Post-postmodernism and the archive: uncertain identities and "forgotten" legacies.

THE DISCOVERY

Early in 2005, a dramatic discovery was made in the attic and basement of a home in Southern California. It was the complete archive of a photographer apparently active in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. A battery of prints, negatives, logs, and equipment constituted this surprising discovery and revealed a previously unknown chapter of photographic history.

The findings were contained in numerous trunks and crates containing crumbling platinum prints and well-preserved glass negatives along with volumes of logs and journals detailing the journeys and activities of one Timothy Eugene O'Tower. From these notes it is known that O'Tower explored the West in the era of Manifest Destiny's westward expansion. The archive was transferred to Terry Towery, a distant relation of O'Tower's, who is a professor of photography at Lehman College of the City University of New York and Parsons School of Design in New York City. Towery, who teaches History of Photography as well as other courses, says that one of the most startling aspects of the discovery was the familiarity of so many of the images. In reviewing the archive, one notes images that scream photo history from images that are similar (to the extent of almost exact framing) to seminal images from the 1860s and '70s by Mathew Brady, William Henry Jackson, Timothy O'Sullivan, and the like. Many were labeled with locations but very few with dates, leaving chronological identification to the text of the logs and more often to conjecture.

O'TOWER'S STORY

The following biography is excerpted from a catalog produced by Towery and Peer Gallery where the first exhibition of O'Tower's work was held in the Fall of 2006:

Timothy Eugene O'Tower (1829-1900) grew up in the shadow of the Tower

of Eire. At ten years of age he was apprenticed to a gentleman scholar

interested in optics and chemistry as well as philosophy and

aesthetics. In his youthful apprenticeship, he spent his days making

lenses and mixing chemicals and his evenings discussing philosophy and

aesthetics with his master. In 1841, he attended to his master at

Henry Fox Talbot's presentation to the Royal Society on The Pencil of

Nature.

Although much of his history is lost, it is known that he explored the

American West and Far East at approximately the same time as those

photographers in "the Canon," but his imagery went mysteriously

undiscovered until now. In the early 1860s, he fled Ireland after

shooting his wife for allegedly having a torrid adulterous affair. He

went eastward in 1865 and simultaneously discovered photography as his

chosen career path.

After making an undetermined number of images in the East he made his

way to America and continued in the tradition of the American

exploration photographers. His close friends included both Edweard

Muybrige and Timothy O'Sullivan. While Mathew Brady was away on one of

his many extended journeys, Timothy Eugene had an affair with Mathew

Brady's wife. Because of the affair, Brady refused to include O'Tower

in the official exploration group. Unbeknownst to Brady, O'Sullivan

hired O'Tower as an assistant for his expertise in both technical and

aesthetic matters. In this manner he traveled with O'Sullivan and

Muybridge, thus revealing the frequent similarity in imagery.

News items and his death certificate reveal little about his demise.

O'Tower's body was found both stabbed and shot. Never claimed by

friend or family, he was buried anonymously in a public cemetery and

he effectively disappeared from history. (1)

THE FICTION

O'Tower never existed. He is an identity and fiction created by the photographer Terry Towery as a vehicle for presenting a body of work that engages questions of authenticity, authorship, originality, the contemporary sublime, and the postmodern obsession with the simulacra of the past.

Culling images from the history of American landscape photography, Towery set out to reconstruct these iconic views of America's self-representational legacy. The "sets" are handcrafted from modeling materials with each sublime view no larger than a tabletop. The photographs were made in a studio using a large format 4x5 inch camera, a system that to this day is not dissimilar from early photographic methods. The photographs were then printed as platinotypes, a process that was quite popular in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and pressed further the appearance of historical "authenticity" in the work. O'Tower and his invented biography were the final step in the project that provided a framework through which the project could be presented.

