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Maelstrom
The steady movement of the metal cutting shafts perpetually swallows up photographs, turns them over, inverts them, until the dispersed particles dance like froth on the maelstrom of the shredder. In the wake of this radical analysis, the photographic traces of past events break up and dissolve. The spectacle enacted by Entropia, however, is not only about the destruction of images but also about their transformation, their conversion into another state: new stories develop from the nuclei of photographic materiality.
Andreas Müller-Pohle has devoted himself to a materialistic reflection on media. Again and again he has taken photography by the handle of its methods and procedures, artfully coaxing from it dispositions and sense conditions in which suddenly something becomes discernible which must remain hidden in the regular business of pictorial reproduction: the particularities of the photographic image, both within and beyond its contentions. Müller-Pohle has pushed, stretched, and frustrated these particularities to the limits of the medium, driven by a persistence apparently supported in equal measure by precision of close-range vision and indulgence towards his subject. In the video Entropia he continues this artful media exploration while at the same time mounting a small theater piece on destruction and resurrection, annihilation and redemption – an experiment in media transubstantiation.
Entropia: twelve minutes of news from the borderland between being and non-being. Although at first it makes the impression of being a media-critical pamphlet, offering a scenario for the disposal of pictorial waste, it soon proves to be something entirely different. Resisting light-footed certainty, it settles in the grey areas, the intermundia between the former concern about a biographical or aesthetic significance to photographs and the industrial disposal of image and sense. It takes the materiality of the photographic image seriously, not declaring it to be a merely passive, receiving carrier of a form-giving message but making it a motif of the action – translation of materialities.
Photography is "suspended time"; it forbids us access to a past whose traces are transmitted to us in the image. The "truth of photography," then, attaches to the materiality of the image and should not be sought in its changing attributions. The industrial shredder set to work in Entropia is thus nothing other than a machine that liberates pictorial materiality from the dictates of meaning; an instrument not to impose meaning but to set it free – as transitorium of the sense-economy.
Seen in this way, Entropia could also be taken as an epilogue to the materialistic extravagance of past schemes of photographic perception. 19th-century authors like Oliver Wendell Holmes, following a modern version of Epicureanism, spoke of "membranes" that flow from objects to the eye which could henceforth be permanently captured with the aid of photography. In other words, photography decrees the order of the image in the chaotic diversity of sense impressions: as the permanently captured skin of the photograph. If we follow the simple lexical meaning of "entropy," the industrial shredder in Entropia can then be taken as a probability generator which again suspends this order. The "picture-skins" are freed from their bonds, the photographic traces disintegrate, as it were, back into their materialities and significances – transcendental philosophy in practice.
It is remarkable that the image does not perish in the fire of unleashed sense; rather, it is the materials that begin to perform an iridescent dance in the play of light. What remains is purely the speed at which the material revolves, with no prospect that it will ever reconstitute to form any image other than that of its own free play. In this view one may assume the mere unending idle motion of the huge machinery just as well as the fragments of a radical counterproject for the compulsory legislation of instrumental rationality: the now intelligent materiality holds before our eyes the mirror of a free play of the imagination.
Speed of Revolution
Entropia allows us to see and hear an audiovisual occurrence at 20 per cent of the original speed. The final product is spliced together from camera images and two soundtracks – one reserved for the basso continuo of the machinery, while the other scans the shrill melody of the rending and shattering material – which are here slowed down to the threshold beyond which the impression of movement would dissolve into its own particles. In this image of movement we can just perceive the boundaries of the paralytic shock inflicted on objects and events by the photographic shutter.
This pause on the threshold of paralysis appears like a mirror image of the distress felt by many people on viewing the first photographic images – in place of the dreamy condition of early photographs there is now the floating rhythm of a kinetic fantasy. Again and again the photographs, atomized into scraps, pour forth in slow waves onto the shredder's cutting shafts – point of departure for a nature imagery stealthily creeping into the movements of industrial metabolism.
It is as if the newer medium were carrying out a symbolic reckoning with the older one – in the name of media history's grand illusion, objective truthfulness. For the photographic images in Entropia are exposed or sacrificed to a process similar to the one with which photography long ago took up its task of recording the traces of things. The photographic image, information that bursts from the flow of events and is inscribed onto the sensitive material, is itself particularized by means of the shredder. In Entropia the remains of media sense begin to oscillate; they present themselves in different ways, depending on whether one views them against the foil of photography or that of cinematography.
