Tom Sherman Presenting Text (1983)
“Tom Sherman Presenting Text,” Parachute, no. 30 (March – May 1983), pp. 26-32.
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Tom Sherman Presenting Text
animals, weather, car crashes and communication
Tom Sherman’s works, or rather texts, are not easy to classify: they break rank and context. His texts have appeared on gallery walls or in cinema windows and lobbies, alone or in conjunction with photographs. Fiction and media journalism have assumed more orthodox forms of publication, while other texts have passed between performance and video—in spoken, taped or printed form.
The texts do not equivocate as much as their categories. In crossing media lines, these texts may change their appearance or mode of delivery, but they do not change their identity. That is, the presentation of texts in different contexts and diverse media does not necessarily determine the text’s form or connote its content. The texts escape multi-disciplinarity in the pursuit of other “themes” and strategies. Writing predominates although its practices may not be visible in relation to or subsumed within other media. Writing is reduced in video, for instance, by a prejudice towards the image. Sherman’s videotapes will re-establish a balance between the audio and video elements. Yet it will not necessarily confirm a video practice. This opposition (audio - video) is only one of many that define a particular strategy for artmaking. For this reason, a text can work to advantage subsumed within a discourse but operating outside it. The fiction and so-called articles are ways of working within the various art disciplines. [1] Moreover, the irony of this writing must be reckoned with: this writing does not naively promote a practice. The opposition journalism and fiction, or truth and fiction, is only one more category put into question and displayed in this textual work. (When I say “textual,” I do not mean the Theory of the Text inflected by semiotics and “deconstruction.” In the opposition between text and communication, Sherman would opt for the latter. The death of the Author and the birth of the reader will have another meaning here.)
The texts respect neither context, media nor their own history. Among all these texts, the “same” text might reappear in another written context [2]; or a mechanically printed text might electronically resurface in a character-generated videotape or as a sound track. [3] One text may appear in performance, “tele-performance” and broadcast television and return years later in a videotape. [4] Other clips pass without quotation marks or reference between fiction, articles, exhibition, performance and videos. [5] In each of these instances of the return of a text, it is not a case of re-presentation, nor is it the gap that the same text as difference offers to theory. Another strategy moves through this body of work undermining the security of the copyright, presence and authority of the individual voice of the artist’s “I”—the artist who speaks authoritatively or imaginatively as the guarantor of the presence and truth of the work. In disrupting this presence and guarantee, in unsettling the categories of fiction and realism, Sherman questions the status and role of the artist in communication with society.
Sherman is a trained sculptor who works in writing and video. (“I am personally interested in making art in the appearance of good writing and better television,”) [6] His training in art does not lead him to use language for the description of the context, limits or conditions of existence of an artwork in the manner of an artist like Lawrence Weiner. His writing/art is not contextually or formally confined. But his work has, in its own way, aligned itself with language practices in art over more than the last ten years. [7]
In Canada, this language orientation was synonymous with the development of the parallel gallery system or individual artist-run spaces and the “dematerialization of the art object.” (As well, in Canada, all three are focused against specific institutional bases and the state bureaucratic support of the Canada Council.) In retrospect, it seems that the surfacing of language passed through three distinct phases: (1) a formal conceptuality (which was too early to be mirrored in Canada except in its behavioural-performative aspects); (2) a semiotic apparatus (which, from the mid-seventies on, provided the theory and methods for much photo-textual, performance and video work); and (3) diverse representational modes. [8] These language conditions can be matched chronologically against successive art strategies from an alternative attitude (parallel galleries; “oppositional” counter-culture; avant-garde perceptual-behavioural “revolutions”), to “inhabitation” and ideological critique (“appropriation,” “deconstruction” and “parasitical” discourses developing parallel to other institutions and engaged in so-called critical disruption), to representation and communication (recognition of cultural responsibility, but also demand for success outside previous marginality).
Sherman’s early objectivist and behavioural prose was presented in the “conceptual” con-text of the gallery (such as in the artist-run A Space) or in artists’ publications (1). His writing since has worked with the photograph and, by extension, the video image (2). And his work seems concerned in part with the relations of production (between artist and technology) and with the condition of representation between artist and audience in communicating information (3). His work, however, shifts ambiguously between these last two categories. Most ironic, however, may be the fact that since late 1981 Tom Sherman has worked at The Canada Council as Video Officer and presently as head of the new Media Arts Section. Elevation into the bureaucratic support structure of Canadian art may not signal the end of Sherman’s creativity as an artist but may only be one more move within the art strategy I want to portray here.
