, scraps away at one of 36 silver gelatine, black and white images. After each day of degrading, the resultant image is then removed from the pendulum, placed in a frame on the gallery wall and replaced in the machine by another print for the process to restart the following day.
Every time The Entropy Pendulum is exhibited the images come back out of their frames and undertake another evolution of erosion. The work becomes less and less, or perhaps more and more. This work was part of a larger solo show I called Getting Better and Worse at the Same Time (2015).
Another work All that Hoopla (2016) is a customised fairground attraction, which I operated outside an art fair. The attraction’s offer was to try win one of my signed and edition works by tossing a hoop over a photograph from a distance at a cost of 5 Euros, or to buy the same photograph in the fair at its full price. The stall was a fully operational fairground concession with music, flashing lights, hoops and consolation loser balloons for those who didn’t win. The signage laid out the rules of play as well as the, intentionally provocative, statement ‘the fairest game at the fair’.
A recent cheaply published zine, Negatives …for fun with Clare Strand’s Photography (2020), offers each of 10 images as transparent negative pages, which the owner can take into the darkroom and print an image from, or scan into their digital archives.
I also have a work called the 7 Basic Propositions (2010), which uses the hook lines of 1950s Kodak magazine advertisements - Photography is colourful, Photography is inexpensive, photography is fast, etc. - to drive a Google image search engine. This is available for anyone to play with at any given time be it on a laptop, or in a gallery as a more performative piece.
These are four examples where the concept of the work follows through to its production and dissemination, each dealing with different output in relation to the ‘unique’, the reproducible and the mass-consumption of the photographic medium. They all appropriate chance, change and performance (often through the audience/user) as central to their function and context.
KG: Fascinating, all. And in particular, from what I can see, the Entropy Pendulum creates gorgeously distressed artefacts. How important is the artifact to you? Can you speak of the balance of concept and materiality in your work?
CS: The concept dictates the materiality of the outcome - so the importance of the artefact is in flux. The concept maps for me the process. Sometimes I don’t even agree with the process, but if it is what the concept is asking for then I keep to the rules. I like working within constraints, as once they are in place the stabilisers come off and the work starts making itself. For the Discrete Channel with Noise I followed the rules preset by George Eckhardt in 1938, which proposed this gridded and painted system for making an exact copy of an image when sent between sender and receiver. As a human machine, my husband and I followed the instructions and our results were accepted for what they were. In this case I was particularly attracted to the rules, as it felt right to make something so absurdly physical and human, highlighting the immaterially so often assumed with technological infrastructures. For theEntropy Pendulum, the images are indeed continually distressed each time they are exhibited. I have no idea how much of their document status will survive, and this is the exciting part of the project. 36 images that are in a constant process of mutation, which may become ‘more’ in their brutal transition to something less.
KG: Finally I want to ask you, what will a post postinternet photography look like?
CS: This is something that I have only considered tangentially I suppose, and so it is maybe best to answer that way..
As a teenager I became interested in the studies of the Polish clairvoyant Stanisława Tomczyk and her photographic materialisation of “Little Stasia” (1900) and then later I became intrigued by ‘Chicago bellhop Ted Serios’ who, in 1960 claimed to send images from his mind directly to polaroids, coining the term ‘thoughtographs’. Images materialised in energetic performances by Serios and it was noted that a lot of beer and hard liquor was drunk during the process.
'Ted said that when making thoughtographs, he didn’t see the image in his mind or his imagination prior to making the exposure… He said that it was more akin to him being a kind of portal through which this information or imagery simply passed.’ *
In 2004 I replied to an advertisement by a young psychologist inviting people to be involved in a study asking ‘Are artistic populations Anomaly prone? Testing the Relationship between creativity and Psi.’ I was equipped with a Palm Pilot (an early handheld device) and documented my visual thoughts in response to my ‘sender’ at instructed times of the day. After the experiment was complete I handed back my Palm Pilot and the results were analysed. The Discrete Channel with Noise has an eclectic range of reference but remote viewing and this experiment were always a strain of thought.
For me, It’s always been useful to look back to move forwards. Looking to see how events of the past connect to those of the present and to future possibilities, for example, Babbage’s proposal that ‘The air itself is one vast library on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered.’ (1837) guides me to our shared post-digital internet experience.
Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant’s Thought-forms (1901) of painted images illustrating emotions such as ’sudden fright’, 'murderous rage’ and ‘jealousy’, take me to today’s emojis of Shigetaka Kurita(1999) , which not only illustrate an emotion but can help reduce the ‘noise’ in our complex messaging systems.
The pseudoscientific studies of Alphonse Bertillon Identification Anthropométrique (1893) marry with the millions of images categorised as synsets on ImageNet, the computer-vision research database. (Princeton/Stanford University 2009)
What does post post-internet photography look like? There are so many ways to think about that question. However, aware of my limitations as a clairvoyant, I can only offer that, in my experience, it has been best to understand the future by looking at the past, preferably whilst drinking a lot of beer and hard liquor.