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Presence, Experience and Historicity in the Works of James Coleman

Traditionally, an artwork endures in its material permanence in the museum. There, it is able to engage in a kind of inter-generational dialogue with other works of art and through this to provide us with information on how we position and reflect on ourselves in history. Visual artworks in museums, as Donald Preziosi points out, “are assumed to bear within themselves traces of their origins; traces that may be read as windows into parti­cular times, places, and men­tali­ties." ¹ The museum is conceived as a place that enables the individual to experience his or her own formation as a historical process and as a process rooted in history.

In contrast, the 1960s and 1970s saw the birth of an art practice—Fluxus, Happening and Performance Art—that lived in the moment and had no interest in making the present a repeatable or reoccurring experience. ² “The culture of the 1960s was about immediacy and presentness,” writes Dan Graham.

“The present was detached from historical time. It was thought that one was to experiment in the here and now: thus life was a per­ceptual experience.” ³ Yet today these forms of art are part of art history and have become part of the museum, albeit marginally. Not, however, in what is fundamental to them: their eventfulness, but rather transformed into something else, into a document or a relic. The art of the 1960s and 1970s pronounced the experience to be art. But it did not solve the problem of how event-oriented art can exist in the long term within a cultural framework that is geared towards permanency, conservation and archiving. For the most part it did not even touch upon this issue. “Event art is actually ahistorical art—it cannot be handed down,” writes philosopher Dieter Mersch, describing a “fundamental difference between event and historicity, between singularity and per­manence,” which ran through culture at the close of the 20th century. ⁴

In opposition to this asserted “fundamental differ­ence”—and by means of James Coleman’s work Box (ahhareturnabout) from 1977—I will pose the question here: Can we conceive of a conception of an artwork, the museum and history that is based not on dichotomies of event and permanence but rather on their mutual, intertwining relationship? What sort of Zeitdiagnostik (time diagnostics) can be conducted by an art that is primarily event-oriented, that takes place as a momentary, instantaneous experience? Do means for an experience of history and historicity in art exist that are not bound to the object character of an artwork?

The oeuvre of James Coleman engages in a speculative discourse on these issues, both on a structural and topical level. Coleman’s work deals with the continuity of history and its suspension; it is both event-oriented and durational. Every work creates a scenario that—in regard to both its structural composition and its subject matter—provokes a reflection on the fleetingness of the moment and the possibilities of its endurance. Coleman’s work addresses historical and modern forms of representation; it reflects on the production of history and its spectacularization; it broaches the issue of recollection and memory and at the same time renders the impossibility of remembering a constitutive aspect of the work itself.

Coleman belongs to a generation of artists who confronted the legacy of Modernism. Having grown up with Minimal and Conceptual Art, i.e. movements that brought Modernism to an end, artists like Coleman, Graham and Jeff Wall have a heightened awareness of the reductivist qualities of Modernism, especially of its ahistorical and universalist tendencies. Attempting to reintegrate a historical dimension into art, Wall in the late 1970s embraces the historical gesture of painterly depiction, for example, he goes back to the tableau of Renaissance art.⁵ And from the mid-1970s Graham begins to incorporate more traditional forms of representation and narration into his art practice. When in the early 1980s a return to these conventions began to assert itself as a general traditionalism, however, artists such as Coleman, Graham and Wall had to face the question (that Walter Benjamin had already raised): How can one reference tradition without lapsing into a fabrication of history as an uninterrupted continuity?

Questions on how historical time can be reintegrated into art, how a consciousness of historicity is developed without fetishizing history, and how such a conception of history might be defined, were posed by many artists during this period. The impact of the Vietnam War and the radical social and political changes that shaped the late 1960s honed people’s awareness for experiencing history. In Coleman’s work, however, these questions have a specific framework that cannot be ignored. In no European country are contemporary politics so conflict-ridden as a result of history and the problems arising from its appropriation and interpretation as in Ireland. “Amnesia and nostalgia, the inability to remember and the incapacity to do anything else, are terrible twins,” ⁶ writes Terry Eagleton about Ireland, a country in which archaic and modern elements come together in a singular manner. Ireland is characterized by an uneven development between tradition and the modern age, which Eagleton (using Marxist terms) refers to as a “combined and uneven development.” ⁷ Modernization did occur in a number of areas (e.g. in parliamentary politics, in the colonial administration and in art), but in other areas the country lagged behind (industry, agriculture, education). This produced a dynamic, modern culture, which bears within itself tense contradictions between the archaic and the modern. The double bind between continuity and renewal, tradition and the modern, is a phenomenon historically anchored in this culture. Coleman takes up these contradictions—and through works that negotiate these tensions he introduces them into contemporary art.

Coleman’s early installations, produced when he was living in Milan in the early 1970s, explore the experience of time and recollection within a meticulously staged exhibition situation. Already these early pieces testify to Coleman’s interest in a subjective perception of time, an interest that anticipates his later preoccupation with the representation and experience of history. Flash Piece, a work from 1970, consists of different colored, alternately flashing light inter­vals, whose varying rhythms allow time to be perceived as something experienced subjectively.⁸ “In fact,” writes a critic, “the length of this duration, difficult to me­morize, and its variable location within the cycle [ … ] lead to different perceptions of time.”⁹ In this work Coleman introduces the light flash as a principle that will play a significant role in later works such as Box (ahhareturnabout): the flash as an instantaneous, flashing moment that elevates time to a structuring principle of the artwork and simultaneously makes it appear to stand still for an instant. These moments are dramaturgically arranged time segments or time sec­tions that generate a before and after, memory and repetition.

One year later Coleman produced the work Memory Piece (1971), in which the visitor listens to a tape recording of a text approximately four minutes long, which he or she can then recite from memory onto a second tape recorder. This second recording is then played to the next visitor who memorizes and recites it once again into another tape recorder, and so on. Produced and reproduced afresh each time the work is transformed through a temporal process involving appropriation and transmission. Maurice Blanchot once described the experience of an artwork as a presence that also is disappearance.¹⁰ Coleman is interested in the role that recollection plays in these dialectics of appropriation and loss, and how time shapes and influences it. It is in these non-linear and non-fixable to and fro movements of recollection that his exploration of a contemporary portrayability of history takes its point of departure.

