Images in the making

Art, process, archaeology

Ing-Marie Back Danielsson, Andrew Meirion Jones

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526142863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

This book offers an analysis of archaeological imagery based on new materialist approaches. Reassessing the representational paradigm of archaeological image analysis, it argues for the importance of ontology, redefining images as material processes or events that draw together differing aspects of the world. The book is divided into three sections: 'Emergent images', which focuses on practices of making; 'Images as process', which examines the making and role of images in prehistoric societies; and 'Unfolding images', which focuses on how images change as they are made and circulated. Featuring contributions from archaeologists, Egyptologists, anthropologists and artists, it highlights the multiple role of images in prehistoric and historic societies, while demonstrating that scholars need to recognise their dynamic and changeable character.

1
Introduction

Ing-Marie Back Danielsson and Andrew Meirion Jones

In this introduction we address and challenge long-held assumptions concerning archaeological art and images, and offer new ways to approach and understand them. Specifically, we argue that art and images continuously emerge in processes of making and engagement, both in the past and in the present. As a consequence, art and images are always in motion, multiple and unfolding. Our argument and point of departure throughout this volume contrast vividly to the traditional view of images as representations or symbols, as static entities whose most ‘salient attribute seem to be their ability to carry meaning’ (Creese 2017: 643). We challenge such assumptions by considering the ontology of images in more depth. In doing so we also take seriously anthropologists Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen's (2017: x) recent ‘injunction to keep constitutively open the question of what any given object of … investigation might be and, therefore, how existing concepts and theories have to be modulated in order to “better articulate it”’. What are images, then?

Holbraad and Pedersen's injunction was developed to confront ethnographic data, as a way of critically addressing what the objects of anthropological enquiry might become (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017: x). In a similar fashion, as archaeologists we wish to reconsider what our object of archaeological enquiry might be. We do so from a recognition that traditional (i.e. representational) approaches to imagery are inadequate to the task of understanding the manifold material and visual character of the images excavated and studied by archaeologists, and the images produced in contemporary art practice. Instead we develop approaches that enable us to follow images in their making, their unfolding, their transformation, their multiplicity. How should we understand images, given that they appear to be in constant motion?

Let us start by asking why it is problematic to assume that images are simply vehicles for meaning. One of the underlying assumptions of the tacit view of the image-as-representation is that images are static. This is powerfully evoked in a recent collection of interviews between the American sculptor Richard Serra and the art historian Hal Foster (2018: 77). Serra explains that early on in his career he gave up painting and film as practices, because both practices were constrained by the act of framing. In Serra's words: ‘Framing is always secondary. It leads to image-making’ (Serra and Foster 2018: 77). Images are created by practices of framing; the act of framing captures the image in stasis. Serra eschewed these practices of framing for a sculptural practice that instead emphasised phenomenological experience and movement. We will also pursue the image beyond the frame to consider how we might engage with images otherwise.

One of the signal points we wish to emphasise is that images are multiple; images might be made to be representational, but they do much more than represent. The rich literature on media theory teaches us that images can represent only because an apparatus exists (a frame, a medium, a practice, a technology; Cubitt 2014; Parikka 2012) that holds the image in stasis, allowing it to convey meaning. But images may escape these constraints. This book looks at images in motion and considers how our analysis of images alter (as archaeologists, as anthropologists, as artists) when we consider the image not as a static entity, but in-the-making. In that sense, we agree with Gosden and Malafouris's (2015) plea for a focus on process in archaeological analysis. Our focus on process here is more modest than Gosden and Malafouris's expansive prospectus and we mainly pursue art and images as they emerge in practices of making and engagement in the past, and through practices of analysis in the present.

The Australian artist and theorist Barbara Bolt (2004: 13–14) draws our attention to further problems with the concept of representation. Drawing on Martin Heidegger's argument that the philosophy of Descartes ushered in an epoch of representation, she points out that representation is a consequence of a more pervasive structure she describes as representationalism. That we take representations as vehicles for meaning, as representations of meaning, is possible only because of a set of underlying assumptions that we might call representationalism. If we trust Heidegger's assessment of this, then the framework of representationalism has been with us only since Descartes, writing in the seventeenth century CE. Cogently, Bolt (2004: 14) asks:

what happened before representation? We know people made images and looked at them before Descartes, so how did they apprehend them if not as representations? What did the maker of these images think they were doing? And what of cultures not under the sway of Cartesiansim, for example pre-Socratic or Indigenous Australian cultures?

These are critical questions, particularly when we are considering images produced and engaged with in prehistory, but also for those of us, such as anthropologists and artists, wishing to understand how images may be engaged with in fresh ways in a contemporary setting. Rather than assuming that images are representations, taking an ontologically open approach to the problem, we instead need to demonstrate how images become representations, as there may be a number of different historically or anthropologically relevant ways to approach images.

Images as ongoing processes

Rather than understanding images as outcomes (or representations), we argue that we are better comprehending images as ongoing events or processes. Our cue here comes from the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's (1987: 13) discussion of tracing and mapping. They remark that: ‘The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involved an alleged “competence”’.

We could consider representations as kinds of tracings, in which the formal resemblance between a prototype is rendered with more or less fidelity in another form. This is a reasonable definition of what occurs during image making, but it overlooks the importance of gesture, skill and experimentation. By contrast, if we consider the image as a condition of possibility then images might be better considered as mapping the world. Mapping involves probing forwards, exploring the world, gesturally establishing possible connections, intersections and relationalities. This characterisation resonates with both Jacques Derrida's (1993) and John Berger's (2005) discussion of drawing and mark making. Derrida points out the essentially blind character of the act of drawing. Decisions regarding the outcome of the mark are taken the moment the mark maker encounters the surface on which they draw, and these outcomes are the unforeseeable result of this encounter. John Berger (2005: 3) echoes this point by bluntly stating ‘for the artist drawing is discovery’. He qualifies this by noting that whether one is drawing from life or drawing from memory both acts involve dissecting the object in the mind's eye and putting it together again. He puts it another way: ‘each mark you make on the paper is a stepping stone from which you proceed to the next, until you have crossed your subject as though it were a river’ (Berger 2005: 3).

There are some useful points to draw out of Berger's analysis of the process of drawing. Firstly, drawing is not simply a process of rendering what is in the mind's eye on to the page, there is a constant interplay between eye, hand and drawing materials. Secondly, rather than simply rendering or tracing an object, drawing involves an active process of confirmation and denial in the object itself or in the memory of it (Berger 2005: 3). The process of drawing is then a process of becoming in which the finished drawing resonates more or less closely with the object (see Taussig 2009). We find commonalities here with Erin Manning's (2016: 47 emphasis in original) declaration that art is a way: ‘art as way is not yet about an object, about a form, or a content. It is still on its way’.

This discussion of drawing and mark making offers some useful lessons for our understanding of images. We should be wary of drawing too sharp a distinction between images as representations or tracings, and images as mappings. As Berger's foregoing discussion suggests, representation is enfolded and closely intertwined with processes of mapping; the two modalities cannot easily be divided. Borrowing from the terminology of the digital domain, we prefer to discuss image making as an active process we describe as imaging (or more cumbersomely, as images-in-the-making). Imaging in our definition understands images as conditions of possibility, as a ‘feeling-forth of future potential’ (Manning 2016: 47), of assembling, drawing together or relating components of the world (both cognitive and material), of providing the conditions to make these meaningful relationships visible. Imaging can be thought of as gestural marks produced from ‘the middling of experience felt where futurity ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Figures
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Emergent images
• Part II Images as process
• Part III Unfolding images
• Index