Introduction

Introduction to Set Pieces by CARYN FAURE WALKER

Which of us has not recently travelled somewhere? Then we are home. What if this pattern changes? Say for a time there is no going back. Only to a place, a community, a language, a national history that was unfamiliar. As exiles our past would remain crystallised. The absoluteness of this new love for our first world could not be recaptured. What would stand before us would be an imaginative gap. to make a bridge would be slow; torn away from our own centre of the world, that would, in the act of translation, would shift away from our centre.

Moving between cultures in Britain and across national boundaries is common today. Yet our lived experience of the space that opens between what we have known and what we find ourselves in, is frequently masked by an image culture of decisive moments constructed by the camera, whose homogeneity overrides these important differences. Oded Shimshon's twenty large format black and white images completed between 1990 and 1993, entitled Set Pieces, also capture time. Yet unlike 'slice of photography' they are not anecdotal. Instead they beckon us to wander on a plateau of open meanings, alert to analogies, calling them to attention at a given moment through our own history and direct apprehension. Aware of, but not disarmed by, photography fact.

Shimshon was born in 1949 in the village of Nahariya in Israel, following his parents departure from Germany. Before his arrival in England in 1978 the artist spent an intensive two years learning every aspect of film making . In England he worked briefly as a freelance, then moved to still photography via Derbyshire College of Higher Education (where he is now a tutor) and Trent Polytechnic.

When at Derby the artist became familiar with American ideas and photographic practices of the 1960's and 1970's. The legacy of three countries -America/Israel/England operate as important filters in Set Pieces, through which we might wish to interpret the work.

AMERICA

In the 1970's John Szarkowski, Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York staged a number of axiomatic exhibitions which recognised fundamental dichotomy in contemporary photography between those who think of [the medium ] as a means of self-expression and those who think of it as a method of exploration'. 1 In his catalogue Mirrors and Windows he expands on this dichotomy by opposing the romantic individual whose understanding of the world is dependent on anthropocentric metaphor and the realist who believes that the world exists independent of human action, that it contains discoverable patterns of intrinsic meaning...'2 Szarkowski goes on to illustrate his thesis by instancing two major figures in American photography: the romantic' Mirror White for whom the technical perfection of the photographic print and its equivalence to high emotion are paramount. And the realist' Robert Frank, a Swiss born American.

Frank's book The American (1958) when it appeared caused uproar. He had travelled across America, adopting the posture of a dumb' witness, shooting multiple, black and white images with a small format camera each raw, kaleidoscope and fragmentary. To make his story Frank sequenced these images picking up the appearance of incidental details which reappear and are and are transformed in subsequent images. When completed Frank's work had captured - according to the American poet Jack Kerouac -the everything-ness and American-ness...[of the country]...[its] 'doting immensity', the crazed voyager of the lone automobile press[ing] forth his eager insignificance in noseplates and licences into the vast promise of life."3

In 1966 and 1967 another photographer, Lee Friedlander, younger than Frank, but influenced by him, showed his work in two exhibitions: Towards a Social Landscape and New Documents. Friedlander pushed Frank's philosophy of observation further away from its sympathy with the directly engaged reformist approach of 1930's social documentary. Like Frank, Friedlander travelled (often by car) with a small format camera to find his subjects in city streets. However he rejected FrankÕs sequenced story in favour of images in which previous photographic styles and the compression of space create an ambiguous message.

Telephone poles, street signs, reflections, mirrors and super-imposition of subjects on shop windows continually break the unity of his images. His shadow within the frame in the Self-Portraits affirms the presence of the photographer. At the same time it denies entry to the viewer who cannot test the commonplaces of content or finally decipher the references implied by the image.

ISRAEL

Feelings of arrival, of common purpose, are shared by the Americans and Israelis, who, like many pioneers, believe that national boundaries express manifest destiny. Whereas Frank and Friedlander continue this odyssey of establishment, Shimshon by making a homeless citation of their work, implies his abandonment of territoriality,. We see this in the artistÕs very transportation of what has been a referent from its familiar American culture to another, England, placing imagery outside of the routine way we can relate to it and the values connected with it.

His positioning - in sight of, but askew from - a homeland and these photographic canons is clearly signposted from the outset. In Set Pieces, the artist photographs humble objects of optical distortions, common in Friedlander's work. This makes a direct transparent reading of the still life image possible. Intentionally Shimshon has modelled his foreground space on a 'ravelling stage' that is pictured in the photographs but also conceptually encompasses the area in front of the image where the spectator stands. As a result both photographer and viewer can imagine themselves as actors in a proscenium and contemporaneously adrift in the world.

Because of this overlap between the space where illusions are constructed (the stage or studio) and the everyday world, when Shimshon makes a picture he reflects on a story of a particular kind, which although the picture shows how camera optics represent appearance and incident technically, the story more strongly refers to our consciousness of the relentless, inexplicable, alteration of things.4

That we are conveyed between the commonplace and the unknown makes reference to the root of the word, exile (salire: to leap). 'One who is exiled is compelled by circumstances to leave his homeland so abruptly that he almost leaps away from it; he jumps far into the distance'5

quickly traversing space. In this space between origin and the construction of meaning through photography, Shimshon lays the architecture for a redemptive discourse.