Since the early 1980s, Coleman has produced elaborately staged slide shows accompanied by voice-overs, which he calls “projected images”: Living and Presumed Dead (1983–1985), Seeing for Oneself (1987–1988), Charon (MIT Project) (1989), Lapsus Exposure (1992–1994). In darkened, soundproof rooms often lined with carpet, several slide projectors coordinate the rhythmic sequence of a large number of images that appear and disappear, superimposed with other images and alternating with black transparencies. Technically, the “projected images” are subject to a linear, chronological process (one slide after another), but their dramaturgy is non-linear; it unfolds with forward and backward movements, repetitions, discontinuities and loops. Through their seriality, the individual images lose their stability, as if set in motion from the inside, rather than being blurred into an action or narrative. Not unlike a poem, the depiction seems condensed in a back and forth between current and virtual images, between present and memory. When recollecting the piece, one remembers not a sequence of distinct images but rather an endless variation of a single image. Kaja Silverman describes the work Initials (1993–1994) as a “single, long pulsating photo,” as if it were a single freeze-frame containing an infinite variety of potential different images.¹¹

Many of Coleman’s works have as their subject matter performances and stage situations. There are scenes from a boxing match in Box (ahhareturnabout) (1977), in Living and Presumed Dead (1983–1985) a series of actors stand in a line at the front of the stage awaiting applause at the end of a performance, while a complex and dramatic narration unfolds, and in Photograph (1998–1999) students in glittery costumes practice for a dance performance. The actual event, however, the performance itself, is omitted in all these works. What is shown is the preparations and follow-up, the act of entering and leaving the theatrical presentation. Precisely because the depiction of the actual event is left out, or as in the case of Box (ahhareturnabout) rendered indiscernible, the experiential dimension of the artwork takes center stage. Above all the expressive, onomatopoeic qualities of the voice suggest a simultaneous presence of actors and spectators. It gene­rates the illusion of a simultaneity of production and reception which is usually intrinsic to theater. Within the works con­ception—and this is what constitutes its aesthetic virtu­osity—, the perception and experience of the work itself seems to be integrated, in effect something that in a visual artwork (in contrast to a theater performance) by nature takes place retroactively. “Why do you gaze one on the other?” asks the young girl in Photograph and “We were … being positioned. [ … ] Come into … the light,” says the voice in Background (1991–1994). By using such dialogue that seems to address the spectator directly, Coleman opens up the representational level of his work to the situation in which it is presented. In Lapsus Exposure, the viewer sees a group of musicians on break in a recording studio. A speaking voice discusses the production of images and argues about the sound quality of the live voice over the recorded one. Topically, Coleman’s works often deal with performance situations, or rather the making of a performance, while simultaneously referring explicitly to their own event-like character. The content corresponds to the impact that the work has on a viewer. I will discuss this particular aesthetic structuring of an artwork at greater length in relation to Box (ahhareturnabout). Although Coleman’s works are representations, they also present something, place it in the world and render it existent. Their performative power is shaped and allegorized on various levels, as demonstrated in Initials (1993–1994), where a child’s voice spells out individual words and gradually familiarizes itself with them letter by letter, first the sound and then the meaning, as if the phonetic com­ponents of the words were physically present in the exhibition space, and in this manner their plasticity is made concrete for both the speaker and listener.

With the exception of a few authorized illustrations Coleman prohibits any documentation or technical recording of his work. His works are only constituted in the here and now of their perception and in the recollecting (necessarily subjective) speaking and writing about them. There is nothing that places itself above the situation in which the work is perceived; no privileged body such as a video recording that can be employed to verify the objective content of what is remembered. Equally in writing about these works I can only rely on my memory. Of course, to a certain extent, every artwork relies on the reconstruction of memory, but in Coleman’s work this instable process is reflected in the work itself. His works deal with how memory operates by raising the subjective and incomplete quality of memory to the structuring principle of the artwork. Topic, structure and reception by the viewer enter into an inextricable bond. In a work like Photograph, Coleman shows only the preparations and pauses rather than the event itself, thereby emphasizing the missing part of the representation while at the same time the omissions in the memory one has of the work effec­tively become a constitutive element of it. Coleman operates within a structure that cannot be fully grasped and reconstructed, always remaining fragmentary, and indeed it must remain so because the work relies on the discontinuous appropriation and recollection of the viewer. He sees representation itself as a dynamic and not as a static reality, produced through the viewer’s perception, appropriation and recollection. This intrinsically fragmentary existence of the artwork lays the ground for Coleman’s exploration of ways of representing history and historical experience. Central to this is the medium of the projected image, whose nature lies in being an image that takes place in space and time, and in the presence of the viewer between the projection device and projection surface. By presenting the projected images in a series, Coleman negates the permanence of the individual image, so that one must remember it. While watching the series of images, one instinctively compares and connects the preceding images, which now are part of one’s memory. In this manner Coleman renders the process in which his work is formed in a viewer’s mind into a structural part of the artwork, which is reinforced by the subject matter.

Box (ahhareturnabout), 1977

Box (ahhareturnabout) from 1977 is the work of Coleman’s that most strongly cites and involves the body. It takes up the rhythm of the human pulse and hence is based not on a formal but on a structural similarity with the body. Already from a distance one hears a hollow beat that fights its way through the exhibition like blood pumped through the body by a beating heart; an even, thunderous beat which reverberates like that of the systole and diastole of the human heart. When Box was shown at the Popes’ Palace in Avignon in 2000 as part of the extensive exhibition La Beauté, this beat passed through the solid walls of the building, becoming louder the closer one got to the installation. On entering the room it reached the limit of the tolerable; the rhythm took possession of the visitor’s body almost violently, and made it the resonating chamber for an artwork. Gilles Deleuze wrote that rhythm’s “capacity reaches much more deeply than the gaze [or] the hearing.”¹² Similarly the beat of Box had such a total impact on the body, going through it uncontrollably and with a vengeance.

