UNTITLED PORTRAITS

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THIRDEYECENTRE GLASGOW 1988

Un!/t/ed, 1988Framed b/w photograph170 >< 122 cm (67" >< 48”)

PAVEL BUCI-ILER’S UNTITLED PORTRAITS

HE crowd has a history and a geography. It is possible that for usthe crowd has virtually ceased to exist; that the crowd is per-ceivable as a historical entity at the very moment when it is no

longer an agent of history. The crowd has been replaced by the audienceof the spectacle, collective activity by passivity. The process which hadalready begun with the festivals of the French Revolution was completedin the transition from the Nurenberg Rally to the Hollywood blockbuster.Instead of participation and carnival, resistance and struggle, the crowd asan aggregate of powerless individuals gaze at the spectacle. The publicspace for the crowd may well disappear altogether in the fragmentation ofTV and video culture, with inner city riots, mass pickets and publicmarathons as a last spasm of collective activity.

As a Czech in his mid-30s, Pavel Biichler’s experience of the crowd isof a disjunction between myth - the communist ideology of the workingclass as heroic collective subject of history - and failure: the failure ofEastern Bloc communism to deliver the promised human fulfilment andhappiness, and the failure of the mass of vulnerable human bodies to resistthe Soviet tanks in the Prague of Spring 1968. In both East and West thedissolution of the crowd into the audience is spelled by technology. Thepost-modern audience is mirrored in the film “Close Encounters of theThird Kind” where people are compelled by a mysterious force toassemble and witness the sublime spectacle of a descending spaceship, asBflchler was drawn by a radio broadcast to hitchhike from near Pilsen toPrague to watch the tanks.

Biichler’s Untitled Portraits consist of individual photographs ofmuch enlarged heads taken from a reproduced photograph of a crowdwhich appears to have been taken some time during the last half century.Mostly men - there are very few, if any, women - wearing shirt and tie,they stand still and close, yet almost every face is separate and distinct. themajority gaze in the same direction, slightly oblique to the camera - atwhat, it is not possible to see. The context of the source-picture is

unknown to Biichler. His concern is with the fragments which do notmake up a whole. These enlargements bespeak a desire to salvage theindividual from the ruins of history. Light, reflecting from one livinghuman being at the moment the photograph was taken that day, wasregistered on film and, passing through various transformations, reachesme and you, here and now, from Biichler’s portraits.

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While the painted portrait commemorates the individual through thehand of the artist, the photograph, a descendant of the death-mask, is theactual trace of the other left behind, a ghost. The Untitled Portraits are an

act of mourning in which Biichler seeks to make the fragment wholeagain, to restore that which has been lost. These images have the pathos ofold photographs which combine immediacy with unbridgeable distance,like the memory of a lost loved one. The radiant face is to be disclosed outof darkness, forgetfulness and death.

However, the enlargement of the photograph, the attempt to bring it

closer, to bridge the distance, emphasizes the abstraction of the screeneddots; the result of rephotographing the repro-duction of a photograph.The “portrait” is the result of the viewer’s interpretation of a figure-ground relationship between the opposites of light and darkness. Theblocking of the “natural” passage from signifier to signified, from thematerial image to the subject of the photograph, brings photographicdesire to the awareness of the viewer. The constellation of light floats inthe darkness of space and the gaze which seeks to penetrate the reality ofthe image would pass beyond them into nothingness. In this apotheosisthe face of the other is appropriated as a technological simulacrum.

Yet Buchler counters the tendency of such simulacra to negate humanfinitude in their very deathliness. The Untitled Portraits remain indexes ofthe real, actual traces of a particular person, hence their pathos. Identity is

contributed by the viewer as if to mitigate the anxiety of the mementomori, the reminder of death, which these images have become. Thephotograph - from the Greek photo-graphein, to write with light -becomes a text to be read: It’s Lenin! It’s Kafka! It’s my father! We wantto turn the unknown and the opaque into the familiar. This very recreationof identity in the Untitled Portraits serves to emphasize the loss of theidentity of the individuals in the photograph of the crowd. The anony-mity of the face in the crowd is irredeemable, yet the photograph is theimprint of a person who once lived, the trace of the other who makes a

claim on us. Buchler seeks to redeem the other from within the regime ofspecular passivity by turning the factual nature of the photograph againstits own abstraction and in that way to create a memorial to those whowould otherwise be obliterated not only from but by history.

Michael Newman

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Thanks toGenevieve Bénamou

lan ClausenEdward Dickinson

Mark Lumley

Michael Newman

Roger PalmerCarola Rush

Christopher TabeckiAlison Woods

Sponsored by Lindsey Lltho Blshop's Stortford

Exhibition organised by Andrew Nairneassisted by Nicola White and Tracy Smith

Typeset by Goodlellow 8. Egan, Cambridge

Printed in England by Lindsey Litho, Bishop’s Stortfordin an edition of 700, June 1988

© Third Eye Centre, © Pavel Biichler, © Michael Newman

ISBN 0 906474 77 9

Kit Woods

Edward Wright Third Eye Centre

Cambridge Darkroom 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow G2 3JD

041 - 332 7521

Director: Christopher Carreli

Third Eye Centre (Glasgow) Ltd.

is subsidised by the Scottish Arts Council and

Glasgow District Council

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PHOTOIVANKYNCLgue,September1979Pm