Towery is a photographer for whom antiquarian picture-making practices and "alternative" (read historical) printing techniques have routinely been part of his artistic practice. Having studied at the University of Florida in the late 1980s under Jerry Uelsmann, who is best known for his masterful multi-negative darkroom composites that explode the notion of photography's mimetic function, it is perhaps not surprising that Towery is engaged in questions around what Barthes recognized as the "evidential force" of the photographic document. Towery writes:

From the inception of photography, "truth" has been suspect. However

photography has a veracity that is, even today, undeniable. Most

people still believe that if it is a photograph it must be true. The

inherent believability of the photographic medium lends truth to an

artificial realm. We are left with an unfamiliar tension between truth

and fiction. Using the veracity of photography, I create worlds where,

at first glance, everything appears as it should. It isn't until

further probing that we realize that our sense of scale is unnerved

and we are left to figure out what is real and what is created. (2)

Towery is intrigued by "the postmodern idea that there is no such thing as originality" (3) and locates the O'Tower project in a long line of similar "unoriginal" photographic explorations such as those of Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and the Rephotographic Survey, who all create work that challenges the modernist "ideology of progress and originality." (4)

THE FICTIONAL IMPULSE

The fictional artist is not a new invention. From noms de plume, alter egos, and public personae (think of Marcel Duchamp's Rose Selavy) to such contemporary fakes as John Dogg, Reena Spaulings, The Atlas Group, and Otabenga Jones & Associates, the creative identity has always lent itself to a fair amount of ambiguity. Of late, this denial of authorship and veiling of artists' identity seems to have gained momentum, with three of the above mentioned "artists" and groups having been featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, an event generally regarded for setting or ushering in contemporary creative zeitgeist. Holland Cotter of the New York Times has written that these kind of identity projects are often utilized to raise critical questions "about art and the often unquestioned ideas surrounding it, like originality, authenticity, influence, history, formal value and biography-as-value." (5) Most of these art fakes include entire franchises of artwork, biography, writings, and other "evidences" that manufacture a post-identity, post-structuralist critique of the current art market and creative practice at large.

For further consideration of the fictionalizing impulse, I would like to introduce two additional projects that are founded on invented artist figures. One of these was engineered by an art gallery, the other by star filmmakers, suggesting that Cotter's questioning of oft-unquestioned ideas is relevant throughout the contemporary creative industrial complex.

THE FORGOTTEN MINIMALIST

Triple Candie, an alternative art space located in Harlem, New York City, recently mounted a retrospective of the work of Lester Hayes, a long-forgotten but influential, fictional artist who was active between 1962 and 1975.

According to the biography provided by Triple Candie, Hayes was born in Philadelphia in 1936 to an African American father and an Italian American mother. He studied chemical engineering in college but, after reading an anthology of Dada painters and poets, began making art in the vein of conceptual assemblage.

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Hayes moved to New York City in 1962 to pursue his new career. He worked as Richard Tuttle's first studio assistant, ran with the Castelli circle, and had his first solo show at Richard Feigen Gallery in 1967. The show was a bust and Hayes sank into depressive anonymity as a professor in various universities. He continued to make art but, after retiring to North Carolina in 1984, his accumulated works were destroyed in a house fire. He died of complications from diabetes in 2004.

The exhibition consisted of thirteen "replicas" of Hayes work, reconstructed from his notes and journals. All of the pieces were actually cobbled together from scrap material by volunteers and Triple Candie founders, Shellie Bancroft and Peter Nesbett. The work is decidedly critical, political, and racially charged with witty pieces like Beyond the Pail (1973), a floor assemblage incorporating a bucket, and a mural-size work made of unpainted, unstretched canvases titled Elegy in Seven Parts (for Lena Home) (1965).

Gallery press material notes that much of his work predates similar pieces by more recognizable artists like Tuttle and Bruce Nauman. As with O'Tower, the mythology includes Hayes being hugely influential, but mysteriously unmentioned in the canonical list of innovators.

THE FORGOTTEN FILMMAKER

Forgotten Silver, a 1995 documentary by New Zealand filmmakers Peter Jackson and Costa Botes, opens with Jackson speaking to the camera amid the grassy and green foliage of the yard of "Auntie Hannah," a woman he has known all his life. Hannah McKenzie is a widow, her husband having died long ago in the Spanish Civil War, and she contacts the long-time neighbor boy-cum-star filmmaker to see if he would be interested in some old films stored in the shed at the bottom of her garden. Jackson leads us down the garden path, retracing the steps toward this extraordinary discovery of the films and life of "a man who is now going to join the ranks of the great film pioneers. A guy called Colin McKenzie."