The room was so dark that one had to feel one’s way through it. At regular intervals it brightened for fractions of seconds, allowing a glimpse of scenes from a boxing match. The visual staccato of stark black and white contrasts was no less violent to the eye than the acoustic beat was to the rest of the body. The flare-like flashing sequences of images were so brief that it was impossible to follow the course of the match. Rather than proceeding towards a climax one experienced the sequence of images as a continuous repetitive loop. The poor quality of the documentary material, the interference and the disjointed movements of the figures indicated that the footage was vintage. The visual staccato of stark black and white image contrasts reinforced the sense of the violence of the artwork. While the beat pulsated from an enormous loudspeaker, words and fragmented sentences like “Do it—again, again—stop, s-t-o-p, return … aha/aha, ah … go on, go on … again, again” spoken by a male voice could be heard from another loudspeaker. Commands like “break it, break it, stop, s-t-o-p-i-t,” a description of the fear (“regressive, to win, or to die”) and of the doubt and pain (“ooh … aah … the liver … the liver”) of the fight, were repeated several times as if someone were thinking out loud, interspersed with loud breathing or gasping. The voice seemed to be articulating the inner thoughts of one of the boxers, as if one became a witness to the boxer’s inner state of mind; speaking in an overly dramatic manner, like the voice of a body that has reached the limit of physical tolerance. The expressive intensity of its onomatopoeic quality recalls Antonin Artaud, who speaks of the “visual and plastic materialization of speech,” ¹³ of using it “in a concrete and spatial sense” and dealing with speech as with “a solid object, one which overturns and disturbs things.” ¹⁴ Fragmentary and veiled allusions like “Murphy’s the best” or “... the wood … the sticks … not capitals ...” in a vague, re­gionally specific, coded manner suggest a historical and local anchoring of the work—depending on one’s knowledge of Irish culture and history, e.g. if one knows that Murphy is a brand of Irish beer as well as a character in one of Beckett’s novels. In Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard talks of the “resonance of an image, which arouses echoes of the past.” ¹⁵ Similarly, Box connects to a history that never becomes concrete.

Box is Coleman’s only work that is based on documentary material. The images in this artwork are taken from footage of a fight between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey, to which the artist added regular black film frames. The September 22, 1927 Chicago fight is legendary in the history of boxing. It was the rematch of two world heavyweight champions. Jack Dempsey, responsible for taking boxing mainstream, was one of the most famous athletes of his time. He was the first boxer to earn millions of dollars. Like no other Irish athlete before him, he embodied the American Dream of working his way up from being the son of a penniless immigrant family of Irish miners and shoe shiners. Famous for his lightning speed punches, Dempsey succeeded in holding the heavyweight title for almost seven years. In 1926, the “caveman” who was considered unbeatable lost the world championship in front of a crowd of 120,000 fans. The fact that he had to hand over his title to an unknown fighter was considered a scandal. Gene Tunney, also of Irish origin, was the complete antithesis of a natural-born fighter. He did not at all conform to the image of a champion, read poetry and Shakespeare, and was considered too aesthetically refined and good-looking to be a boxer. The rematch a year later, awaited with great excitement, was to go down in boxing history as one of the most spectacular fights of its time. Initially, Dempsey appeared to be the stronger one. When he knocked Tunney to the mat, the referee did not start his count be­cause Dempsey, rather than going to his corner, stood over the other fighter’s body, giving him a few extra seconds to recover. Tunney won the fight, but his victory was not widely accepted, because it was believed that he had only won because of the extra time. Dempsey was robbed of his victory in a fight that went down in history as the “long count.”

More myths have grown up around the boxer than around almost any other sports figure. In innumerable stories the boxer embodies the rebel who employs his seemingly superhuman powers to fight for a place within the social order, frequently symbolizing the revolt of the individual against repressive social conventions. In connection with Coleman’s work, a symbolic reading of the fight between Dempsey and Tunney almost suggests itself, which, taken in conjunction with the recited sentence fragments, seems to allude to the conflicts of Irish history. Coleman’s work, however, aims neither to exploit the myth of the boxer, nor to deconstruct it. Although there might be a suggestion of such readings in Box they fade instantaneously behind the aesthetic impact of its visual and acoustic stimuli.

According to the historical version, everything was at stake for Tunney in this fight. The fight was a rematch, he had to win a second time to keep his title. At the moment of the fight he has his status, and yet simultaneously does not. In order to retain his identity as a champion he had to repeat, one might say reiterate, what he already is. This motif of repetition in a moment of existential instability charac­terizes Coleman’s work. In a boxing match it is not only the two contestants but also the spectators who share a common space and time; the division between the boxing ring and the spectator seems suspended by the spectator’s identification with one of the boxers. Similarly, in his work Coleman sublates the division between the representation of a historical event and its present experience, between an artistic representation and its (physical) perception. In her 1987 essay On Boxing, Joyce Carol Oates describes a boxing match as an artistic dialogue between two bodies, which is comparable to dance or music.¹⁶ For Oates boxing is “incredibly intimate” which might sound strange, but indeed reflects an experience that to a certain extent corresponds to the feeling that Coleman’s installation evokes. The pulse of the beat in one’s own body and the drama of the spoken word mimic the feeling of being both in the body and in the consciousness of the boxer. At this moment the division between inside and outside becomes permeable—as with the boxer, who is isolated and at the same time the center of a nervous, energetically charged perceptual field directed by a public. Coleman orchestrates a (visitor) body, who forms a bond with the visual and acoustic apparatus. This becomes most evident in the afterimages, which the eye of the observer produces on the screen in reaction to the stark contrasts between light and dark, the abrupt alternation of bright images and black film segments. These afterimages add an uncontrollable, physical aspect to the artwork, which fills the space between flashing image projections with the viewer’s feedback.

This fusing of body and cinematographic apparatus, of perception and portrayal, calls to mind the revolutionary gesture with which Walter Benjamin—in the figure of corporeal space (Leibraum) and visual space (Bildraum) —develops a vision of a mechanism that absorbs the subject; of an image that, as Sigrid Weigel writes, “moves in on the subject and materializes itself in physical innervations.”¹⁷ Coleman connects the perceptual apparatus to the spectator’s body; he links the mechanism to a visual-aural experience. This produces not only the highly complex aesthetic structure of the artwork, in which theme, structure and effect are interwoven and cor ­respond to each other, but ultimately also results in an intertwining of various time levels. The representation of the historical event and the perception of the artwork become, as it were, permeable to one another. For a moment it seems as if the historical was not depicted or represented, but rather rendered present and suspended in the aesthetic experience.

The Temporal Structure of Box: Rhythm, Fragmentation and Repetition

Rhythm (the structuring of time) is the central structural, topical and aesthetic principle of Box. On a structural level, Coleman draws from experimental film, more precisely from 1960s Flicker Films, which create a visceral experience, because they stimulate and confuse perception with an in­terruption, a stopping of time that disrupts the illusion of cine­matic movement. In their most rigorous form, Flicker Films use only the essential components of the medium: a light to dark flickering of images and alternation between sound and silence in an ordered rhythm.

