2 | Filming the Artist/Suturing the Spectator ‘The Documentary Field he construction of the solita ry Abstract Expressionist artist in his studio took place in both verbal and visual discourses. In the preceding chapter we viewed both as interwoven systems: photographs and reproductions that appeared with ve bal stagings—statements, captions, reviews, and other commentary that further bound the threads of these images’ cultural meaning. Language, in the form of es- says, interviews, criticism, biography, and even the titles of works of art, impressed the auditor/reader with the artis’s individuality and isolation from claims of the outside world, Photographs portrayed the Abstract Expressionist artist as a lonely, brooding re in a private studio space; in their statements, artists fought cohesive labels and. defended the unintell gibility of their work as explicit rejections of mass public meaning in favor of private symbols. For all their belief in a collective unconscious ora group avant-garde, in the end these artists claimed only to paint for themselves, to “get the rocks” out of their ang shed guts in the safe house of the studio, The work of art took its place within these systems of signification, with the viewer of the Abstract Expressionist canvas constructed as an isolated individual rather than an active member of more complex social and political worlds. We saw in the previous chapter that the very structure of sublimity in these paintings de: manded an individual's response: the individual ego was dissolved and fragmented into an absorptive, oceanic realm of color, or lost in extensive webs of paint, only to be rece nstituted through the process of introjection that makes sublimation the consummate cultural act. As Barnett Newman had said, the viewer of his paintings “relates to me when I made the painting... . giving someone as it did me, the feelin of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality."' Those feel ings, and the close proximity to the canvas that Newman called for, both recapitu: lated the space of the studio for the viewer—a closed place of purely private contem: plation and individuation. dep mum, there is an indexical pointing at a natural wonder, but sublimity is more likely c¢ Abstract Expressionist sublime, like all others, is endent on this individual level of human response and reconstruction. 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JO UORDY au “Huu sy puy asnur uoneuaseidar auTgns aun erat ur play pos v ainmpsuo> [Je s1903-umnastun ‘AyJeuy “pue “SIoLA-ondeD sroqued “staod ‘Soqu9 “SexDUIeD aULL CPAIF cuoperuasasdag ax woyas 01 ‘parerauad Xaput axp st todas 20) :adeFINS AIfeNdtIAAa IsMUU SuIaTSAS asaxpt Jo xopeLPTE wwledge of such admittedly ephemeral practices? afford us the access we seek 10 Do “documentaries,” which I place in scare qu information on what I have termed the performative aspect of the postwar industrial aesthetic? Memory, anecdote, and interview become part of the discourse that pre cedes (and constructs) the documentary record; Il are representations, or at best presentations, of lived experience—clues, not proof. The historian yearns to some- how violate Heisenberg’s principle, to be an invisible, noninvasive witness, to be come a (dispassionate? objective?) voyeur along the lines of historian of science Peter Medawar, who confesses his own desire to record “science through a key hole.”* IL we would know not merely the product, but the production, we must find sources other than the printed document or the painted form. Enter the documentary film, and the reportorial photograph—both promising to breach the closed door of practice and satisty our desires to see without bei seen. As Roland Barthes argues movingly in his last book, these chemical processes that fix light in its passage—reflected from the object, through the “keyhole” of the camera, to our eye and, the plane of the photographic film—these processes seduce us eternally with their testimony of lived moments.’ We come to the filmed image of the artist in his studio for some partial record of artistic production, some glance through the keyhole at the moment where rhetoric, posturing, and discourse become momentarily frozen in the flow of producing the art object. Although the previous chapter analyzed many stil photographs, parsing them for the preexisting codes of representation they forwarded from painting and text (Baudelaire’s descrip tion of Delacroix’s “ivory tower” figures here}, this chapter reads them both more naively and, at the same time (paradoxically) more theoretically. As Barthes empha: sized: “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. . .. the photograph possesses an evidential force, and . .. its testimony bears not on the object but on time."* But against Barthes’s passionate recognition of the noeme of photography, its ly real thing which has essence, that “photographic referent” which is “the mecessa been placed before the lens,” I want to add my analysis of the mode of that referent’s meaning—some sense of the social field which constructs, and is constructed by, the reading of the image.” For in tandem with Barthes's reading (which, more than anything else, makes eloquent our own inchoate faith in the photograph), we must also possess the “ontological agnosticism" of deconstruction, which reminds us: “The photograph is not a magical ‘emanation’ but a material product of a material appara tus set 1o work in specific contexts, by specific forces, for more or less defined pur- poses. It requites, therefore, not an alchemy but a history: The photograph—like all representations—is but a trace, a mark of an erasure where immanent presence must always be denied in the very act of representation make mean the “real” referent always already deferred, its difference repressed 1 ing)’ The documentary film parades its devotion, its filial relationship to reality, and rance—the deferral of mean: yet it necessarily participates in this same process of ing elsewhere, to a prior reality that can never be captured on filn