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Phantom Painting
Reading Reed: Painting between Autopsy and Autoscopy —Peter Weibel

(Part III)

III. Machine, Media and Vampiric Painting

The dissolution of the subjectivist consciousness of reality by the advent of the machine triggered a general crisis in systems of representation. In art, the machine was the technical apparatus of photography, the image machine. Along with machines for transporting goods (the train, the car and the plane), the 19th and 20th centuries saw the arrival of machines for transporting information (the telegraph, the telephone and television). These machine-aided systems of image production, transfer and reception were later called media. The photographic, film, video and computer media as data processing, transferring and producing machine systems triggered a drastic crisis in the classical systems of representation since these forms of representation had been essentially manual tools, i.e. defined by the artistŐs hand.

There were several ways to react to this crisis. One was to resist the dissolution of classical representation, insisting on historical forms for the construction of representation and reality (Naturalism, Realism or the New Objectivity). Another was to give in to this subjectivist dissolution of historical structures, depicting the reproduction of reality itself as a flow of reality particles and subjective emotions (Impressionism). Or a third way was to react to the uncanny realm of alienation in the industrial revolution by inventing one's own phantoms, artificial creatures and alternative, perhaps more human, ghosts (Symbolism). Or fourth, there was what would appear to be the most legitimate reaction, to respond to the advent of the machine by entering into a critical dialogue with the machine and changing one's own methods of production and representation.

At the level of systems of representation, photography as an image machine implied the same displacement and threat for the historical ordering structure of painting as industrial machines posed for the social systems of order and their constructions of reality. So only the artist who critically analyzed and reviewed his own historically evolved systems of representation was able to become the real seismograph of social change induced by the industrial revolution, the triumph of machines. Such an artist was, for example, Marcel Duchamp who thought through the whole range of topics of the industrial revolution, from the industrial ready-made to the 'Bachelor Machine'. Since the beginning of photography, painting has existed against the background of the machine. During its hundred-year monopoly as the medium of images, the machine and photography, have threatened, assaulted and castrated painting.

The many well-known statements made by painters and photographers in the 19th and 20th centuries which declare painting dead, are an indication that the advent of photography caused painting to become a ghost of itself, a specter and phantom, no more living than dead, buried alive. To stay in the logical vein of our analysis, photography became the doppelgänger of painting, causing painting to fear for its existence. And painting became the doppelgänger of photography, castrating photography's claim to be art. Photography phantomized painting, as it were, transforming it into a ghost, a specter that could only be kept alive by means of artificial infusions. All new media not only double reality--they do this only fragmentarily--but also, above all, they are the doppelgängers of the old media. Media as doubling machines are vampires. The old media fear that the new doppelgängers will live on their blood, that they will be bled dry, consumed and contaminated. The new media always claim to replace the old media. But the old and the new media ought to know that whoever kills his doppelgänger, also kills himself. The different media behave towards each other like vampires, doppelgänger reflections. The substance and innate essence, such as the Self, is concentrated only in the doppelgänger. Each medium lives like a vampire on the doppelgänger, as Dorian Gray lived on his picture. Self identity (the identity of the medium) comes from the doppelgänger, says Lacan's famous mirror stage theory. In his work The Uncanny (1919) Freud picks up on Otto Rank's study The Doppelgänger (1914). Not being able to see and recognize oneself in a mirror means not being one with oneself. But in the myth of Narcissus, as soon as I see myself in the mirror, I am lost. Vampirism is thus also a modified myth of self-love, narcissism. This is why the vampire, the phantom, is a signifier of absence. For the figure of the doppelgänger as the narcissistic other also stems from the fear of encountering oneself, only to be disappointed or in one's own way. This is why we prefer encountering and thus losing ourselves in the other. The doppelgänger is thus a figure of the fear of loss, of death, and with that a figure of death itself. The doppelgänger as a narcissistic other is both protection from death and a harbinger of death, a defense mechanism against destruction and loss, as well as an expression of loss and lack of uniqueness. While doubling expresses the fear of castration and absence, it also implies them. This is like the head of the Medusa, the myth of the castration complex, where the great number of snakes on the head conceals the fact that the one decisive snake is missing.