WRITING EYE AND VOICE
The early writing was descriptive—photo-descriptive in the manner of Robbe-Grillet. Meaning was on the surface—reading was directed to this surface rather than to a theme (the myth of “depth”)—and the time of reading was co-existent with the narrative. Whether describing a self or a scene, the writing guided the attention of the “viewer”/reader through the construction of images in time. As much as this gave the “referents” of description objectivity and reality, the moment-to-moment amplification of vision (controlled by the artist) and “visible” content from sentence to sentence was in fact a narrative and could easily be deflected to the fictional. At the same time, a “prescriptive” rather than descriptive tone entered the writing spoken from a first person point of view. With this shift, another rationale within the text became necessary to maintain the reality and authenticity of what was spoken in the text. (There are two strategies here: one within the text seeks to maintain this authenticity; the other, as the intention of the writer, seeks to display the apparatus of its construction.)
The photograph, or rather the description of photographic subjects, actively entered into these strategies. Especially between the years 1975–1978, Sherman wrote from photographs. He requested black and white or colour 8” x 10”s or 4” x 5”s from photographers he knew but whose subjects he was not familiar with. Early attempts showed the texts restricted to a verbal survey of what was photographically given.
In August 1977, Sherman exhibited more of these works as well as some texts whose descriptive prose, according to the author, had developed from the process of writing from photographs. These latter texts were exhibited in the windows of a Toronto film theatre, Cinéma Lumière. [9] Writing from the Photographs of Lynne Cohen and Rodney Werden occupied the theatre lobby. Sherman had already written from the photographs of Lynne Cohen. His prose at the time seemed adequate to the nearly fetishistic clarity of these empty, mundane spaces. The Cinéma Lumière texts marked a departure from the descriptive constraints implied by the mute surface of portrayal and the framed limits of the photographic space. A photograph frames a scene and records an instant of time. For a writer to describe the objects and their spatial distribution already is to disturb that presence. Writing follows the narrative time of looking at an image, not recording a site. Description and presence are in opposition.
These photographs were exhibited with the texts. The photographic intention of Lynne Cohen had not changed; Sherman’s had. Sherman used the people-less space of the photograph as a scene for the writing. The writing commanded the photograph as if it was a trace of the writing. The photograph was now situated in time, not as an instant of the shutter mechanism, but.as a moment in an event, one point in a narrative, opening or closing it, maintaining it in its absence. The “objects” within the photograph acted as referents for the written text. They ground the narrative in specificities, gave it its authenticity.
Werden’s photographs perhaps were more open to this deviation as their fetish was the content not the form of the shot. Sherman used two photographs: one of the lower torso of a reclining woman, and the other of a woman’s shoe and foot alone. The writing on the first photograph gave it and its subject a history. Objectively, the photograph must mark a meeting between the photographer and subject. The history in the writing anticipates that meeting. But the woman as well is given a personal, although immediately mundane, history (shaving legs in preparation, arranging a pose, etc.), which can only be fictional. The pose is the end point of a narrative and an anticipation of the photographer. The instants before as well as the subjective expectation are not given, and cannot be given, in the photograph. More than anticipation, the writing also directs us out of the frame: “With the shoes on she waits for him to show. From her position reclining on the couch, she can see her legs in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall.” Neither her face nor the mirror are visible to us.
Fictional devices direct us to what is outside the frame and anterior in time. Video, with its possibilities of real and edited time, carries on this demonstration: marking and showing time, conveying not only what is outside the frame but controlling what is in it as well.
Three more of these texts were published in PARACHUTE 9 (Winter 1977-1978). One from 1977, Writing from a Photograph by Rodney Werden, pursued the fictional by projecting out of the frame and into the subject and her life. The others from 1975 were restricted to the descriptive framework of what is given by an 8” x 10” photograph and what is demanded by the writing strategy. An introductory explanatory text accompanied this publication, but none of this fictional strategy was revealed. It was couched instead in terms of an epistemological investigation. What was re-presented in the writing was not the photograph, but the original subject as given by the photograph—the distance between the writing and the original subject or site that the writer did not know. What interests Sherman here, besides the collaboration, is the transformation of content through different media, not epistemological or ontological questions provoked by the gap between writing and photograph, primary presence and secondary evidence. That is why the photograph is not always necessary in presentation. Without the existence of the photograph, these texts are “original” copies, which is why they can have a copyright symbol on them. Without the evidence of the photograph, the text is given the value of presence, but this presence is disrupted by the relation all the same. These two representations—the photographer’s (which is an individual representation) and the writer’s—are maintained in presentation to a third :
By pushing the source material (in this case, the subject of photographic attention) through two successive media transformations, 1. source material to photograph, 2. photograph to picture text; then offering this information in a finished collaborative statement (a whole perceptual model combining the representational work of two separate individuals), the writer and photographer arrive at a finished work involving the neutral observer (the third person in) in the act of deciphering (viewing and reading) this double abstraction, this consummate treatment of source material. [10]
The photograph and text are presented to the viewer as two separate representations. But it is not so much that “This delicate balance of abstractions ideally produces a newly formed whole concept and object, the result of the consummation of picture text and photograph,” and that this is given to the viewer. In too many cases in Sherman’s work, we find this “binary” opposition and a presumed third to whom they are directed. This binary combination (and opposition) is presented in many ways, but not so much for resolution.