The film purports to tell the story of this unknown genius through archival images and footage from his lost films. Among the "treasure trove" of discovery is evidence that McKenzie was truly a revolutionary. Born in 1888, he discovered film at the turn of the century and, as an enterprising adolescent, began his lifelong obsession with the medium. According to the documentary, McKenzie was decades ahead of his time, developing the first mechanized film camera, a steam powered projection unit, a color emulsion made from an obscure Tahitian berry, and even the world's first talkie (Warrior Season, 1908, 84 minutes).

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In the hour-long documentary we learn that McKenzie was shunned by his father; lost his beloved brother in the first World War; was jailed for pedaling smut when his first color experiments accidentally captured topless Tahitian beauties; went bankrupt three times in the course of pursuing his unfinished, biblical epic Salome; lost his first wife and baby in childbirth; was pursued by communists and Sicilian gangsters who all claimed the rights to the unfinished film; and finally was killed on the Moroccan front while working as an editorial journalist in the Spanish Civil War. In the most Sisyphean manner, for every innovation McKenzie is cosmically punished, leading to his obscurity.

Of course McKenzie, like O'Tower and Hayes, is a figment, a construct. The documentary was screened on the evening of October 29, 1995, on TV New Zealand with no obvious indication as to its fictional nature. Though the presentation was laced with clues, including the fact that the programming slot in which it was screened was reserved for dramatic works, no one caught on and the nation acquired a new national hero. The next morning, when the fiction was revealed in the national press, the public reacted immediately, deriding the production as a mere hoax and the filmmakers as mean-spirited hacks.

FORGED IDENTITIES AND CULTURAL REMEMBERING

In an interview in Forgotten Silver, the film historian Leonard Maltin says, "Here we have this unknown genius who died in obscurity and now belongs in the pantheon of great cinema artists and innovators." Replace "cinema artists and innovators" with "American exploration photographers" or "post-Minimalist heroes" and Maltin could be referring to any of these three fictive artists.

Each of the three projects centers on a fiction that speaks to and perpetuates a sort of heroic mythology that has specific significance to an intended audience. In their essay "Forgotten Silver: A New Zealand Television Hoax and Its Audience," Craig Hight and Jane Roscoe suggest that "a crucial part of the effectiveness of the program for New Zealand audiences was based on the subtlety and variety of ways in which its filmmakers exploited cultural stereotypes and accepted notions concerning the nature of New Zealand history and society ... [McKenzie] is one of the legendary backyard inventors at the heart of New Zealand's mythic development." (6) In the same way, O'Tower came to North America and found a new life as a heroic individualist braving the frontier and capturing the sublime beauty of nature while Hayes broke down racial and conceptual barriers at a key moment in the development of contemporary art.

Roscoe and Hight point out that "In New Zealand popular culture, the native bush and its associated landscape plays something of a similar function to the Western frontier in American folklore." (7) The connection here to the O'Tower fiction is obvious and, in the case of Hayes, one might make the case that the 1960s were the temporal "frontier" of contemporary art, lending him a similar role in the establishment of new areas of exploration. These pioneering tales have the function of modern social creation myths that identify archetypal identities and access collective fantasies of the past.

The Atlas Group, a fictional foundation created and perpetuated by artist Walid Raad, has created a similar narrative and system of belief with regard to the contemporary history of Lebanon. In excerpted interviews, Raad (as The Atlas Group) has stated that the intention of the project has never been to see "what we can 'get away with,"' but rather to explore how "cultural fantasies erected from the material of collective memories" can capture attention and belief. (8) What is key here is that the fictional aspects of the Atlas project are not the result of arbitrary invention, but rather play into and engage the belief of a specific audience, engendering a metacritique of the general nature of history and belief. O'Tower, Hayes, and McKenzie function in much the same manner.

