Exhibitions
Crossing Marker
Adrian Martin
Where but in the most overlooked corners, and in the briefest moments,
does one expect to find something like the past?
– Alexander Nemerov
An intriguing obituary in the newspaper, titled 'Spook Spoke More Than 50 Languages': it is about a man named George Leoni Chestnut, 'a spy by day and translator of Biblical Greek by night', dead at 89. Beyond his extraordinary career as a translator – compiling Serbian and Afghan dictionaries, rendering children's poetry from Chinese into English and Spanish and producing Biblical texts in Dinka, the language of southern Sudan – Chestnut worked for more than 30 years as a 'civilian director of the analytic section' of America's National Security Agency. The obit notice contains this anecdote:
Although he never discussed his work at the NSA, family members could often determine how things were going in Czechoslovakia or other world hot spots by how many Bach cantatas Chestnut played when he came home at night. A three-sonata night meant a crisis somewhere.
It is unlikely that you or I will ever encounter anything more about George Leoni Chestnut than what is recorded in this story. His life – already so shrouded with secrecy – exists for us only in this flash, this scrap rising up from the ceaseless churning oblivion of news, media, information, biography. Yet will I ever be able to forget this beautifully dramatic-cinematic formula for the intersection of art, life and politics: 'a three-sonata night meant a crisis somewhere'?
All things considered – and government espionage set aside – the fleeting, condensed life story of George Chestnut sets me thinking about Chris Marker. Something that is rarely said about his films, videos and installations is that they each seem to be many works compacted into one, a collage of notes, anecdotes and projects for which 'magic Marker' has managed, miraculously, perhaps by chance or impulsiveness, to draw the provisional connecting line. How often I have watched some TV or cinema doco – 90 minutes or two hours churning over one topic, one place, one person – and thought: Marker could have got that down into a crisp ten-minute vignette in the midst of some unexpected mosaic (or better, constellation). I pondered this, for example, during the Australian documentary about Arthur Stace, the mysterious man who elegantly chalked the word 'Eternity' on every available street surface – a little like the smiling 'Mister Cat' stencilled enigmatically everywhere above Paris rooftops (and in cyberspace), bearing its enigmatic message of playful hope, in The Case Of The Grinning Cat (2004).
There is a democratic sense in Marker's work that everyone deserves to have their story told, even if it is in the condensed form of such a flash. Yet, as he drolly observed in 2003, 'that the unknown writer and the brilliant musician have the right to the same consideration as the corner storekeeper may be too much to ask'. Much has been made, in vexed biographical speculations, of Marker's penchant for secrecy, his playful fake names (which still obscure his authorship of some significant pieces in various media), the near-total absence of photographs of him and so on. Beyond any personal issues, however, this fog is strategic. Marker wishes to place himself at the level of every ordinary, more or less nameless-faceless person, the kind of citizen who may pierce public consciousness for only a brief moment: that is, if someone else (in most cases) bears the responsibility of artfully compressing and transmitting their tale in a lively witty way. Marker's art depends on anonymity – only secondarily his own anonymity, but primarily the anonymity of most of us; precisely that Prufrockian pathos that comes down to us in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, which is the spur and subject of the installation Owls At Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men (2005).
As with the case of George Chestnut, Marker's work has become inextricably reflected, for me, in a colourful little paperback about the history of tabloid journalism, deleted copies of which flooded the secondhand bookstores I haunted in the early 1980s. Gossip Wars: An Expose Of The Scandal Era was self-published by its author, Milt Machlin (died 2004), in 1981. His surprising bio-note has the contours of a Markerian vignette: served in the Pacific theatre during World War II, graduated from Brown University and attended the Sorbonne, studying in the Coeur de Civilisation; editor of Argosy magazine and author of numerous books (fiction and non-fiction) about crime, international politics, the laying of pipes, the Holy Land ... and the history of scandal and rumour-mongering. Gossip Wars, as I recollect it, is a book filled to bursting with ultra-short accounts of briefly memorable individuals – almost a pop-trash equivalent to Michel Foucault's poignant archival project (also very Markerian) called Lives Of Infamous Men (1977), which collects the single fleeting traces, in some bland legal or bureaucratic document, of the dramas of otherwise unremarked-on and unrecorded ordinary lives. In Gossip Wars, there is a story about a workaholic freelancer who, like so many who toiled in this journalistic field, wrote anonymously, with no byline. This particular writer, who filed his gossip scoops furiously, hit upon a novel way of immortalising himself, even if no reader (until Machlin?) ever knew how to read this graffiti-like gesture. He would somehow work in, quite meaninglessly, his own name, in the course of some quoted rhetorical flourish or curse ('I swear on the Bible of ... '). That was his only signature: his name hidden in plain sight as gossipy news.