Of the other examples of this juxtaposition (opposition) of image and text, many use the photographic image of the artist—the index of his presence. (Image-text juxtapositions encompass any form and combination: still photograph, video image, printed text, audio track.) For example, a text in FILE (Spring 1977) published under the editorial title “Writing” has a photograph of Tom Sherman juxtaposed to a first person text. The same text is carried on the audiotrack of the videotape Envisioner (1978); between the partly character-generated text flashes another image of Tom Sherman. Most of Sherman’s videotapes show this opposition in the most plain way imaginable—partly to emphasize the video and audio elements of video/ television whether in separation or combination. [11] There is more than a formal opposition of sound and image or photograph and caption here. They are too recurrent, too redundant, too obsessive in their presentation and direction towards us for us not to pay attention to them and not to observe the differences between them.
In the final analysis, not all of these images are directed to us, the third party. Some look out, others look in. If we took these two—looking in and looking out—to stand for figures in a dialogue, then all these oppositions might come together in communication. That is not the case, however—there is a disjunction between the two. One has power over the other: either the image directs the text or the text gives meaning to the image. But another disjunction occurs even before that split. It exists on the level of intention—the artistic intention of presentation or communication.
Some look out, others look in; and this is the case for images of the artist as well. Early examples look in. The earliest images are “portraits” of the artist as inspired or insightful. In each, the artist “Tom Sherman” has his head tilted backwards, eyes closed. The invitation and only photograph in Sherman’s exhibition of texts at A Space in 1974 showed the artist this way. So does the image to “Writing” in FILE. The pose is duplicated again in Animal Magnetism, the Only Paper Today issue (January 1978) devoted to Tom Sherman’s writing. An unillustrated text from Spring 1977 labels these images with their “meaning”:
Talking through the back of the neck is talking nonsense. Lifting the chin up high, roiling the head back as far as it goes; pose the throat for biting. The lids are pulled down tight over the eyeballs. The power to picture without eyesight. You must have eyes in the back of your head. Insight is part of your vision. [12]
In “Writing” (FILE) this insight is directed in and out. The insight is insecure, as the text starts: “There is instability in my self-image;’ but it soon passes to the assurance of a social presumption “It’s easy to see what people do in their homes.”
“Tom Sherman” is the envisioner here. In the videotape of this name—Envisioner (1978), whose audiotrack reproduces the FILE text the image to the writing is replaced in the videotape by one of Sherman looking out, facing straight ahead, eyes meeting the audience. With the text remaining the same but the image differing, the “meaning” or reference of the text seems to change. Or rather our relation to it changes. That the same text is used in the videotape, with the artist’s now serious face, should alert us to the manipulation of the codes of realism that the text “confesses”:
To appear authentic in conversation and print I enrich each sentence I pronounce with a bit of general detail; perhaps I quote a number or tell a temperature or exaggerate the adversity of conditions affecting my physical body. For instance it burns my ass to hear people advertising their “one of a kind” identities.
From this point on, the image in video becomes full frontal torso and head or closeup facing the viewer. The pose and closed eyes of the “envisioner” have been displaced not to another image but to an intention—an intention by video artists to inhabit broadcast media through advertising “one of a kind identities.” This will be criticized but not opposed in a simple way to a positive reception of its opposite—the authentic speaker who looks into the camera and meets our eyes.
The conclusion to Envisioner signals Sherman’s tactics for assuring authenticity. But sometimes in their repetition from piece to piece these signals of authenticity give evidence of themes—they symbolize rather than signal. If the texts are communicating something, they are communicating more than this fictional apparatus of authenticity displayed in its gaps, repetitions and errors.
