What is characteristic of the 'time' which is accessible to the ordinary understanding, consists, among other things, precisely in the fact that it is a pure sequence of "now", without beginning and without end, in which the ecstatical character of primordial temporality has been leveled off.
Martin Heidegger 1
The camera saves a set of appearances from the otherwise inevitable supercession of further appearances. It holds them unchanging. And before the invention of the camera nothing could do this, except in the mind's eye, the faculty of memory. . . . Yet, unlike memory, photographs do not in themselves preserve meaning. . . . Meaning is the result of understanding functions.
John Berger 22
If, as Kant urged, all appearings appear within the frameworks of space and time,3 it is not remarkable that these frameworks are thematized as such within the appearings that are artworks. This thematization occurs in Angela White-Tragus' works at the level of the medium, at the level of content, and at the level of installation of the works. If the events referenced in White-Tragus' works are quotidian, however cathected they are for the artist as referencing moments of family life, the appearing of these events as mediated in the works is hardly quotidian. In this shift from the ordinary to the extraordinary, in the gap between the lifeworld and world of the work, between the event and the representation of event, is the mediation of the medium.
A medium consists not simply in the material cause of an artwork, but in the set of conventions and practices that can be deployed in the facture of the work. This set of conventions subsists both in their sedimentations in past practices within artworks, and is yet open, in the sense that new conventions can be invented and deployed. Whether sedimented or invented, the conventions of a medium are always already differentiated. Within the facture of an artwork, then, deployment of the conventions of an always already differentiated medium consists in the sequence of choices by which the work comes to be as it is, and not otherwise. Angela White-Tragus' works originate as photographs, and deploy the conventions inhering in photography, layering these photographic conventions with digital manipulation of the photographic image, and with physical manipulation of the digital output with the materials used in presentation. The material form of the works is further manipulated by the deployment of the conventions and practices of gallery installation, not least of which is eyelevel on a white wall.4 Not least among the conventions inhering in photography is its spatial-temporal position. Roland Barthes urged:
The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have now is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then. It is thus at the level of this denoted message or message without code that the real unreality of the photograph can be fully understood: its unreality is that of the here-now, for the photograph is never experienced as illusion, is in no way a presence . . .its reality [is] that of the having-been-there. . . .5
Barthes' regard of the consciousness of time in photographs might be compared to that ascribed by Alain Robbe-Grillet to the convention of the flashback in cinema:
Yet the most narrow-minded spectator has no difficulty understanding the flashback; a few blurry seconds, for instance, are enough to warn him of a shift to memory: he understands that from this point on he is watching an action in the past, and the sharp focus can then be resumed for the remainder of the scene without his being able to disturbed by an image which is really indistinguishable from the present action, an image which is in fact in the present tense.6
What is central in Barthes' and Robbe-Grillet interpretation of temporality in photographs and cinema respectively is viewer response, and particularly the mode of viewer response: at once was and as if is. That the facture of the image is always already an act of agency in a present for a future in which the image will be understood to have been made in a past but regarded as if yet a present. This is a curious ontology, and powerful, insofar as it has a structure similar to the functioning of experience in memory. Thus Edmund Husserl:
Through associative linkage, the no longer living worlds of memory also get a kind of being, despite their no longer being actual; the present 'awakens' a past, flows over into a submerged intuition and its world. 7
Memory presupposes fragmentation, and entails a synthesis of fragments through linkage. East Coast / Gulf Coast consists of nine components, installed in two vertical columns of five and four components each. With inkjet transparencies embedded in liquid plastic, each component is a moment of vision twice frozen: in the interval of exposure of the source photograph, and like the air bubbles trapped in casting the plastic resin, in the solidified plastic of its presentation. The title suggests the conflation of two coasts, two spaces experienced at different times: a synthesis of a single memory from multiple events. So also Fish Out of Water: a large inkjet transparency is mounted on a corrugated aluminum panel, with two smaller components to the right consisting of inkjet transparencies on Plexiglas held off the surface of the wall by an aluminum bracket. The opacity of the support of the larger component halts the gaze at its surface, while the transparency of the support of the two smaller components allows both the gaze and light to penetrate the surface, projecting the image onto the wall and thus doubling it.
Memory is a backward looking. In Re-reflected, the work has twenty nine components consisting of black wooden frames resembling rear-view mirrors, separating by the thickness of the frame an inkjet transparency and a sheet of reflective Mylar. Arrayed in three rows of ten, nine, and ten components each, the components are mounted off the wall, enhancing the rear-view mirror reference and, more saliently, denying the trope of two-dimensional artwork as window through a wall as a simulation of direct, unmediated vision.
Slo-Mo clusters twelve twelve inch square components into four groups of three. Each group fragments a single image into three sections. Together, the four groups form an sequence in which a narrative is implicit, if not explicitly developed. Fragments of landscape in the images, seen blurred as if photographed from a moving vehicle, seen as it were almost in peripheral vision, are doubled by the mirror Plexiglas on which the inkjet transparencies are mounted, with the mirror Plexiglas support further mediating the image by layering the viewer's reflection on top of, or within, the image. Seeing oneself seeing the image is not unlike seeing one's reflection in the window through which one looks. To see oneself seeing, as Octavio Paz put the matter, is "la mirada ciega de mirarse mirar," "the look blinded by seeing itself looking."8 In this Medusal blinding of re-flection on oneself seeing, vision is replaced by visuality:
Between the subject and the world is inserted the entire sum of discourses which make up visuality, that cultural construct, and make visuality different from vision, the notion of unmediated visual experience.9
Good Times, Good Times consists of twenty nine parts, each 1 5/16 inch square, installed in a 68 inch long row. The scale of the individual parts elicits close viewing; approaching closely to view the individual images embedded in clear epoxy obviates seeing the whole group. As in East Coast / Gulf Coast, small air bubbles are trapped in the resin during casting, and evoke an underwater feel for the images.
The nine photointaglio images comprising Reposo are arrayed in a three by three grid. The images, of a mounted insect, a suspended light fixture, architectural fragments, traffic at night, seem as unrelated, yet as beautiful, as "the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table."10 Yet one wants to find connections, to find coherent relations, between these disparate images. One supposes those connections, that coherence of relations, to have been present for the artist qua efficient cause in the facture of the work. There is no necessary basis for this supposition, for apart from its entailing the Intentional Fallacy,11 the linkages the viewer seeks may also be sought by the artist through the facture of the work. If Angela White-Tragus' sequential works do not give the viewer a facile exegesis of a specific narrative, something far more valuable is given: confrontation with the problematic of seeing and memory, of finding meaning, whether in the worlds of artworks or the lifeworld.
Angela White-Tragus attended Brookhaven College and the University of Texas at Dallas, and received the Bachelor of Fine Arts from The University of Texas at Austin. Recent exhibitions include: Expired Time, Women and Their Work, Austin, Texas; Plunge, University of Dallas; Blink, University of Dallas. She lives and works in Austin.