The Gold Room (2015), GCGCA(i)
The Gold Room
A General Metaphysics of the Image
Photographers’ Gallery, London
20 Mar - 20 Jun 2015
The photograph in The Gold Room
‘There is an explanation for the photo, though it’s a bit strange and paradoxical because it’s both real and unreal — the idea that Jack was always at the hotel in some earlier incarnation. Jack had somehow been the creature of the hotel through reincarnation. At the same time, we’re meant to experience it “in the now.”’
- Diane Johnson, co-author of the screenplay for The Shining (1980)
The Gold Room (2015), GCGCA(i)
The dialectical image
While the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what has been to ‘the now’ is dialectical: image-like. Images disrupt narrative continuity. They have a de-temporalised status, and are thing-like. But they can become temporalised narratively in film.
The basic two-fold structure of the image
Contained within images is a temporal structure - a relation between a certain absence, and the peculiar form of the presence of this absence, registered by the lack of - or withdrawal from - the reality of the thing presented, in the act of its presentation. The image combines the aesthetic, spatio-temporal concretion of an object of sight with a static ideality. It is sensuously particular and ideal.
The Gold Room (2015), GCGCA(i)
The photograph’s secularisation of the theological structure of the image or icon (its participation in the thing it represents: the divine)
The photograph has ontological properties that derive from its indexicality (pointing to or referring to an object depicted), whereby light reflected by objects, which allow us to perceive them, is imprinted directly onto light-sensitive surfaces (analog or digital). It is a mechanical mimesis of visual perception. The photograph participates in the being of its reference, reflecting a direct presence of the past within the present, as a detemporalising ‘immobilization of time’.
Metaphysics
What is beyond possible experience
