Chris Marker suffers from the obsolescence of the CD-ROM format. His autobiographical disc, »Immemory«, is becoming harder to run in today’s technological race, and »Immemory« is a central project in his later work. It is sequentially bracketed by two projects originating at the Wexner Center: »Silent Movie«, his first American museum installation, and the current exhibition, »Staring Back. Silent Movie«, an installation of five stacked video monitors and large-scale movie posters fancifully devised by Marker from his earliest film memories, was occasioned by the centenary of cinema and the Wexner’s unique commissioning program for artists working in film, video and related media. Many of the graphics and stills in »Silent Movie« can be found in »Immemory«, and many of those images can be followed now into »Staring Back«.

The show appears inspired by the odd shape of the museum’s narrow V-shaped gallery, which resembles a book either partly closed or partly open. On the main walls, the sides of the V, we follow an exchange between »I Stare 1«, which the museum staff refer to as the political wall, following a time line of forty years of activism, while the neighboring portraits, entitled »They Stare«, follows a train of memories of the faces Marker has recorded, and which in turn continue to pursue him (variations on the opposing wall arrangement will reappear at future venues, to date Peter Blum Gallery in New York in September-October 07, and the Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich, in summer ‘08). These two extended arrangements open upon two smaller sets of images at the gallery’s vertex. There, »I Stare 2« is composed of a single enlarged contact sheet of portraits of his better known contemporaries: Joris Ivens, Salvador Dali, Emil Zatopek, Fidel Castro and many others. The second grouping is a series called »Beast of…« and is comprised entirely of animal photography. It is a slight shock to see the straight animal photos here, the base referents for so much of his animism’s retellings. Caged and domesticated and ready for re-imagining, the animals in »Staring Back« are the mute, primary sources for global narratives. This would not be a Marker project without these figures, whose film cameos are usually as statuary, legend, myth and cartoon, and so, like the historic events that set Marker’s course in »I Stare 1«, these photos signal the show’s center: origins.

The photos are of a modest size and mounted unframed, arranged in extended sequences with wall texts comprised of Marker’s brief recollections of the times. The aesthetic of display is closest to photography’s mid-century appearance in museums, in such projects as »The Family of Man« or »Minimata«. To this Marker adds music by Moondog, John Cage, Kronos Quartet, Bertolt Brecht and others. The voice of the wall texts, the music and the sequencing of images in a complex narrative of memory and history mean that this work, like so many of his projects, leads us back to perhaps his best known film, »La Jetée«, in which a survivor of World War Three is forced to travel through time in search of a childhood memory of a face.

The entire exhibition and its incarnation as an autobiographical archive began with freezing video frames from footage he shot at protests in Paris, marches against the CPE legislation which would have given employers the right to fire younger workers without cause.

»A few words of explanation. These are not bona fide photographs. They’re stills from my video footage, somewhat manipulated thru the jujucraft of Photoshop and Painter. It’s an experiment I conducted for years, in order to extract meaningful images from the inordinate flow of video and television. I developed the concept of »superliminal«, which is a sort of counterpoint to Subliminal. Instead of one frame lost in the stream of other, different frames, »Superliminal« is one frame lost in the stream of almost IDENTICAL frames, or so it seems, for when you take ‘em one by one, one happens to be THE real photogram, something nobody then has perceived, not even the guy who shot it (me, in most cases). « (April 1st, 2006)

So Marker describes his method of navigating fresh video material, a method which subsequently brought forth the entire photographic archive, and finally the mix of historic negatives from forty years ago, the video frames from last year, and the global reportage of the years in between. Not satisfied that this collection might be confused with a wish to preserve, the photos are restlessly, urgently and blatantly processed for the here-and-now. Like agitating a print in a darkroom’s chemistry, the prints themselves agitate to loosen the constraints of memory and emerge from the archive as events.

Marker’s use of graphics software is a confrontation that challenges both the indexical foundation of photo-theory and the post-modern excesses of fine-art photography, with its cinema-inspired illusions of impossible narratives. His »Superliminal« is the scar that marks history in a half-century of work in writing, photography, film, video, CD-ROM and installation—the scar of friendship, of comrades and of political struggle.

 

 

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