ENGLAND

At various times between 1990 and 1993 Shimshon drove a camper van through Derbyshire and Wales stopping to photograph places which attracted him. There was no compunction to cover ground, he arrived at random. The van's interior was a tiny cell where he could juxtapose the domestic miniature with (the often walled) landscape outside the van's window.

He would park the van and try out how best to set out the 'studio stage set'; position the camera so that foreground and background proportion remained consistent. Then he would forage, returning to the van with discarded wood, stones, wire, or crockery. His trophies were not of historical interest, nor monumental, but hybrids which existed between industrial processing and decomposition. These bits were turned over, sometimes painted, wrapped or sawn up and set out on the van's table using a minimum of arrangement: stand, lay, stack, bend, wedge.

Completed, Set Pieces is veined by an elliptical structure which recalls the visuAlly scattered language texts of Edmond Jabes, the Cairo born philosopher and poet 6. It is made up of twenty unique images and one set piece - repeated twenty times. A sequence which tells a story by analogy and a non sequitur that unwinds consequence. Take the set of six images, Plates 5 - 10. Here calendar time is represented by bright sunlight and confirmed by the repeated siting of similar distant church steeples in a derelict landscape. This chronology is ruptured by the contrariness of the images' editorial sequence. Reading from left to right again from right to left (as Shimshon might do first in English, then in Hebrew) images of cultivation and ruin in conclusively contest with one another.

The first and last photographs of Set Pieces - Plates 1 & 20 - suggest further paradoxical readings. A well known symbol of illusion, the window - our view of landscape from the van's interior - holds within it an intimation of how his still life objects are _felt' against the camera's flattened representation. That phenomenal experience is present but hidden is played up by other visual puns: The tops of walls frequently deputise for the sky's horizon; inexplicable shifts in depth of field between photographed landscapes are made more disturbing by the exceptional size of still life objects as measured against these backdrops.

Shimshon's schema is one which Paul Virilio 7 points to in his description of the windowÕs evolution: The door functions as the first window through which one enters, and defines manÕs first habitat; the second window gives us the daylight only. The car windscreen (or camper van window) operates similarly, and because it is portable insofar as it can be shifted begins to define the architecture of what is outside. The third window is the computer and video with which we can superimpose an independent electronic map on appearance, also moving this outside ordinary time. Subliminally the camera, video and television offer to replace our biorhythms with another technically organised duration whose speed defines thought.

Unlike Szarkowski's 1978 realist who records the world objectively, Shimshon uses camera technology to mirror us as faltering actors in the game of understanding. It is as we move in these photographs at a slowed pace between things. Through this change in our sense of duration Shimshon offers us the opportunity to regain qualities electronic seeing now erodes. The photograph with its power to record can destroy memories of homeland. Set Pieces puts the possibility of this disappearance before us without judgement. When the past is abandoned it will leave an expanse of white space which we must come to appreciate and in which we must learn to build.

Footnotes

1Szarkowski, John, Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, 1978, pg 11.v 2 Ibid, pg 19.

3 Kerouac, Jack, Introduction to The Americans, Robert Frank, Aperture Photographs, New York, USA, 1958, (unpaginated).

4I n Samuel BeckettÕs Acts Without Words I (1956) a mime for one player, an anonymous player takes up an assortment of odd objects. Unsuccessful in making progress with them, the repetitious, graceful formality with which the character continues to act nonetheless makes our alertness to his actions an end in itself. Shimshon finds the continual questioning of the player and the cycles of repetition important to the making of Set Pieces. A short quotation from the mime is illuminating. _A second smaller cube descends from the flies, lands. He continues to reflect. Whistle from above. He turns, sees second cube, looks at it, at carafe, goes to second cube, takes it up, carries it over and sets it down under carafe, tests its stability, gets up on it, tries in vain to reach carafe, renounces, gets down, takes up second cube to carry it back to its place, hesitates, thinks better of it, sets it down, goes to big cube, takes it up, carries it over and puts it on smaller one, tests their stability, gets up on them, the cubes collapse, he falls, gets up immediately, brushes himself, reflects.Ó

5 Stamelman, Richard, Nomadic Writing: The Poetics of Exile The Sin of the Book: Edmonds Jabes, editor Eric Gould, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, USA & London, England, 1985, pg 106.

6 Shimshon acknowledges the influence of Edmond Jabes, the Cairo born philosopher and poet (who lived and died in Paris, 1991). The founding cosmologies which inform Jabes writing are that of Lurianic KabbalahÕs conception of tsimtsum the self exile of God from the world prior to the creation and the breaking of the tablets of the law which initiated the JewsÕ exile from divine language, and the writer metaphorically from the power of pure and total expression. Jabes designs a graphic notation for language which stands for his state, calling it a _vocableÕ, a seen immanence of the word in the book in which fragments of language posit meaning and evaporate it. Leaving blank spaces between words to communicate the presence of GodÕs ultimate absence.

7 See:Virilio, Paul The Third Window: An interview with Paul Virilio, Global Television editors, Cynthia Schneider and Brian Wallas, Wedge Press New York, USA, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and London, England, 1988.

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