The Art of Darkness: on Steve Mcqueen

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The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

T. J. DEMOS

Steve McQueen’s Western Deep (2002) is striking for what it does not show. Documenting the labor conditions of miners in the Tautona mine near Johannesburg, the deepest gold mine in the world, the film begins with a long sequence of utter darkness. At first, the shocking soundtrack dominates: piercing mechanical screeches and metallic low-pitch knockings vibrate the exhibition space. These sounds immediately reverberate throughout the visitor’s body, hitting it with unseen force. It’s as if we have suddenly found ourselves blind within the grinding internal organs of some industrial machinery. This clamor lasts for several minutes, accompanied only by flashes of light here and there, which remain ambiguous and disorienting. These images are as estranging as the soundtrack: patches of color, fugitive sensations emerge at a low threshold of visibility. Reddish blurs flash on the screen in a field of pitch black. Soft, dim points of light flicker momentarily and then vanish into an abyss. The crushing mechanical noise contra- dicts the soft tones and mute chromatic infusions that subtly play on the surface of the screen. After several minutes, the film eventually brightens to a fluorescent violet cast by a strong artificial light, shining through what appear to be human figures in front of a large metal grill. By the time we realize that the camera has been positioned in an elevator loaded with a group of miners descending to an infernal depth, its metal grate thrown open, the sound has suddenly stopped, and we have been plunged into an environment that is as extraordinary for its silence as for its bizarre illumination. For a film that ostensibly documents a South African mining operation, this dark introduction is strategic. On the one hand, it draws in its audience by using visual lacuna to stress our envelopment by sound. That sound is physically registered and it opens the body to an impact often unexpected in the virtualized domain of contemporary video installations. In this sense, the film proposes a par- allel between its content and the terms of its reception, creating a multisensory mimicry of the brutal experience within a mine. On the other hand, we have the first indication of a conspicuous refusal to represent in the visual register, which frustrates the documentary impulse to which the film is seemingly pledged. A black hole lies at the beginning of a film about a journey into a mine, and this

OCTOBER 114, Fall 2005, pp. 61–89. © 2005 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 62 OCTOBER Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Steve McQueen. Western Deep. 2002. All McQueen works courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, and the artist. darkness is not simply metaphorical; rather, it says something important about the film’s conditions of representation. The film begins enticingly with a paradox stretched between metaphorics and negation, between the virtual and the actual. It presents us with a form of representation somehow based on the flickering presence of absence, or conversely on the recognition of a lack of anything like a presence to capture. It begins by resisting representation. It begins by offering us a telling key to the work of Steve McQueen. Commissioned for the 2002 international exhibition Documenta XI by director Okwui Enwezor, Western Deep appears to fulfill Enwezor’s imperatives for contemporary art: to channel postcolonial experience against the forces of triumphalist globalism, and by doing so, to expose those zones of economic and political inequality that are normally and tragically unrepresented within the dominant The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen 63

mainstream and western media. For Enwezor, this provides the crucial counter- weight to the myopic support of capitalism’s global empire, with its unfulﬁlled rhetoric of technological progress and democratizing institutions:

Whatever definition or character we invest it with, it is in the postcolo- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 nial order that we find the most critical enunciation and radicalization of spatiality and temporality. From the moment the postcolonial enters into the space/time of global calculations and the effects they impose on modern subjectivity, we are confronted not only with the asymmetry and limitations of globalism’s materialist assumptions but also with the terrible nearness of distant places that global logic sought to abolish and bring into one domain of deterritorialized rule.1 That Documenta XI sought to undertake the “representation of nearness as the dominant mode of understanding the present condition of globalization” was clear: the exhibition was filled with examples of photographic-based work that attempted to render proximate forgotten geographical areas and forsaken ways of life that normally fall below the radar of mass media.2 To mention only a few examples, there were Ravi Agarwal’s documentary photographs of the daily life of India’s landless poor, including images of camped-out, homeless families in Jugarat stationed before middle-class housing blocks that harshly exclude them, and David Goldblatt’s photographs of post-apartheid South African “intersections” that incisively juxtapose extreme urban poverty and corporate wealth. There were also Olumuyiwa Osifuye’s photographs of the decrepit but lively streets of Lagos, Nigeria, and Ulrike Ottinger’s documentary film of the artist’s passage through Eastern Europe, which lyrically revealed the experience of women in the geographical and temporal periphery of 1. Okwui Enwezor, “The Black Box,” in Documenta 11, Platform 5: Exhibition Catalogue (Ostfildern- Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002), p. 44. 2. Ibid. The term “representation” requires a complex meaning, extending both to the sociopolitical, in terms of substituting for another as in representational politics, and to the logic of signification, as in artistic representation. Documenta 11 was perhaps more concerned with the former, whereas I will be interested more in the relation between the two.

Left: Ravi Agarwal. Slum Dwellers in Front of Skyscraper, Gujarat, India. 1999. Right: David Goldblatt. Jo’burg Intersections. 1999–2002. 64 OCTOBER

modernization. Far from a unified group, these few instances from the massive show are exemplary in that all stress a photographic or filmic connection to those shadowy zones on the margins of the global order, what Documenta co-curator Carlos Basualdo termed a “more generous and complex geography,” and thus they assisted the exhibi- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 tion in its formation of a more inclusive, transnational public sphere.3 In the process of this geographical rearrangement of the field of contemporary art, Documenta XI carried out a reordering of the hierarchy of artistic mediums. As several critics have noted, it elevated above all others documentary modes of representation—photography, video, and film—which assumed privileged place ostensibly for their ability to depict Enwezor’s “postcolonial order” with mechanical or electronic accuracy, and thus to bring visibility and testimony to geographical regions and cultural areas outside of the West.4 It is perhaps these documentary mediums that, based within an epistemic paradigm of the “evidentiary,” are seen to be best equipped to compete with the hegemony of mainstream television and Hollywood film—the central purveyors of our vaunted image of globalization. Such developments, however, elicit potential dangers, familiar from critical analyses of earlier waves of multiculturalist art advanced more than a decade ago.5 Current documentary prac- tices, for instance, may return dangerously to precritical notions of representation that make problematic assumptions of transparency or neutrality. They may also run the risk of proclaiming truthful depictions of a “reality” of authentic subjects living beneath a spectacle of stereotypes, or, again, of unified fields of alterity—Enwezor’s postcolonial “order”?—whether archaic or geographically distant, which exist anterior to representation. While politically activist and radical in rhetoric, the proposed transparency of a political signified may bring with it a paradoxically authoritative interpretive structure that forecloses an otherwise open and polyvocal field of meaning. Today, however, many artists are just as likely to move in the opposite direction, embracing the instability of representation, even its decidedly fictional status, to the point where it becomes common, even fashionable, to announce subjective biases, or to argue for the impossibility of documentary representation tout court due to its his- torically discredited status, even if this clearly was not the case with Documenta XI.6

3. Carlos Basualdo, “The Encyclopedia of Babel,” in Documenta 11, Platform 5: Exhibition Catalogue, p. 61. 4. See, for instance, James Meyer, “Tunnel Visions,” Artforum (September 2002), and Kobena Mercer’s review in Frieze (September 2002). For his part, Enwezor writes—somewhat ambiguously— that the postcolonial order will be made present “either through the media or through mediatory, spectatorial, and carnivalesque relations of language, communication, images, contact, and resistance within the everyday” (p. 45). 5. See, for example, “The Politics of the Signifier: A Conversation on the Whitney Biennial,” October 66 (Fall 1993), pp. 3–27, which critically assessed the 1993 Biennial’s “certain turn away from questions of representation to iconographies of content; a certain turn from a politics of the signifier to a politics of the signified,” as Hal Foster put it (p. 3). For more discussion of related issues, see Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). If Documenta 11 advanced the globalization of multiculturalism, it is less clear, even doubtful, due to the complexity of its inclusion of several different aesthetic strategies, that it shares these earlier problems. 6. Allan Sekula, for example, explains that: “The apparent ‘crisis’ surrounding the photographic image is less the result of skeptical enlightenment or digital technology than a matter of assigning a new The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen 65