Rhythm, a measure of time subjected to certain rules, is a significant component of Box not only in structural terms but also as subject matter. One could describe the boxing match as a temporal drama, or, better still, as a struggle with and against time. This is particularly true for the fight on which Coleman’s work is based. After all, it went down in history as the “long count,” the winner supposedly owing his victory solely to the prolonging of a measure of time:the timed count for the opponent lying on the floor. Oates writes about the significance of time in boxing:

When a boxer is “knocked out” it does not mean, as it’s commonly thought, that he has been knocked unconscious, or even incapacitated; it means rather more poetically that he has been knocked out of Time. (The referee’s dramatic count of ten constitutes a metaphysical parenthesis of a kind through which the fallen boxer must penetrate if he hopes to continue in Time.) There are in a sense two dimensions of Time abruptly operant: while the standing boxer is in time the fallen boxer is out of time. Counted out, he is counted “dead” [ … ]¹⁸

Time, or rather the measure of time, is of central importance in the history of boxing. The Queensberry Rules were in­tro­duced in England in 1867. These rules gave boxing a new rhythm and time frame, civilizing boxing and elevating the visual spectacle to a certain level of social acceptability. They also regulated the fight in terms of time with the in­troduction of three-minute rounds with one-minute breaks and ten seconds for a boxer to get to his feet after being knocked down (the count previously had been 30 seconds). These regulations must be seen as symptomatic of a histori­cal tran­sition, namely the development of controlled and standardized time—World Standard Time was introduced in 1884—that structures private and public experience within the industrializing societies of the 19th century. In the same way that factory whistles structured the work time and in­terruption of work, the new rules prescribed a temporal rhythm for the bouts and breaks of the boxing match. Essen­tially, boxing was adapted to the pulse of the modern age, to the tangible fact of passing time. As Oates writes, time became the “invisible opponent” ¹⁹ that can beat the boxer or knock him out. It is the invincibility of the third opponent—time, that accounts for the frequently melancholic aura surrounding the boxer, who is both hero to and victim of the public and greedy managers alike. The boxer fights only in order to fight again and, ultimately, to move ever closer to a final defeat, and with it the inevitable social, emotional and mental decline. “In the ring, boxers inhabit a curious sort of ‘slow’ time [ … ], while outside the ring they inhabit an alarmingly accelerated time.” ²⁰ The boxer’s time inevitably runs out.

Remarkably, Coleman replaces this linear conception of time with principles of fragmentation and repetition. There is no beginning and no end to the fight, just as there is no winner or loser; the rhythmic principle of the work loops endlessly. The experience of time that Coleman makes concrete is not narrative and focused on end as in Lessing’s conception of time and motion, but instead operates with repetitions, feedbacks and loops between apparatus and body. Rosalind Krauss’s book, The Optical Unconscious (1993) on the temporality of the visual is revealing in this context. As opposed to the timeless and incorporeal conception of seeing that is typical of modernity, she combines seeing with time, the body and the unconscious.²¹ In a kind of anti-history of seeing in modernity, the title of her book refers to Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” (1931) which describes the specificity of the medium of photography to create meaning—the ability of the camera to capture time and motion in a manner that the naked eye cannot.²² Benjamin combined a psychoanalytical yet materialistic perspective towards the technical and material properties of this new artistic medium. Influenced by his argument, Krauss turned to various artworks of the historical avant-gardes, including the Dada collages of Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp’s Precision Optics, both from the 1920s, introducing an innovative conception of temporality in visual art.²³ Ernst uses new optical instruments such as the magic drum (Daedalum) in his Dada collages to produce an ambivalent, broken image. From the outside, the rotating Daedalum presents a seemingly uniform image, while on the inside one sees an event broken into its individual com­ponents, but, as Krauss explains, what unites the experience of outside and inside, the perception of an illusion and its mechanics, is a beat or an oscillation that strikes through the field of the magic drum. For more than 15 years Duchamp was concerned with the Precision Optics , revolving discs specially adapted to record players in order to reveal colored patterns. As these discs rotate in an organic rhythm, these patterns appear to lose their shape and then regain it. The discs use a temporal rhythm, a beat, to create a shape and simultaneously negate it, which breaks up the formal coherence and constancy of the artwork from the inside out. Krauss sees a connection between this temporal pulse and the influence of the new phenomenon of mass culture: “It is,” she writes, “through the lowest and most vulgar cultural forms that the visual is daily invaded by the pulsatile: the blinking lights of neon signs; the ‘flip books’ through which the visual inert is propelled into the suggestive obscene; the strobe effects of pinball machines and video games—and all of this undergirded by the insistent beat of rock music surging through car stereos or leaking voicelessly through portable headsets.”²⁴

In outlining her concept of a “pulsating” visuality, Krauss also refers to Coleman’s Box as an artwork, which be­cause of its rhythmically composed structure is never en­tirely manifest or present.25 The visual flash of Box elevates time to a structuring principle and simultaneously makes it appear to stand still for an instant, breaking up the coherence of the form and connecting it to the productive force of the visitor-body. However, there is an aspect of the artwork that Krauss does not consider. In Box the rhythm introduces a concrete historical reference. In what Krauss describes as “a kind of pulsating On/Off, On/Off, On/Off,” a past event and historical moment flashes up. As such, the temporal rhythm in Box constitutes a time axis that mediates between present time and historical event, quite literally in the sense of a mediator through whom the historical can be experienced both in the present and as the present. There are two levels of time that play a role in Box, those of experienced time and historical time, which are united by the rhythmic principle of this artwork and mediated in the spectator’s bodily and aesthetic experience. This particular aesthetic structure makes the historical appear in a unique way: history is not re­presented but rather evoked in and as a present experience. Box produces an image of the historical, which takes place in a space beyond all pictorial representation. One way to discuss this particular notion of history and experience is through Benjamin’s thoughts on the philosophy of history, which were relevant to the art discourse critical of Modernism in the 1970s and seem to bear a particularly intimate relation to this artwork.

History and Experience

For Benjamin, too, the afterimage plays a role in his theory of experience and history. Drawing on the writings of Henri Bergson, the afterimage is a philosophical term describing the turn towards something that is already a thing of the past and can only enter the philosophical consciousness as a complementary entity or as an image contrasting with the present. ²⁶ The afterimage projects a memory, or as Bergson might say: it is memory. In that moment we see memory as present. For Bergson this idea was of central importance, because he thought—and this is the concept that Benjamin refers to—that every form of experience, of experienced time can only exist because a present perception combines it with a memory, interlocking the present and past.

