Emerling, Pompeii Archive

History of Photography ISSN: 0308-7298 (Print) 2150-7295 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/thph20 Pompeii Archive Jae Emerling To cite this article: Jae Emerling (2018) Pompeii Archive, History of Photography, 42:3, 310-312, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2018.1531602 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2018.1531602 Published online: 14 Jan 2019. Submit your article to this journal View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=thph20 Pompeii Archive William Wylie. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2018. 120 pages, with 83 duotone illustrations. Hardcover $35.00, ISBN 978-0-300-2366-7. Of course, this is one of the really important things about art, that you can make more than you can understand at the moment the thing is being made. But the gap between what we recognise inside ourselves – our feelings – and our ability to trust ourselves and to trust exposing ourselves to those ideas can be great. (Emmet Gowin) The arrival of William Wylie’s latest book Pompeii Archive deserves the serious attention of those of us committed to understanding the continued ontological and historiographic power of photography in the twenty-first century. Wylie created these images while a Yale University Doran Artist-in-Residence, which allowed him to live in Praiano, Italy, on the Amalfi Coast, at the villa of Carol and Sol LeWitt. Wylie’s initial plan for this residency was to rephotograph the nineteenth-century photographer Giorgio Sommer’s images of Pompeii. He has long collected Sommer’s albumen prints of Pompeii and its environs. This plan to rephotograph Sommer’s now canonical vedute of Pompeii was enticing to the archaeologists currently supervising the site as they saw it as a way to lionise Sommer and document their work. This plan, however, turned out to be less than interesting to Wylie himself. The images we have before us are not reperformances of Sommer’s angles, viewpoints, and chiaroscuro. Wylie quickly realised that this way through the past was foreclosed because it is an impossible project – one that demands a fidelity to Sommer resulting in mediocre images which merely fetishise an origin or author. Instead, he came to the realisation that Sommer’s work, although a catalyst, had to be betrayed: he had to generate as much difference as possible from the cultural imaginary Sommer had constructed. Repetition, yes, but an act of repetition generating difference, variation, individuation, and intensive vitality. This was a true betrayal, one that reveals a paradoxical fidelity since ‘to betray’ is an infinitive verb that remains untimely, never quite aligned with sequential, linear time, but always partakes of a series of asymmetrical becomings that have their own oblique, immanent temporality. Wylie has found his own passages through the physical, temporal, and cultural site that is Pompeii. The result is a stunning contemporary body of work, and one whose untimely vision and aesthetic force undermines the seeming calmness and familiarity of its subject matter. Encountering an archive such as this is a transformative experience. Wylie’s Pompeii Archive is an encounter in the truest sense because it belies simple reading or viewing pleasure, which is not to say that it is experimental, abstruse, or visually displeasing. Far from it. Rather, it is intimate, haunting, and elliptical. Wylie’s archive offers us nothing of the past. On the contrary, it presents us with an intensified aesthetic experience that complicates historicist and conceptual documentary strategies. It offers an experience at once aesthetic and epistemic, sensible and intelligible, because the images comprising it are 310 Reviews incapable of fully archiving Pompeii: the actual archaeological site as well as its metaphoricity within a Western cultural imaginary. The proper name ‘Pompeii’ withdraws and yet coyly approaches as it is represented, time and again. Images of Pompeii inhere and form an inexhaustible archive that becomes part of the event itself. The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, the disappearance of the buried site, ‘frozen in time’ as they say, until its rediscovery in 1748, its primacy in the nineteenth-century Romantic mind as memento mori, its postwar presence as the most moving image in Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1954), and as a contemporary tourist image repeated ad infinitum across social media. Working with and against all of this, Wylie’s artwork gives us untimely, beautiful, temporal cartographic images for the twenty-first century that embody the duration of an event, the future anterior becoming of Pompeii as a proper name, as a transmitted memory image. Contemplating Wylie’s work, I was struck by how Pompeii expresses the entire prehistory of photography. All of the language we use to understand Pompeii anticipates that of photography: stasis and movement, a moment frozen in time, presence and absence, the imbrication of surface and depth, the chiasmus of light and shadow (chiaroscuro as force), a framed vignette instigating narrative, displaced and mistaken desire for positivist meaning, and a complex, immanent temporality. Simply put, the manner in which we talk about Pompeii is precisely how we discuss a photographic image. Wylie senses this secret link – Pompeii as a photographic image of thought. For this reason, he labours to convey the expressive singularities of the materials that compose Pompeii: the texturology of surfaces, the indifferent ennui of