Being (:) the text in the image

2009

Presented as a photograph and object/installation as part of a group show called Pre-Text in 2902 Gallery (Old School).

This installation is based on the Hippolyte Bayard’s Self Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840). In early 1839, as rumours concerning the daguerreotype spread around Paris, Bayard developed his own version of photography. It combined the positive image of the daguerreotype to the paper support of the Talbot’s calotype. But Daguerre had already managed to grab the government’s attention and Bayard’s invention was ignored. The self-portrait discussed here was then conceived and staged by Bayard as a protest against the rejection of his invention in favour of the Daguerreotype. The photograph was completed by a text inscribed at the back of the print that tells the supposed story behind it.

Although well known in the history of photography, this work is in my opinion still far from being perceived for its true importance and many implications. It deals with the topics of self, death, history, text, protest and most importantly, it is the first image in which reality is intentionally pretending to be something else than what it really is. With one single image, Bayards was touching on most of the subjects that are now major topics of works in the contemporary art world.
 
At a time when people around him were getting ecstatic to the point of getting fooled by the realistic rendering of photography, Bayard was initiating the photographic fictional interpretation of reality that has now become a major trend in art. If one adds to this that Bayard staged the first photographic exhibition on the 14 July 1839, and that the bodies of work of artists such as Cindy Sherman and Morimura are more or less direct continuations of his groundbreaking approach, one can see that Bayard’s position in history of art and not just photography clearly needs to be re-assessed as possibly one of the most visionary artists of the 19th century.
 
My interpretation of the Self Portrait as a Drowned Man aims at expending the different meanings of the work by looking at its inner structure. Bayard’s self-portrait is an image externally explained by a text which in turn suggest another image, a virtual/imaginary one, that of a drowning. I thus turned the table around by staging a physical drowning that supports the text, which in turns become an integral part of the phenomenon from which Bayard started: an image. But the image in the 21st century exists as a double entity, the result of Bayard’s seminal artistic action when he created a fictional photograph that posited itself as reality.
 
On the one side of a room corner, the text exists as an image, the very image of the situation suggested by the text: the virtual world of photographic reality. On the other wall of the same angle, the text exist as a physical object, but displayed upside-down, left-to-right, the natural orientation of images in physiological vision and photographic phenomenon: the physical world as virtual/intangible images. By looking at these two images together, the photograph and the acrylic text, a physical bridging between reality and fiction takes place. The image of the acrylic text is projected on the viewer’s retina in the position mentally perceived as that of the text in the photograph, in turn projected as an image on the retina the way the physical text is seen on the wall.
 
Between the two, a ninety degrees angle, which when added to the ninety degrees of the viewer position in regard to the walls, make up the hundred eighty degrees that make reality and fiction look in two opposite directions. When added to the other two ninety degrees angles that complete the square of the installation, we come to the three hundred sixty degrees that see reality and fiction collapse onto one another: with the mechanical image, reality is becoming image and image is becoming reality, no longer metaphorically as in the case of painting, but physically.
 
The choice of a wallpaper support for the print is intended for two reasons. First of all, it reflects the fact that the wall is an integral part of the installation. Secondly, the textured surface creates an effect perceived when one comes close enough to the print. From afar, everything looks fine, when coming close, something is not quite right. The ‘image’ is destroyed and what is left is the object. Image, objects/supports and text come together as one. 

Exhibition Catalogue

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Installation View

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Exhibited Artwork

Photograph by Lim Sheng En
​Photographic print and vinyl text on acrylic in a room corner Dimensions Variable

The corpse which you see here is that
of M. Bayard, inventor of the process
that has just been shown to you.
As far as I know this indefatigable
experimenter has been occupied for
about three years with his discovery.

The Government which has been only
too generous to Monsieur Daguerre,
has said it can do nothing for Monsieur
Bayard, and the poor wretch has
drowned himself.
Oh the vagaries of human life....!

He has been at the morgue for several
days, and no one has recognized or
claimed him.

Ladies and gentlemen, you'd better
pass along for fear of offending your
sense of smell, for as you can observe,
the face and hands of the gentleman
are beginning to decay."