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FOREWORD

In June 1859 La Revue française published a now-famous article by Charles Baudelaire titled “Le public moderne et la photographie”. In his third review of a Salon, the poet castigated the decline in the public’s artistic tastes, which in his opinion, was due in part to twenty years of photographic realism. This well-known story contributed, in its own way, to a century of French mistrust of the photographic medium. In the United States that same month, in a very different vein, The Atlantic Monthly published vibrant praise by the literary critic Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr of stereoscopy, a form of 3D photography, then enjoying considerable popularity among the public. After lauding the new technology’s amazing capacity for realism and vaunting its documentary role, Holmes called for the future establishment of libraries of standardized stereoscopic pictures that would be categorized by subject – a forerunner of today’s image banks. Concluding his discourse on a lyrical note, he added, “And as a means of facilitating the formation of public and private stereographic collections, there must be arranged a comprehensive system of exchanges, so that there may grow up something like a universal currency of these banknotes, or promises to pay in solid substance, which the sun has engraved for the great Bank of Nature.”1 This is an astonishing observation, in which, perhaps for the first time in the critical discourse on photography, images were explicitly compared to monetary currency. Right before the reader’s eyes, the alchemy of words transformed the little cardboard squares of stereoscopic views into the banknotes of a new system in which pictures are not only exchanged for money but have themselves become money. It is hardly surprising that this metaphor arose in America. Sixty years later, in another register and a different medium, the Hollywood studio system first established a link between the cost of pictures and their supposed value. As Jean Renoir pointed out in his memoirs, Carl Laemmle, head of Universal Studios and producer of Erich von Stroheim’s high-budget film Foolish Wives, used the extravagant cost of the film as an advertising strategy: in the summer of 1921 he had an electric sign erected on the Astor Hotel in New York’s Times Square, which displayed a weekly update of the constantly rising cost of the movie – which ultimately became the most expensive film in the history of cinema at that time. This twist prompted audiences to go to see not the film itself but rather the money spent on making it. In other words, the operation involved transforming $ 1,103,736 (the final advertised cost of the film) into 130 minutes of running time, or 125,000 individual film frames. This 10

approach turned the film’s images into the invisible substrate of what was being advertised in lights over Broadway: money. Ever since, such phenomena have only grown, and their story is part of what is told in The Supermarket of Images exhibition and its accompanying catalogue. The point of departure for this project, launched by my predecessor Marta Gili, was a book Peter Szendy published in French in 2017, and in English in 2019, The Supermarket of the Visible: Toward a General Economy of Images. My warm thanks go to the author for having agreed to participate in what was for him the new adventure of devising an exhibition, which he did with all the enthusiasm, attentiveness, generosity and inventiveness required of such a project. I would also like to thank the two curators who brilliantly aided him in this task, Emmanuel Alloa and Marta Ponsa, whose respective sensibilities and contributions brought new perspectives to the project. An undertaking of this scope demands the participation of many talented individuals and organizations, not all of whom can be listed here. I would nevertheless like to thank the many artists who participated either directly by producing works specially for the show, or else indirectly by lending existing works. I am also grateful to all the other lenders, public and private, who willingly entrusted us with their works. Without them, nothing would have been possible. I would furthermore like to thank the many writers, from very different fields, who contributed to the catalogue. The insight offered by their articles and catalogue entries, like the variety of issues addressed, make this publication a true forum of ideas and debate – one which will become, I trust, a future reference work. I am equally grateful to Gallimard for their collaboration in this book’s publishing. Money is the reverse not only of images, but also of exhibitions. I am therefore grateful to Jaeger-LeCoultre, a distinguished patron of the Jeu de Paume throughout the year, who in addition contributed generously to this ambitious show. My thanks also go to our faithful friends’ association, Les Amis du Jeu de Paume, for their support of this publication. Finally, my sincere congratulations go to the entire team at the Jeu de Paume for all the talent and hard work they have put into the exhibition and the catalogue, both of which help to make the Jeu de Paume a key international venue when it comes to issues of contemporary image-making. Quentin Bajac Director of the Jeu de Paume Translated from the French by Deke Dusinberre 1. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph”, The Atlantic Monthly 3, no. 20 (June 1859): p. 748.