Warhol's multiplication of a motif (for example, the Coca-Cola bottle) not only references the industrial mass production of this bottle, but is equally an expression of the crisis of representation of painting, its fear of castration. Instead of painting one Coke bottle, he manufactures lots of bottles, or soup cans, with the aid of machine printing (silk screen). He duplicates the motif in the way that the snakes on Medusa's head are multiplied so as to hide the fact that the one decisive snake is missing. Warhol multiplies painting mechanically from fear of castration. He tries to escape from admitting that painting has lost its monopoly as an image medium. Like a consumer, he flees from the problem of painting precisely by multiplying it, as if panic stricken by fear of Medusa.

In a different way Reed also recognizes how the existence of painting is imperiled by machines and the media. He acknowledges the historical objectivity of this threat and gets to the root of it. He realizes that the identity of painting in the age of the media cannot be the same as it was formerly. And he realizes that the origin of the crisis of painting is in the birth of the machine in the industrial revolution for this has phantomized all subsequent historical systems of representation, transforming them into ghosts. Since then, painting has existed split in two and has lived because of this split. It lives on the 'post-modern' reflection of its history, and history lives on the present. Painting lives on the encounter with its doubles, media such as photography, film, video and the computer. It tends to encounter itself in the other, in the other media, fearing to be lost within them, and getting lost for that very reason. Reed takes another attitude. In order not to lose painting, he declares 'lack' and 'loss' as the starting point of his vampiric painting. In his painting, he takes up the master-servant dialectic between the original (painting) and the copy (media) just as he does the motif of the doppelgänger. So in Reed's painting, the Fantastic means admitting to the fact that painting must deal with the 'uncanny' nature of the machine and the media and the resultant phantomization of its own historical function.

The doppelgänger and vampire motifs are metaphors for the crisis of both the social and the cultural orders, both of which were transformed by the industrial revolution. So when David Reed reflects upon the vampire motif in his painting, he is not concerned with the picturesque superficial elements of vampire stories. Rather he is involved with fundamental reflections on painting as a construction of representation and reality in the age of the machine, the media and the post-industrial revolution. Reed is reacting to the phantomization of painting by art requiring technical equipment, from photography, film and video, to computers. Reed reflects methodically on all the possibilities of modern-day technical machine image systems that replaced the historical systems. He uses them to visualize the status of painting as a phantom on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to overcome this status with new painterly methods. He is trying to make painting its own vampire and double. Reed's preoccupation with the vampire motif and his investigations into painting as a doppelgänger of video, computer and film (for example, the artificial, synthetic incorporation of his paintings into Hitchcock's film scenes--veritable metaphors of vampiric blood transfer), are a fundamental reflection of the changes undergone by painting in the age of the industrial and post'industrial revolution, the fundamental changes undergone by painting as a system of representation and construction of reality in the age of the machine. Precisely in this way, painting finds its way out of its condition of phantomization. Reed's mediatisation of painting and, at the same time, his immunization of painting against the media, make him one of the most central painters of the nineties.

I have attempted to show that the vampire and the doppelgänger are structurally related and that reflection is the link between them (this also applies to the myth of Narcissus). Within the dialectic of reflection, the doubling and mutual dependence of the self and the mirror self, the image and the mirror image, a drama of visibility evolves, a dramatic transformation of the conception of the visual. All the aforementioned aspects of history, the doppelgänger, vampire and reflection myths, represent the history of machines and media, the visual media first and foremost. Painting has undergone a dramatic history of being doubled, reflected and phantomized by the media. This history could also be seen as one of loss and castration.