We can look for this vacillation between signal and symbol in “The Trouble with Psycho-surgery, Advertising Photographs with Words.” This is listed as “An Article” in the table of contents in Criteria where it was published in spring 1978. [13] “The Trouble with Psychosurgery...” is a fictional text within this two page spread of writing. This writing includes a large point heading:
Someday, we will all think the same things. Or someday, when our mental privacy is our last personal space, we’ll have no idea what the other person is thinking simply because we will no longer be conscious of others;
three written picture texts (1976) without their stimulus photographs ; the explanatory/epistemological text printed in PARACHUTE 9; and the text in which the two parts of the title—“The Trouble with Psychosurgery, Advertising Photo-graphs with Words”—slide into one another. This text, whose title seems to imply an article and analysis, starts out in the first person voice of fiction or documentary: “I feel like writing now. Finally, I’m writing again.” What follows is indeed a written text, but it relates the time spent before writing (as well as signalling what follows as an authored text): making phone calls, listening to records. These actions which establish a narrative and set it in commonplace everyday activity are referred to over and over in Sherman’s work, making an inventory of the different mechanical/electronic forms of communication related to each of the senses. These are brought together just as the audio and visual channels of video are emphasized by Sherman. [14]
Relating the habit of television watching cues the rest of the “story”: “I won’t turn the TV on until 6:30. Sometimes I leave it on with the sound off. The other day I saw these movies of brain surgery on monkeys.” It is a movie reproduced on television missing the sound. These animals, like the staring figures of Sherman’s videotapes: “Involuntary provider of the characteristic result. Analogues in flesh. Responsive subjects. Show us what we need to know.” Their image is without sound: “The sound in their cages. We can fake it.” And the first person voice becomes a voice-over: “With a mix of voice-over and ambient sound. We can mix it right over the best available stock. It’s the credibility of the script we have to worry about. Put the time and money in the script. Work is hard. Be careful what you say. Use the film to feed the words. Have them read out loud by somebody who can see it when they read it. Make them hear the words with the picture. Fit them in your own time and space. Form their critical path.” From a “cynical” behind-the-scene account the text slips into advertising photographs with words: “‘Tighten up their neckties. Show a little cleavage. Make it a toast to their lips. Scotch on the rocks. Advertising. Glossy copy sings hard-sell over garish fine colour printing. Expensive, Well done. Imaginative. Thoughtful? Shoestrapped ankles. Long legs. Something for everybody. Fat lips. Pretty clean hands for a man. Coloured messages.” Then a return to another voice and the writing: “But are not their thoughts your thoughts? Are not these thoughts your thoughts? Examine the difference between you and me, so far. If noticeable, their difference would be your consciousness, I would guess, you would know for sure.”
These messages are put into the habits of everyday: “The cup after cup of coffee, day after day, the cigarettes, the drugs, the sex. Advertising photographs with words.” A dramatic stimulus—a motorcar accident—is montaged into the text, but it appears within the natural flow of the sentences, word after word. Thoughts become automobiles: “... beautiful language illustrating the optical nature of misshapen thought. Apparently solid objects moving through space. Automobiles on the highway. Motor cars, they’re always easier to pick up in natural light such as daylight. Left to right, words, line by line. 1964 TRIUMPH IN OFF-ROAD ROLLOVER AT 12:20PM, AUGUST 3RD, 1978. WEATHER CONDITIONS CLEAR AND DRY. MODERATE DAMAGE FROM ROLLOVER, VEHICLE CAUGHT FIRE AFTER UPSET. 2 BURN DEATHS, FUEL CAP POPPED OPEN.” This crash report then is referenced to a photograph that the narrator keeps. “Holding the snapshot in my left hand, writing with my right,” the narrator can describe the two subjects of the photograph in the manner of Sherman writing from photographs, except that now the subjectivity (the fictionalizing) is projected out of the text through an I, not projected into it by the author. The photographic subjects turn into this writing, advertising copy to photographs: “But they’re only a photograph now, just the words running behind the surface of my looking glass (see Face A and B).” The parenthesis refers us to two paragraphs at the end of the piece headed “Face A” and “Face B.” These two texts duplicate each other except for the signifiers of locale. As the narrator initially left the sex of these identical twins ambiguous at the beginning and said he was sexually involved with both, this duplication could stand for that experience or that gender differentiation. The duplication might only reinforce that ambiguity, that is, reinforce the story thematically. But the repetition can also make us question the narrative voice—doubling the text makes it lose its presence. [15]
Once again this doubling faces us as a third to its binary opposition in a way that is not obvious in the rest of the text where we become a repetition of the text and assume its identity. “Are not these thoughts your thoughts? Examine the difference between you and me…” This text must become represented in us rather than repeated or resolved.
The number three enters the text: “The narrative begins here with the number 3. As I look into this paper white, I decide this is where it should begin again. I must write it down to stay. We begin here, just after 3, you and me.” Now it is just “you and me”—narrator and reader, not a photograph and written picture text—from which a third must be composed, pulling away from its fictional realism into communication, not sliding into its message, a controlled conveyance of our thought. Once again the text is disrupted: the figure who addresses us calls himself dead, dead for three years and dead at 3:15 in the morning. We read of that accident earlier in the text from the point of view of the other victim, a motorcyclist. His thoughts and physical sensations are conveyed and they disappear easily into ad hype: “Open it up, listen to it purr, and here the advertising language moves right along with a professional voice reading cause there’s a new brand of cycleman, a new featureman. Whenever he wants, he is filled to capacity with the sensations of his extended mobility. When you are high gliding on your cycle, your wheels disappear... 1966 BSA IN OBLIQUE HEAD-ON COLLISION WITH 1968 CHEVROLET ON AUGUST 21ST, 1978...” By the end of the writing we are brought back to this accident in the present tense of text as the narrator scripts a new advertisement: “Here I am, writing this to you from my new home in Covington, Kentucky. Right now I am free as a bird facing the afternoon’s heat with a cold one. A tall green glass of Molson’s, imported from Canada. Pull in, give me a closeup of the label. Cut to the ’68 Chevy winding down the hillside. Not yet in the picture, the BSA sounds its climb. I’m driving the Chevy listening to country music on WSM-Nashville, 650 on your dial, I’m asleep at the wheel, but I’m not guilty.”