FOREWORD

Entrance

Sylvie Fleury Born in Geneva, Switzerland, 1961 Serie ELA 75/K (Won’t Smudge Off) 2000 Gold-plated shopping trolley with Plexiglas handle and vinyl lettering mounted on a rotating mirrored podium, 114 × 100 × 100 cm overall Collection Pascal Montfort, Paris Courtesy of the artist, Olivier Varenne and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris What could be more ordinary than a shopping trolley? It is an emblem of the housewife, seen – as suggested by a wellknown sculpture by the hyperrealist artist Duane Hanson – in slippers and curlers pushing a cart overflowing with items from some vast supermarket. It is also one of the rare items possessed by the homeless (and post-apocalypse survivors), who keep their belongings in them. Known in France as a caddie (a brand name registered in 1957 by the company of the same name), these carts are everywhere. Who notices them? Who rests momentarily on its baskets, its metal frame, its wheels? And yet, on taking a closer look, a shopping trolley is a true icon – an icon of modern times, of the consumer society, of self-service, of the conversion of the flow of goods and so on. Serie ELA 75/K (Won’t Smudge Off) is a gold-plated shopping trolley set on a glittering rotating podium, that finally lends nobility to this object. The trolley becomes not so much a luxury item as a fetish object. Sylvie Fleury is fascinated by the consumer universe, which she has constantly evoked and subverted since the 1990s – just think of her emblematic luxury Shopping Bags, filled with her own purchases and placed on the floor. She recognizes the mystifying power of gold, which she applies to (or finds on) various objects (including a mini-skirt, tyre, rubbish bin and trolley). Teresa Castro Translated from the French by Deke Dusinberre

Entrance

We live in a world that is increasingly saturated with images. Their number is growing so exponentially – each day more than three billion images are shared on social networks – that the space of visibility seems to be literally inundated. As if it can no longer contain the images that constitute it. As if there were no more room, no more interstices between the images. This brings us closer to the point that Walter Benjamin imagined, almost a hundred years ago now, as “the one hundred percent image space”.1 Faced with such an overproduction of images, questions need to be asked, more than ever before, about their storage, management, transportation (even if it is electronic) and the paths they follow, their weight, the fluidity or viscosity of their exchanges, their fluctuating values – in short, questions about their economy.

In the book from which this exhibition is derived,2 the economic aspect of the life of images is called iconomy. The works and artists chosen for the exhibition cast a keen and watchful eye over these issues. On the one hand, they reflect the upheavals that currently affect the economy in general, whether in terms of unprecedentedly large storage spaces, the scarcity of raw materials, labour and its mutations into intangible forms, or in terms of value and its new manifestations, such as cryptocurrencies. On the other hand, however, these works also question what happens to visibility in the age of globalized iconomies: caught up in an incessant circulation, the image – any image – appears increasingly like a freeze frame (arrêt sur image), that is as a temporary crystallization, as the provisionally stabilized balance of the speeds that constitute it.

In the supermarket on display here, images of the economy always involve the economy of the image. And vice versa, as if they were the recto and verso of the same page. Peter Szendy, Emmanuel Alloa and Marta Ponsa

Peter Szendy

Shadow Iconomics and Road Networks of the Visible

1. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929), trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 1, 1927–1930 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 217. 2. Peter Szendy, The Supermarket of the Visible, trans. Jan Plug (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).

Peter Szendy

Shadow Iconomics and Road Networks of the Visible

There are so many images. So, so many. An immense quantity. A literally immeasurable flood of them. A little research turns up the statistic that in 2015, “social network users shared more than three billion images every day”.1 Today, an unprecedented number of photos and videos are produced and circulated. And when we try to visualize – to produce an image of – this plethora of images, we inevitably find ourselves with a mere metonymy (however striking it may be), a small part for the unimaginably huge whole. Despite its title, the impressive installation designed by Erik Kessels in 2011, 24 Hrs In Photos (fig. 1), captures only a tiny portion of our daily overproduction: the enormous pile of about 350,000 photographs downloaded in a single day by users and printed by the Dutch artist certainly evokes a “feeling of drowning in representations”, 2 but it is a long way from being equivalent to the actual density of iconic traffic, which is well over 100 million images per hour. Can you imagine it? This flood, this perpetual avalanche is nothing, however, compared to the number of images that are constantly being produced without necessarily making their way onto social networks. Kodak announced in 2000 that “consumers around the world had taken 80 billion photos”; but the figures have increased exponentially with the spread of digital photography, so that in 2015, the market research firm InfoTrends predicted that “more than one trillion photos” would be taken.3 To get a clear idea of the incalculable proliferation of images that surrounds us, we must also consider, as Trevor Paglen recently suggested, that “human visual culture has become a special case of vision, an exception to the rule”: “The overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines, with humans rarely in the loop.”4 Automatic licence-plate readers, shopping-centre cameras that track movement and detect consumers’ facial expressions, imaging devices that control the packaging or distribution of products: the American artist lists a whole series of images that, in other times and contexts, would undoubtedly have been called acheiropoieta (made without

