Flashbulb Memory


We tell ourselves stories in order to live - or so it has been said. The princess is caged in the consulate.01 The suitcase of plutonium is secreted in the lock-up.02 The Marat colors the bath water with his own blood. Charlotte Corday, a minor French aristocrat, had taken her Girondist sympathies from Camembert to Paris. Her belief, or so history recalls, was that through her actions she would emulate Brutus in the destruction oft the tyrant, thus ridding France once and for all of the man whose rhetoric had lit the September uprisings. For her actions if not her beliefs, Charlotte angel of assassination loses her head to the guillotine. Of her execution we can be sure, even as the motives that had once seemed so self-evident now derive from speculation and probable cause. Out of these recreated mise-en-scenes conjecture renders memory.

We know, tor instance, that in the case of Jean Paul Marat the instrument of death was a table knife With a dark Wooden handle and a silver ferule, bought for a few sols at the Palais Royale. We know also that such a knife is visible in the bottom left-hand corner of the commemorative painting by Jacques-Louis David. But if the allegorical past, through such engrained imagery, unfurls inside the revolutionary pieta, the psychopath's corridor03 or the Pope's landing,04 our own histories are more improvisational. Like the images created by Thomas Demand they draw less upon the event than the non-event. They narrate its abstract architecture in ways that make us accustomed to look for the sermon in the homicide, for the social or moral lesson in Jeffrey Dahmer's murder of seventeen. As Joan Diclion puts it in the White Album: 'We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."05

At least for a while. And then other images take over the same narrative templates. Centuries after the Marat assassination another story drew blood and politics into the format of an established frame. It too had an iconic image indelibly etched in a collective imagination, albeit a collective of which I played no part. Here was another set of circumstances, another set of secrecies, motivations and betrayals - republican and otherwise - cast in doubt and water. immediately dubbed 'the greatest political crime story in postwar Germany the stranger than fiction tale of Uwe Barschel, former premier of Schleswig-Holstein, stretched the credulity of limited fact across the expanse of a single surface, an image which spoke the proverbial thousands of read and unread words.

On October 11th, 1987, the CDU politician was found cleacl in the bathtub of room 317 where he was staying at the Hotel Beau Rivage in Geneva. To this day, the how's and why's of this particular death remain occluded in the fog of speculation. What is known is that on September 25th of that year Barschel, then a rising star of Chancellor Kohl's Christian Democratic party, was forced to resign from office after an aide publicly accused him of hiring a private detective to gather damaging information about a political opponent's sex life. What is also known is that on the night of the 10th the father of four had flown to Geneva and checked into the Beau Rivage. There, he had hoped to meet an informant who claimed to have evidence impugning the accusatory press aide and exculpating the politician of his involvement in the alleged smear campaign. Accompanying the 'known' facts was a better image. Taken by the same journalist who discovered the dead man's body it was, before long, an involved participant in the scandal on which it purported to report. In an ironic twist to a case already founded on the public revelations of private life, the evidential photograph went not to the police but straight to the front page of the tabloid media where it immediately set the scene for a final act in the ongoing morality play of exposure and deception. Some time later, as the scandal that surrounded the ethically questionable depiction of a dead man subsided, I found myself inducted into the debate by another, lesser-known image which had begun to make sporadic appearances in galleries and museums.

To the former picture theories had attached themselves like flies to dead meat. Its structure solicited them. The peek through the half opened door suggested the prurient crime-scene voyeurism of a reporter eager to capture but not intrude. Lacking the memorializing sentiment of David's famous portrayal of the death of Marat, the un-credited photograph ran as a film still from which the script had been lost but not the plot. Carefully composed, it literally left the door open to speculations of all kinds, most of which were unified only by their lack of proof. At the time, Barschel's death was ruled suicide. Later evidence, some of which was found encrypted within the infamous bathroom image, suggested the sleeping drug Cyclobarbital had been introduced into the politician's body only after other narcotics had rendered it incompetent to act. The conspiracy line-up summoned to make sense of the mystery-soaked mise-en-scene included the usual suspects - lranian hit squads, Stasi killers, Mossad agents and the CIA. Whether Barschel was the victim of a diabolical plot or the creator of a posthumous puzzle will, in all probability, never be known. Of those accused, only the Israeli government issued a formal denial of its involvement. But in the Middle East a denial, especially if it is formal, is widely accepted as confirmation that the opposite is true.