With Entropia Müller-Pohle explores the border area between photography and cinematography. He has long been investigating this zone from the standpoint of photography. One of these photographic research projects is the Transformance cycle (1979-82), which ultimately presents an image of the chance meeting between the speeds of the motif and the speed of the light pattern, and in so doing points to a gap in the apparatus's operating instructions which ruptures the spatial-chronological flow of events. The new video Entropia approaches from the "other side"; it observes the medium's centrifugal powers on the frontiers of the photographic universe circulating within itself. It is thus not only a description of borderlands but also the rehearsal for a ritual of transition – a rite de passage.
The Ways of Using Photography
As the industrial exploitation of pictures seems to have erased all their differences and individual characteristics, there is a temptation to scour the photographic raw material of the event for possibilities of differentiation. Many of them can be quickly detected, giving the observer initial signs before they disappear: material objects such as wooden frames, glass or metal plates are as easily recognizable as individual motivic elements that are sometimes only indistinctly identifiable.
The various materials behave in quite different ways at their appearance. While the translucent lithographic film, when shredded, dangles from the teeth of the shaft and then detaches itself only to come up again clinging tightly, the metal plate jogs to and fro until it becomes wedged and is pulled under. The large photographic works appear to be gradually devoured, one after the other, in an almost dramatic process. And when a photogram with traces of a human body is subjected to annihilation at an agonizingly slow pace, a memory germinates of an older reading of the body and its pains, of the image's mimetic feature, which has communicated itself to the photogram and now perishes with it. Meanwhile, the swarms of miniature photographs descend upon the shredder in a flurry of image fragments – harbingers of an artificial life environment designed by later media.
The image typology that emerges here and is read into the event has its countable analogy in the actual use of photographic materials which for the production of Entropia were transposed to a state of heightened probability – that is, they were destroyed. The stakes were high, as well as being of surprisingly precise statistical accuracy. By far the largest contingent was made up of so-called snapshots, followed by various forms of commercial photography from photojournalism to the waste products of the printing trade. And against this broad background the exquisite products of photography stand out as art. They are products of a photography which in the video is not only recognizable as mere material, but also – even as a fragment flitting across the screen – discloses an aesthetic concept or an author. Hence this image typology, discernible in the course of the action, could refer to two different things: the structures of the photography market and those of the market for photographs. The circulation of photographic products and services, in which raw materials, through the combination of dead and living work, are transformed into products which then proceed through the channels of distribution to their respective consumers, that is, they are sold, used and consumed until what eventually remains of them is disposed of again – this circulation forms, in a sense, the undeclared prehistory of Entropia. And the constant transformation of form in this economical process also furnishes the prototype of the events shown in the video. For Entropia is also a mise-en-scène of photography's wealth of subject matter as pure, unfulfilled potency.
The valuation law of this economy is juxtaposed with the law of values on the market of special images, those images that lay claim to recognizability in the indifference of utilization processes. They oppose the work of destruction, which in the course of their disposal will thwart all their demands, by laying claim to time: the time of record-ing, time of reproduction, and time of perception. This calculated time corresponds to their value.
The material of the pictures – with its determining characteristics – and the movement of the machinery come together in various connections, and these associations set the pace at which the progress of disposal proceeds. In this process the supposed artistic or commercial importance of the pictures is of interest only insofar as it reveals itself in the robustness, the inertia of the pictorial matter. For the fact that the utilization of pictures follows the statistical average of the photographic market is just another variation played through and disposed of in Entropia. Not only the various special strategies we follow in our dealings with the quantities or qualities of photographic images are under negotiation: that which holds these things together and binds them to one another – their origin in the photographic process – is also at issue. This universal law of photographic sense-economy is redeemed in the disposal of the images, their liberation from "care." In the end one can only say: they were once there as pictures, but no path leads back to them from their detritus.
This approach has its eminently historical truth, though it applies insight into the reticence of photographs to the medium as a whole. For Entropia no longer enquires as to what is suspended in photography, but instead investigates the suspension of photography. In the process, the pattern of motion in its electronic form once again takes charge of photography, as in a ritual act, and opens a realm of remembrance in which pictorial strategies, methods of use, and materials happen one last time – before they merge once and for all into the free play of matter in the immateriality of electronic registry.
Bernd Busch is director of The Forum at Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Art and Exhibition Hall of Germany), Bonn.
© European Photography, 1996
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