Figure 1 — Erik Kessels, 24 Hrs In Photos, 2011. Installation view, Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2012. Courtesy of the artist

1. Simon Faulkner, Farida Vis and Francesco D’Orazio, “Analysing Social Media Images”, in The SAGE Handbook of Social Media, eds Jean Burgess, Alice Marwick and Thomas Poell (London: SAGE Publications, 2018), p. 161. The authors discuss the “dramatic increase in image circulation occurring from 2013 onwards”, described as “social media’s visual turn”. 2. Diane Smyth, “Erik Kessels”, interview, 1000 Wordsmag (undated): http://www.1000wordsmag. com/erik-kessels-2/. 3. Stephen Heyman, “Photos, Photos Everywhere”, The New York Times, 29 July 2015. 4. Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You)”, thenewinquiry.com (8 December 2016).

Figure 1 — Erik Kessels, 24 Hrs In Photos, 2011. Installation view, Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2012. Courtesy of the artist

death).8 The three terms around which he articulated his view of our “post-historic” era can in fact be linked to the three levels identified in the preceding sections. According to Flusser, our world of imagery – both “technical” (stemming from the invention of photography) and “telematic” (stemming from computers) – ushered in the reign of apparatuses, that is to say of “black boxes” (both mechanical and institutional) that reorganize our mindful environments according to operating rules that escape everyone except a tiny elite of engineers, computer experts and administrators. These hardware-related devices gobble up information that trigger operations. They would nevertheless remain hollow and inert if software programs didn’t arrange this information into packets, which affect us as packets (icons, affections) rather than as isolated bits or pixels. The main property of the apparatuses, programs and models that inform our individual and collective behaviours requires, however, that they never serve us without simultaneously making us serve them. They function all the better by making us their functionaries. Aesthetics Ideology ideas Iconomy icons Cybernetics imagos

Semantics meaning affection information

Figure 1 — Martin Parr, Gateway Supermarket, Nailsea, Bristol, England, Great Britain. Customers, 1990. Courtesy of the artist and Magnum Photos

Politics functionaries programs apparatuses

The challenge of the supermarket of images, of its iconomy and the innervations embodying it in our bodies and minds, thus emerges more clearly. The problem is not so much the flood of imagery, nor the role that market mechanisms play in it. It is more related to the degree to which we are functionarized by the apparatuses and programs that govern – technologically and administratively – our social intra-actions. The overtaking of images It would obviously be too simple to seek to counter the devastating effects of our current iconomy by banking on an anti-functionarist ideology. The real difficulty of our times is that we live thanks to apparatuses that simultaneously serve and enslave us. De-functionarizing ourselves would result in many of us dying of hunger. Thus, the antidote to this possessive grip is not so much to seek to take it down as to find a way of overtaking it. Surprise happens when something deviates from the program without making the apparatus explode. 8. See in particular Flusser, Post-History, and Vilém Flusser, La Civilisation des médias, trans. from the German by Claude Maillard (Belval: Circé, 2006).

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Semantics meaning affection information

Figure 1 — Martin Parr, Gateway Supermarket, Nailsea, Bristol, England, Great Britain. Customers, 1990. Courtesy of the artist and Magnum Photos

Politics functionaries programs apparatuses

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In 1929 the French journal Documents announced a series of lectures by Sergei Eisenstein at the Sorbonne University.1 Instead of six lectures, Eisenstein gave only one; the premiere of his new film The General Line was cancelled and the copy of the film confiscated by the French police. In 1930 Documents published an article by Robert Desnos titled “La Ligne générale”,2 accompanied by a double-page spread with stills chosen and arranged by the director himself (fig. 1). Desnos highlights the “concreteness” of Eisenstein’s cinematographic method, a quality that for him provides the link between two projects, The General Line and Capital:

Figure 1 — Sergei Eisenstein, montage of thirty stills from the film The General Line (1928), published in a double-page spread in Documents, no. 4, 1930