sunlight, the weight of shadow traversing a scene like a gravitational force pulling all of the objects, lines, and surfaces into new, unique arrangements. Erosion and reflection; structure and façade; fragments and openings; collections and bones; the gestures of the figures and the handles of the amphora; series of columns and passages; scaffolding and nature: all of this is assembled into photographic artworks of the highest order that situate us within the spiral of an event that erodes any notion of a preexisting, independent reality. The photographic technicity of Wylie’s images of Pompeii (his view camera, lenses, apertures, exposure times, full plate negatives ultimately scanned, the final prints) and its representational parerga (the archaeological taxonomic cases, the vitrines and casts, the geological effacements) situate us within the duration of an event, within a threshold between historicist and aesthetic images. Thus, his photographs allow us to understand that an event undergoes becomings: an event becomes otherwise, unfolds, redoubles and splits off – or ‘ruining rather than the ruin’, as Wylie himself says – right before our eyes and yet always partially out of frame. Wylie’s photographs acknowledge that an event is inseparable from its representations and yet cannot be reduced to them; this relation of immanence between an event and its representations, memory and oblivion, motivates his work here. Following Jacques Derrida’s remarkable work on the concept of the archive, Wylie’s archive is spectral, allusive, and haunting rather than informative, complete, or representational. He offers us only images of shadows and entropy. His curious skiagraphia is evident in the fact that nearly every photograph presents a shadow that draws our attention away from the ostensible physical referent. But the shadow is not merely the negative image of the thing itself; instead, it is our memory image of the referent as such – a referent that has no real existence without the material prostheses needed to keep them present. As Derrida has written: If there is an art of photography (beyond that of determined genres, and thus in an almost transcendental space), it is [. . .] not that it suspends reference, but that it indefinitely defers a certain type of reality, that of the perceptible referent. It gives the prerogative to the other, opens the infinite uncertainty of a relation to the completely other, a relation without relation. (Original emphasis) Thus, Wylie focuses equally on shadow and entropy in order to suspend or defer the ‘perceptible referent’, implicating it within an ensemble of memory images as well as future becomings. Within the photographs or often just on the edge of the frame, we encounter the materials required to delay that disappearance of Pompeii, such as the use of cheesecloth to cover bits of eroding fresco, and the archaeological tools such as trisquares, clamps, tables, and wires remind us how this past remains present and thereby open to future becomings. Wylie writes with shadows in order to affect us with an archive that is, as Derrida concludes, ‘neither present nor absent “in the flesh,” neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met’. In other words, he defers the perceptible referent ‘Pompeii’ in order to render the contemporary photographic image as an aesthetic passage within which another temporality, another becoming, takes place right before our eyes. Wylie places us where we will have been, which is precisely where our perceptions of Pompeii are inseparable from our recollections of it. This emplacement is the ‘silent vocation’ of Wylie’s undeniably contemporary work. Neither a completed past nor a final document, each individual photograph is an aesthetic passage that allows an event and its representations, past and future, to become a vital, mutable, interdependent, anachronistic, porous, affective ensemble. Moreover, Wylie’s 311 Reviews images encourage us to attempt a redefinition of photography as an index that embodies what is lost as much as what is saved or remembered. Every photograph is precisely what it does: it is an index creating a passage between memory and oblivion. But an index is an absence encountered as something tangible, embodied, sensible. Therefore, a photograph is a passage and a retrieval cue. As Wylie’s archive reminds us, aesthetic labour courses between memory and forgetting. Artwork is therefore the ability to create sensations that embody and resonate the past anew – changed, altered, disguised, dissembling – in its true place: the future. A photograph is this indexical link of past–future. By magnetising forces (time, memory, will, imagination, desire) and embodying them within forms, photography offers us ‘a promise of happiness’ as Stendhal assured us, but only if it is recognised not as a return to an origin or a faithful repetition of a preexisting state of things or perception. Happiness is proffered only within an enfolding of past–future, within a temporal passage that allows us to touch life as such, to sense an immanence that renders time without measure. The individuations of Wylie’s images leave one assured that he is capable of transmitting how and why art still remains, still affects, and still generates sense events (repetition and difference, singularity and duration, structure and iteration) that force us to think and to feel beside ourselves, which is nothing other than a true ‘promise of happiness’. Jae Emerling # 2019 Jae Emerling https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2018.1531602 312