projeter / projecting When the Carousel stops turning … What shall we say about

projeter / projecting When the Carousel stops turning … What shall we say about the slide show? Martha Langford …plus d’informations  Martha Langford Concordia University URI DOI Diffusion numérique : 7 décembre 2015 https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1034158ar https://doi.org/10.7202/1034158ar Un article de la revue Intermédialités / Intermediality Numéro 24–25, Automne 2014, Printemps 2015 projeter Tous droits réservés © Revue Intermédialités, 2014  Abstract When we speak of the slide show, we are speaking of many things. Photographic art, social documentary photography, information, entertainment, education, discipline, and punishment… the Carousel projector (1961–2004) was part of all these histories, and to an appreciable degree these cultural products      When the Carousel stops turning … What shall we s… – Intermédialités... https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/im/2014-n24-25-im02279/1034158ar/ 1 di 39 06/01/2022, 21:01 shared not just a technical apparatus, but its language and embodied effects. As these machines disappear, we are increasingly reliant on visual and textual documents, as well as creative translations, to try to understand these works, their meaning and effects. My paper interrogates these accounts to grasp what was particular to the slide show medium, regardless of authorial intent, subject matter, and the increasingly porous division between high and low cultures. Résumé Parler de diaporamas, c’est évoquer plusieurs choses : l’art de la photographie, le documentaire social, l’information, le divertissement, l’éducation, la discipline et la punition… le Kodak Carousel (1961-2004) a fait partie de tout cela. Dans une large mesure, ces produits culturels partageaient non seulement l’équipement technique, mais aussi son langage et ses effets concrets. Avec la disparition de ces dispositifs, nous nous tournons de plus en plus vers les documents visuels et textuels, ainsi que vers les traductions créatives, pour tenter d’expliquer ces oeuvres, leur signification et leurs effets. Dans mon article, j’interroge ces enjeux pour saisir ce que ce médium avait de particulier, indépendamment des intentions de l’auteur, du sujet et de la distinction de plus en plus perméable entre la culture savante et la culture populaire. The Kodak Carousel, introduced to the market in 1961, was not the first projector – modern slide projection technology, which had superseded lantern slide projection, was a creature of the interwar period – but the round tray that held eighty 35 mm slides[1] literally doubled the capacity of the Kodak Cavalcade (the straight tray model it replaced), retaining useful features such as repeatability or continuous play, and the capacity for synchronization with sound programs from tape recorders. The company ceased manufacture of the Carousel projector in 2004, so we are talking about an audio-visual apparatus with a relatively short active life in the commercial market. Artists became interested in making slide shows in the 1960s – works appeared under the signs of formalism, conceptualism, performance, public projections, and critical practice – but they were late to the party. Slide shows were events of everyday life as marketing and training tools; family slide shows and personal travelogues were holding audiences captive in the dark; the age of the multi-screen slide and sound extravaganza was upon us. When we speak of the slide show, we are speaking of many     When the Carousel stops turning … What shall we s… – Intermédialités... https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/im/2014-n24-25-im02279/1034158ar/ 2 di 39 06/01/2022, 21:01 things. Still I begin with the recognition that the question posed by my title has already been answered, at least partially, by artistic creation and curatorial intervention. The Baltimore Museum of Art exhibition SlideShow was mounted in 2005 – the body was still warm.[2] Nineteen artists were included in the exhibition whose catalogue explains their preoccupations and processes: Robert Barry’s rigorous systematization of projected words and images, Lothar Baumgarten’s bountiful “manipulated realities,” Marcel Broodthaers’s monocular inspection of an academic painting, James Coleman’s deconstruction of a single artless photograph, Jan Dibbets’s monumental six-frame horizon line, Willie Doherty’s ideological brandings of a suspected IRA terrorist – letters projected on a woman’s face, Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s encyclopedic display of nature, Ceal Floyer’s struggling-to-focus machine, Nan Goldin’s improvisational tribal album, Dan Graham’s “serial logic,” Louise Lawler’s nocturnal projections of private collectors’ interiors, Helen Levitt’s economical and efficient presentation of a social document, James Melchert’s compressions and relocations of space, from wall to floor, Ana Mendieta’s nine-frame solo performance, Jonathan Monk’s translations of family snapshots into projected phrases, Dennis Oppenheim’s dissolving multiple frames, Jack Smith’s stagey “obscure narrative,” Robert Smithson’s