As part of a longer passage that reflects on history and historiography, Benjamin writes in his history of Paris in the 19th century, The Arcades Project (1927–1940), “Our life, it can be said, is a muscle strong enough to contract the whole of historical time.”²⁷ For Benjamin it is in the idea of a compression of time—both within and outside the human body—when the mutual bracing of past and present becomes concrete, which embodies his vision of a history that continues to be operative in the present and a present that refers to history. This construction is based on Benjamin’s idea of a materialist historiography. The materialist conceives of time not as governed by the law of progress, but to construe and construct from jetztzeit a discontinuous compression and materialization of history. Essentially, Benjamin turns against a historicist concept of history and takes up the critique Friedrich Nietzsche had presented 40 years earlier, an idea which recurred in the philosophical debates of the 1920s. In historicism, history is construed as a constant chain of cause and effect that proceeds more or less without interruption, and like Newtonian mechanics is based on a conception of time as both continuous and linear. In this argument both humans and things are subject to objective processes, and this is what Benjamin criticizes in On the Concept of History, which he wrote in 1940, shortly before his death: “The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.”²⁸

Benjamin’s concept of history presumes the destruction of the historical continuum. He counters the mechanical, Newtonian notion of time with a “dialectical relationship in leaps and bounds” between the past and the present. The prevailing principle is that of interruption, fragmentation and repetition. Only when physical time is abrogated does historical time appear—in the sudden flickering of an image. For Benjamin, this is the mystery of time being rendered present, opening itself to history, thereby suspending all linearity. The flash or shock become images for this sub­lation of linear time. These formal principles translate modern forms of experience into the realm of the aesthetic. According to Benjamin, in modern urban life, a continuum of traditional experiences is replaced by isolated experiences, and, as he described it in an essay written a year earlier, “On some Motifs in Baudelaire,” “this may be due to a change in the structure of [ … ] experience.”²⁹ This loss of continuity becomes the starting point for Benjamin’s deliberations on the philosophy of history. Benjamin’s main focus is on finding a productive side to this rupture and grasping it not as a deficit but as a constitutive element in a new conception of memory and experience. The shock or experience of shock are concepts that Benjamin developed in his study of Charles Baudelaire and considered dialectically as designating both a loss and a gain in experience. On the one hand, the shock stands for the “energies threatening the living organism” that, if the consciousness’s defenses fail or do not materialize for some reason, penetrate the psychological apparatus. In this sense, it constitutes the loss of continuity and the dissolution of coherence.

By contrast to these threatening shock energies, how­ever, the shock as an aesthetic figure can also trigger in­sights. As regards its effect, threatening and yet triggering expe­rience, the image of the shock possesses a dialectic characteristic in Benjamin’s thinking. It is threatening, a massive stimulus that has to be repelled; yet, as a stimulus that breaches defenses and penetrates into the deep levels of the psychological apparatus, it also generates experience. A process is brought to a standstill and fixed for a moment, enabling it to appear in a new, independent way. Baudelaire captured the breakdown of the shock defense not in a boxing match, but in a duel, which can also be read as a symbol for the process of artistic creation.³⁰ In this struggle against the symbolic order, the writer fights himself, “‘stabs away with his pencil, his pen, his brush; [ … ] thus he is combative, even when alone, and parries his own blows.’”³¹

The specific quality of Benjamin’s concept of history is to have linked it to a lived dimension of experience just as, conversely, he extracts the concept of experience from its rationalist reduction in the philosophy of his day, and gives it a historical dimension. In the essay on Baudelaire, Benjamin writes on the philosophical debate over the concept of experience and makes special mention of Bergson’s research:

Since the end of the last century, philosophy has made a series of attempts to lay hold of the “true” experience as opposed to the kind that manifests it­self in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses. It is customary to classify these efforts under the heading of a philosophy of life. Their point of de­parture, understandably enough, was not man’s life in society. [ … ] Towering above this literature is Bergson’s early monumental work, Matière et mémoire. More than the others, it preserves links with empi­rical research. It is oriented toward biology. The title suggests that it regards the structure of memory as decisive for the philosophical pattern of experience. Experience is indeed a matter of tradition, in collective existence as well as in private life. It is less the product of facts firmly anchored in memory than of a convergence in memory of accumulated and fre­quently unconscious data. It is, however, not at all Bergson’s intention to attach any specific historical label to memory.³²

Bergson must be credited for linking perception as experienced time to the productive activity of memory and, more­over, for having shown how perception and memory in­terpenetrate. Just as perception of the present is fuelled by images from memory, the past can be given a more dif­ferentiated form in relation to the present. Benjamin quotes from Bergson’s Matter and Memory : “Memory thus creates anew the present perception; or rather it doubles this per­ception by reflecting upon it either its own image or some other memory-image of the same kind.”³³ In our perception we are, as Bergson puts it, “constantly creating or reconstructing. Our distinct perception is really comparable to a closed circle in which the perception-image, going towards the mind, and the memory-image, launched into space, career the one behind the other.”³⁴ While for Bergson memory as time brought into the present is determined subjectively and later biologically, Benjamin is interested in images of collective memory. “Where there is experience in the strict sense of the word, certain contents of the individual past combine with the material of the collective past,” as he writes.³⁵ In this sense, “experience” can be understood comprehensively as the potential of a past that is rendered present. This was Benjamin’s revolutionary achievement, for he transferred the experience of lived time from the personal into the his­tor­ical sphere and thus proposed a new type of mediation be­tween the collective and the individual, the past and present.

One of the linguistic concepts that Benjamin uses in order to find an aesthetic form for the linkage of history with present experience is that of the dialectical image. For Benjamin, the dialectical image is an image that is imbued with time. The dialectical image is imbued with real time “not in natural magnitude—let alone psychologically—but in its smallest gestalt.”³⁶ This “smallest gestalt” is the temporal difference discerned in a quotation or testimony to the past. In it, we find a concrete instance of that volatile linkage of jetztzeit and past that Benjamin tries to pinpoint. In The Arcades Project he writes:

It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present casts its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relationship of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language. ³⁷

Benjamin’s “image” of history initially refers to the rejection of a one-dimensional understanding of history as a linear-successive process. In the dialectical image, time is sublated as a linear notion when in the “now of its recognizability” the past and the present meet directly and without distance. ³⁸ The past is rendered present; it flashes up as an image, creating correspondences between jetztzeit and the past. In the dialectical image, past and present here and there mutually illuminate one another. It is an image that, to quote Georges Didi-Huberman, “is able to remember without imitating, that comprises a new, indeed unheard-of and truly invented form of memory.” ³⁹

