[Winter 2022]

James Coleman, What Goes Around Comes Around
By Stephen Horne

“A being racing into the future passes
a being racing into the past two footprints
perpetually obliterating one another
toe to heel, heel to toe.”
– W. B. YEATS ¹

James Coleman´s complex cinematic installations disclose the beauty and pleasure of “looking.” The aesthetic experience to which I refer is sourced in a notion of “play” as understood in the context of theatre, where it has some reference to the practice, and even the pretense, of dissimulation. Or of deception, in the sense that we might say the mass media “plays” us – play in the sense of a “slippage” or as a synonym for ambiguity. Coleman’s cinematic installations are composed of the play that can exist between words and images, sound and sight, and are intently concerned with a conception of time as void or lack. His process is a critical intervention in a rationalism that “boxes” in, or contains, the flux of time with a demand for coherence, unity, and linear progress. Michael Snow has been an important inspiration for Coleman, who has taken on Snow’s statement “There is something inside repetition.” A retrospective of Coleman’s installations was presented during summer 2021 at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Coleman’s image projections are isolated in a black room, with the projection apparatus exposed and incorporated into the viewing experience. In a number of his works, he uses the technique of the slide-tape, a device that synchronizes sound and image, adapted from commercial use. Other works are presented as films, film loops, and videos. The entire apparatus of projection is a primary reference. A “projected image” makes a virtue of its own failing with regard to its potential for permanence. Coleman adopts aspects of theatre and of media such as recording, storage, and playback. His installations have the appearance of an intervention in a mise en scène being prepared in the studio, prior to being filmed, as if we have taken a step back in time and caught the work in process. Speaking and seeing are related but not connected in any predictable sequence.

Before I discuss the Pompidou retrospective, we could look at one earlier and remarkable piece. Box (ahhareturnabout) (1977), a film-loop projection, places us already in the middle of an event and of a story. There is a projection mechanism in a darkened room, and the room resonates with a booming, grinding rhythmic sonic impact. Images and sounds, interspersed with black frames, feel like blows. The sound is difficult to place, as it emanates from within the felt sense of one’s own body. Alongside the viscerality of this impact is the scene itself, documentary material of a boxing match – the boxers being renowned figures, two Irish-American world heavyweight champions Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney. Here, they are competing in a rematch, Dempsey attempting to recover his former status as world champion, a status he had previously held for seven years and lost to Tunney in 1926. When Tunney won again, thus retaining his title, in 1927, the result was intensely contested due to what was perceived as an error in the referee’s procedure, an error that had gave Tunney an interval, a few extra seconds in a crucial moment of the fight. And so, in various ways, this documentary material already contains various references to time, timing, and history, all elements of Coleman’s involvement with voice, interior monologue, and narration. The film emphasizes discontinuity throughout, presenting a voice intermingled with sounds and rhythms of intense physical exertion, of heavy breathing and gasping, and a male voice expressing what we take to be that of an inner monologue from one of the boxers. The “inner” feeling comes from the integration of words with breathing and other bodily sounds and the words tend to emphasize the repetitive dimension, such as “do it again . . . stop . . . go back . . . aha/aha . . . again . . . go on . . . go on . . . again.” The title, Box, given that the site of this event, the boxing ring, is an arena; square, elevated and “set up” as media theorist Samuel Weber explains, “in the sense of being posed, feigned or contrived. This is part of what happens on [the theatrical] stage. . . . As a podium . . . it is a place of address . . . raised above the horizontal.” We might even read the theme of boxing in the sense proposed by Weber: “The notion of ‘organizing’ is thus equated here, not just with closure or completion, but also with the more sinister sense of ‘finishing off.’” That is, boxed in, photographed, filmed, viewed.

What makes Coleman’s work specifically a “compelling” experience? Is it that the piece provokes a sense of finding oneself “already there”? It may be that Coleman is setting up situations in which a viewer can sense the pleasure that is time in dispersal, freed from its “box.”

The very notion of “retro-spective” has always been a crucial aspect of Coleman’s works. The current retrospective, curated by Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov, was presented in a large black room with an interior island divided into another room, again divided. Each work was presented in isolation from other works and from the architectural envelope. A dozen pieces were included, commencing with a piece titled Early Films (1967–72) and concluding with Still Life (2013–16). Liucci-Goutnikov’s introduction proposes that Coleman’s concerns are close to those of Dan Graham in his highlighting of the central role of memory and language in the perception of images.