Neither transparently objective nor openly fictional, Western Deep escapes both camps. Opposing the aesthetics of photographic fiction, the film evinces a commitment to documentation, to a witnessing of experience that is not simply the result of its own fabrication, nor one that collapses into a modernist fetishiza- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 tion of its own conditions of representation. But it also refuses the pretense of transparency, articulated in its initial withdrawal of visuality, which expresses the limits of its capture of a reality that exceeds it, and thus rejects any supposition that the “postcolonial” exists as such—for any representation will determine it anew. Perhaps the darkness at the heart of Western Deep is a materialization of the very limit between representation and reflexivity, locating a threshold wherein we confront the uncertain relation between the two. Or more, perhaps this shaded “center of indeterminacy”—to use a signature term of Gilles Deleuze’s—creates an initial zone of open-ended possibility not fully structured by the film or by traditional documentary conventions. This opening joins cinematic and audience spaces, and it intimates the “terrible nearness of distant places” of which Enwezor spoke, which requires further exploration. As such, McQueen’s work is part of a growing trend in contemporary art—one that Documenta in part intended to map—that is developing a new model of documentary form, one incredulous about the objective or unmediated representation of some truthful event or experience, even while it refuses to dispense with the recent ethical imperative to pose new relationships of proximity—if troubled and complex—to those typically excluded or marginalized from the global order.7 McQueen’s project shares this imperative with several of his peers, including Zarina Bhimji, Emily Jacir, Amar Kanwar, Walid Raad, and Anri Sala and especially insofar as it links the exposure of (post)colonial experience to a representation that—as we will see—unleashes an uncertain relation to time, uproots any secure material site, and opens onto a multiplicity of meanings.8 And like the alternative documentaries of groups close to McQueen’s London-based context, such as the Sankofa Film and Video group and the Black Audio Film Collective, which focused their cameras on the politics

cultural status to photography: the climb upward requires that truth claims be checked at the foot of the stairs. So the old myth that photographers tell the truth has been replaced by the new myth that they lie” (Debra Risberg, “Imaginary Economies: An Interview with Allan Sekula,” in Allan Sekula, Dismal Science: Photo Works, 1972–1996 [Normal, IL: University Galleries, Illinois State University, 1999], p. 239). The inclusion by Documenta 11 of artists such as James Coleman, Jeff Wall, Walid Raad, and Allan Sekula, among others, who work on the level of the signifier, offered several important and diverse instances of the complication of documentary modes of representation. 7. Enwezor argues: “Postcoloniality, in its demand for full inclusion within the global system and by contesting existing epistemological structures, shatters the narrow focus of Western global optics and fixes its gaze on the wider sphere of the new political, social, and cultural relations that emerged after World War II. The postcolonial today is a world of proximities. It is a world of nearness, not an elsewhere” (Enwezor, “The Black Box,” p. 44). 8. The photo-text-based pieces and videotape installations of Emily Jacir, for instance, are tied to the exposure of Palestinian experience, yet also, intriguingly, exceed the regionalist specificity of their representation in their reception. I examine how their shared structure of dislocation and mobile mode of address open onto an experience of exile in “Desire in Diaspora: Emily Jacir,” Art Journal (Winter 2003), pp. 68–80. 66 OCTOBER

of British race relations during Thatcherite rule without assuming the paradigm of truth and objectivity that has plagued older forms of documentary, it is the uncertainty between the real and the virtual that Western Deep stresses. Yet, what further defines McQueen’s project is not just its participation in the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 ongoing revisionist contestation of documentary realism, but equally its simultaneous examination of the physical conditions of the projected image. Over the last ten or so years, this too has become a prevailing concern for another major formation within contemporary art. Like Pierre Huyghe, Tacita Dean, Matthew Buckingham, and Douglas Gordon—to mention only a few—McQueen works on both sides of the projected image: on its virtual representation and on the actual site of its installation.9 In fact, McQueen’s practice concerns itself precisely with that liminal area between the two spaces, virtual and actual, and draws on the power of the interval between them for critical purpose: to unravel the certainty and oppositionality of each side, and to throw the audience into a place of indeterminacy. In doing so, McQueen underlines the materiality of the film’s installation, which resists the audience’s passive immersion into new forms of technology, as much as it opposes a transparent model of representation, autonomous and ideal. By critically approach- ing representation through mediums that both maintain a degree of reflexivity and create the possibilities for phenomenological interaction, he draws on the force of film and video to unleash new forms of being and belonging in the world, both within and outside the image.

McQueen developed his strategies over the course of several films and videos during the 1990s (the choice of these two different mediums is by no means arbitrary, as we will see). Consider two works in particular, Catch (1997) and Just Above My Head (1996), in which documentary functions begin to fray at the edges. The subject of the nearly two-minute-long, silent video Catch is straightfor- ward. Standing in a nondescript yard, McQueen and his sister toss a video camera back and forth while it is recording. When each sibling catches it, he or she briefly aims it at the other, who poses expressionless, before throwing it back again. The simple device recalls the intersection of performance art and experimental film during the early 1970s, in which simple physical gestures facilitated reflexive inquiries into the status of the documentary medium, as in Helix/Spiral (1973) by Dan Graham. In that work, Graham scripted a banal but complex task: two cam- eramen would film each other, one spiraling around and filming a stationary figure, who would in turn trace the entire surface of his body, from head to toe, with the camera’s viewfinder, all the while filming his counterpart. The piece

9. This was clear at a recent McQueen exhibition at the Fundació Tàpies in Barcelona in January 2004, where the artist installed Western Deep in the depths of the building, reflecting the downward journey suggested in the first few minutes of the film, while the windowless room where the film was projected, which was painted uniformly dark gray, vaguely alluded to the darkness of a mine shaft. The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen 67 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Dan Graham. Helix/Spiral. 1973. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Photo: Jon Abbott, New York.

allowed each participant to oscillate between subject and object, disrupting the opposition between the two. The imagery of each of the two films would be directly grounded in the physical movements of its maker. Just as one camera’s shifting viewpoint would be determined by the contours of the cameraman’s body, the other ﬁlm would owe its formal characteristics to the camera’s mapping of the topography of the land; thus corporeal, territorial, and cinematic perceptions would converge. The resulting “kinetic reverberations” of the handheld cameras would also extend to the viewer’s experience when watching the jittery double projection.10 Similarly, Catch elevates the experiential conditions of the physical use of the camera over and above any illusionistic function that might eclipse the reﬂex- ive signs of its own production. But if for McQueen video production becomes physicalized, so that the result indexes the body that creates it, its representation is also marked by what cannot be shown. This differentiates it from video’s “utopian moment” during the late 1960s and 1970s, when many artists celebrated the new medium’s capacity for self-representation, for its interactive and democratic possibilities that offered a promising alternative to the passive subjection to, and institutional control of, broadcast television.11 In Catch, this negation emerges in the alternation between representation and its failure, a pattern that the video repeatedly enacts. While thrown between catches, the camera records blurred images of the world in rapid motion that are impossible to decipher, footage impossible to “catch.” In these shots, video is thrown toward the boundaries of its capacity to represent. During those moments, in which it spins chaotically in midair and is freed from the holder’s control, the camera captures images that refer less to exterior referents than to its own internal technical incapacity. Even though the indecipherable lights and streaking colors index things in the world, the camera’s inability to record them

10. For Graham’s description of Helix/Sprial, see Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art, ed. Alexander Alberro (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), p. 95. 11. See Martha Rosler, “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment,” in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, ed. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (New York: Aperture, 1990), p. 31: “Artists looked to a new shaping and interventionist self-image . . . seeking yet another route to power for art, in counterpoint— whether discordant or harmonious—to the shaping power of the mass media over Western culture.” 68 OCTOBER

in any legible way reflexively elicits the specificity of video’s technical support by touching on its very limits. While watching the piece, we are able to con- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 template, if briefly, a video image that is anterior to its focused resolution on the exterior visual field; consequently, the modes of perception peculiar to it become visible as it attempts to represent what it can, delivering its own optical processes in place of a transparent image. From the viewer’s point of view, this “reveals the alterity of the filmic image, which takes on a materiality in its independence from subjective consciousness,” as Michael Newman per- ceptively notes.12 This materialization results from the dislodging of signifier from referent, which estranges both, and from the subsequent rupture of the viewer’s identification with the camera’s vision, breaking its naturalization as a form of human perception. At the same time as one encoun- ters the materialization of video’s image as the image of video, there is a simultaneous embodiment of the viewer. With the large-scale projection of the video onto a wall in the gallery, which is typi- cal of McQueen’s installations, Catch produces a physical experience of nau- seous disequilibrium, where the sudden shifts from stasis to jarring movement dislocate one’s sense of stability. The McQueen. Catch. 1997. video’s visual distortions counter the illusionistic basis of conventional forms of the medium, and its emphasis on the physicality of the spectator countervails the disembodied, passive subject of classic cinema’s virtual experience. As Enwezor observes, “By making the conditions under which the projected film image is experienced both visually and bodily, McQueen renders the space of cinema into a zone that is simultaneously haptic and optical. The overwhelming