Although Benjamin’s dialectical image is not meant to be a material image, but suggests a form of representation that is beyond all image-based visualization, as a figure of thought it sheds light on the aesthetic structure of Coleman’s installation. In Box, the representation of a historical event and its direct, physical experience, or in general terms, topic, compositional structure, materiality and effect, inces­santly and dialectically refer to one another. Coleman’s work creates a representation that cannot be pinned down. The subject of the boxing match corresponds to a mode of representation that is structurally very similar to the rhythm of the punches, to the discontinuous shock-like rhythm of the visual pulse with the hammer-like beat. Coleman’s work produces an effect (the rendering present of a fragmentary and discontinuous image of history) that is already an innate structuring principle in this work (as fragmentary and dissociating as it is). The artwork is based on a form of frag­mentary representation, which concurs with a conception of history that is likewise defined by fragmentation and dissociation. Because the dividing line between the artwork and the viewer’s body appear to dissolve, seemingly we, the viewers, penetrate the body of the boxer, just as the visual/aural apparatus penetrates our bodies. If we understand this artwork—and in fact this is what I would like to propose—as a kind of contemporary history painting, we must also accept it as a radical renegotiation of this very idea. Not only because it questions a positivist tradition of historical representation and the beliefs in continuity, progress and permanence that come with it; nor—as I have discussed in reference to Benjamin—because it replaces a linear understanding of time with an idea of history that is seized and actualized from the present and at the same time in the present, but because the artwork creates an image without being a representation. Like Benjamin’s idea of the dialectical image, Box evokes an image of history that is beyond pictorial depiction. And this is because its actual location is neither the visual nor the aural medium but a visitor-body that is physically seized by the impact of the beat and integrated into the work. It is only in the visitor’s physical and reflective experience that the individual parts of Box (the visual pulse, the beat and the voice) blend to form the work. Only there does this installation materialize in its entirety as an artwork. And only there does this work’s conception of condensed time become concrete—in a moment that is both jetztzeit and history simultaneously, like, to borrow Benjamin’s words again, “a muscle that contracts historical time.”

In this staging Coleman brings two distinct levels of the work of art together: the level of representation and portrayal, which shows and re-presents something , and a di­mension within which this portrayal shows itself, making its reality-creating effects explicit. Coleman’s work produces an effect (the envisioning of a fragmentary and discontinuous image of history) that is already present in the (just as frag­mentary and dissociated) structure of the work. It is only through the conjunction of these three areas of subject matter, structure and physical effect that the meaning of the work finally emerges. It is in this particular aesthetic con­struction that the singularity of this work of art lies, and also its link to an aesthetics of the performative, in Austin’s terms.

Digression: The Saying of Doing (John L. Austin)

When John L. Austin introduced the expression “performative” in the mid-1950s, he was referring to the active character of speech. The underlying proposition of his argument is that under certain conditions language creates the reality it describes, so that one actually does something with words. In the 1990s, Judith Butler gave Austin’s linguistic theories a social and political horizon by emphasizing the constitutive and the restrictive powers of conventions; both are prerequisites to giving the individual the performative power to create a reality.

Butler’s wider application of the performative subsequently was adopted by cultural studies, in that it is also possible to examine the performativity of visual art as a specific area of social praxis. In my view, however, this extension of Austin’s theory also led to the loss of an essential aspect of the con­cept: Austin not only describes how we take action with words, but also develops a way of speaking in his own presentation in which his saying and doing with words are related to one another in a performative manner.

Austin’s lectures, published posthumously in 1962 as How to Do Things with Words, operate as a kind of instruction manual; establishing the existence of a performative level of speech by demonstrating how the production of meaning can be created through “doing” while speaking. This view of Austin is also suggested by Shoshana Felman and Sybille Krämer (independently of one another and with different emphases), both of whom I draw on here.⁴⁰ Their reading of his text varies from the usual one inasmuch as they understand How to Do Things with Words not only as a proposition, but also as a staging; not only as a text that speaks about doing things with words, but that also does something through speech. According to Krämer, “understanding Austin not only means listening to what he says, but also looking at what he is doing by saying it.”⁴¹ But what does Austin do? He begins his lectures by aspiring to formulate a theoretical definition of the performative, based on the distinction between a performative-generative and an asseverative-constative use of language. Austin very soon realizes, however, that this distinction is untenable, as there is no unequivocal criterion by which the performative and the constative can clearly be differentiated. At this point he decides to “go back to fundamentals,” as he puts it.⁴² He examines a series of criteria and rules through which he continually awakens new expectations of a theoretical systemization. As the newly conceived rules become more and more complex, the reader begins not only to doubt their validity, but also to wonder whether Austin is even interested at all in establishing a clear theoretical definition of the performative. He contrives a wealth of situations in which the performative power of the act of speech comes to fail: he marries donkeys, baptizes penguins, appoints horses as consuls. In the end, every absurd and at times mys­terious attempt to fix the meaning of the term performative demonstrates the failure of the rule. For most academic readers, Austin’s lectures are a seminal but flawed attempt to define a theory of the performative, and therefore in need of improvement.⁴³ Read with Felman and Krämer, however, How to Do Things with Words seems more like a performance of the failure to establish the meaning of the performative—with the effect that, precisely because the performative cannot be determined in a conventional manner, a different modus operandi is needed to approach the concept and elucidate its meaning.

Austin, who taught at Oxford University, belonged to a continental tradition of analytic philosophy, a system of thought characterized by seeking meaning in concepts themselves, and not in their efficacy. In How to Do Things with Words he initially operates within this tradition—as his excessive use of examples illustrates—but eventually causes its internal logic to collapse. Austin shows that in saying there is always a doing and that this doing always brings forth meaning. Finally he demonstrates how this interaction can be configured. Austin devises a concept that eludes its own determinability, but that through a praxis, through use, becomes concrete, and in its application provides the most consistent definition of its own idea. Because of his subtle ability to connect various points of view and ways of thinking, the Wittgenstein philologist Georg Henrik von Wright dubbed Austin the “doctor subtilis” of Oxford postwar philosophy, recalling a 13th-century Oxford colleague who had been given this epithet. Wright sees a similar talent in Austin, describing him as “the unrivalled master in detecting conceptual shades of linguistic usage—superior in this art even to Wittgenstein.”⁴⁴

