Sherman, like some of the best artists working with the medium of photography, reveals to us how the desire to make meaning can often eclipse the truth, and how reality, inconsistent and abrasively random, gets lacquered over with fiction. CF. P56
Meaning—or narrative—isn’t always what we see, or even look for, in images. In 1868, following the International Exposition in Paris, the Italian novelist and essayist Vittorio Imbriani published “La quinta promotrice,” a collection of his observations and theories on contemporary European art. This included his theory of the macchia, which Teju Cole describes as “the total compositional and coloristic effect of an image in the split second before the eye begins to parse it for meaning.” Approaching a painting, one is most likely to see before anything else its arrangement of colors, shapes, shadows, and space, and only afterward begin to understand those colors as flesh or flora, those shapes as human, or as stone. This visual macchia (“stain”) acts, Imbriani says, upon the nerves before the consciousness can interpret it; like anything primal, it readies the human animal before the human being. “Imbriani’s was an argument for the inner life of pictorial effect,” Cole writes, “not so much about the way in which visual organization transcended subject matter but the way in which it preceded subject matter.” This seems to embrace Impressionism down to its most subconscious, emotional level—one’s passions excited prior to understanding, which Edmund Burke described as the sublime.
Cole—a photographer as well as a writer—describes experiencing something similar when he uses Google’s “Search by Image” function to find “visually similar images” to his own work. What he found, he wrote, “told me what I knew but hadn’t articulated about the pictorial idea of my own picture, its rhetoric of red and shadow and scatter. It was like hearing a familiar tune played on unfamiliar instruments, with dramatic changes in the timbre but the pitches staying the same.”
Attempting this same experiment with gifs instead of still images, Google doesn’t return visually similar images but instead images that are contextually similar: gifs or stills from the same films, for example, or the same moments in culture. But that is not to say a macchia of motion does not exist. There are gifs that echo other gifs in their variations of movement, their choreography, as in Tumblr gif sets that assemble tapestries of images. They are synchronous, separate but simultaneously so.
Unlike sets of gifs that recount jokes in multiple frames, the viewer doesn’t read these choreographed gifs sequentially, but opens their eyes to a quilt of motion. The delight here is in the moment before the brain can see each gif individually, before it can understand. Even porn gif sets offer a macchia of flesh that echo the ecstasy, and the anachronisms, of the erotic moment. They reveal the beauty of motion in sex; their emotional stain is one of rhythmic synchronicity, of bodies transcending understanding. Even a captured cumshot—that curtain call of the video clip—is here presented as infinite, a fantasia in which pleasure can flow in perpetuity. Any narrative beyond the body’s becomes inconsequential.
Toward the end of his life, Guibert wrote in his journal that he “dreamt several times, recently, of the existence of a type of photograph that overflows in its restitution of the instant it has captured, a little like the cinema, but rather like a sort of temporal, transparent holograph.”
The gif’s unique macchia of motion is what makes it valuable as a unit of language, especially as used in memes. Moving there in the frame is an array of colors, a pacing of movement, and a unique, repeated choreography; and all of this our nerves register before, first: understanding what’s literally taking place in the image; second: reading the caption that’s been assigned to it; and third: completing the juxtapositional association so we can perceive what the meme is trying to say. In short, our eyes soak up the gif’s stain of motion before we even perceive that someone is trying to communicate with us: the impression precedes language.
