James Coleman. Photograph. 1998–99. Images Courtesy the Artist. Girl Love

James Coleman. Photograph. 1998–99. Images courtesy the artist. Girl Love KAJA SILVERMAN Photograph (l998–99) begins like the story of creation: a “formless void and darkness cover[ing] the face of the deep.”1 Before long, a wind “sweeps over the face of the waters,” and light begins to separate itself from darkness. But the creation with which Photograph begins gives rise to a gray-and-white world, not the Technicolor one we usually associate with the inauguration of time; it is as if color has not yet been conjured forth. On a first screening of the sequence I have just described, we have no idea what kind of a text we are looking at. The opening images resemble one of those Gerhard Richter paintings in which a newspaper photograph has been abstracted to the point of unrecognizability. The subsequent play of light on water does with gray and white what a late Turner painting does with color.2 But these images appear to move, as if they are passing through a film projector. Here, too, we are not on firm ground. The viewer who takes advantage of the freedom James Coleman gives her by turning around to look at the film projector is astonished to see, instead, the usual three slide projectors, one on top of another. If she goes closer to the screen, she is in for an even bigger surprise. The rippling of the water comes to an abrupt halt, and then congeals into the unreadable materiality of a still photograph. The opening images of Photograph are accompanied by the almost liquid sounds of a young girl sighing. After a few moments, she begins to speak. Her language is evocative in its cadence, elisions, and ornateness of an earlier moment in time, but one that is impossible to locate. It sounds like a twentieth-century imitation of a 1. I quote here and in the sentences that follow from Genesis 1: 1–6, in the translation provided by The New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy (New York: Oxford University Press, l994), p. 2. 2. Rosalind Krauss characterizes these images as “blurs” in “First Lines: Introduction to Photograph,” James Coleman (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, l999), pp. 22–23, and Mieke Bal refers to them as “stains,” in “Memory Acts: Performing Subjectivity,” Performance Research 5, no. 3 (London 2000), p. 103. The account of performativity, which is at the heart of Bal’s essay, helps us to theorize the different accounts each of us offers of Photograph’s black-and-white images: Each viewer “‘plays’ the part scripted by the work” in a way that is specific to her (p. 102). OCTOBER 104, Spring 2003, pp. 4–27. © 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 6 OCTOBER nineteenth-century version of a yet more archaic mode of speech.3 “Almost with pain, and bursting from control, and finding first their pathway free, could a rose brave the storm? Such might her emblem be,” the girl says in the opening sequence. At times, she seems to be quoting from a specific text, but it is unclear which. It is also difficult to say where quotation leaves off and invention begins. The meaning of the girl’s words evaporates almost as soon as she articulates them. This permits them to become a vehicle for the expression and conveyance of affect, rather than—as is classically the case with language—an agency for social intercourse and the binding of affect. I say “conveyance” because the words the girl uses are “open,” like unconscious forms of symbolization; each word transmits its full “charge” to the next one. But this kind of speech is like an electrical current: Its charge only registers when it finds an outlet. We provide this outlet; it is at the site of our subjectivity that the girl’s words come into their own. Even if we refuse to be part of the libidinal conveyance system and struggle, instead, to understand what the girl is saying, we are brought back to affect since it is about her state of mind that the girl speaks. As in Background (1991–94), another of Coleman’s “projections,” this state of mind is melancholy. The girl’s melancholy is, however, ringed by ecstasy; it is the sorrow of someone who is encircled by a joy that does not reach her; she is present to a “bright stillness” from which she remains “afar.” Because of the biblical resonances of the opening images, we at first assume that the radiance and joy to which she alludes were once available to her, but have since been taken away. Like the child described by Wordsworth in “Intimations of Immortality,” she came into the world trailing clouds of glory.4 Since then, though, this glory has faded, making the world a dark and narrow place. But it soon becomes evident that Coleman is not mapping the story of the fall onto that of creation. The joy about which the girl speaks at the beginning of Photograph is not one that she has already forfeited, but rather one that she has not yet reached. The melancholy or “woe” that she presently experiences is also not opposed to this joy; it is “beneath” it, or “behind” it. As the girl herself puts it in the opening sequence of this installation, “The dark hours wring forth the hidden might which hath lain . in the silent soul.” Surprisingly, the images that dissolve into photographic grain when we approach the screen regain their watery consistency when we return to our earlier viewing position. How can our textual knowledge evaporate in this way? The answer is that Coleman is as much a phenomenologist as a modernist. Although intensely self-conscious, and determined to work outside conventional photographic 3. Krauss writes that the girl’s language “rings with the tones of verse learned in high school, so that it is both terribly familiar . and depressingly uninhabitable from our vantage as adults” (“First Lines,” p. 14). Bal also notes that the lines she speaks “belong to the treasure-house of language handed down at school,” but nevertheless feels profoundly “addressed” by them (“Memory Acts,” p. 104). 4. The lines in question read: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; / The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, / Had elsewhere its setting, / And cometh from afar: / Not in entire forgetfulness, / And not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home” (“Intimations of Immortality,” lines 59–66, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. Arthur M. Eastman et al. [New York: Norton, l970], p. 580). Girl Love 7 and narrative codes, he is not opposed to what is often called “illusionism.” Indeed, he does not even recognize the category. There is not “being” on one side, and “seeming” on the other. Rather, things are what they seem to be, and this “seeming” shifts over time. The photographic grain of the opening images no more constitutes their truth than the rippling water we see when we first look at them. I am not saying that all forms of perception are equal in Photograph. The installation is—among other things—a kind of bildungsroman of the look; it charts the girl’s journey from a perception that is at war with the colors and shapes of the world to one that embraces them. But this is a voyage from solitariness to love, rather than from fiction to truth. In journeying away from solitariness, the girl could even be said to move away from truth. At the beginning of Photograph, we learn, her look sheds “too clear a light” upon what it sees, one that is “too sorrowfully true.” Although the images in the opening sequence of the installation still appear to be moving when we return to our original viewing position, they no longer look exactly the same. What earlier seemed to be an amorphous mass of shadows and light passing over a body of water now consists of two discrete layers: one showing the waves and play of light, all in perfect focus, and another, intervening between us and the first, which forms a cloudy mist. This cloudy mist is the mark that the girl’s sorrow leaves upon the things she sees. In Freud’s account of melancholy, the shadow of the object falls on the ego.5 In Coleman’s, the formula is reversed; it is the ego that casts its shadow upon the object. This is what it means to be at war with the forms and hues of earthly things. It might seem paradoxical that the girl should equate this darkening effect with “too clear a light.” However, when intensified beyond a certain point, a spotlight does, in fact, tarnish that which it illuminates. Melancholy can be this kind of a spotlight, diminishing beauty, magnifying imperfection.6 The girl herself later characterizes the kind of light she casts on things at the beginning of Photograph as an “unsettled fire.” After her look has been tempered by love, it burns “calmly” and “brightly,” in harmony with what it illuminates. Since it must be clear by now that Photograph is bristling with references to earlier texts, I hope that I will be forgiven if I introduce another biblical analogy— one that further clarifies the work’s visual allegory. Like the child about whom Paul talks in 1 Corinthians 13: 11–13, the girl through whose eyes we look at the outset of this work sees through a glass darkly.

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