12. Michael Newman, “McQueen’s Materialism,” in Steve McQueen (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1999), p. 30. The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen 69

physicality and raw immediacy of the encounter between the viewing subject and the films reinforce the haptic/optical scope.”13 Yet this hybrid address is far from isotropic: the viewer’s embodiment—materialized in the act of observing—is realized through a visual dis-identification, a rupture from the image, even if it’s Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 carried out by the image. Not only is the represented subject continually thrown into disarray, the viewer is also dislocated in turn. The nearly ten-minute-long 16mm film Just Above My Head captures an uneventful everyday activity: a single tracking shot shows the artist walking down a street. The location is undefined, for the camera, held by the artist, is positioned at belly level and is directed at the artist’s head and the sky above it for the film’s duration. Once again, the projected image maps directly onto the entirety of the gallery wall, from floor to ceiling, from side to side. The peculiar effect—which continues the estrangement of the camera’s perspective in Catch—is that viewers find themselves peering down at the bottom of the image in order to look up at the artist’s head.14 While this strategy of display monumentalizes the image, which might seem to heighten the viewer’s capacity for immersion through the increase in scale, the result is rather the opposite: the projection, having become context- dependent, calls attention to its architectural frame, and in turn to the viewer’s physical experience in that space. McQueen explains: Projecting the film onto the back wall of the gallery space so that it completely fills it from ceiling to floor, and from side to side, gives it this kind of blanket effect. You are very much involved with what is going on. . . . The whole idea of making it a silent experience is so that when people walk into the space they become very much aware of themselves, of their own breathing. . . . I want to put people into a situation where they’re sensitive to themselves watching the piece.15 Such an operation again recalls the early use of the projected image in the 1960s and 1970s, when artists such as James Coleman, Paul Sharits, and Peter Campus began to project images onto the entirety of the walls of galleries, facilitating a heightened awareness of the physical experience of the space of projection. Visitors would be able to walk freely in the exhibition space, even blocking the projected image, breaking with the traditional cinematic convention of stable theater seating and its immobilized, passive spectators. This sensitivity to the frame, apparent in the installation, also organizes the internal logic of McQueen’s film, which proceeds to engage and play with the liminal area of its representational boundaries. As McQueen walks down the street, his head bobs in and out of the camera’s viewfinder. Thus the film continually points to its out-of-frame area, as if registering

13. Okwui Enwezor, “Haptic Visions,” in Steve McQueen, p. 38. 14. This is also noted by Robert Storr in “Going Places,” in ibid. 15. “Let’s Get Physical: Steve McQueen interviewed by Patricia Bickers,” Art Monthly 202 (December 1996–January 1997). 70 OCTOBER

an inability to fully capture what is outside of itself. Since this movement takes place at the bottom of the image that is thrown onto the wall, the figure’s head is Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 reflected on the nearby floor—in fact, for these installations, McQueen pol- ishes gallery floors to achieve just this doubling effect. As a result, the conflict internal to the film—that of the oscillating capacity to represent the figure as it moves in and out of its frame—parallels the competition between the projected image and its reflection in the exhibition space, each vying for attention. This engagement with the boundaries of representation is emphasized during those shots when the figure falls completely out of the frame, resulting in the momentary failure of illusion, just as surely as during the camera’s flight through the air in Catch. But here, the projected light comes to illuminate the blank presence of the wall, instead of filling its void with a virtual image. The strategy evokes past experiments with Top: McQueen. Just Above My Head. 1996. the projector beam, such as Nam June Bottom: Nam June Paik. Zen for Film. 1964. Paik’s Zen for Film (1964), for which Paik ran clear leader through a projector to produce a film of white light. Like McQueen’s projection, Zen for Film illuminated the material conditions of its site and opened up possibilities for the viewer’s physical participation in the cinematic situation, whether through casting shadows to create spontaneous silhouettes on the screen or by canceling out the light to negate representation altogether. In McQueen’s piece, the estrangement of perception and the tenuousness of representation seem to be related outcomes of a sensitivity to the physical site of the film’s projection, which retracts the film’s ability to present a virtual image, discrete and objective, let alone to achieve an immersive viewing experience. The important advance in McQueen’s work— beyond Paik’s phenomenological-cinematic experiment—is that it relates the visual signifiers of identity—of race and of gender—to the structural conditions of the projection, which enact a perpetual play between presence and absence, and oscillate between belief in the filmic illusion and recognition of the space of exhibition. What marks these works—more than any simple documentation of identity—is the recalci- trance of their representations. McQueen’s complex assemblages involve exhibition The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen 71

spaces, projected images, and viewers’ bodies. They indicate a vast network of institutional structures, representational conditions, and material grounds at the intersection of which we find the production of an identity only graspable as an unstable term. It’s as if identity always falls away from itself, exposed as mere Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 appearance, posed in exteriority to itself, neither grasped by the stereotypical codes of race and gender, nor firmly positioned within historical traditions or cultural matrices (hence the frequent generic quality of subjectivity in the early work). Once brought to light, appearance remains inscrutable, soon to vanish in the gaps between impersonal institutional structures and foreign mediums of representation. This is a key to the logic of McQueen’s practice, and it is one offered by both Catch and Just Above My Head: each in its own way elevates the interval to a structural condition of the work. In his writings on cinema, Deleuze explains how the “interval” is an essential condition of film.16 Instead of locating the essence of film in movement or illusion, Deleuze, like several theorists and practitioners before him, identifies the interval—that is, the gap within and between frames—as a con- stitutive condition of the medium. Located within the frame, the interval is filled when the camera records something in the world and each individual frame of exposed film captures a duration of time. The interval’s logic is similar to that of early auratic photography, when, according to Walter Benjamin, exposure times were long and the photographic plate’s receptive surface became an open window onto an accumulating duration of visual experience.17 With film, the interval multiplies through the succession of frames, offering extended periods of duration. McQueen’s Just Above My Head captures exactly this sense of time by fixing on the drawn-out passage of a single shot of a figure walking down the street; in the film, protracted duration replaces narrative development. The monotonous simplicity of the activity emphasizes the interval as prolonged extension of time, which is furthered by the film’s looped presentation, theoretically pushing it toward infin- ity. The interval between frames, on the other hand, refers to those black bars that divide the filmstrip into discrete images, which are typically suppressed in classic cinema so that the illusion of movement and diegetic continuity most optimally succeed. For Deleuze, the function of the interval has shifted across cinematic history. In earlier periods, it tended to operate as rational connector between images, for example, when subdividing a body’s movement over several frames to record an action. The late-nineteenth-century chronophotography of Muybridge and Marey, while not quite cinema but still proto-filmic, perfectly defines Deleuze’s point: there, photographic frames are linked by a standardized system

16. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). Cinema 2 hereafter cited in the text in parentheses. Of course, Catch is a video, and thus an important complication to this reading, which I address below. 17. This is elaborated in D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 8ff. 72 OCTOBER

of progressive exposures, separated by repeated intervals of an occluded temporality in order to describe (through spatializing) the movement of a body in time. The rational correlation of frames in chronophotography characterizes the subor- dination of time to movement in classic cinema, and Deleuze terms it the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 “movement-image.” However, with the subsequent turn to the “time-image”— roughly concurrent with the growth of independent film from World War II onward, beginning with Italian Neo-Realism and French New Wave cinema (though this is far from a rigid chronology)—shots would increasingly be released from any logical connection and instead become “irrational.” Gaps between frames begin to generate sites of radical ambiguity, producing dreamlike connec- tions between sequences, or shocking and inexplicable interruptions between scenes, familiar in Godard or Resnais. Movement succumbs to temporality, to an open and protean durée, as in Bergson’s understanding of time, which underpins Deleuze’s analysis. This is exemplified in Catch during those moments when the static images of figures are sundered by the thrust of the camera into the air, an action which manifests the irrational interval—the senseless but necessary material spacing between substantive shots. One also witnesses it in the beginning of Western Deep, where the intervals between and within frames merge into one long stretch of dark duration, as if the negative breaks have accumulated to the point where they tip the balance and come to pervade the film’s images, even its entire initial sequence, instead of operating invisibly between them. The larger significance of this uneven transformation from the movement- image to the time-image is that when the interval no longer logically connects before and after, organizing it into narrative continuity and temporal chronology, film unlocks a new sense of time experienced as open-ended possibility, one that escapes from the slavishness of the movement-image, from its sequential actions, from the inexorable progression of plot lines. As Deleuze explains, “Film ceases to be ‘images in a chain . . . an uninterrupted chain of images each one the slave of the next,’ and whose slave we are” (Cinema 2, p. 180). That this is carried out in McQueen’s Catch and Just Above My Head may seem improbable: both pieces are firmly structured in the manner of task-based performances of the 1960s and ’70s. Yet despite the seeming rigidity of their predetermined activities, the repetitiveness of these actions liberates them from the structure of narrative development and from past cinematic conventions. In other words, they advance a seriality that paradoxically unleashes the unexpected and gives rise to a sense of duration that characterizes the time-image. In addition, they bracket the substantial ontological security of the representation itself. By gesturing toward the outside, toward the structuring conditions of the medium, and toward the limitations of the very technology of representation, they desubstantialize and render contingent the interior of their images. The time-image consequently carries the promise of a cinema of liminality and the perpetual generation of virtuality, rather than one closed in on its static identity. It creates what Deleuze calls a cinema based upon “the method of between,” which, by exposing intervals as sites of radical instability, “dispels the cinema The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen 73

of Being = is” (Cinema 2, p. 180). This is explained by the fact that temporality, or what Deleuze—after Blanchot—terms the power of the “Outside,” is invited into the interior of the ﬁlm: “The whole thus merges with what Blanchot calls the force of ‘dispersal of the Outside,’ or ‘the vertigo of spacing’: that void which the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 image must cross over in order to carry on, which is no longer part of the image as a sensory-motor bridge, but is rather the radical calling into question of the image” (Cinema 2, p. 180).18 The image is called into question because it releases a form of becoming, rather than submitting to the enclosure of being. It unfolds according to a temporality of undetermined options, rather than conforming to a restrictive self-same notion of identity, one where “Being = is”—precisely the identity that McQueen’s work places in jeopardy. The time-image thus enacts the liberation from the mechanicity of technology, from the irrevocability of traditional forms of narrative, from the rigidity of chronological understandings of time, and even from the ontology of truth and falsehood—all of which characterizes McQueen’s use of ﬁlm.19

Despite the promise of addressing McQueen’s practice through the optic of Deleuze’s film theory, this approach may also prove limiting in certain ways, for McQueen works across video and film, and he addresses the context of installation. These are factors that should not be overlooked and they are relevant to a broad array of contemporary practitioners. Even when he employs film—whether 16mm or Super-8—as in Just Above My Head or Western Deep, he transfers it to video for projection in galleries and museums, disposing of phenomenological distinctions between the two and corroding the specificity of the original means of production. It is therefore more appropriate to examine the relationship of his work to what has generally been referred to as “the projected image,” a term reaching back

18. As Rodowick explains: “ . . . this outside is the force of time which, incommensurable with space, changes the function of the interval. There is no longer a rational interval assuring continuity in space and succession in time [as in the movement-image]. Rather, the force of time produces a serialism orga- nized by irrational intervals that produce a dissociation rather than an association of images. The interval is no longer filled by a sensorimotor situation; it neither marks the trajectory between an action and a reaction nor bridges two sets through continuity links. Instead, the interval collapses and so becomes ‘irrational’: not a link bridging images, but an interstice between them, an unbridgeable gap whose recurrences give movement as displacements in space marked by false continuity” (p. 143). 19. Recently, there has been a surge of Deleuzian readings of contemporary film and the projected image, to which my own interpretation of McQueen’s work undoubtedly responds. See George Baker, “Reanimations,” October 104 (Spring 2003), pp. 27–70, which finds in the work of James Coleman a realization of Deleuze’s notion of the sharing of forms around incommensurability, thereby opening a new line of contemporary art beyond postmodernism; Jean Fisher’s provocative commentary on McQueen, “Intimations of the Real: On Western Deep and Caribs’ Leap,” in Steve McQueen: Caribs’ Leap/Western Deep (London: Artangel, 2002); Laura Marks, “Deterritorialized Filmmaking: A Deleuzian Politics of Hybrid Cinema,” Screen 35, no. 3 (Autumn 1994); and Rosalind Krauss, “‘ . . . And Then Turn Away?’ An Essay on James Coleman,” October 81 (Summer 1997), pp. 5–33, which theorizes the invention of a new self-differing medium, one that disrupts the concep- tion of an authentic and pure postcolonial identity. 74 OCTOBER

to the late 1960s and early ’70s,20 when artists employed ﬁlm and video to investigate the experiential conditions of the site of exhibition, or to focus on the temporality, materiality, and narrativity of the projection, without essentializing

the medium. This question of terminology is not simply a matter of semantics; the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 use of the term “projected image” becomes increasingly relevant as video has come to displace the technology of film, such that even Structural films from the 1960s and ’70s—which were tied to the investigation of the specificity of film as a medium—are now commonly but paradoxically being transferred to video for public presentation in galleries and museums. And with film’s dissolution into video, the filmic interval is obscured, even erased, for in video, there is no discrete break between frames. Rather, video is constituted by an interlacing of electronic scan lines, whereby contiguous images roll together. (This is perhaps most percep- tually evident in a work like Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho [1993], which projects in video the original Hitchcock Psycho film in its entirety, but slowed to a twenty-four-hour duration. As a result, the continuity of video’s glistening pixels replaces the filmic intervals between frames, which would be visible if the film were viewed at this reduced rate of projection.) Consequently, it is impossible for video artists to exploit the potential of the interval in the same way one could with film (although artists have materialized video’s scan lines as a way to disrupt its spectatorial capture, and to sensitize viewers to its technological mediation, as in Joan Jonas’s Vertical Roll [1972]).21 The dominance of video also abrogates the option of drawing on the interval for its power of liberation—at least according to how Deleuze conceived it—as a repeated negation of the filmic image, offering an immanent space of absence welling up with temporality that opens the possibility of freedom from within the film itself. If the filmic interval was partly defined as a space between frames, a portal to a temporal “outside,” then it is closed by video. Video seals this fissure. There is consequently a demand today for a new site of interruption, which, I believe, McQueen’s work provides. Because McQueen’s Catch, for instance, is a video, it can only approximate something like the filmic interval—that black bar between filmic frames—by rendering the “cut” visual through the act of literally throwing the camera back and forth. During these moments, the interval mutates into a shimmering field of pixels rolling across the screen’s surface; the negative rupture structural to film transforms into a positive image in video. The last few decades have witnessed a paradigm shift in our technologies of representation—from film’s “time-image” to video’s “total flow.” For Fredric

20. See, for example, Projected Art (Finch College Museum of Art, New York, 1966–67), and Projected Images (Walker Art Center, 1974). For broad considerations of this development, see Chrissie Iles, “Between the Still and Moving Image,” in Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964–1977 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2001), pp. 32–69; and the roundtable on “The Projected Image in Contemporary Art,” October 104 (Spring 2003), pp. 71–96. 21. This reading of Vertical Roll is suggested by Rosalind Krauss in “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976), pp. 50–64. The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen 75

