Working (with) the Dead: Agency and its absence in the use of the found image | Andrew Dearman

Summary: Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Andrew Dearman Would it be strange if Shakespeare appeared up the back of a theatre in which one of his plays was being performed and called out; ‘I didn’t write that!’? Would it be odd if Pollock sent the NGA an email advising them that ‘Blue Poles’ had been hung upside down? Most probably, given that both are dead; however such questions raise interesting issues of interpretation and agency. Among other things, interpretation involves a performance of the space between various sites, such as; the viewer, the viewed, and the maker. Likewise a conventional understanding of collaborative practice is that it is one in which a relationship between multiple sites of agency is performed. Added to this is the understanding that agency is performed within agreed upon boundaries, whether they be contextual, conceptual or material. This performative space of meaning becomes interesting however, when one site is less active than the other—when one is in fact dead. Using examples such as vernacular family photo albums; Gerhard Richter’s ‘Atlas’ and Tacita Dean’s ‘Floh’, this paper considers the degree to which the agency of the author of the vernacular photograph may be re-enacted and performed by proxy through the inclusion of the image in a work produced by an artist. The paper asks how such works might sit within conventionally understood definitions of collaboration. The theoretical frame work within this paper is provided by the material semiotics of STS studies, which privileges the role that inanimate objects play in the construction of the social relations that surround them—in other words—inanimate objects actively collaborate. Thus, images of the dead, by the dead, can be said to collaborate in highly complex ways. Andrew Dearman teaches Art History at Adelaide College for the Arts (TAFESA) and Drawing and Art History at the South Australian School of Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia where he completed his PhD titled 'Art Practice and Governmentality; The role modelling effect of contemporary art practice and its institution' in 2008.