Gif-based memes, like all memes, risk entering our everyday usage; read often enough, they become part of our standardized vocabulary of motion. As Britney Summit-Gil observed in her essay “Gif Horse,” there are ancillary technologies cropping up all the time meant to augment the technology of the gif as language: “Sharing a gif now has been streamlined and democratized by the rise of searchable databases like Giphy and by the integration of gifs into phone apps. Finding just the right clumsy puppy or celebrity eye-roll is as easy as finding the right word in the moment, making communicating through gifs commonplace.” Proliferating as they are across multiple platforms of text-based communication, the risk of unique gifs cementing themselves as specific connotations, and one day denotations, increases exponentially. Lauren Michele Jackson, for example, has written about how gif search engines can create clichés of motion, even racial slurs of motion. Discussing the commonplace deployment of “black reaction gifs” by white users, Jackson describes how “these are the kinds of gifs liable to come up with a generic search like ‘funny black kid gif’ or ‘black lady gif.’ For the latter search, Giphy offers several additional suggestions, such as ‘Sassy Black Lady,’ ‘Angry Black Lady,’ and ‘Black Fat Lady’ to assist users in narrowing down their search.” This kind of “digital blackface” is a consequence of a delightful linguistic technology left unexamined and uncriticized—sort of like able-bodied persons continuing to refer to themselves or others as “paralyzed with fear,” as “tone deaf.”
Put another way, digital blackface is what happens when metaphor is cleaved from ethics and from politics, consigned solely to aesthetics.
Of course, a shared vocabulary of motion preceded the widespread use, or even the invention, of the internet. Since the 1950s, communities of gay men have quoted not only the dialogue of camp films, but the motions as well—Anne Baxter’s hand gestures in The Ten Commandments or Bette Davis’s shoulder shrugs in All About Eve (or really, anything from All About Eve). For decades now, covens of young people have quoted, in speech and in gesture, every frame of Monty Python and the Holy Grail or The Rocky Horror Picture Show from memory. What has changed with the internet is our ability to quote motion in writing.
Via gif-based memes, our person-to-person language of motion is gaining a writing system, and with it an increasing tendency toward standardized meanings. Like the photograph, which clips a moment out of time and uses it to say this is how things looked in this moment, the gif has captured how it was that we moved in that moment. It liberates motion itself from time and elevates it to a mythology of movement; and it’s in this technological middle space where we find ourselves, right now, able to write this captured motion but simultaneously experience it as art. It hasn’t yet fossilized, not completely, into language.
In Crowds and Power, Canetti distinguishes the crowd, which is fixed and “centripetal” in its force, from the pack, which is “a unit of action.” Packs, too, have a tendency to shift identities; a pack of hunters becomes a pack of mourners if one of their kind is killed in the hunt. “Some of these transmutations,” he writes, “have been taken out of their wider context and fixed. They have acquired a special significance and become rituals.” This is an attempt to catch or control a transformation, to capture change itself. The gif could be, in Canetti’s vocabulary, a shared ritual belonging to a pack of individuals.
The cliché—or the dead metaphor, or the image we see instead of watch, or the gif we read instead of enjoy—is where art ends. It is, after all, a kind of death—not for the person but for what persons create—and what we see in these corpses is where language begins; and from there it’s the new metaphors, the next images, the future works of art, that we build from these bones.
The technological solution called forth by photography and later mutated into film, television, video, computer animations, succeeded so profoundly that it has become the medium in which we live, but it is only a medium of flickering light and darkness.
—REBECCA SOLNIT, River of Shadows
In his memoirs of his famous father, filmmaker Jean Renoir
recalls, as much as he can, the moment French Impressionism found its way into the world. Auguste Renoir and his peers—Monet, Cézanne, Pissarro, Sisley, Bazille—had taken a few rooms at Marlotte, near the forest of Fontainebleau. It was there, Renoir writes, “that they were, in Monet’s phrase, ‘to ensnare the light, and throw it directly on the canvas’ . . . Behind the facile effects of rays of light shifting down from the foliage they discovered the essence of light itself.” The painter Renoir, his son says, was particular about light, going so far as to refuse to paint by artificial light of any kind. That Impressionism is contemporaneous with the earliest days of photography—and that photography was immediately democratized as a public technology “for all of France”—hints at a nascent consciousness of light.
Upon the plates of the photographers, light falls; upon the canvases of the painters, light moves. If capturing the way light fell or flickered is our technology for carrying these visions around with us and for sharing them with others, the way we read these visions is another, much older technology—our first technology.
