How to Do Things with Art. Dorothea von Hantelmann
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