The poetic charge of Marker's art has a lot to do with what momentarily rises up from the anonymous flux of social information and rumour: a story, a face, a single photographic frame. His profuse creativity of framing and recording deliberately confuses itself (like Orson Welles' in F For Fake, 1974) with the seeming proliferation of 'samples', quotes, found objects from another's hand (as in Remembrance Of Things To Come, 2001) or no one's hand (anonymous art, provenance lost, no signature). This is explicitly the data-bank supporting Owls At Noon: 'objects, images that don't belong, and yet are there. Leaflets, postcards, stamps, graffiti, forgotten photographs, frames stolen from the continuous and senseless flow of TV stuff'. In Marker, this work of collecting, sifting and connecting fragments is a specific work of memory (or 'immemory') and of how remembered time constructs what he calls a 'subjective journey', within and against a more massive, official History. Although Marker takes that textbook timeline seriously too, in his incessant pondering of 'the generation that rose with the great wave of 1917' – this fabulously idealist but 'tragic generation' of, for instance, Soviet director Alexander Medvedkin (to whom Marker devoted several films including his 1993 epic The Last Bolshevik). Marker ponders that generation's difference to his own, which, being 'born on the other side of the black hole', 'cannot ignore the depth of its failure' (as he wrote in a contemporary postscript to his 1959 collection Korean Women) and must obsessively bear the responsibility of bringing the dreams of the socialist and capitalist Utopias, alike, to account. As Ross Gibson once remarked: Marker, now 87, can lay claim (whether he likes it or not) to some 'serious history'.
But let us pause, with a warning, on Time and Memory: this couplet governs a hundred scholarly commentaries on Marker's best-known film works, La Jetee (1962) and Sunless (1983), as well as the interactive archive which bears the title of Immemory (1997). Actually, we may need to restore to these charmed words, too, a bit of Prufrock's classic banality: both time and memory are, in one sense, bland unremarkable phenomena; time flows by, and recall is inevitable, for all of us. Time-and-memory is, in itself, no magic formula for art-making – as a mountain of banal contemporary art attests. But Marker's art reaches for the poetic (even Utopian) moment when time and memory become inventive, when time doubles back or springs forward, layering itself, and when memory creates a living (rather than dead) archive and a collective connection. Hence his fondness for temporal paradox, as in the primal disquieting plot of a child witnessing his own death in La Jetee, or the 'proleptic' prophetic visions recorded by Denise Bellon's photographs of the surrealists in Remembrance Of Things To Come.
What is Marker's 'work of memory'? Again confusing what he himself shoots ('images taken apparently at random') with what he collects ('from every country I visit I return with postcards, newspaper cuttings and posters which I tear off walls'), Marker has described his lifelong creative project of cataloguing images – his 'subjective journey through the Twentieth Century' – as a characteristically modest 'small study of classification of my archive of images'. Warming to his topic, he conjures this: 'I am sure that if I study my documents systematically, I shall find, hidden in that disorder, a secret map, like the map of the treasure in a tale of pirates'.1
Marker writes: 'Any reasonably long memory (like every collection) is more structured than it seems at first sight'.2 On this level, the free associations that structure Marker's work resonate with the artistic practice of Italy''s Gianfranco Baruchello, as traced in his protean projects in many media (drawing, painting, sculpture, filmmaking, farming) and expressed in his remarkable books (written via his interlocutor Henry Martin) How To Imagine and Why Duchamp.3 All of Baruchello's works and reflections take the form of an almost Surrealist juxtaposition – they begin from the question, 'Well, what am I going to do with that?' and proceed to, 'I think I'm just going to put it over there, just put it there and see what happens'. Another obsessive collector of everyday fragments, Baruchello once summed up the purpose of his quest this way:
I surround myself with archives, I've done all sorts of lists and accumulations and boxes and drawers and each of them is really something on the order of a brief in a file cabinet: a brief on the concept of the ass, or the class struggle, feminism, the house, the idea of the omnibus, the techniques of solitary navigation ... and maybe one day I'll make a definitive and final archive, definitive and final of course for me, or an inventory of all the things that clutter up my mind in a way that implies that each of these things is a complement of all the others, and that what they're looking for is the secret of what all of them can mean together.4
This is something like the years it takes for a psychoanalytic free association to eventually form some pattern, reveal some logic. Until that moment, one must pursue, armed with all the remembered and collected fragments at one's disposal, the poetic art of setting side by side, the building of fragile bridges, the forming of striking shapes.
Let us return to the category of anonymous art and the project of time as rendered by another great photographic artist, Walker Evans. In her superb Walker Evans: A Biography, Belinda Rathbone emphasises the significance of all the anonymous art forms that Evans assiduously collected and cultivated: everything from unsigned letters and tourist postcards to cigar-box art and freight-car emblems.5 This practice often took precedence over the artist's conventionally 'creative' output, which was relatively slim in terms of books and exhibitions. Evans, in a sense, ended exactly where Marker began: with the art of graphic editing, laying out pictures and text in juxtaposition, at Fortune magazine in Evans' case, at the publishing house Seuil in Marker's. But don't contemporary digital computer-based multimedia art projects (Marker's included), with their sampling and treating, simply provide an update on such revolutionary design projects of the 20th Century?