This is a film with a single goal. Concreteness. Concreteness of what? … Eisenstein is already in the process of realizing the project presented in his Sorbonne lecture: to render concrete, tangible, and clear as daylight theories of the most abstract sort, the very conclusions of reason and of inference that are least accessible to the uninstructed. … The photogeny of ideas remains to be studied. It was therefore confidently, if not without some surprise, that an audience of eight hundred listened to his intention of filming Marx’s Capital.3 Desnos’s brilliant insight resides in linking the ideological, economic and aesthetic dimensions of Eisenstein’s cinema to its tangible operations. This is further underlined by what remains unsaid in Desnos’s text: an operation of visual economy able to counter and exceed a predetermined set of abstract ideas. This was the aim of a series of experiments undertaken in Documents. The formal design of the journal consisted in a complex juxtaposition of images and texts, refusing to treat the former as mere illustrations of the latter. This is how in Georges Bataille’s contributions the images themselves become the theoretical groundwork contaminating the spheres of dogmatic historiography. Reading Eisenstein’s Capital project – an idea that strongly inspired the work of Documents – our text traces some deeper resonances between the visual economies of Eisenstein and Bataille. By analysing a series of recently discovered materials for the Capital project, we will show how Eisenstein translates some key concepts from Marx’s Critique of Political Economy onto the level of the circulation of concrete images.4 Here 1. Georges Henri Rivière, “Six conférences d’Eisenstein”, Documents 1, no. 7 (1929): p. 384. 2. Robert Desnos, “La Ligne génerale”, Documents 2, no. 4 (1930): pp. 217–223. 3. Ibid., pp. 220–221. Translated in Annette Michelson, “Eisenstein at 100: Recent Reception and Coming Attractions”, October no. 88 (Spring 1999): p. 79. 4. A selection of these materials is presented for the first time in the exhibition The Supermarket of Images at Jeu de Paume, Paris. The display was developed in collaboration with the book artist and designer Uliana Bychenkova.

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Figure 1 — Sergei Eisenstein, montage of thirty stills from the film The General Line (1928), published in a double-page spread in Documents, no. 4, 1930

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since he even claims to have documented the “living legs” for inclusion in The General Line (“to be shown in parallel to the death scene of the bull in the village. Night scenes”).10 Among various other episodes, this scene must have been censored in the last version of The General Line, which Stalin himself renamed Old and New.11 On another page of Eisenstein’s notebook, we find a kind of director’s note: Woman’s stocking full of holes and a silk one in a newspaper advertisement. It starts with a jerky movement, to multiply into fifty pairs of legs-Revue. Silk. Art. The fight for the centimetre of silk stocking. The aesthetes are for it. The Bishops and morality are against. But these puppets [in French in the original: mais ces pantins] dance on strings pulled by the silk manufacturers and the garment peddlers who fight each other. Art. Holy art. Morality. Holy morality. 12 The imagined sequence for Capital, which echoes Marx’s “scenes” of the market from his Critique of Political Economy,13 was intended to introduce a “comic” contrast to the previous sequence, centred around the relation between capitalism and war. Some days later, Eisenstein reinforced the effect of repetition, resuming the aforementioned “stocking” scene in a more drastic rhythmic structure. The final element of the associative chain on “a pair of silk stockings” suddenly introduces a critical cesura: In this sense one could solve A pair of silk stockings – A. p. s. S. [A pair of silk stockings] – the Moral. A. p. s. S. – the sale and the competition. A. p. s. S. – Indian women are forced to carry silk cocoons in their armpits.14 The capitalist economy exemplified here in one single case is brought to an excess – an excess that resonates with Bataille’s anthropological economy. Such effect results from the repetition and variation of a single element, a fetishized commodity 10. Ibid. 11. On the censorship of The General Line, see Annette Michelson, “Reading Eisenstein Reading Ulysses: Montage and the Claims of Subjectivity”, Art & Text 34 (Spring, 1989): pp. 64–78. 12. Eisenstein, diary, 7 April 1928, RGALI, 1923-2-1107, pp. 26, 27; “Notes for a film of ‘Capital’”, October 2 (1976): p. 17. 13. To exemplify the metamorphosis of commodities, their dynamic entanglement with social relations, Marx uses examples whose status is neither that of empirical facts nor that of economic numbers or mathematical abstractions. Rather, in order to address transactions on the market, he introduces characters such as “our old friend the weaver of linen” and others. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), pp. 199–200. 14. Eisenstein, diary, 11 April 1928, RGALI 1923-2-1107, pp. 177–178.