According to Google Maps, Mount Ida is a twenty-nine-hour walk from the ruins of Troy. These days, the route hugs country roads that cut through farmland and the occasional village, at least until the foothills, where—satellites show—you see mostly trees, escarpments of pale rock and red dirt, cell towers, lens flares. There’s a turn toward the southern coast of Çanakkale, and then through the resort city of Altinoluk. The approach to Ida is from the southeast, back into the foothills and up to its modest summit—just over a mile above sea level. From there, one can see, in the distance, the hill where the city burned, the beach where the Achaeans camped. I’ve never been there, but I can look any time I wish.
Three thousand years ago, the route was more direct. In one version of the story, Helen makes the journey to beg Paris’s first wife, Oenone, to heal his battle wounds. In another version, it is Paris himself who crosses the plains, only to die on the mountainside. Despite the road signs and farm fences, it’s easy to picture Helen fraught with worry as she hurries through fields of wheat, or Paris bleeding on the peasants’ crops as he crawls toward the woman he abandoned. From this perspective—soaring over Asia Minor or, through the uploaded photos of tourists and travelers, gazing out over the crumbled walls of Troy—one is free to drop in and out of the city without limitation, to travel from the plains of Ilium to Mount Ida with a click. Like other, more ancient surveilling eyes, one can observe without the burden of being. All these years later, one can look at Troy through the same lens as the gods.
There is a moment, as Roberto Calasso puts it, “in which the peculiarly Greek breaks away from the Asian continent . . . That moment is the Greek discovery of an outline, of a new sharpness, a clean, dry daylight. It is the moment when man enters into Zeus, into the clear light of noon.” This, and not so much godly or “of a god,” is perhaps what Homer meant when he called his heroes divine (dîos): “the clarity, the splendor that is always with them and against which they stand out.” This light, for them, is crucial—a spotlight beneath which we see them live out their lives. It is, too, because of that light that darkness is knowable, that the threat of it is visible: “All the more irresistible then must one’s brief spell in the light have appeared,” against which our death looms—“an unparalleled cruelty.”
Fittingly, Zeus (“to shine”) may be the god to whom more words owe their lineage than any other: day, diurnal, divine, daily, diary, deity, diva, providence, journal, journey, dismal, diet, meridian, adjourn, circadian, quotidian, dial, clear, clarity, psychedelic, July, jovial, Tuesday, deus, sky, heaven. He fathered the day and all its variants, by which we see and measure our actions.
Clicking and dragging across the Aegean, tracing Agamemnon’s return to Mycenae, it’s easy to evoke another divine image: God hovering over the face of the waters, before the division of light from darkness. Above the Mycenaean ruins, just north of modern Argos, satellites show the citadel as distinct from the hillside. Here—less remote, and within a country famous for its ruins—there are far more uploaded photographs than at Troy. The great stone lions at the gate, the circles of graves, the view of the rolling hills from which a conquering general who may or may not have called himself Agamemnon surveyed his kingdom just after he’d destroyed another: one Google user has given the archaeological destination three out of five stars.
During the research process for what would become her novel Cassandra, Christa Wolf projected herself into the future. In the early 1980s, traveling across Greece, Crete, and Turkey, she wonders, “What kind of faith will the people of the future (assuming there are people in the future) read out of our stone, steel, and concrete ruins?” If we’re to take history as a reliable measure, the story of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries will, in two or three thousand years, be quite reduced: we built the freeways because we thought they would save us; we lost our great coastal cities out of hubris; we destabilized an entire subcontinent to defend something called freedom. Every ruin has its myth; every war has its Helen. Like memory itself, history is an act of erasure and re-creation, a replacement of the past with an image of the past: a memorial, say, that “honors” those who were slain, or a foundation that “fights homophobia.” This is elemental in Wolf’s work: “There is and there can be no poetics which prevents the living experience of countless perceiving subjects from being killed and buried in art objects.” Art, all too often, is the trophy cut from the corpse of its muse.