THE ARCHIVE AS A SITE OF HISTORICITY

In tandem with the establishment of these recognizable (believable) archetypes is the centrality of the "archive" in the perpetuation of the belief and value systems of these projects. It may be helpful to consider first what is meant by "the archive." By definition, an archive is simply a repository or collection containing records, documents, or other materials of historical interest. But there is a more connotative value, one that postmodern media and culture studies espouses in the consideration of archival discourse and cultural memory. In the introduction to The Archive, a collection of key writings on the archive in visual culture, editor Charles Merewether opens with the statement that "One of the defining characteristics of the modern era has been the increasing significance given to the archive as the means by which historical knowledge and forms of remembrance are accumulated, stored and recovered." (9) To this end, according to German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst, "the 'archive' has become one of the most popular metaphors for all kinds of memory." (10)

Ernst explains that "the (hidden) power of the archive relies on its materialities ... and its symbolic operations, resulting in a non-organic body of evidence." (11) This is to say that the potency of the archive is in its capacity as an objective site of primary knowledge sources and thereby unbiased memory. Ernst justifies the assumed veracity of the archive by its non-humanness, an argument that parallels early discussion of the objectivity of the camera.

In each of these projects the fictional identity is grounded in the "discovery" of an archive. What's more, the creative object is the archive itself. Towery meticulously crafted O'Tower's photographs, Nesbett and Bancroft constructed and installed Hayes's "lost" pieces, and Jackson and Botes shot and distressed countless reels of film for McKenzie's history-changing opus.

In a posting about the Hayes project, art blogger Edward Winkleman asks "whether or not it's important to actually go see [the Lester Hayes] exhibition ... it's clearly important that [Triple Candie] installed an exhibition and that the context provides the opportunity for some viewers, at least, to assume the work is legit, but once you realize what's going on, can't you debate the questions it raises from the comfort of a bar or via the Internets [sic], without having to see the 'fake' work?" (12) With the blogosphere being all about call and response, one reader immediately posted the following comment: "The fact that the team gave these 'works' a bricks and mortar reality (even if one never sees the show), gives the whole shtick a kind of legitimacy and rigor. The conceptual idea here doesn't require viewing the exhibit, but the show does need to actually exist. It's really like a lot of conceptual work; do you really need to see Spiral Jetty to get it?" (13) No, but the knowledge that it existed as an actual physical articulation of the conceptual premise is essential in its reception and longevity as a seminal work.

As a framework for such fictions, the archive is similar in its (problematic) association with unsubjective truth to photography, as well as documentary film and biography. As such, the archive provides the ultimate selling point of the narratives. In these projects, an archival discourse is galvanized by the creation and existence of the purported source material. The archive functions as what Alexandra Juhasz, co-editor of F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth's Undoing (2006), terms "technologies of truth-telling" (14) and presents the essential "brush with the real" (15) that secures the verisimilitude of the previously offered mythology. It is this dedication to the archive as the treasure trove of truth that tricks us with its believability and implicit factuality.

POST-POSTMODERNISM AND THE PASTICHE OF "PASTNESS"

Nearly twenty-five years ago Suzi Gablik asked, "Has Modernism Failed?" She suggested that the possibilities for stylistic innovation had reached a limit and that artists had no choice but to return to the past in an effort to repair the fissure that Modernism had enacted between creativity and tradition (or history). Similarly, in "The Archival Impulse," Hal Foster wonders if archival art might "emerge out of a sense of a failure in cultural memory; of a default in productive tradition." (16) This "failure" seems too reductive, almost too boldly postmodern in its weary cynicism, as regards the O'Tower, Hayes, and McKenzie projects.

Paul Grainge, who writes on nostalgia, cultural remembering, and the popularity of "pastness" in contemporary culture, posits that the impulse to engage historical pastiche is not so much about "reeling from discontinuity and the experience of loss" but rather is indicative of our culture's ability "to transmit, store, retrieve, reconfigure and invoke the past in specific ways." (17) In other words, it is our archival aptitude that lends us not just the impulse but also the ability to return to (and even reinvent) the modes, mythologies, and methods of yester-year, or our fantasy thereof. Grainge draws heavily from Frederic Jameson's theory of the postmodern "nostalgia mode," whereby historicity, that is to say historical authenticity, is replaced by a visual culture and language where the past is realized through stylistic connotation. (18)

This nostalgic impulse provides a clue to locating the situation and circumstance of contemporary creative practice. First, there is the reality of the post-postmodern era whereby, at this point, we are responding to postmodernism as postmodernism responded to the modern era. Post-postmodernism, like Grainge's nostalgia, allows for the inventive, almost utopian, revival and remix of all the things that postmodernism critiqued and rejected. Also at work here is a post-digital sensibility marked by a nostalgia for tactility (19) and a knowledge that "truth" is not just suspect but completely fabricatable.

