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out of bounds across mediums, and out of high modernist discourse. Field not only displaces the field of flowers which it pictured; it also puns on the security of its own reference (it’s a wild field) which in turn threatens its sign function and the value of its real-world reference. “This” is not “that.” Although Field, like One and Three Chairs, supports argument that the seen must be legible to enter human discourse, the pun both highlights and destabilizes the divide between reading and seeing, the authorized and the unauthorized , discursive and the non-discursive, and the visual and verbal. So, unlike looking at One and Three Chairs, while roving the Field something disruptive overflows. Field enjoins more than police work on conventions, more than a change in reception from the seen to the read and from individual to collective; it figures a traffic between them which improperly disfigures or unravels my site in my sight. The piece is funny and I get pleasure from this play which draws me into a closer look. The images on the small prints are fragmentary, indistinct, neither wellfocussed nor well-composed. The photograms on a virtual “field” of paper have life-sized recorded images. They are not reduced in scale, structured in clear planes or focussed around a central point. Some of their backgrounds seem very deep, while shapes that seem close to the surface are knife-edge sharp. They were obtained by scattering bits of light-sensitive paper in a field. Snow’s method recalls how Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, in the early twentieth century, used photograms as a natural process of abstraction and invention, a correlate of Kafka’s mimetic empty gestures. Exposed “naked,” without the mediation of a lens or other directives on how to read, the papers have perhaps looked sideways at the field, chanced just a roving glance. I should honour them as a true report, but what they report arrives badly focussed, ill-composed, and unregulated . How can I verify the photograms’ “truth” about the field, and is the field already the one referred to over there with flowers or that held between the photograms ? Because of the haphazard sampling process and the patchwork of photograms , the originating field of this representation can never be seen as a whole, only as a mosaic which offers no guarantee of continuity in scale or space. Transferred to the plane of representation, each one of a pair of prints decentres the other as original. They question the priority of the field of flowers and photography’s capacity to represent or preserve the original. For me the wild flower field isn’t even a memory, so that the prints are the original idea that I have. The so-called referent or “truth” is demoted to the last to arrive on the scene, if at all. This means that the grid, a sign of objectivity and a will-to-order, is deceptive, a false promise, because it conceals the fact that the “real” field has fallen through the cracks. So, I have to admit that the photograms and flowered field arrived in my sight together with no secure prior referent: let’s say from an improperly mixed parentage. No doubt they endanger my discursive security. 136 FIGURING REDEMPTION Figuring the Field: The Machine, the “Garden,” My Self 137 The large prints, also in positive and negative versions, are an overview of the field taken with a camera. They present a different kind of seeing, the field seen as an abstraction, whole and all at once. A monocular point of view (such as a camera lens), as “argued” in Sighting and Monocular Abyss, forgets or represses the roving, viewing body. The lens has framed, cut out, and reduced in scale the view as a field regulated by the focal planes and centre-edge effects of lens optics, while the developing and printing processes have translated light into a scale of tones and contrasts. I halt my playful movements in front of the correct viewpoint, the centre staked out by the lens, to ascertain what is really going on. The lens identifies my sight with the intentions of the viewing instrument , this site prescribed by the technological rule-giver, and of the artist who chose this viewpoint for himself and foresaw it for me. From there, the truth of the rule shows itself: the photographed scene documents the sampling procedure of the light-sensitive bits of paper in the...

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