Demand's bathroom scene - a painstaking paper-thin reconstruction ofthe original news photograph - carries the freight ot abstracted recognition. It had been a while since the Barschel news had been in circulation, during which time much of the narrative sediment had settled. Politics had conspired to make of images icons and of ablutions assassinations. Time passed, and with it the sharp etching of factual detail had faded into a more ambiguous psychological imprint. Blunted into a state of lapidary bleakness this other photograph dispenses with the figurative aspect of the original. It directs our attention instead towards the corner of an empty hotel sarcophagus, now half-filled with blue green water. In the showing of all that was left behind it had become a story without a narrative, a declaration that the captions of all images are in a permanent state of egress, the language of their landings reduced to nothing more than the dumb, empty imprint of a boot on the moon. So when, some years later, I encountered other of these reconstructed images for the first time, they served only to illuminate the Barschel events, retreat from the habitat of worldly and factual things. All that seemed to remain were spaces paralyzed by lack of feeling - mnemonic hotel rooms whose guests have long since checked out, taking some, if not all, of their baggage with them.

How, then, do we interpret what we see? How do We read between the paper-thin lines and make sense of the phantasmagoria, how do we pull experience from the deadly wreckage of recorded events? How, then, finding ourselves within the layers of fiction, do we navigate through the multiple choice to find identity beyond its ever shifting facade.

Perhaps we don't. And perhaps it is the purpose of images to remind us of the psychological and philosophical slipknot of Borges' labyrinths, dreams and endless mirrors. In the world of the Argentinean writer, images and the histories assigned them start to caption one another to become circular ruins: A man goes into the forest, prays to the fire god and dreams another man into existence. This second man then goes to the fire and comes out unscathed only to realize that he too must exist in another man's dreams. And so, in the flicker of the photographic fire we also learn to narrate the character of that which is never seen. 'Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One lights?' asks Borges. 'Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictions.'06

Demand's object-based images also encircle their subject. His paper architectures are bereft of human presence even as their very emptiness implies the residue of human deed. Bleached of signifying action, their spaces have become diagrams of remembrance and projection. Their refusal to speak holds us hostage. Like the cigarette heir Jan Phillip Reemtsma - seized on March 25 by four masked men and held for thirty-three days to a $20 million ransom - we find ourselves imprisoned in circumstances not of our own making. Searching for clues as to the terms of our confinement we follow the paper trail from one place to another: from hanging shads to the new Athens of West Palm Beach democraoy, 07 - from disposable paper rolls of a Times Square massage parlor to the artificial hygiene of the Disney entertainment complex.08 Or, in the celebrated case of Reemtsma, a trail that led investigators from the German philosopher Peter Slotercliik's Critique of Cynical Reason to his underground place of capture.09 Reemtsma later wrote a book about his experiences. In the Cellar is the story not of his physical confinement but its psychological condition, recanted in the form of an extended interior monologue that describes his struggle with the "Stockholm syndrome". The condition by which an abducted victim begins to identify with his or her captors, it serves as a metaphor for much of Demand's work. The objective conditions of the histories to which they have become more or less identified, their seduction belongs in large part to their descriptive captivity. They are the records of the recording process, the silent rooms We enter in order to hear the sound of our own voices.

Out of such promptings murmurs begin to fill out silences, memories are reformed and histories become mythologies. And while Demand's images have been all but cleansed of the theories and postulations that surrounded the original, the song, like geometry, remains the same. That said, entire stories are left untold or at least muted inside the architecture of their revision. But far from draining the image of its essential subject matter these re-images substitute the abstraction of the myth for mythic abstraction. Emptiness becomes the permission of repossession.

The bloodlines of politics and crime run through these silent facades. Apartment 213 of 924 North 25th St. Milwaukee appears little different from the generic balconies that embellish the faceless facades of East German housing projects." In all instances the institutional shades of normality prevail. This corridor floor is covered with a gray substance not much like carpeting - more like something to keep the dust down, like something to cover the cement. Nothing in these images indicates what may have passed through the empty spaces or taken place behind closed doors. They are as isolated and uncommunicative as their most infamous tenants.

What we see is as nondescript as it was on July 23, 1991, when two cops entered to be greeted by a pleasant thirty-one-year-old blond man. He had invited them in to recover the key to the handcuft they found dangling from the wrist of a young man they had picked up just before midnight that evening. What greeted them was so unspeakable that none of the hundreds of images later taken by forensic experts were ever released into the public domain. For our knowledge of this interior, with its intimate juxtaposition of the tidy and the unspeakable, we must rely on eye-witness accounts such as that of Anne E. Schwartz, one of the first reporters on the scene who describes what she saw in her book The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough: '...in the back of the closet was a metal stockpot that contained decomposed hands and a penis. On the shelf above the kettle were two skulls. Also in the closet were containers of ethyl alcohol, chloroform, and fomaldehyde...Polaroid photos taken by Dahmer at various stages of his victims' deaths. One showed a man's head, with the flesh still intact lying in a sink. Another displayed a victim cut open from the neck to the groin, like a deer gutted after the kill, the cuts so clean I could see the pelvic bone clearly.' These are the things that we wish we didn't wish to see.