From this perspective Austin’s failure to reach a theoretical definition of the performative is not a methodical failure, but a failure with method. In How to Do Things with Words, his speech employs aspects of an aesthetic model of tension that is not only rhetorical but also dramatically staged between the levels of saying and showing, message and performance, in which words come to act and through this to mean. Within this conceptual frame, Austin can be seen not primarily as the theorist of a basic but deficient clas­si­fication of the performative, but rather as a thinker who introduces a new relationship between act and referent. In the separation between word and deed, between the sign and what it signifies, there is a foundation of enlightened thinking that underlies every cultural praxis. “This is the nerve centre of the idea of ‘representation’: not epiphany, i.e., presentness, but rather surrogacy, i.e., envisioning, is what signs have to accomplish for us,” writes Krämer.⁴⁵ This kind of relationship to the world, which is rooted in the semiotics of representation, is countered by Austin, in his concept of the performative, an approach that substitutes an ontological distinction between sign and being, word and deed with an intertwining and mediating of these levels. In How to Do Things with Words Austin shows that action can be taken with words and also how such action is organized and given significance. He demonstrates, accentuates and frames a performative level of speech, while at the same time providing a model for the consequences of shifting the production of meaning onto this performative level: the perception of the meaning of an utterance or text not only, or not even primarily, in what it says , represents or depicts, but above all in what it does, i.e., the real effects it brings about.

There is a methodical challenge in this emphasis shift from saying to doing that, as I think, can be made productive to the understanding of works of art. What is the relationship between an artwork’s meaning and its effect? How do contemporary artists work with different modes of production of meaning? Every work of art functions by bringing forth a moment of aesthetic experience that can endure, yet is repeatable, thus enabling the work of art to exist in historical time. On a thematic level, Coleman’s Box allegorizes this temporal existence of a work of art as an experience and portrayal of time. Performatively, however, it shows how the artwork itself can bring about these various levels of temporality and make them tangible—in an artwork that creates a moment that is both now and historical. Coleman’s works thematize the practices of cultural memory, consciously aware of being a part of such a praxis which they also modify and form. Coleman sets up relationships between the portrayal and the creation of history; he gives expression within the work of art to a discontinuous understanding of history, and also intervenes formatively and transformatively in the similarly discontinuous passing on of his work into histo­rical record. Understanding this approach as significant and as an element of his artistic message—in other words, to perceive the saying of doing—requires the methodical shift of emphasis that Austin instigated with his concept of the perfor­mative and put into effect with How to Do Things with Words.

Box and Minimal Art: Historicity and Experience

Coleman alludes to the distinctive iconographic feature of Minimal Art with the title Box and, at the same time, to a certain extent also takes up what Rosalind Krauss calls the primacy of Minimalist sculpture’s “lived physical perspective,” namely its spatial orientation to the viewer’s body.⁴⁶ Minimal Art fundamentally changed the relationship between the object and its viewer, between art and its venue, by shifting the meaning of the object completely to the experience that is made with and through the object. The level of representation and that of narration both step behind the object’s impact on a situation; an impact that throws the viewer back on him or herself, in space and in a situation. Although it is difficult to pinpoint this experience, it is not only the con­stitutive role of the viewer that comes into focus here, but also the spatial and atmospheric conditions.

For Krauss this phenomenological orientation to­wards experience, something she elaborates primarily in reference to Robert Morris’s sculptures, brought with it not only a new approach to the physicality of the body, but even a kind of compensatory, if not utopian gesture. ⁴⁷ A viewer-subject, alienated in everyday life from his or her own experiences, was to be re-aligned with them through the experience of art. “This,” Krauss says, “is because the Minimalist subject is in this very displacement returned to its body, re-grounded in a kind of richer, denser subsoil of experience than the paper-thin layer of an autonomous visuality that had been the goal of optical painting.” ⁴⁸ In the course of time, Krauss revises her original position, acknowledging that the promise of Minimal Art not only remained unredeemed, but to a certain extent had even turned into its opposite. Looking back, she no longer considered Minimal Art to be the seedbed of a richer form of art experience, but rather as having paved the way for its own depletion. Because the Minimal Art object focuses not only on the viewer’s body but also on the surrounding situation, i.e. the exhibition context, this desubstantiation of the art experience also impacts on the museum. For what is in the final instance bereft of content is, Krauss suggests, the historical dimension of the art experience, or, more specifically, a dimension that references the historical. Krauss becomes aware of this at that very moment when, at the end of the 1980s in America, the social function of the museum profoundly changed. A new tax law enabled objects to be sold from collections, which affected the status of the museum collection, as did new spatial concepts, new museum design and presentation forms. Krauss quotes Thomas Krens, then the director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, a key protagonist in this change, who referred deliberately to Minimal Art in explaining these developments: “It is Minimalism that has reshaped the way we [ … ] look at art: the demands we now put on it; our need to experience it along with its interaction with the space in which it exists; our need to have a cumulative, serial crescendo towards the intensity of this experience; our need to have more and at a larger scale.” ⁴⁹ Krens understood that conventional museum architecture was not able to provide the kind of experience that these Minimal objects required. These sculptures prompted him to opt for new design paradigms, preparing and anticipating new spatial concepts that took their cue from warehouses and factories and presentation formats that were geared towards com­prehensive, monographic shows. “Compared to the scale of the Minimalist objects, the earlier paintings and sculptures look impossibly tiny and inconsequential, like postcards, and the galleries take on a fussy, crowded, culturally irrelevant look, like so many curio shops,” Krauss observed. ⁵⁰

When, in 1989, Krauss visited the Panza Collection in Paris and saw an exhibition of works by artists such as Robert Morris, Dan Flavin and Carl Andre, she realized in what way Minimal Art indeed heralded a “radical revision” of the museum. The powerful presence of these objects, she wrote, renders the room itself the object of an experience. Thus the museum itself becomes for the viewers an objectified and abstract entity, “from which the collection has withdrawn.” ⁵¹ This experience, as Krauss explains, is very intense and ef­fective, but in the final instance remains essentially empty, as it is merely aesthetically and not historically determined. The experience evoked by the Minimal Art object is oriented towards an individual who constitutes him or herself in the act of perception and hence only temporarily, from one moment to the next. This aesthetic experience, in its radical contingency and its dependence on the conditions of the space and its respective situation, creates a specific kind of subjective experience, but not one that can (or intends to) anchor the individual in the coordinates of history. This experience of self is one that neither is nor can be historically underpinned. With Minimal Art, Krauss argues, the museum becomes a space for a new spatial/aesthetic dimension of experience, but is no longer a space where history, or rather, the individual’s rootedness in history, can be experienced:

The encyclopedic museum is intent on telling a story, by arranging before its visitor a particular version of the history of art. The synchronic museum—if we can call it that—would forgo history in the name of a kind of intensity of experience, an aesthetic charge that is not so much temporal (historical) as it is now radically spatial [ … ] ⁵²

Precisely because these objects engender an experience that remains contingent and does not refer to an essentially stable subject, this experience cannot spawn a cultural context such as is traditionally represented by the museum. Instead of “reconciling” the individual with his or her own experiences, Minimal Art, according to Krauss, ultimately serves to underscore what she calls the “utterly fragmented, postmodern subject of contemporary mass culture” ⁵³ that no longer finds the terrain for experience within a historical trajectory. In other words, it nurtured an individual that is subjugated to spectacle.

