Seeing Double: Eleanor Antin's Roman Allegories

Roman Allegories, an exhibition of photographs by Eleanor Antin. Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York City, February 12–March 12, 2005.

All the ephemeral is only allegory

Goethe

Allegory and allusion are among the most difficult of rhetorical forms, a point not to be lost in viewing Eleanor Antin's recent series of large-scale photographs. The title itself is an allusion: Roman Allegories. Looking at these works, all of them created in Southern California landscapes, one is instantly aware that something is going on, that the rich precision of postures and places, both excessive and overwrought, harbors something hidden, a secret, one which alludes to the virtualities and latencies of photographic representation by, first of all, naming itself as allegorical. Roland Barthes claimed that it is impossible to see a photograph, since we characteristically look at, and for, what it represents.Photography, almost invisible, is subsumed by its referent—a face, a person, or a place, but also a character, a type, a pretense. In Antin's tableaux there is a remarkable stillness to the images, as if they embody, even proclaim, a "perfect moment" of representation. In this respect they are monumental and descriptive, precious and ephemeral, traits they share with both portraiture and pornography. At the same time they are also excessive, another attribute of the allegorical, not only in their ornamentality, but in their figural range as well. But perhaps their most surprising effect is that they bring about an unexpected reflection on the photographic itself.

Photography, tormented by the ghost of painting, bears a secret in every frame. Is The Triumph of Pan a reference to the painting of Signorelli, or Rubens, Snyder, or Poussin?¹ Does it refer to the legend of Pan, who, as the issue of Hermes (and a nymph), is a figure in need of interpretation? Or does Antin refer to the doubled figurality of Baroque painting and allegory (and so also to Benjamin or Deleuze)? An actor in a film (or a photograph), for example, is allegorical to the extent, that he or she is a doubled being, one standing for, and before, another. There is a commensurability, at the level of identification, between the traits of actors and the characters they play; both biography and pretense are mediated to such a degree that they are almost indistinguishable, and the secrecy of the private life of celebrity becomes highly commodified: what is [fill in name] really like?

Photography's conceit, that there is a single, perfect, moment, which, through the intercession of the camera, one might capture,² arrest, or fix, is belied by a phenomenological and technical flaw: the camera, as Walter Benjamin notes,³ does not see, and consequently its "second sight" apprehends an event within a purely technical interval, to which the eye is at best an enabling and external supplement. This is most clear in the current generation of consumer-level digital cameras, where the instantaneity of sight and touch enable an automatic process which introduces a gap—a deferred interval—between perception and recording: push the button, and a few moments later the images is "taken."The perfect, unique, moment is no longer immediate, but mediate, and the enabling eye operates at best as a resolute approximation, and most often as a familiar fiction. The presumption of the intending eye, whether factual or potential, is revealed as inessential to the technology, and, within this recognition, our own investment in the visible is rendered problematic. However, it is in the very moment that the eye returns, reinscribing itself into the interval within which the photographic image is to be apprehended, that the position of the spectator is naturalized within the technical continuum. In its passage from alterity to familiarity, the eye once again takes up residence, within the register of the image, as commensurate with a presumed originary subject-position (e.g., the identification of the eye that initially beheld...