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par excellence: “a pair of silk stockings”. First introduced in all its visual concreteness, namely as “living legs that must make Charleston kicks as a storefront ad for stockings”, the commodity continues its spectral life in the verbal incantation. At the same time, frenetic dance and rhythmic repetition of such concrete elements exceed the level of commodity as mere motive for the planned film. The commodity fetishism, and the acceleration of industrial production themselves get animated traversing the pages of Capital’s working diaries. Eisenstein turns these movements into a critical method of a cinema performed on the pages of his notebooks: a morphology in the age of technical reproducibility. “A series,” Eisenstein writes, “gives us a dialectical possibility to produce, again and again, a comparison.” 15 This is how the image of the dancing legs is multiplied through words, transformed and dialectically rendered in all its singularity in the last example of the associative chain: the colonial exploitation of labour, referenced in the case of “Indian women”. As such, the repetitions place the disparate elements into a rhythm, thereby involving montage as a structure – a critical structure that raises conflicts between disparate spheres: aesthetics and economy, politics and spectacle. In this way, the series produce critical difference within repetition. This is how the Capital project’s morphological chains create an excess value, opening up venues for an experience of epistemic and aesthetic transgression. A metamorphosis. The montage, as an operator of such associative arrangements in Eisenstein’s notes, shakes things up and makes them dance. It is the gesture of cutting – the cut of editing – that takes the elements out of their context, that is, their usual conditions, and operates their critical revaluation. What is under consideration here is not a film but a “dancing” variation on its themes staged on paper. In Eisenstein’s montage, sequences of elements – of capitalist industry and the commodity fetishism – are subjected to a movement of revaluation. Such a sensory economy of means exceeds the quantitative parameters of the capitalist economy. In the same way, it transgresses the dogmatic understanding of historical materialism, which was shared by Eisenstein’s contemporaries in the Soviet Union. In this perspective, what occurs on the pages of the Capital project can be named a dialectic of concrete forms. Although in different ways, Eisenstein and Bataille were both experimenting with matter’s immanent potential for alteration. Eisenstein’s dialectical method figures in Georges Bataille’s text on “The Deviations of Nature”, which appeared 15. Eisenstein, diary, 2 April 1928, in RGALI, 1923-2-1107, p. 177.

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icons strikingly concretizes the deconstruction of the symbolic power embodied in personality cults. The distant and objectified character of this material, its nature as fait divers, reinforces the ambiguity. In Eisenstein’s heretic montage, these concrete elements dismantle the complex logic of cultic images, especially the image of the political leader, a dictator who had found new forms in capitalist as well as socialist systems. Eisenstein invests the “symbolic standpoint” with a political and anthropological significance in the same way as Bataille reverses the idealism in power with concrete survivals of Gnosticism’s “impure fermentations”. As if through resonance, Bataille’s vision of these expressive artefacts from a remote, almost inaccessible archaeological past, lends urgency to Eisenstein’s project of “showing the method of the dialectic” in Capital, that is, of applying Marx’s theory of value on the visual level of concrete forms. For what Bataille, in the conflictual montage between texts and images put forth in Documents, devised as the shattering of idealism can be recognized – despite their differences – in Eisenstein, when, in Capital, the film-maker systematically devaluates symbolic authority. In their strategic use of excess, such operations need also to be recognized as minor and eccentric economies: economies that question and affect our gaze on the very concrete level of form, in its precarious ephemerality and decay.

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Dork Zabunyan

Two Capital Flows

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Dork Zabunyan

Two Capital Flows

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Figure 2 â€” Production still from the film The Big Short by Adam McKay, 2015

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Figure 2 â€” Production still from the film The Big Short by Adam McKay, 2015

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Money has been a recurring visual motif, from Hans Richter’s 1928 short film on inflation to the large-scale wall installations that Máximo González composes from obsolete banknotes (Degradación, 2010). Value permeates into everyday gestures: Robert Bresson has choreographed hands grabbing banknotes (L’Argent, 1983), and Sophie Calle has collected video surveillance images from a cash dispenser to show us the gaze of people looking at money (Cash Machine, 1991–2003 and Unfinished, 2003). Materiality is a crucial issue for art and finance in the age of cryptocurrencies: Yves Klein exchanged “zones of immaterial pictorial sensibility” (in the form of a cheque) for gold, while Kevin Abosch uses his own blood to print the address of the blockchain that represents the ten million virtual works of the IAMA COIN series (2018).1 Art itself may be an object of speculation

(Kunst=Kapital, Joseph Beuys famously wrote on banknotes), but it also makes it possible to visualize the most elusive of speculative processes: Wilfredo Prieto multiplies the reflected image of a banknote between two mirrors (One Million Dollars, 2002), while artists such as Femke Herregraven (Rogue Waves, 2015) and the RYBN.ORG collective (ADM XI, 2015) materialize or subvert the movements of stock-market algorithms.

1. See Catherine Malabou’s definition of blockchain, p. 257.

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1. See Catherine Malabou’s definition of blockchain, p. 257.

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