Jameson, “total ﬂow” characterizes the medium of video.22 Constituted by a contin- ual visual stream, video assumes an endless quality, perhaps most visibly in its most common manifestation as television, which has become an increasingly colonizing

presence in everyday life. Nevertheless, there is an obvious phenomenological differ- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 ence between film and video. By flattening out film’s depth of field, significantly reducing its resolution, and offering a continuous flow that overwhelms film’s intermittent frame-by-frame progression, video brings about a post-filmic phenomenological arrangement, which includes new modes of spectatorial involvement in its spatiotemporal matrix. Video has become a technology of continuous presence that dislocates historical consciousness and degrades memory, and it offers a spatial ubiquity that erases critical distance from its image. It is because of these factors, according to Jameson, that video is now the dominant medium of our postmodern and globalized condition.23 This new dominance of video provides a challenge to the Deleuzian celebration of film, to which McQueen responds. McQueen first shows the effects of video’s “total flow” in Illuminer (2001), a roughly fifteen-minute-long piece, shown in a continuous loop, in which we witness the surveillance of a dark hotel room flooded with the eerie glow of a television. We watch the scene through a camera placed on top of the TV, its lens trained on a bed. The image immediately recalls the well-known photograph by Felix Gonzalez-Torres of an empty bed with unraveled sheets and two pillows bear- ing ghostly impressions, as if two people were just lying there. That photograph offers a haunting meditation on the tragic disappearances and mournful losses experienced during the AIDS crisis in the early 1990s; placed on numerous bill- boards in New York City, it brought signs of private devastation to public awareness. But McQueen’s video is concerned with other absences, including a 22. Fredric Jameson, “Video: Surrealism Without the Unconscious,” in Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991): Jameson’s use of the term “medium” here is tripartite: it unites artistic mode, specific technology, and social institution. But such a conceptualization is tentative. Posited as a medium even as video resists traditional interpretive temptations due to its structural exclusion of memory and critical distance—how can there be temporal or spatial distance when television is characterized by an insistent presence?—“the thing blocks its own theorization.” 23. Ibid., pp. 71, 91–92.

Left: McQueen. Illuminer. 2001. Right: Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Untitled, New York. 1991. 76 OCTOBER

commemoration of the untimely death of Gonzalez-Torres himself, a model for McQueen of an artist who blended aesthetics and politics into a lyrical and com- mitted vision. When McQueen’s body appears in Illuminer, immobile like the reclined figure in Warhol’s Sleep, it is shown as a shadowy phantasm. It flickers in Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 the oscillating hues and shifting values of the stream of light emitted from the television, cast in shades of silver blue, dark orange, and deep violet. Sometimes it disappears altogether below the threshold of the camera’s vision. McQueen explains that this effect was partly the result of an attempt to bring forth the digital camera’s auto-focus facility, in order to force it “to work overtime” and “fight the blackness to try to make sense of it all.”24 Once again, as in Catch, the video stages the limitations of the camera’s power to represent, and gradually the image releases all legible signs of the visual field before it, as identity slips into precari- ous appearance and then into nothingness. As a screen for the glowing projection, McQueen’s body dematerializes, trans- mogrifying into a fluttering surface. Like a luminescent veil that has shed its weighty bulk, his physicality is dispersed into television’s pixilated assemblage of electronic information, passive and disembodied, a wraith bathed in the light of the spectacle. Watching this corrosion of body by light, the viewer experiences what Bergson termed a reversal of the role of light within western metaphysics, as later glossed by Sartre: “Instead of consciousness being a beam of light illuminating things, it is a luminosity flooding the subject. There is no illuminated matter, but rather, a phosphorescence diffused in every direction that becomes actual only by reflecting off certain surfaces which serve simultaneously as the screen for other luminous zones.”25 In that earlier phase of modernity this may have represented

24. Interview with Steve McQueen by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Angeline Scherf, in Steve McQueen: Speaking in Tongues (Paris: Arc and Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2003), p. 26. 25. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’imagination (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1948); cited in Rodowick, p. 33.

McQueen. Illuminer. 2001. The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen 77

the salutary perceptual connection of a post-Cartesian subject to things in the world. Later still it led to the conceptualization of a dialectical split between the “eye and the gaze” (between one’s experience of being simultaneously subject and object of vision), as in Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of subject formation. It now Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 concerns a visual interpellation defined by the dominating extension of television’s luminous zone—a new kind of generalized “consciousness,” fully programmed and virtualized—to the point where it forms a massive network of control to which viewers can only passively succumb. As we watch the disappearance of McQueen’s body as it vanishes into seemingly total immateriality toward the end of the video (the projection is the only source of light in the dark exhibition room), we soon realize that we too have become a screen for the projection of video. While the projected image from the television dematerializes McQueen’s body, the viewer’s body materializes the projected image. But as we experience our physical existence behind its light, we become the site of the limit of video as well, as it fails ultimately to represent or capture the depth of our own lived bodily experience. Due to this asymmetry between our position, split between body and image, and that of McQueen’s more perfect metamorphosis, we become aware, once again, of what video can’t ultimately represent; for television’s flood of imagery, its “total flow” is interrupted by making the viewer experience his or her own physical existence behind the image, as an absence in its encroaching light. Even though one is dislocated in the process, the work becomes a source of visual power and even enjoyment—like so much of McQueen’s work—precisely because the phenomenological gap between the image and viewer limits video’s capture, providing a sense of exhilarating transportation without our own complete virtualization. What McQueen accomplishes across several works is an intervention into the conditions of projection—whether video or film. This is why the term “projected image” is an appropriate description of his work. Following the gradual obsolescence of film, and proceeding from the erosion of film’s self-differing logic owing to the separation between frames that offered the potential for an intrinsic negation of the medium’s claims to representational plenitude, McQueen’s work effectively pushes the interval so that it materializes between the virtual image and the actual space of its projection. Here, the viewer is posited at the crossing of luminosity and embodiment, virtuality and actuality, image and space. Looking again at Just Above My Head or Catch, we can now read the significance placed on the gap between image and exhibition space. In that interstice generated by the installation, an opening appears. The work edges video into a contested site, pitting its role as virtual image against the physical conditions of the space of its projection. A radical uncertainty emerges—what Deleuze might call the “dispersal of the Outside,” or “the vertigo of spacing”— that limits the effectiveness of illusion, even while functioning within it, offering the viewer traction against the ineluctable suture into video’s disembodied, passive spectatorship. The power of the filmic interval, then, is reintroduced within 78 OCTOBER

the display conditions of video’s projected image. It installs a break in video’s “total flow,” inviting in the Outside. Through it, McQueen’s work affords some distance from the image. This critical purchase is surely gained from McQueen’s look back to that Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 moment in the history of the projected image when artists such as Graham, Peter Campus, Michael Snow, Coleman, Jonas, and others investigated the exhibition space as an arena of perceptual sensitivity to the complex apparatus of video or film. Behind this historical development in the projected image in the early 1970s was the confluence of certain artistic imperatives that had emerged a decade earlier in the context of Minimalism and Post-Minimalism; for it was during this period that sculpture gave way to temporality, just as the projected image became physicalized. Consider Richard Serra’s process-based sculpture, Splashing (1968), for which the artist threw ladles of molten lead into the corner of the Leo Castelli warehouse. The hardened pieces of metal, molded into forms by the angle between wall and floor, became the resulting sculptural object. Yet more than a complete, fin- ished identity, the object was a process, a complex but direct index of its making, and its physical condition registered the duration of its formation—the throwing of the lead, the transition from liquid to solid, the dried splash’s casting in the corner. Emerging out of the Minimalist context, the temporal experience of the sculpture opposed the putative idealism and autonomy of the art object, as well as stressed the viewer’s phenomenological involvement in what Robert Morris famously called the “situation” of Minimalism—that is, the new assignment of aesthetic value to the hybrid artistic assemblage involving viewer, object, and space, which overcame the discrete identity of the lone art work.26 That Serra’s sculpture simultaneously becomes in some way cinematic owes to the fact that his physical gesture—throwing lead across space through the air—is not unlike the beam of light cast by the projector onto the wall or screen. This comparison is not so outlandish (and I am surely not the first to make it) considering Serra’s exploration of sculptural procedures within film, as in the 16mm Hand Catching Lead (1968), in which the camera recorded Serra trying to catch pieces of lead dropped from above by composer Philip Glass. Here, as critics have noted, film becomes physicalized, in that the rectangular lead pieces dropping repetitively through the air mimic the fall of individual frames through the projector’s aperture,27 an action that McQueen takes to another level—specifically that of video—by throwing the camera back and forth in Catch. These simultaneous artistic movements—of film-becoming-sculptural and sculpture-becoming-filmic—would converge in the projected image of the early 1970s, which partly materialized as a complex negotiation of two related developments: performative, process-based Minimalist sculpture and a Structural film