In the absence of images, blankness became the corroboration of depravity. Thus the iconography of death came to be identified with the spatialization of the unseen. The news photograph of Dahmer's corridor withheld forensic evidence just as surely as the Barschel crime scene splashed it across headline pages. Both images invoke societal taboos prohibiting the depiction of the dead. Only moral propriety separates the evidence from the image. Staring into the stone cold sobriety of Demanci's empty corridor we find ourselves equivocating between the threat Within and the horror without - between a nightmare reality and the nightmare we imagine that might be. Thus, the conceptual architecture of the unimaginable becomes a scene without a crime, an everyday occurrence as prosaic and mundane as a carpet on a concrete floor or a deadlock in a bolted room.

Not all of Demand's images carry the burden of forensic history. A tiered diving board rises out of nowhere.11 Its platforms are the cantilevers of fear, gravity and athletic achievement. They reach out from empty bleachers. Its vaguely menacing presence might, for some, recall the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the lepidopteral precision with which Leni Rietenstahl pinned her human subjects to the shadows of Albert Speer. Or, the associations may be more intimate: the metallic bloom of fear on your tongue as you ascend the ladder, the darkened circles of those Who have stood there before you, the first gasp of breath that carries with it the bleached smell of a chemical flower. All of these things can be read into the picture. They are the stories of humanity that rush in to fill its absence and contaminate the still water of the photograph with the blood of life.

And this in fact is almost exactly what happened. In 1988 Greg Louganis, still considered by most to be the greatest competitive diver ever, cracked his head while performing in the Olympic springboard preliminaries. 'I started coming out of the dive and then I heard this big hollow thud, and then I found myself in the water,' Louganis told ABC's Barbara Walters, 'I just held my head. I didn't know if I was cut or not, but I just Wanted to hold the blood in, or just not have anybody touch it.' A U.S. Olympic Committee doctor, unaware that Lougahis had recently tested HIV positive, closed the two-inch gash with five stitches. What had begun as a moment of poised equilibrium launched an epidemic of panic that spread through the Olympic body as it spread through the clear water below. 'I didn't anticipate hitting my head on the board,' said Louganis in the same televised interview. 'I didn't anticipate, you know, blood...that's where I became paralyzed with fear.'

So for a brief moment, in my imagination at least, blood and chlorine were mixed in the tourmaline architecture of the dive. I'd watch the endless adagio repetitions of the network footage and be mesmerized by the snap of the diver's head and the soft crease that rippled through the otherwise perfect descent. It was like watching gravity, the ally of grace, take him to an invisible edge. And then only the eerily violent signs of disappearance: the shudder of the board, the excruciating pause that preceded the splash. But the real resonance of these images lay in the disruptive effect they had on the fantasy marriage of pure blue sterility and physical perfection. Accident had contributed to Louganis' fall from grace. But it was endless repetition that lent it the inevitability of the Zapruder sequence. Fear, it seemed, had traveled back up the rungs of the ladder to take grip on the very architecture of the event.

Here is an anonymous architecture whose distinction arises only through the human presence it supports. Of itself, and of its creator, it says virtually nothing. Like the balcony,12 stairwell,13 or corridor14 its presence is registered only through the agency of others. All these spaces are empty vessels awaiting replenishment. Only verbs can activate these anonymous architectural nouns. Only language has the power to invoke the identity forsaken by its creators. And through this narrative proximity, the diving board, the corridor, the balcony, the stairwell become the very things which they are not, or perhaps, to put it another way, the very things they have always been predestined to be. What we see is the signature of deeds imposed upon the apparent blankness - a palimpsest of human activity written across these mundane architectural scaffolds. This is architecture of another kind, a psycho-architecture of partial remembrance and recognition that weaves its invisible skein into the solid structure of appearances. And from the unseen we learn to improvise the scripts of our lives.

Springboard was made six years after Louganis took his fateful dive. Neither does it describe the event nor does it discount its possibility. What in its availability to such association it does do, is acknowledge that the future retroactively shapes the past. And so we find ourselves forever searching for the parable in the stillness, the meaning in the metaphor. The springboard compels us to leaps of the imagination. But sometimes a springboard is just a springboard. It might be just this in the same way that Freud, in refuting his own phallic fixation, famously claimed that a good cigar could just be a good cigar.

Plenty of Demand's images refuse the assumption of history and its narrative caption. Even the most object paranoid would be hard pressed to identify in the uninflected surfaces of the pegboards, lawns, panels and sheets of material the shadow of an intentionality darker than that of their intended use. These are images that function as rest stops in an endless short circuit. The section of motorway we see wrapped around a steep" incline could represent the transit between subject and object, of site and non-site, of history and psychology - check points in the narrative dementia that Borges famously designated the circular ruin. No cars are visible. All that We see is the geometry of movement. The thin brown line of a guardrail marks safety's perimeter. On the other side, only danger and the unknown.