All throughout this text the present tense of the narrative moves into ad copy and slides into an accident. What Sherman warns us in this presentation is how the devices of authenticity of his fiction apply equally to advertising and the me-dia. Thoughts, which are not our own, are like automobiles: we move through them and they move through us. The words to the images de-liver us to the advertisers and the products. When the narrator speaks to us: “We begin here, just after 3, you and me. 3 in the morning night. The three in the middle of the afternoon”, not only are we the reader of this text, we are the BSA cyclist meeting the narrator’s Chevy.
The car crashes are important here: they number 3. The shorthand of the reports conveys information to us; they are specifiers of year/ model, time/date, weather conditions. These are exactly similar to what was given in Envisioner—the quoting of number, temperature or details of bodily sensation. They are also analogues in a simple communications model. [16] The number of dead in the accidents are also specified—all burn victims. These are more than specifiers of authenticity. Death and communication are in some relation here. Death may be necessary for a proper thought conveyance to arise.
DEATH AND COMMUNICATION
At this point it is necessary to follow that death drives across the different forms of Sherman’s work. Now the articles, the writing and video connect in one thematic strategy. The so-called articles (called such because of the context of their publication) are an active part of this and cannot be thought outside of their fictive enunciation. The articles inhabit specific practices, although not their forms. “More Dead Artists”—a “history” and “sociological” analysis of ten years and beyond of artists in artist-run spaces—was published in a Parallelogramme Retrospective produced by the Association of National Non-Profit Artists’ Centres (ANNPAC). A fiction satirical of television and performance was published as “Television as Regular Nightmare” in a collection on performance art—Performance by Artists.
Each statement in these articles cannot be approved of at their face value. They are positive, negative, critical and ironical, Within the overall direction of Sherman’s work, however, certain of these enunciations add up to a program. It is a question of art practice in the age of media. It is a question of what the artist can offer and what the capacity of the medium is. It is a question of the presentation of one of a kind identities” to fill the time offered to art and of something that could be called communication. It is simply a question of time.
These articles follow the publication of “The Trouble with Psychosurgery...” and 1 Traditional Methodology for Processing Information and are contemporary to the production of the trio of videotapes Envisioner, Individual Release and East on the 401 (1978) and TVideo (1980). In the last of these articles, “Transvideo” published in FUSE. Sherman defined video as: “first and foremost a communications media. It is an accessible high technology for the direct conveyance of information. Video information produced by artists must be assessed in terms of its communications potential.” [17] Earlier in the artists’ magazine Centerfold, Sherman asked “Are We the News?” with the subtitle “Who is reporting what we are repeating?” He suggests artists not in the news but behind the news, presenting a different kind of information. “Of course, most would look to the artist for a different kind of information... how does the artist see his or her role in terms of the delivery of an information that could be useful to others?” He asks, though, “If you do get your news from an artist, how did you come to trust his or her version of the story?” More importantly he asks, or fictionally projects: “How did the artist lose his or her self-respect?” in this loss of identity in entering an information marketplace.” In shaping and distributing values, “Must we become government in order to lead? Must we disappear to adhere to our principles?” Sherman asks in another article and since by example of his work at The Canada Council. [19]
Without the restraint of journalism’s protocols, Sherman’s history and “criticism” of artist’s video can be more performative. “The Artist Attains Ham Radio Status in an Era of Total Thought Conveyance” (1978), “Television as Regular Nightmare” (1979) and “More Dead Artists” (1979) respond to the changed intentions and ambition of video: its desire to be broadcast television. The early video artists were “pioneers of the personal communications field. 000100 By a twist of fate they were among the first people to get their hands on the equipment. 000101 They were able to log their private lives as worthy material for public display because of their early entrance. 000110 Later on, those working in the new medium would have to approach the art of revealing themselves in an entirely different manner.” However, for this text (and it is a text, not Tom Sherman speaking) this did not seem to be the case: “100101 So quickly broadcast television turns into just another performance situation for the artist... 011101 How great is the need for personal message on the major networks?” [20]
Maybe channels will be offered to this work and there will be time to fill. “Time is so important. Filling time. They all want the chance to fill the television time for somebody they don’t know.” “Television by hypersensitive personalities, the hot stuff, it’ll be on cable and it’ll cost you. Performance is made for television. Television performance. Killing time with the viewing audience, from the inside out. Can you bring yourself up high and down and out to conclude your action in approximately 28 minutes, give or take 30 seconds?” This arbitrary division of time should disrupt presence, and yet there is a demand and a desire to saturate that time with a presence (a personality) so it does not exist. If the display of this “one of a kind identity” (which is a false subjectivity) fills time, then that personality must be killed, both for time to be known and communication to arise. [21] It is necessary for the “Red Hot Re-entry into the Mass Society Through Death”:
Having inhabited our tiny world for far too long, we artists will all sooner or later become terminally bored with missing the point of our own esoteric communications. At this point, it becomes necessary for the artist to eliminate the “especially sensitive” aspect of his or her personality. This might be better understood in terms of a figurative or metaphoric death. A positive loss of life. Death is one grand process of social equalization. [22]
Individual Release (1978) rehearses all these preceding themes in video form; TVideo (1980) signs a coda to them. In Individual Release there are three disclosures: firstly, an individual report (an individual release), secondly, a performative analysis of television/video, and thirdly, the disclosure of the names of three accident victims as the narrative resolution of a preceding story. (It is structured much like “The Trouble with Psychosurgery...”)