26. For his critique of idealism, see Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). 27. Benjamin Buchloh makes this point in “Process Sculpture and Film in the Work of Richard Serra” (1978). Also see Annette Michelson’s 1979 interview with Serra, “The Films of Richard Serra: An Interview,” in which Serra contests Buchloh’s reading in favor of a medium-speciﬁc approach that keeps ﬁlm and sculpture apart. Both in Richard Serra, ed. Hal Foster (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen 79

attendant to its sculptural qualities. (Of course, this genealogy is more complicated, especially when one factors in the development of Happenings and experimental theater, which made use of film works that emphasized temporality, process, the play with illusion, and the sculptural fact of the set, as in the work of Robert Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Whitman or Jonas.) The precipitation of an “embodied virtuality” in the use of the projected image would be anti-idealist, contingent upon the materiality of the production process and upon the viewer’s own situated, physicalized interaction with the projected image—as in Graham’s performance-based films that transfer a physicalized cinema to the space of exhibition, engaging the gap between multi- ple projections in order to mobilize a radicalized position for the viewer.28 McQueen’s project, then, draws on this history, particularly on the simultaneous emphasis on the tactility of the filmic image and on the sculptural conditions of the cinematic installation, and he puts it to task in his own critical reconsidera- tion of the politics of representation and the formulation of a new documentary film today.

Much of McQueen’s earlier work hints at the autobiographical. It repeatedly focuses on the artist’s body and its gestures, but reveals little else. Any centering of the self is also a decentering, a positioning that is also a dislocation, whether con- signed to the periphery of the image in Just Above My Head, or repetitively obscured by the flying camera in Catch, or immersed in the “total flow” of video in Illuminer. These could be viewed as so many allegories of displacement, for they respond to McQueen’s own history—he grew up in London after his family emi- grated from Grenada, and he now lives and works in Amsterdam. But recourse to such a metaphorical reading, were it to stand alone, would be a reduction and also a misrepresentation, because his work not only references a diasporic identity, but also uproots its subject from rigidified representational systems which secure metaphoricity in the first place. The two in fact come together in the short film Exodus (1992/97), in which McQueen filmed two figures walking through the streets in London. Roughly a minute in length, the entire film—which was again transferred to video—represents a brief street encounter with two black men, apparently immigrants, though we will never know for sure. Ostensibly strangers to the filmmaker, the two figures carry potted palms, their tall fronds fluttering above the crowds in street, even as the two men disappear behind other people. The video offers an image of displacement, which is announced in the title and suggested in so many signifiers of foreignness; it’s also suggested by the fact that

28. My terminology is borrowed from N. Katherine Hayles, “Toward Embodied Virtuality,” in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Hayles posits a “posthuman subject” that is “an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction,” which is not inconsistent with Deleuze’s notion of existence within the unstable circuit between deterritorialization and reterritorialization developed in his cinema books (p. 3). 80 OCTOBER Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

McQueen. Exodus. 1992/1997. the viewer never discovers who the two men are, where they come from, or where they are going when they board a bus that drives off, bringing the film to an end. The sequence, like one of Vito Acconci’s peculiar performances in which he fol- lowed random strangers around on the street, offers an exodus from the referential as surely as it shows figures in exile. Displacement is an effect of the video, not something simply found readymade, and it dislodges viewers from any comfortable knowledge of or relation to the world. This dislocation partly results from the use of a handheld camera, whose movements shake us away from illusionistic clarity. It also places viewers in the position of filmmaker, in that the image becomes an ostensible projection of our own embodied vision rather than an objective account of the world. As in Catch, the two figures are continually removed to an oblique angle in relation to their representation—they are obscured by other people, set in motion, seen in an ephemeral and short passage of time, fragmented and marginalized by the shifting camera. Such effects bear on the identity of those depicted. While the representation of blackness operates as a leitmotif in McQueen’s work—whether the camera focuses on these two men, McQueen himself, or the African miners in Western Deep—its significance is consistently rendered uncertain, such that identity must continually be seen to be constituted by its very resistance to capture, by an exodus that constantly troubles location and frustrates definition. Dislocation also figures in Caribs’ Leap, a second film commissioned by Documenta XI in 2002 and the counterpart to Western Deep, for which McQueen trav- eled back to Grenada to produce a documentary account that intertwines scenes of The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen 81

everyday life with phantasmic images inspired by colonial history. The majority of the film records beach scenes, but these are intermittently and suddenly interrupted by clips of single figures falling through the sky in slow motion, which are placed seemingly without logic or connection to what precedes or follows. The film alludes to the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 grisly history of seventeenth-century French colonialism, when a group of Caribs, having survived the initial assault of the French, were forced back to the northern cliffs of the island, where rather than submit to the invading forces, they jumped to their deaths. The story provides yet another allegory of the resistance to capture, of the sacrifice of the body in the escape from the forces of colonization. In recent screenings, McQueen has projected the different sequences—the scenes of Grenada and those of the falling figures—onto two screens separated by an expanse of exhibition space, as in the show in Barcelona. In this way, an interval is spatialized within the gallery, producing a gap inhabited by the viewer. The result is that the relation between the actual and the imaginary, between the facticity of each image and the possible connection between them, is rendered indeterminate, contingent upon its realization by the viewer. The division of the two fields of imagery enacts the uneasy and disjunctive forking of a present that exists between the banality of contemporary daily life and the haunting residue of the collective memory of the past. This site multiplies

McQueen. Caribs’ Leap. 2002. 82 OCTOBER

potential meanings and relationships between images. It does so by directing the ongoing progression of time to fray into what Deleuze calls a crystal-image, which refracts uncertain circuits between continually evolving pasts and presents, each ever dividing. As the double projections connect in no certain way, we approach Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 “temporality as a state of permanent crisis” (Cinema 2, p. 112). This crisis is the very source of the film’s power. It unleashes a crystallization of time, which—as opposed to an “organic regime” or a “chronic regime”—brings about a de- narrativization, an intensification of sounds and images, a displacement of the real and of the now. The consequent dispersion of potential meanings might be assembled and linked in any number of ways, depending on the viewer. “The fact that sequences do not ‘follow’ each other with any predictability suspends the viewer in uncertainty; this does not mean that they are arbitrary, only that the viewer, not the film itself, must provide the linkages and associations to construct sense,” observes Jean Fisher.29 Yet how, more specifically, does McQueen’s work mediate between the image and its audience? As we’ve seen, his project advances from a Deleuzian disruption of the internal that structures the conventional filmic image to the materialization of a “center of indeterminacy” between exhibition space and projected image. If this migration of the interval was motivated by the historical progression from film to video, which necessitated the development of new strategies of resistance against video’s “total flow” that were realized in the separation of image and audience, then how are the two fields also put into contact, as is also a crucial aspect of McQueen’s project? This question returns us to our initial consideration of Western Deep.