Writing for Harper’s in 2014, Rebecca Solnit outlined Cassandra’s modern predicament, lamenting the failure of our collective imaginations to enshrine her as we have Helen, Achilles, Odysseus, Paris, Agamemnon. “Generations of women,” Solnit wrote, “have been told they are delusional, confused, manipulative, malicious, conspiratorial, congenitally dishonest, often all at once. Part of what interests me is the impulse to dismiss and how often it slides into the very incoherence or hysteria of which women are routinely accused.” This suppression or denial of truth—particularly in regard to sexual assault and harassment—would indicate that Cassandra is the perfect character through which we can see, understand, and undermine contemporary misogyny. She offers the potential to narrate misogyny. But being ignored was always her pain. To impress her, Apollo bestowed her the gift of prophecy. However, when she refused sex with the god, he cursed her: she and her prophecies would never be believed. Even in the Oresteia, her voice goes unheard. “I say you will see Agamemnon dead,” she warns Aeschylus’s chorus, now a slave in the Mycenaean court—standing, perhaps, before those same lions tourists have photographed for decades. The chorus only hushes her, making way for Agamemnon’s death—not to mention her own.
In Wolf’s novel, Cassandra is a brilliant, wise, and deductive young woman, far too reasonable to get swept up in so foolish a war. Her so-called madness is her burden of being Troy’s sole moral compass, the only person who questions authority. “A judgment had been passed on me,” she says, “but how could I be guilty when I had done nothing but tell the truth?” It is exactly this truth that makes Wolf’s novel such a sad, chilling portrayal of war—and of rape: no one ever wants the truth, and may openly, even violently, refuse it.
Cassandra warns Priam, her father and her king, not only of the war’s outcome but the effects of war itself: “The first sign of war: We were letting the enemy govern our behavior.” The answer she receives is both unsurprising and crushingly modern: “Priam explained to me that in war everything that would apply in peace was rescinded.” Yet war isn’t even the term the Trojans are permitted to use: “Linguistic relations prescribed that, correctly speaking, it be called a ‘surprise attack.’ For which, strange to say, we were not in the least prepared.” Vocabulary is crucial in Priam’s defense. When Menelaus, Helen’s husband and Agamemnon’s brother, is seated at the head of a banquet table with Priam and Hecuba, the court is forbidden to refer to him with the traditional term, “guest friend.” Instead, behind his back, Menelaus is a �
�spy” or “provocateur,” the “future enemy.” In exchange for hospitality, Priam establishes a “security net”—“a new word,” Cassandra observes. “What do words matter? All of a sudden those of us who persisted in saying ‘guest friend’—including me—found themselves under suspicion.” It isn’t long before the king establishes a citywide surveillance network: “Those who had nothing to hide had no reason to fear the king.” Nevertheless, the story is the same. The Trojans drag the horse inside the city walls. “Blood flowed through our streets,” she recalls, “and the wail Troy uttered dug into my ears; since then I have heard it night and day.” One imagines her warning at Mycenae, after this desperation and trauma, muttered with near indifference, and the knowledge of her own death, looming just after Agamemnon’s, seen with that same indifference. At least then, she knows, it will be over. There will be no more seeing.
Should one elect to surveil for themselves, “Grave Circle A” is just outside the walls of the citadel. It’s here, presumably, where Agamemnon, his wife, Clytemnestra, her lover, Aegisthus, and—why not?—poor Cassandra are rotting in each other’s miserable company, down to the last carbon atom. At least if you forget that the Iliad is only a poem, Cassandra a novel, and the Oresteia a cycle of plays. Even those who’ve never read Homer know the stories, buried deep in our culture, in our language. A Trojan prince absconds with Helen, wife of the Spartan king, and—to defend their honor—the Greeks sail 1,186 ships to the walls of Troy, where for ten years they lay siege. We know what doom is in the large wooden horse, what a poison-tipped arrow means for Achilles’s heel. It is said that Helen is the most beautiful woman on earth, the most beautiful to have ever existed (and thus the most treacherous). To accept this beauty and to know a thing or two about men, it’s not so farfetched for misogynistic generals and kings to wipe out a civilization and call it her fault. But ten years of siege? Over a thousand ships? All this, as Herodotus wrote, for “the sake of a single Lacedaemonian girl”?
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