Evans, like Marker, developed a specific attitude towards time, memory and history. While contemptuous of nostalgia (the kind that gushes over, as George Alexander once memorably put it, 'the price of milk 50 years ago'), he nonetheless sought to freeze, through obsessive and stately image-documentation, a certain period, a certain sensibility, which he felt to be imperiled, on the verge of passing away ('Before They Disappear' was the title of one of his magazine features). In fact, when Evans framed the scenes of his present day through the camera lens, he wanted to fix them with what he regarded as the gaze of the future; that is, how subsequent generations would see, remember and value that era. Another kind of remembrance of things to come, another ghostly uncanny layering. This is the kind of cultural work today's students associate more readily with Walter Benjamin and his Arcades Project of the 1930s. Benjamin, Evans and Marker are alike in their attachment to 'their time' – which happens, as for most of us, to be the time of youth – as well as in their conviction that the lesson of this time is about to pass into oblivion, and that its essence can best be caught by netting the tiniest and seemingly most banal traces of the period's ephemeral manufactured culture, its matchboxes and beer coasters and pub flyers.
Actually, let us add a fourth name, another very Markerian figure, to this spontaneous list: experimental animator and wild musicologist Harry Smith. As a heartbreaking documentary records, Smith suffered the agony of having his vast uncatalogued ephemera collection taken to the tip by a disgruntled landlord, yet also lived long enough (as he said on stage at the Grammys) to see his famous recordings of eccentric American folk music 'change the world'. That, too, is the Utopian dream that gives Marker's work its finest, most lyrical and moving flights of fancy: when a scrap of poetry or whimsy, a 'cat listening to music' (the title of a short video) or sudden delightful or surprising conjunction of images and sounds, seems to change the world...
A final association. It seems like a joke, but it's not: Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, two old pals of the pre-Nouvelle-Vague, Left Bank group of filmmakers, are today great fans of certain very slick American TV shows. Where Resnais' taste runs to Millennium and The X-Files, Marker goes for the likes of The Practice, Deadwood, Firefly and The Wire. The maker of La Jetee and Level Five (1997) sets us straight in a 2003 Liberation interview he translated and updated for the 2006 Criterion DVD release of La Jetee/Sunless:
I feed my hunger for fiction with what is by far the most accomplished source: those great American TV series ... There is a knowledge in them, a sense of story and economy, of ellipsis, a science of framing and of cutting, a dramaturgy, and an acting style that has no equal anywhere, and certainly not in Hollywood.
Two men in their 80s, watching their favourite series on DVD sets and computer monitors, apart, in their homes, just as once they watched certain Hollywood musicals (An American In Paris, 1951, is remembered) together in London, during their collaboration on Statues Also Die (1952). In Resnais' lovely 1956 essay-doco about the Bibliotheque Nationale, All The Memory Of The World (which contains the immortal credit to 'Chris and Magic Marker', no doubt for the use of his 'Small Planet' travel guide to Mars!), there is a moment which is pure musical, pure Kelly/Donen/Clair/Lubitsch: three workmen deliver the day's journals to the library, marching in synchronised steps ... But what is there in these modern American fictions of gruesome death and forensic detection, alien invasion and paranoid conspiracy, that attracts our two Eternal Modernists?
The current program that always makes me flash onto Marker (I don't know whether he has yet seen it, or sampled it) is Crossing Jordan, which concerns the investigative work of coroners in a city morgue. Like many shows of its ilk – about profilers, vice cops, psychic detectives – Crossing Jordan often builds to grand 'dramatic re-creations' of crime or murder scenes that are more like visionary projections: our inquiring heroes suddenly walk around inside images of the imagined past, sometimes magically animating still photos, computer schematics or police sketches in order to do so. This is interesting enough already as a cultural phantasm, but Crossing Jordan, in particular, brings this taste for revivification, this remembrance of things past or 'time re-edited' (as The Case Of The Grinning Cat puts it) to an especially urgent and poignant point. So many of its plotlines, large or small, are precisely about reconstructing, in a flash, the life-stories of largely anonymous people: children, the homeless, loners, ordinary folks either below the radar or entirely off the map of society's record of itself. And the flash that matters most, the pivotal moment for Crossing Jordan, is the exact moment of death: how someone fell, was hit or shot, how long their corpse has been left to decompose, and what history can be read once the body is scanned for its surface marks and then opened up to its archaeological and geological levels of trace-experiences.
Is this so far from Marker's own poetic-political project, to 'bring into the light events and people who normally never access it'?
1. 'Chris Marker On Immemory' (1998) Nora M. Alter Chris Marker University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2006, p150.
2. Ibid
3. Documentext/McPherson and Company, New York, 1983 and 1985.
4. Why Duchamp op cit, p38.
5. Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1995.