Roughly twenty-five minutes long and shot with a Super-8 camera, later transferred to video, Western Deep begins with the elevator’s descent into darkness. Scenes of mining activities follow, in which figures pass ambiguously through dark subterranean tunnels or drill into rocky walls with heavy machinery, during which the soundtrack alternates between loud drilling noises and utter silence. As in Caribs’ Leap, there is no narrative structure. The film is composed of sequences that stress uncertain relations between cuts. A continually modified series of mutating relationships gradually unfolds. Shots of dark mine shafts are variously intercut with images of water conduits, of figures performing exercise routines, of miners relaxing in a lounge with a television perched in the corner. It is significant that the film offers no authoritative voiceover, which in a traditional documentary would explain such drifting chains, endowing them with narrative significance. Instead, we are presented with a seemingly never-ending unfolding of desultory passages, as if we were wandering about in a labyrinth. This results in an interpretive multiplicity, which is opened up by the film’s proliferation of irrational

29. Fisher, “Intimations of the Real,” p. 120. The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen 83

intervals, where combinations of shots occur in various directions, continually modifying themselves as they form new arrangements. Also as in Caribs’ Leap, this strategy elicits a sense of time that is open and ambiguous, freed from the irrevocability of any necessary progression. It is effects such as these that have warranted Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 comparison of McQueen’s recent films to the cinema vérité of ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch, who in the 1950s and ’60s rejected ethnography’s claims to authority and objectivity and favored letting the camera record the spontaneous gestures of unscripted life.30 “Cinema vérité,” Rouch explained, was really “la vérité du cinema.” For Deleuze, the truth of cinema would represent the truth of becoming: “Thus the cinema can call itself cinéma vérité, all the more because it will have destroyed every model of the true so as to become creator and producer of truth: this will not be a cinema of truth but the truth of cinema” (Cinema 2, p. 151). The liberating outcome of this disruption of truth, really signaling the termina- tion of Enlightenment-based paradigms of truth, is that the audience is activated on an interpretive level, just as the filmed subject is released from its representational capture. This is dramatically enacted in one particularly moving sequence in Western Deep (in which the potential passivity of cinema verité’s camera is over- come by McQueen’s interventionist editing). In this bizarre but deeply mesmerizing scene, which appears toward the end of the film, two rows of miners clad in blue boxer shorts perform a step exercise while monitored by figures in white coats, perhaps scientists or doctors, who walk back and forth among them. The activity is never explained or contextualized, and the scene hovers in ambiguity. The figures alternately step up and down, following the steady rhythm provided by a loud buzzing noise synchronized with blinking red lights. Whatever

30. Fisher makes such a comparison.

McQueen. Western Deep. 2002. 84 OCTOBER

its explanation, the activity forms what Deleuze would call a “movement-image,” which here coordinates physical mechanization and collective regimentation so that bodies conform to the rule of machinelike repetition and standardized temporality.31 Uncanny, the image calls up late-nineteenth-century experiments that Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 integrated the body into the photographic synthesis of movement and time, as in the chronophotographic routines carried out by Marey and Muybridge. The passage also evokes 1970s endurance performances, such as Acconci’s Step Piece (1970), in which the artist tested his physical stamina by stepping up and down on a stool as many times as he could in a single period every day over the course of a month. In such images, the subject submits to a regime of mechanical regulariza- tion, and in the case of chronophotography, the standardized frames fully demonstrate the symmetrical relationship between chronological time and mechanical proto-filmic reproduction. As Jameson observes, “Measurable time becomes a reality on account of the emergence of measurement itself, that is, rationalization and reification in the closely related senses of Weber and Lukacs; clock time presupposes a peculiar spatial machine—it is the time of a machine, or better still, the time of the machine itself.”32 The techniques of Muybridge and Marey would culminate in the deployment of Frederick Taylor’s theories of the scientific management of labor, the goal being to engineer the super-laborer. The worker would function as perfect extension of the machine, the industrialized body rendered ideally efficient through the use of photographic modes of analysis, which is subsequently exposed and parodied by Acconci in his daily exercises.33 Yet rather than simply reveal the scientific management of labor in the postcolonial context, Western Deep brings about something unexpected and remarkable: the ser- ial movements of the miners gradually spin out of control as the buzzer begins to sound irregularly. Due to McQueen’s edits, the sequence breaks free from its rhyth- mic tempo to produce an irregular beat. Shots flash by chaotically, as sound and image become detached from each other. The mechanical progression of the sensory-motor sequence, in other words, is disrupted in favor of unlinked connec- tions between shots and between sound and image. With this development expectations of the continuity of the film falter. As a result of the postproduction intervention of McQueen’s disruptive editing, the series of movements becomes unmoored from chronological time, industrial repetition, and mechanical reproduction. The effect simultaneously extends to the viewer, releasing him or her from the regimentation of spectatorship, from the obedience to the mechanization of the image. A drama of the intensification of randomized sensation ensues, in which a fully spontaneous play of highly saturated colors and screeching sounds are freed from their rigid armature. It ends with a prolonged close-up of the red light,

31. I have since learned from McQueen that the scene depicts an annual medical examination, which subjects miners to an exhausting day-long exercise regimen conducted in punishing heat to determine their health and stamina, and thus their capacity to work. 32. Jameson, “Video: Surrealism Without the Unconscious,” p. 76. 33. On the relation between chronophotography and Taylorism, see Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen 85

which, accompanied by a buzzing noise, both shocks and liberates in that it finally releases image and viewer from the slavish repetitions of routine. The film, in other words, directs disjointed temporality against the constraints of the movement-image, delivering the force of becoming against the bonds of repetition. This is precisely Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 “the radical calling into question of the image,” of which Deleuze earlier spoke: “Film ceases to be ‘images in a chain . . . an uninterrupted chain of images each one the slave of the next.’” In a film about a South African gold mine, this final flash of light, which floods the entire screen blood red for several seconds, is the closest one gets to an image of gold—which is to say, not very close. The absence of gold, replaced by blood, seems an analogue to the film’s focus on the endless monotony of exploita- tive labor conditions in postcolonial Africa, of an ongoing form of slavery, belying the triumphalist pretense of globalization. It serves as an analogue as well for the film’s general resistance to the truth claims of documentary filmmaking regarding the existence of a substantial identity—like gold—behind, or anterior to, the image. An endless deferral of the real in Western Deep overcomes older forms of social documentary or postcolonial representations that tended to rely on claims of authenticity, or on some archaic realm of essential identity, as if it could be res- urrected against globalism’s homogenizing imperialism. These older forms are problematic for several reasons. As D. N. Rodowick notes, in such cases “identity politics falls prey to a schema of reversal that reifies or essentializes the subaltern subject no less than that of the cultural hegemony it is trying to combat.”34 This amounts to what Abigail Solomon-Godeau calls a “double act of subjugation”: “first, in the social world that has produced its victims; and second, in the regime of the image produced within and for the same system that engenders the conditions it then re-presents.”35 Conversely, McQueen’s Western Deep “puts truth in crisis” (Cinema 2, p. 130), which inflects its figuration and determines its mode of address, and the ramifica- tions will offer a further solution to the question posed earlier—how does the film relate—not just distance—image and audience? In terms of figuration, the film highlights an oneiric connection between images, which throws the miners into both a temporality of undetermined openness and a space of possibility. In the dark mine shafts, figures are shown as emergent or residual, cast into a blurring of time that is never reduced to a discrete present and that disperses bodies across luminous zones. Consequently, there is a loss of the discernible distinction between what is real and what is imaginary, due to the film’s favoring a protean sense of becoming over the stasis of being. McQueen’s use of darkness precludes access to anything like a full account of the mining conditions, or an ostensibly truthful depiction of its

34. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, pp. 153–54. 35. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 176. For further critiques of documentary photography, see Martha Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography),” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), and Allan Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” in Dismal Science. 86 OCTOBER

laborers, which might claim to capture a subject in some illusory totality; rather his strategy is to investigate what film and the projected image might offer that could free up representation and disintegrate its incrustations. While darkness may become a metaphor for blackness, it also figures as a racial sign that remains open Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 and flexible, its political import directly owing to its resistance to concretization, as in McQueen’s earlier pieces that we have considered. Still, this is not to say that McQueen denies the actuality of the events or people he depicts—indeed he shows the continued racial basis for the division of labor in post-apartheid South Africa, and he documents the ongoing regimentation of black bodies. That this may express a certain level of contradiction—as a form of reportage that deconstructs its own relation to reality—is precisely the point. The challenge of Western Deep is to create the possibilities for release from the conditions of documentation within its very system of representation. Rather than reifying identity, the film renders depiction inextricable from the endless process of its imaginary description, such that the real and the imaginary continually “chase after each other,” like a dog after its tail.36 Consequently, we witness both depiction and its failure, representation split between documentation of what exists and what is becoming. What abets this fluid circuit is the materialization of the filmic interval in the space between the video projection and its exhibition space, which—as in McQueen’s previous work—becomes a center of uncertainty. On the one hand, audience and film are drawn together in Western Deep. The exaggerated effects tend to create for the viewer a somatic encounter, one defined by intensified colors and streaks of light, by the gorgeous darkness in which so much of the film is cast, and by its powerful and unpredictable soundtrack, which both impacts the body with physical force and allows one to experience one’s own physiological presence before the image. During those moments of silence, the audience can hear itself breathe—a desired effect, as McQueen points out—which not only serves as a reminder of one’s own physical existence, but also establishes a situation in which viewers create their own sounds for a film that they themselves partially realize. This does not mean that Western Deep completely engulfs the viewer within its virtual expanse; far from it. The sudden alternations between sound and silence mean that the audience oscillates between embodiment before the image and inclusion within it. At times the film punc- tures boundaries between the real and the imaginary, between audience space and projected image; at others, it closes in upon itself as representation, maintaining the alterity of its image and the separateness of the viewer. This oscillation recurs dramatically in the frequent shots of miners wearing headlights. In these scenes, fragmented physiques and luminous bodies blur and form complex, shifting interactions, which radiate out in concentric circles or sparkle with flashes of light. Startling images result of figures that resemble constellations of flickering stars streaking through a