Indeed, Minimal Art, albeit not in factual terms (as with Happenings or Fluxus events), but with regard to its underlying conception, does not fit into the customary model of history used in museums. Although today Minimal artworks can be grasped as belonging to a specific time and can be represented as such, in terms of their conception they initially excluded a specific type of reference to history. Minimal Art maintains a position beyond the historical determinacy of art and thus also refuses, to a certain extent, to fit into a museum as the mise-en-scène of a sequence of historically determined artifacts. In a certain way, Minimal Art robs this historical narrative of content, because it shifts the meaning of artworks onto the essentially general and indeterminate level of effect. If Tony Smith’s sculptures refer to megaliths, to Egyptian temples and to Herodotus, these references are not legible as the historical source or influence, and instead resort to something indeterminately archaic rather than to a specific historical epoch. ⁵⁴ Just as Minimal artworks are abstract—with their geometric shapes and qualities as pure objects—and seem to maintain a position outside the representational conventions outlined in art history, so, too, the experience of viewing these artworks remains abstract. This becomes clear, for example, in Smith’s oft-cited anecdote of his night-time experience on the not-yet-completed New Jersey Turnpike. Smith drove down the empty road and reported how this experience, for him, was quasi-aesthetic in nature and yet also shattered all the customary aesthetic orders. “There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it,” is how he summa­r­ized the experience, and it was clear for him that a reformulation of the aesthetic would also provoke a fundamental change in the conception of art, ⁵⁵ transgressing the aesthetic experience in a way that was universal. It was precisely this universality that ultimately rendered the experience of these works indeterminate and general.

When Krauss’s essay was published in Texte zur Kunst in 1992,⁵⁶ it was prefaced by a film still from the absurd Hollywood romantic comedy LA Story, in which the favorite pastime of the protagonist, played by Steve Martin, is speeding on roller skates through museums, something he does twice in the course of the film. First he races through the historical collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and then later through the Modern Art Department at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Euphoric, he enjoys his aesthetic buzz through art history, where the individual artworks pass him by almost like a film. The antithesis to the museum as the location of a collective, historical/cultural memory, as described in Jürgen Habermas’s model of the bourgeois institution intended to enable visitors to experience the formation of the bourgeois individual as a process rooted in history, can hardly be better described: here the museum becomes the site of the potential for hedonistic experience in which a subject is not constituted, but instead loses him or herself, in viewing his or her cul­tur­al heritage.

This discussion on the relationship between history and experience allows one to outline the significance of Coleman’s work Box more precisely: How does this artwork address the dilemma between art that is focused on experience and the structural framework of the visual arts that necessitate duration and continuity? To what extent does it reflect the relationship between artistic production and the culture of the spectacle?

In Minimal Art, it is the human being that experiences itself as a body standing in an indeterminate manner outside power, sexuality and history. In contrast, Coleman gives experience a historical-materialist contour. With Minimal Art, the intention was to oppose the art criticism of the day by producing a form of art that refused any subjective/linguistic appropriation. In Box , Coleman introduces a dimension of experience that does not exclude meaning, language, critique and history, but gives these categories a concrete form as the necessary basis for all experience. The subject is presented in a socio-geopolitical context, and at the same time enacted on the uncontrolled level of affect and physicality, thus in this regard unconscious responses. The body is thereby conceived as material, as a semiotic bearer of meaning, and, simultaneously, as a psycho-physiological being.⁵⁷ In this way, Coleman roots the individual and the individual’s experience in a concrete historical context. But he does not do so out of the wish to re-create a coherent tradition. Coleman’s work operates instead with a (Benjamin-like) dialectic between the fragmentary presentation of a historical figure and a present experience. It is as if the intention were to constitute an individual and an idea of history in the process of disappearing, one that results from a depiction and, simultaneously, exists on the very liminal boundary of that which can be represented or experienced. This process is precisely allegorized in the theme of the boxing match. Joyce Carol Oates has written that “every boxing match is a story—a unique and highly condensed drama without words.” She suggests that “boxers are there to establish an absolute experience, a public accounting of the outermost limits of their beings.”⁵⁸

Benjamin Buchloh terms Coleman’s works an “archaeology of the spectacle.” ⁵⁹ “In this respect,” he writes, “it is by no means unimportant that Coleman makes the classical arena of the culture of spectacle the object of his work: the public fight between two (athletic) rivals has re­peatedly fascinated artists in the 20th century—not only as a primordial form of spectacle but also as a fundamental metaphor for general social relations.” ⁶⁰ The concept of the archaeological introduced by Buchloh can be given greater precision through the thought of Michel Foucault. ⁶¹ Coleman’s approach is “archaeological” precisely in the sense that it does not involve a linear concept of history, but, in a radically discontinuous way, forges links between subjective experience and specific historical events, relating in turn to general cultural phe­nomena in the history of modernity.

When Guy Debord, who published his opus magnum The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, was asked 21 years later when he would date the beginning of the culture of the spectacle, he answered that the spectacle was hardly 40 years old when his book first came out. ⁶² In other words, its historical beginning can be dated to the late 1920s, even to around 1927, the year of the rematch between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey. It was the first boxing match to be broadcast live on radio and transmitted by 79 stations in Africa, Latin America, Europe and Australia. It was thus one of the first global mass sports events, a linking of the body with the abstractions of international transmission. ⁶³ Likewise Joyce Carol Oates describes its character as an event for the masses. “Photographs of these events,” she writes, “show jammed arenas with boxing rings like postage-sized altars at their centers, the boxers themselves no more than tiny, heraldic figures. To attend a Dempsey match was not to have seen a Dempsey match, but perhaps that was not the issue.” ⁶⁴