In the first section, the voice of “Tom Sherman” tells us that it is time to report again. The technology is available, and he is responsible to put it to good use. Not only is this like reporting to the arts councils once a year, it fills the time of technology with an individual personality or statement. A disclosure of identity is to be made, but in a banal way. [23] The image of the artist is not always available. Over a close-up of a coffee cup, his voice tells us: “Trust me when I say to you, there is a material body absolutely true to these words.”
The disclosure is also an investigation and inventory: of television time, of sound and image, of the manipulation of information and its low level on the screen, of the conveyance of thought and personality, of elite control. Over the image of his rotating body, his voice describes the circumstances of our viewing: “There is motion as there is sound. I find myself in motion on this screen inside your field of vision, held in place by the impression of these words on your eyes.” As in the writing in Criteria we are directed to “Be the picture. See the voice.” He asks over top of the second of the three figures: “How influential can a set of stationary eyes actually be? Can your eyes remain fixed for very long on a point in space such as this when your sense of time is being manipulated by the sound of this voice track wandering?”
This fixed point becomes obsessive in the third section. We are travelling down Highway 401. The image is one continuous shot from the passenger seat. On the highway we have one thing to see—the road ahead of us that hypnotizes us like television fatigue. We have only the habit of watching, and yet this image is not continuous. Subtle edits and repeats of footage make up its length of “real time.” Moreover there is a voice moving us in time, just as the image seems to be driving us into space. Through its repetitions, this voice moves us, but it also catalogues our sensory habits in a car:
Driving and driving. And sitting there watching. And listening to the radio. And sharing with a companion a conversation. And sharing with a companion talk. Listening and listening to what it is they have to say over and over the same words. The radio voice washes over our conversation. The News. The weather. The music.
Of course, all this motion and voices are a means to thought conveyance:
I can’t stop here. I must go further or never reach my destination. In time my approach will be clear of bad conditions of all classifications of my approach to your mind. The bad conditions of all classes will be clear, smooth sailing on automatic pilot. The freeway.
The third part is also a story of car crashes as the narrator remembers some experiences from childhood. The three lifeless figures off whom the narrator bounced words earlier return as these crash victims. “Who was in the Buick? It was Bill Walker,” and we learn his age, his business, the family he left behind. “Who was in the Ford? It was Vivian Marsh,” and we learn her death details. But the last changes: “Who was in the Plymouth? My name is Tom Sherman. I’ll be thirty-one years old the day after tomorrow.” These were the three makes of cars. By implication and by detail the narrator is the third death; we are forced to believe the reality of his death even though he speaks to us.
Much of what underlies these narratives is time. East on the 401 (1978) virtually repeats much of the highway footage of Individual Release. It is 28 minutes and 45 seconds of highway time for prime time. It is straight driving and straight video. There is no verbal track to the tape: it is about time.
Discussing this tape and TVideo in a 1980 lecture, Sherman stated:
I think there must be ways of articulating time more realistically, ways of moving time while maintaining a conscious portrayal of it. Working with a controlled representation of time—time beyond the control of the audience—if the work is to have clarity, the artist must involve himself with a perception of the dimensional bias of the work... A representational video, not presenting extreme, sensational “new” information, is bound to be seen as dreadfully slow, banal, boring video. The trick is to find a way of ‘‘moving” time without revealing its passage. [24]
TVideo continues where we were left dangling at the end of Individual Release. It picks up the melodrama of Tom Sherman’s death. According to Sherman, the script for this tape is based on More Dead Artists.” TVideo was made for broadcast television as part of an A Space series called Television by Artists curated by John Watt. The tape carries through the demand expressed in “More Dead Artists” for a metaphorical death in its actual presentation in broadcast transmission. And yet, as content, Tom Sherman tells us he is still dying and makes a display of it. Dying is used to establish a personal identity in the media. However, even this most genuine mark of authenticity—we must believe that a dying man will tell the truth—is undercut by the construction of the tape.
Once again the devices in this tape build a narrative and character only to mark time and to undercut the figures of authenticity. The tape is divided into three parts. It follows the early day of a man who does not like television anymore and does not want to make this program. Moreover, he is dying. He tells us in the first part: “By the time you see this I’ll be dead. And that’s the reason I decided to make this videotape. My name is Tom Sherman.” For all these reasons, we are inclined to believe what he says on television, about television, etc.