36. “The two modes of existence are now combined in a circuit where the real and the imaginary, the actual and the virtual, chase after each other, exchange their roles and become indiscernible. It is here that we may speak the most precisely of crystal-image: the coalescence of an actual image and its virtual image, the indiscernibility of two distinct images” (Cinema 2, p. 127). The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen 87 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

McQueen. Western Deep. 2002. nocturnal sky. They also suggest an allegory of social relations through moments of glowing contact between luminescent entities in a nebulous zone of darkness. In them, identity becomes a multiplicity of representational forms and metaphorical allusions, evoking the fragile sense of being described by Jean-Luc Nancy as “a tracery, a marking—a gleam, an echo, a rhythm.”37 Unable to be fully captured or isolated, being allows only an ephemeral sign, which inevitably resonates with others. It is relational, coextensive with its environment. One effect is that these images throw the audience into the virtual field: it’s as if we find ourselves in the mine shaft, interacting with others, illuminated by their headlamps, sharing in a shimmering community of beings. Yet the same effect also suggests the sudden disruption of this contact: when the lights shine outward from the dark void, blinding out everything else, it’s as if the audience suddenly finds itself gazing at the lights of so many film cameras or projectors pointed at them. As in Illuminer, the projected image reverses direction, as the process of production is revealed and the stark materiality of the film overtakes its metaphoric powers. The striking result—which is perhaps the most amazing aspect of the film’s power, and affords an answer to the seeming paradox between metaphorics and negation, virtuality and embodiment, with which we began—is that a mutual sharing occurs between the two fields—viewer and viewed—each made to approach the other, yet without collapsing together. These visual conditions conceptualize what Nancy calls “the singular-plural-being that ‘we’ are”—where “we” suggests a grouping between forms within the image, and between image and audience made possible through luminous contact.38 This coincidence of singularity and plurality rejects

37. Chantal Pontbriand, “Interview with Jean-Luc Nancy,” Parachute 100 (October–December 2000), p. 23. 38. Ibid. 88 OCTOBER

both extremes of the unifying element in “community,” as well as the atomization of the “individual,” which correlates with the above scene in Western Deep. Its structure, moreover, parallels the cinematic condition of relationality theorized by Deleuze, which develops from what he calls “two dissymetric, non-totalizable Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 sides” to create a larger whole, each affecting the other, but without fusing together (Cinema 2, p. 261).39 While in this passage Deleuze refers to an audiovisual assemblage, it applies equally well to the audience-film relation set up in McQueen’s work. The film mediates this relation through an interval in which proximity is both closeness and distance. Through it, Western Deep allows audience and image to touch, thus engendering an empathic culture between forms of difference that nevertheless maintain their separateness. We—the viewers—are placed in a relationship with an outside world, but not from the safety of an objective position; rather, we approach the other by becoming other. It is precisely through this complex negotiation of self and other, this staging of a compassionate encounter with difference, that McQueen’s Western Deep models new forms of being and belonging in the world. This force of becoming represents the promise of Western Deep and is a sign that, against the cruelty of what it documents, it is a film of hope. This insight allows us to articulate finally the difference between McQueen’s work and past forms of documentary practice within an earlier context of multiculturalism. As Nancy explains, “To speak of ‘multiculturalism’ is to presuppose that there are constituted cultures, closed identities, and that their coexistence is a prob- lem to be resolved. But a culture is an angle of vision or a way of grasping things that only opens up in and through a co-opening with others. It is like a language; a single language is many languages.”40 It is such a “culture”—of transience and fragility— that crystallizes in Western Deep, which pits it, as we have seen, against the fixity of past representational forms. But while the film engenders a “co-opening with others” and a release of the power of becoming into its representations, how can it claim to docu- ment at all? How can it claim to expose real-life conditions or the experience of actual people in the first place? This has led commentators to locate a conspicuous absence within the center of the film, an absence that is hinted at by the darkness in its opening sequence. Fisher argues: “An effective discourse, as McQueen’s work real- izes, is only one through whose invention the people can re-invent themselves in

39. In his reading of the work of James Coleman, George Baker argues provocatively that it engenders a “chiasmatic sharing” of forms around incommensurability, wherein the limit of each is what connects it to the other (“Reanimations,” p. 62). He writes: “ . . . far from the gray imprecision that might be attributed to a general mixing of previously separate forms, the great lesson of Coleman’s art has been to show that there is precision in the space between forms. For it is there that one will ﬁnd both transformation and mutation, both sharing and new relations. There is ‘life’ in the space between forms” (p. 69). As such, Coleman must be added to the important precedents that prepare the ground for McQueen’s practice. My own interest in this sharing and the space of “the between” concerns less this new structuring of the medium as heterogeneous assemblage—which nevertheless occurs, I think, in its own speciﬁc way in McQueen’s work—and more how the force of becoming that is released therein disrupts the security of identity found in representations of subjectivity and constructions of the audience, which differ from earlier forms of documentary conventions. 40. Pontbriand, “Interview with Nancy,” p. 17. The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen 89

turn. In the meantime, as Deleuze says, ‘the people are missing.’”41 The people are missing in Western Deep because they are thrown into contin- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/016228705774889583/1751239/016228705774889583.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 ual transformation. They are never consistently secure enough to be located or identified. I would add that this “loss” applies both to those before and within the image, and that as beings of endless self-invention they will never be found. However, can we conclude that this is the film’s solution to the problems it lays out, one with McQueen. Western Deep. 2002. which we can be satisfied? Can it cele- brate this disruption as its singular success? I think not, at least not simply. Were it so, the film would court the dan- ger of merely aestheticizing those who are impoverished and exploited, overestimating its power as a force of liberation. It is true that, when viewed from the perspective of the global order of contemporary art, Western Deep acts critically upon western representational conventions. As such it is a reflexive film: as much as it draws the postcolonial order into its vision, exposing “the terrible nearness of distant places” of which Enwezor spoke, it directs its introspective gaze at western forms of labor, representational conventions, perceptual habits, modes of subjection and identification. It reveals a western heart of darkness. But while it strives for the release of being from the stasis of documentary identification, it also does not rest content with its success, or with this success alone. At the end of the film, we are left with a lone miner whose tired face appears in an extreme close-up shot through a metal grid. His eyes are shut; he is no doubt exhausted. It is a depressing image, for sure: it suggests that ultimately there is no easy release from these carceral conditions of labor. These miners may just as well be digging their own mass grave. If “the people are missing,” then who is this man? We contemplate him for a seeming eternity, as the camera hovers in a prolonged moment of disconcerted perplexity. We know that upon the screen, his image is already a dematerialized instance of projected light, incomplete, ephemeral, and ultimately unknown. Yet we also realize that the miner whom McQueen recorded is not simply fictional. At this ending point, the film dwells on this man’s face from the other side of a cage, poignantly, as if to ask: what of these miners toiling underground day after day for years on end, while we await a people to come? There is no simple solution here, and I will not to suggest one. Western Deep concludes with an acknowledgment of its own limitation—both to represent and to disrupt. It presents forms of experience, at which, ultimately, it can only gaze from a distance. 41. Fisher, “Intimations of the Real,” p. 124.