CONCLUSION

The O'Tower, Hayes, and McKenzie projects manifest this post-postmodern nostalgia in their dealing with pastness through contrivance. In some way, they epitomize this remix culture by drawing from various sources and effectively employing complex coded mediums of (assumed) truth-telling to create these reinvented narratives that reveal the collective fantasies of history. It is the grounding principle of the archive, along with the sophisticated manipulation of an art or culturally savvy audience, that propels these fictions from narrative to mythology, from fake to revealing.

To describe any of these projects as lies, hoaxes, or even fictions, is not really sufficient as it obfuscates what is central to the reading of these and similar works: the fact that in an age when there can be no originality and no unequivocal "truth," all we have to go on is our willingness to accept artifice and construct as a means to genuinely enter into the higher purposes of art.

SARA HINES writes on art and culture from the frontier of outer Brooklyn. She is pursuing an interdisciplinary Masters degree in humanities and social thought at New York University.

NOTES 1. Terry Towery, "Recently Uncovered Platinotypes and Stereoviews of the American West" (New York: Peer Gallery, 2006). 2. In an unpublished artist's statement, Terry Towery describes the development of the O'Tower project. 3. Ibid. 4. Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? (London: Thames & Hudson, 1984). In Chaper Five, Gablik describes the failure of Modernism is its effective breach in historical tradition. She says, "Artists are finding that the only way to make something new is to borrow from the past. All this has led, in the last few years, to a disaffection with the terms and conditions of modernism--a repudiation of the ideology of progress and originality." 5. In an article on the Triple Candie exhibition, "Lester Hayes: 1962-1975" (New York Times, January 16, 2007), Holland Cotter discusses fictional artists and the role such projects may play in a larger critique of the art world and market. 6. Craig Hight and Jane Roscoe, "Forgotten Silver: A New Zealand Television Hoax and Its Audience," in F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth's Undoing, Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, eds. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 171-186. 7. Ibid. 8. The Atlas Group (Walid Road), excerpted from "Let's Be Honest, the Rain Helped: Excerpts from an Interview with the Atlas Group," Review of Photographic Memory, Jalal Toufic, ed. (Beirut: Arab Image Foundation, 2004), 44-5. Reprinted in The Archive, Charles Merewether, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 9. Charles Merewether, The Archive (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 10. 10. Wolfgang Ernst, "The Archive as Metaphor: From Archival Space to Archival Time," in Open 7: (No) Memory: Storing and recalling in contemporary art and culture, Jorinde Seijdel and Leisbeth Melis, eds. (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2004), 46-52. 11. Ibid., 49. 12. Edward Winkleman. "If a Sculpture Falls in an Empty Garden and Nobody Hears it ..." at http://edwardwinkleman.blogspot.com (accessed May 15, 2007). 13. Ibid. 14. Alexandra Juhasz, "Introduction: Phony Definitions and Troubling Taxonomies of the Fake Documentary" in F is for Phony, 1-35. 15. Ibid. 16. Hal Foster excerpted from "An Archival Impulse," October, No. 110 (Fall 2004); reprinted in The Archive. 17. Paul Grainge, Monochrome Memories: Nostalgia and Style in Retro America (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2002). 18. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1991). 19. It is worth mentioning that Towery has spent the past fifteen years teaching and utilizing digital technologies in creative production, thus the O'Tower project was, for him, a real return to the tactile. Similarly, Jackson and Botes made Forgotten Silver at nearly the same time that they began production on The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It might be assumed that this was their "last ditch" effort in lo-fi production knowing they would spend the next six years staring at green screens and computer monitors.