The tape plays with the presentation of “real time” transmitted at another time: “By the time you see this I’ll be dead.” Later in this section, he adds: “By the time you see this it will probably be evening or in the afternoon.” It was morning then; “but that won’t matter much at that time,” he adds. In the second part he conjectures: “By the time you see me it’ll be a lot different. It will probably be a different season.” And in the last section he reiterates: “By the time you see this program I’ll be dead. There is no question about that.” In each, the contradiction of time only serves to reinforce his death, the truth, his absence in the future and hence the presence and authenticity of his voice in future transmission and communication.
The three sections, which seem to follow the natural tempo of the day and the banal narrative of his activities, in fact, are highly structured. In each, a specific ailment is related to a mode of travel and that in turn is related to a dimension of time. For instance, in the first part, he is having trouble with his back from travelling on a bus: “You’re not really anywhere in time on a bus... It’s a lot like being home in the morning” or like watching this videotape. In the second section it is trouble with his ears from air travel. Travelling by plane makes him think of the future. And in the last, it is his eyes he has trouble with. He notices this problem when he travels by train where he reads and thinks about the past.
“Sherman” recalls his problem with his eyes while reading the paper at the opening of the third segment. The conversation seems to come naturally out of these circumstances—the newspaper makes him think of telling us about his eyes. Similarly in the second part his ears make him tell about records: he doesn’t play them much anymore, nor watch television for that matter. He is writing during the opening of this segment, and as he writes a calculator alarm beeps. It is the alarm that he used to remind him to watch certain programs on television. Now that he no longer watches television, he uses it to mark off time: “If I know that time is moving in a certain way it helps me get through the day.” In the first part, if being at home was like travelling on a bus with no sense of time (much like uninterrupted video), time is broken up on television by the changing of programs. Still, time is not noticeable; it is invisible. For the tape, more than for the man, the visible clocks, the talk and the calculator display time, establish it as the narrative.
Because these conversations arise from his daily activity and because his admissions are forced by his impending death, we are inclined to believe what this man tells us in a personal way. We do not even question the formal symmetry connecting senses (ailments), forms of travel and dimensions of time. We are inclined to believe, moreover, because all the signifiers of authenticity are displayed, as in documentaries or newscasts: the narrator looks straight at us (he handholds a microphone, though, which is an alienation device); there are close-ups for confession; we are given details of time and date: January 8, 1980, etc. Most of all it is his death that makes us believe the commonplace as well as dramatic confessions. But there are discrepancies that force us to doubt him. Since he is going to die, he tells us that he wants to clear up something. But what he sincerely tells us is blatantly contradicted in two other places in the tape. Moreover, in the first part when he tells us he is going to die and that is why he is making the tape, between two consecutive statements in real time there is an edit.
As in all of this work by Sherman, authenticity of personality and truth of statement are carried by a voice in time—a voice that creates a narrative, a voice that confuses the personal and the impersonal in communication, that confuses senses and technologies, all in order to separate them and bring us to our senses to use them to communicate in time and across space. At the end of TVideo, the narrator talks about phoning people long distance: “It’s hard to maintain a friendship or to be in contact with people over a long distance.” From one sentence to the next, the personal contact through a technology that brings people into “touch” imperceptively becomes contact with an audience the narrator will not know in time or space:
It’s hard for me to say things that are really personal over the television format, through this camera. It’s hard for me because you’ll be listening to this and you’ll be watching me at a different time and I don’t really know if I should tell you anything too specific. You’re probably not interested in what I have to say, what I’ve been doing. As I told you its already too late anyway.
NOTES
1. For instance, “Television as Regular Nightmare,” in Performance by Artists, eds. AA Bronson and Peggy Gale, Toronto: Art Metropole, 1979, pp. 149-158; ‘‘More Dead Artists!?” in Spaces by Artists Parallelogramme Retrospective 3, ed. Tanya Rosenberg, Toronto, ANNPAC, 1979, pp. 36-46; and, “How to Watch Television,” Impulse 5:1 Fall/Winter 1980, pp. 46-50.
2. For example, the animal and insect stories displayed in the windows of Cinéma Lumière (Toronto) in August 1977 reappeared as “references” in 1 Traditional Methodology for Processing Information, Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1978.
3. For example, “Writing,” FILE, 3:3 Spring 1977, pp. 54-55, and the videotape Envisioner, 1978.
4. ‘See the Text Comes to Read You” as a performance text; as the audio track to a performance for the Fifth Network “Tele-Performance” Festival, subsequently cablecast (1978); as photoelectric writing (character-generation) for the cablecast event “Reading Television,” (1978): and as part of the audio track to the videotape Transvideo (1981).
5. Moreover, one project—1 Traditional Methodology for Processing Information—can include an exhibition, a catalogue of writing, and a performance that included a lecture on the exhibition, a videotape by another artist and a performance—“See the Text Comes to Read You.”