The advent of the photographic machine destroyed the foundations of painting and its constructions of reality and representation. Reed's painting, like vampirism, is a phantom between autopsy and autoscopy. Autopsy is the viewing and examination of corpses with the naked eye. Autoscopy means something like viewing oneself. It is the branch of clinical pathology in which a person really believes that he can meet or see his doppelgänger. Reed's painting is between autopsy and autoscopy, between being seen by others and being seen by one's self, and it is thus painting that attempts the impossible: to see with one's eyes closed. Reed's painting is thus discursive painting in which the formal problems of the visual are obsolete. He performs an autopsy on the phantom of painting. He carries out a transfusion on the corpse of painting with the blood of the new media.

Reed is concerned with the doppelgängers of painting such as film, video and computers, aiming to prevent the castration of painting, its loss and disappearance. That is what his famous statement of 1987 means: "We see paintings in a different way now, because of film and video." His painting is a narcissistic self-reflection of painting and at the same time a dissimulation of painting by means of doubling and reproduction. In his painting, he analyses the methods of production and constructions of representation in the new media. He has recognized the real function of the doppelgänger (such as shadow, reflection, Narcissus, and vampire). The doppelgänger's function (for example, photography's in relation to painting) is not only to be insurance against the disappearance of the original (painting as the first image medium), but also to show that it is the harbinger of it's own disappearance (other technical means have also existed to produce images since photography). This paradox is precisely what triggers the uncanny, as Freud recognized in continuing Rank's study of the doppelgänger. Doubling does not lead to the original becoming immortal, to the corpse not decaying, but rather to its phantomization and loss. This paradox of the twin relationship between averting death on the one hand and welcoming death on the other, is expressed in the vampire. This paradox creates the dimension of the inexplicable, the uncanny. Reed''s painting is thus 'uncanny' painting, which fights for the status of painting, conflicted between averting and taking pleasure in its own disappearance. His paintings, inserted like vampires into film stills from Hitchcock, live on the blood of the new media. His work tries to resolve and at the same time to realize the uncanny. To do this would be to see one's reflection in the mirror closing one's own eyes. 'Uncanny' painting would make manifest the lack of painting within the medium of painting itself, making the figure of absence present in an invisible manner. Reed's vampiric painting can watch itself in the mirror of painting, knowing that it has already lost it's historical autonomy. Reed does not want to conceal the historical castration of painting by the new image media with the aid of an illusion: pluralist, post-historical, post-modern reproduction. Rather, he admits this condition of painting, taking it as the starting point for his own painting. This gives rise to a new form of painting as a phantom between autopsy and autoscopy, between being seen by others and by oneself. His aim is to define the real of painting within the unreflectable, for the vampire, too, is unreflectable.

Nothing could be more supportive and probative of my argument than the fact that Reed has undertaken this deliverance of painting, of the reality of painting (this reality depends on and acknowledges painting's historical loss and lack vis-à-vis the new media), by showing his work in the Mirror Hall of the Neue Galerie in Graz. This hall of multiple lights and multiplying mirrors, the room of the Medusa, is not far from Sheridan Le Fanu's Castle Hainfeld where Carmilla suffered her fate. In this hall of mirrors, the image of the vampire is not reflected--see the motif on the invitation card, a film still from The Brides of Dracula by Terence Fisher (1960). In the Mirror Hall painting is constructed as an allegory of the visible, at the moment in history when it wishes to see itself close its eyes in the mirror reflection and watch itself disappear as an image, and even as an image medium. But as we know, this is not possible. In a mirror, the subject that closes his eyes can only partially see his own eyes closing and cannot see, except in the imagination, the end of the gesture. This is why painting, like the vampire, cannot die.

Literature:

Dieter Sturm, Klaus Völker (ed.), Von den Vampiren, Hanser, Munich 1968.

Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves. The University of Chicago Press, 1995.

D. L. MacDonald, K. Scherf (ed.), Collected Fiction of John William Polidori. University of Toronto Press, 1994.

Klaus Hamberger, Über Vampirismus 1801-1899, Turia & Kant, Vienna 1992.

Klaus Hamberger, Mortuus non mordet. Vampirismus 1689-1791. Turia & Kant, Vienna 1992.

Otto Rank, Der Doppelgänger. Vienna 1925. Reprinted. by Mladen Dobar in Turia & Kant, Vienna 1993.

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