improvisational travelogue, and the restaging of a site-specific action at Hal Bromm Gallery by Krysztof Wodiczko. I have respected the catalogue by organizing this list alphabetically. A timeline would run from Graham’s Homes for America (1966–67) to Louise Lawler’s External Stimulation (1994–2005), with heavy traffic in the early 1970s and the post-millennial slowdown into works of memory and mourning. Most poignant for me are Monk’s One Moment in Time (Kitchen) (2002), in which family snapshots have been replaced by phrases (“Me and Ben (my dog) at home”), and Ceal Floyer’s Auto Focus (2002) featuring a machine on life support (electricity), that is starving to death (deprived of slides), and projecting its own hagiography (a halo on the wall). SlideShow must have been a fine exhibition, though its catalogue reveals certain gaps. In Darsie Alexander’s curatorial essay, the history of the slide show is back-formed by conceptual and performance artists’ appropriations of the slide projection, which are traced to the 1960s. It was a “found medium” – part of the alternative artists’ uptake of “technologies once considered too familiar, accessible, and low.”[3] The backstory as Alexander narrates it includes some of the domestic and commercial applications already mentioned; under early history, she brings out the use of slides in public lectures and classrooms, capturing the “synchronicity between images and words,” whose delivery could be controlled by “teachers and business professionals alike.”[4] This allusion to power – Jacques Rancière would have pounced on it – is not pursued.[5] Instead, the fusion of education and entertainment is traced to the magic lantern: “elaborate spectacles combining multiple projections, musical accompaniment, and complex image sequencing.”[6] At this point in her chronicle, Alexander inserts a most telling distinction, for however creative the producers of these works, by her light they were not artists. Public slide shows remained in the realm of popular entertainment, “a people’s medium, appealing to a general rather than an elite audience.”[7] They were spectacles – made to impress and, occasionally, to deliver information to large heterogeneous groups. So in SlideShow we are not dealing with a large and bumptious family of resemblance, but a branch of     When the Carousel stops turning … What shall we s… – Intermédialités... https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/im/2014-n24-25-im02279/1034158ar/ 3 di 39 06/01/2022, 21:01 that family that went on to better itself. This is the line that interests Alexander – it is elitist and institutional to the core. The “ingrained associations” that she detects in artists’ uses of this “found medium” are close, whether in the living room or the classroom[8] – a very small step, we might say, from pop to conceptualism, and easily plotted on a modernist timeline that must include the rise of the scene: the cosiness of Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt’s loft, where dinner and drinks might be followed by a slide show, promoting both conversation and careers.[9] A later scene was the seedbed of Nan Goldin’s early use of the slideshow; she gave her first slide-show performance of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1979) at Frank Zappa’s birthday party, held at the radically chic and elitist Mudd Club. Chris Townsend calls it “an artwork through which a subculture recounts its stories to itself.” He underscores the point that the various iterations of this work have alienated it from “the original community of reception that its narratives served.”[10] These are the terms by which we tend to describe family albums that wash up in museum collections: their translation from the private to the public realm is determinant, though they have an active afterlife in collective memory and public history.[11] The important point in both Alexander’s and Townsend’s analyses is the axis of the shift: it is horizontal. When artists such as Smithson or Goldin take up the slide show, the medium makes a horizontal move from one social circle to another. No re-skilling or de-skilling is required. Omitted or glossed in the rationale for SlideShow are other kinds of “ingrained associations” that spectators might have brought to their reception. Under the heading of mass culture, multi-screen slide shows generated by high degrees of skill – in the form of editorial and technical mastery – were transfixing audiences. Under the heading of public art education, displays of knowledge and connoisseurship had been training audiences to see and feel since the post-war effort to democratize education. In the 1960s, these events were not part of some phantasmagorical past or hermeneutic circle, but concurrent with the artists’ discovery of the slide-show technology and happening regularly in middlebrow institutions nearby. Left out as well are the slide projections that were brought to the people in their agoras – site-specific works of protest by Krzystof Wodiczko and uploads/Industriel/ when-the-carousel-stops-turning-what-shall-we-s-interme-dialite-s-intermediality-e-rudit.pdf

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