6. “My Brand of Video Aesthetics #2,” Un aspect different de la television (Montreal: Musee d’art contemporain, 1982).
7. Like photography, a text’s capacity for reproduction and distribution has the power to disrupt the aura of an original, authentic and expressive artwork. Too often, though, index as reference has been restored to index as presence. While language has been allied to photography in semiotic art and theory, it is also aligned in its effects. While language could display itself as art as a formal metalanguage and in time disclose the political and institutional determinations of art, in bringing the context of presentation to the surface, language came to the indexical conditions of photography.
8. See Monk, Philip, Language and Representation, Toronto, A Space, 1982,
9. See note 2. Sherman had also shown texts in the window of the theatre in January 1977.
10. PARACHUTE, no. 9 (Winter 1977-1978), p. 17.
11. Theoretical Television (1977) starts with a frontal image of the “inventor” Sherman followed by a silent character-generated text; Television’s Human Nature (1977) has a full-face image of a man staring towards the viewer followed by a woman in the same pose, and both are overlaid with the nearly identical audio text with only gender differentiated; in Individual Release (1978), static or revolving heads are either overlaid with an audio track or juxtaposed with a tunnel vision highway shot.
12. “Promise Me Warmer Weather, ABCDE,” Art Communication Edition, no. 5, (Spring 1977).
13. Sherman, Tom, “An Article,” Criteria, 4:1 (Spring 1978), pp. 14-15.
14. Cf. “Writing” or Envisioner: “It’s easy to see what people do in their homes. In their homes they are ‘home’ inside an enclosure of hand-built walls. They are home comfortably reading newspapers and magazines or watching TV. When they eat they listen to music on the radio. When they talk they plan records on their stereo. And the ones who go to movies read novels when they stay at home. Those who watch quite a bit of television love to thumb through magazines at the newsstand. People in their homes all get a big kick out of a good coffee table book.” In Individual Release, however, a separation is stated not necessarily maintained throughout the tape: “You can’t even get out of the car. You can’t watch television and drive a car at the same time. They know it.” But in “My Brand of Video Aesthetics”, Article, no. 2. Sherman states “I say ‘You can’t watch television and drive a car at the same time’ at the beginning of the tape /East on the 401/. I am interested in these common, widely accessible activities.”
15. This same device is used at the end of “Television as Regular Nightmare”, except that gender is opposed. The repetition also structures the videotape “Television’s Human Nature.” The picture texts are a form of repetition that is representation. Repetition is also a form of redundancy: in the videotapes, for example, it allows someone to roam the channels and still get the message.
16. To adapt a model of verbal communication from Roman Jakobson: “The ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to the ADDRESSEE. To be operative the message requires a CONTEXT referred to (“referent” in another, somewhat ambiguous nomenclature), seizable by the addressee, and either verbal or capable of being verbalized; a CODE fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and the addressee (or in other words, to the encoder and decoder of the message); and finally a CONTACT, a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and the addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication. Jakobson, Roman, ‘‘Linguistics and Poetics,” Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT, 1960).
The addresser and addressee are the two drives or writer-reader); the context is the referent of time and date: the contact is the road, but also the weather—clear or noisy; the code is the familiar experience of driving a car or competence in the codes of advertising; the message is?, and the communication is the car crash. (The year and models of the cars are analogues for recording/transmitting equipment. In the videotape Transvideo (1981), during the time of the tape, Tom Sherman explains and gives the brand name of the equipment he used to make and edit the tape, the microphone he is speaking into, and the models of car and van from which the tape was shot. In Individual Release, weather is given as a channel: “In time my approach will be clear of bad conditions of all classifications of my approach to your mind. The bad conditions of all classes will be clear, smooth sailing on automatic pilot.”)
17. “Transvideo,” FUSE, 5:2 & 3 (March/April 1981), p. 97.
18. “Are We the News?,” Centerfold, 3:3 (February/March 1979), pp. 124-125.
19. “The New Triumvirate (Artists, Broadcasters, Police),” Centerfold, 3:1 (December 1978), p. 58.
20. “The Artist Attains Ham Radio Status in an Era of Total Thought Conveyance,” Centerfold, 2:6 (September 1978), pp. 86-92.
21. “Television as Regular Nightmare,” Performance by Artists, pp. 149-158. This text includes the heading from the Criteria piece: “Someday, we’ll all think the same things, Or, someday, when our mental privacy is our last personal space, we’ll have no idea what the other person is thinking simply because we will no longer be conscious of others.” “Personal matter through television”, in its indifference in not knowing its audience, is the same thing as its reception in mass consciousness, as mass consciousness.
22. “More Dead Artists!?”, p. 40.
23. “Banal material packages up so beautifully. If you want a structure or a shooting style to be clearly in evidence, you have to work with low-key, familiar situations.” “My Brand of Video Aesthetics #2,” p. 20.
24. “My Brand of Video Aesthetics,” Article, no. 2.