The most recent work, Still Life, presents an over-sized, digitally projected video loop of a poppy plant filmed as if freshly plucked from its soil. The poppy plant stands vertically, in total isolation from any environment, and so, in its glorious colour against the entirely black space, its impact is almost hallucinatory. Its roots are exposed and caked with dirt, and two of its vibrant pink petals are torn away, while the others seem to float in a dimensionless black void. Still Life is just that, up to a point, beyond which the stillness of the still image is gently undermined by tiny motions of the petals or the roots, but, more importantly, by the intrusion of doubt as to where “in reality” the motion is located. Are we “seeing things”? As is often the case in Coleman’s practice, we discover allusions to the poetry of W. B. Yeats, and Still Life is one of those occasions: “A lyric poet’s life should be known that we should understand his poetry is not rootless flower but the speech of a man.” Still Life offers the intriguing question about how the boundary between alive and dead is blurred in the technological environment, and extends this into a question regarding our own perceptual present: Still alive? Is “alive” only a characteristic of the organic realm? How do we determine what counts as life?

In the same space, Lapsus Exposure (1992–94) situates the installation in what seems to be a studio used for the production of sounds and images, giving a “backstage” emphasis, a feeling as if we have arrived in the middle of a rehearsal, or, as in French, a répétition. This “beginning” within a repetition is a key move throughout Coleman’s production. We encounter slide projections and audio recordings situated in the sound studio where a rock group is preparing to do a recording session while publicity photographs are taken. The event unfolds around an ongoing discussion among the musicians regarding the question of analogue versus digital in their production. Composing by including played-back pre-recorded elements is central, and an interesting definition is offered by the musicians as they argue through the distinction between “live,” and “alive” in the incorporation of “playback.” This includes the larger question of reworking the traditional distinction between “alive” and “dead” in relation to an alternation of presence with absence. Coleman’s blurring of the distinction between the living and the dead intertwines the two.

I N I T I A L S (1994) also presents a slide projection and pre-recorded audio. The “stage” for I N I T I A L S is an abandoned tuberculosis hospital from the 1950s. This work derives its title from Irish literary history, the reference being to a tree known as The Autograph Tree, into the bark of which generations of authorial signatures have been carved. Of course, the tree has had only so much space available, making it more and more difficult for subsequent generations to “arrive.” In the voiceover we hear, “It’s hard to make out the initials . . . growing still . . . ex-communicating as we speak . . .” The acting in these installation/performances adopts conventions in popular television dramas, especially that of readymade expressions, a device that leaves the characters “hollow.”

In I N I T I A L S a speaker disassembles her phrases, separating words from each other with long pauses, without ever completing a thought. She talks about sounds, not images. In the voice-over we hear, “weave . . . weave close-wefted . . . green . . .obsolete . . . unfolded . . . folded back . . .” Retreat, “step back,” loop and playback of a pre-recorded moment, not yet present – or discontinuously present – rather than simply past. Here we find recording and playback informing contemporary perceptual process. What has already happened is about to happen. A narrator says to the viewer/reader, “Say it. SAY IT . . . say IT!” One is trying to hold onto something “immediate” as it breaks up, disperses. This recalls the “inner monologue” that plays such a large role in Box (ahhareturnabout), and recollects this aspect of Samuel Beckett’s play Not I (1972).

On the one hand, Coleman’s project of the past five decades is intellectually rigorous, esoteric, and uncompromising; on the other hand, it has all the beauty of face-to-face contact with the enigma that is art. There is a degree of familiarity due to his adoption of thematic structural forms such as the window, the frame, the screen, and the loop, as well as imagery, styles, and themes found in popular media culture. An intense complexity is revealed as we experience a recursive layering of the viewer’s active memory playing within perceptual experience, and in a similar intertwining of language with the visual. To be overly impressed by the technical precision and intricacy in Coleman’s practice would be to miss its greater value as aesthetic experience, the place to begin that Rosalind Krauss described as a “powerful experience . . . [having] been ravished, been seduced, been taken in.”

Coleman reveals our attempts to organize time with our practices of domination. In this sense, he can be seen in a long view that connects him with a history of art that includes Alberti’s discussions of painting and the window frame as an empty/full, something that places Michael Snow in Coleman’s purview, along with Chantal Akerman, especially for her installation de L’Est (1993).

In an interview with Irish philosopher Richard Kearney, Coleman says, “You are here because of me and I am here because of you.” This chiasmus is close in spirit to things that Dan Graham has said, for example, in his Louisiana interview, and Coleman, like Graham, emphasizes the place of pleasure and play in the activity of “looking.” Coleman’s present is not an instant but a process in motion that is non-linear and multi-directional. The famous “here and now” of which Barnett Newman spoke exists, but not within the model of time as a linear sequence of instants. The model that Coleman proposes alternates a then and there with a here and now. His present is a dispersal that is forever incomplete. His viewer is a self perpetually disappearing, never entirely present nor entirely absent. Never complete or solid, never fixed but cyclical, fading away, following, allowing space to exist by its withdrawal. Coleman’s installations, in which emptiness has taken the place of ground, are exemplary for their ability to suspend the viewer in a near-hypnotic state of attention. We are, as viewers, like the players in a game, played by the game, or like musicians with a composition, played by the music.

Stephen Horne, who lives in France, writes about Canadian art. His recent book on the concept of Arte Povera has been published by Les éditions de l’Attente, in Bordeaux.

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 119 – AGAINST NATURE ]