These are images that move in incremental steps. They cycle through the rubble of meaning to create an endless minuet of real and imagined time. Each is marked by the will to animation. Yet as they record the unmaking of the lost song, descend into the historical underpass, escalate to platforms of questionable security, they capture only the tunneling of this type of vision. Like the CCTV cameras that recorded the double mugging of two late-night revelers caught in a slipway between London's Charing Cross and the Royal Festival Hall, their looped sequences speak to an unfathomable disappearance.16 This is the type of photography that records what isn't seen. Only the commissioning of crime or the onset of catastrophe elevates surveillance into evidence and orders the scrutiny that transforms description into narrative. Recording nothing at all, We Watch as nothing passes, aware that in its passing we, like Godot, are awaiting the experience of something that may never have happened and may never happen yet. Before us is the conceptual structure of an event from which all eventfulness has been removed. Drama and chronology can become fictive remembrances entirely of our own making.

We tell ourselves stories in order to fill in the blanks; to draw over the yawning spaces of abstracted lives. We learn to decipher that which lends itself to cipher and discard the rest. Many of these images, through the act of looking and writing, will gain a significance they never had before. But what is written and what is written about diverge from their moment of confluence never to meet again. As Dave Hickey writes: 'For even though the visible artifact must necessarily predate the language that describes it, the artifact itself, as we stand before it, is always newer and more extensive than any word written about it - newer and more extensive, even than the visual codes incorporated into it, because whether we like it or not, we always confront works of art as part of that selfless, otherless, unwritable instant of ordinary experience.'17 Such are the limitations of description. The princess will be forever caged in the consulate or hurtling through the underpass to a fateful rendez-vous with history. 18 The plutonium will forever radiate from within the lock-up. The Marat will forever be mummified in a liquid tomb. But, where the eye encounters the stratagems of Demand's stringent vision, we discover less about the ways in which we learn to find what the dissembling image has promised to have hidden, than about those things that We can no longer unsee once they have been seen.

Notes:
01. Joan Didion, The White Album, Simon & Schuster, New York 1979, p.11
02. Drei Garage-n (Three Garages), 1995. According to the artist, a garage of the sort described in this image was for a short time host to a suitcase containing radioactive material. its contents were the celebrated subject of clisputed dis-ownership since neither authorities from East or West wished to c aim potentially deadly responsibility. Like a freighter of Liberian registry, the garage existed for a period of time as unclaimed territory apparently exempt from international law.
03. Flur (Corridor), 1995. See subsequent discussion of Jeffrey Dahmer.
04. Gangway, 2001. Loosely based on a news image depicting Pope Jean Paul as he was caught disembarking the Vatican jet in Berlin. Apparently not in good humor, the Pontift's likeness has been significantly omitted.
05. Joan Didion, The White Album, p.11
06. Jorges Luis Borges, Partiaf Magic in the Quixote, in: Labyrinths, New Directions, New York 1964, 19.196
07. Poll, 2001. Based on the Florida recount that determined the outcome ofthe 2000 U.S presidential election, Po!! is a litera1 fetishization of the paper on which democracy stands or fails.
08. Salon (Parlor), 1997. Originally commissioned by the NY Sunday Times Magazine for a special issue detailing the de~sIeazification or disneyfication of Times Square, the material for Salon came from the archives ofthe NY Times.
09. Campingtisch (Camping Table), 1999
10. Balkone (Balconies), 1997. These prefabricated architectural embellishments were used to re-face the faceless East German apartment buildings that became a part of unified Germany following the fall of the Berlin wall.
11. Sprungturm (Springboard), 1994 12 Balkone (Balconies),1997
12. Balkone (Balconies),1997
13. Treppenhaus (Stairway), 1995. According to the artist, this image was based on an apparently false recollection of the common stairwell of his secondary school.
14. Flur (Corridor), 1995
15. Brennerautobahn, 1994
16. Rolltreppe (Escalator), 2000. Falsely attributed as the site ot the Bulger child murders, Rolltreppe is based on a notorious elevated walkway near Charing Cross Where two people returning from an evening out were mugged by a group of youths. Seeing another band of people at the other end ofthe walkway they called out for help only to discover that they had contacted the Bad Samaritans. This second group on discovering that the victims were already stripped oi their possessions threw both men off the bridge where one later died in the icy Thames.
17. Dave Hickey, Air Guftar, Art Issues Press, 1997, p.166
18. Tunnel, 1999. Based on a recreation of the tunnel at Pont de i'AIma in Paris the scene of Princess Diana's fatal accident, Demand's titm recollects only the curvature of an endless event.





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