Emanation and Return

Abstract

The origin of the word archive is located the public domain and possesses a secular significance, most often referring to documents sequestered a particular repository, the Greek arkheion. In a lecture delivered London on June 5, 1994, that father of the deconstruction revolution, Jacques Derrida, identified archives as shelters for memory--historiographically, arks that house documents that will pass from the private to the public realm. (1) The artist's book, Feast: Christy Johnson and 33 Confessors (2007), functions as a shelter for a fraction of the more than three-hundred First Communion commemorative photographs collected by the artist Christy Johnson. These are private images made public through her act of archiving and are joined by a textual archive. In a rite of secular remembrance, Johnson transcribed over one hundred and seventy-five pages of taped dialogue between herself and thirty-three women on the subject of their communion pictures. With the help of Victoria Millar of Bloomsbury Press, Johnson edited the transcriptions and they audiotaped the dialogues together so as to reclaim the conversational quality of the discourse while minimizing the intervention of the interrogator. They did not rewrite or remove anything from the responses except for the occasional hmm or pause for breath. No one put words into anyone's mouth ... except each interviewee who entered the photograph by way of a subversive dialectic structure, thus sanctioning the real experience of the silent subject the image. Strangers to one another, the interviewee and the pictured communicant unwittingly conspired to create an authentic fictional state through the fusion of a factual document with a true story. Johnson assembled these two distinct archives into the artist's book Feast--a communion of sorts. The sacred status of the ritual to which these archived photographs attend liberates them from their worldly, chemical substantiality. The photographs become revelations of the soul, literally of the referent that touch us through their carnal medium, light. (2) Johnson enables this release by allowing the images to commune together within the pages of the book. Avicenna, the Persian philosopher, describes the release of the soul his Treatise of the Bird (Risalat at-Tair). (3) His fable recounts the ordeal of a flock of doves that, when ensnared by hunters, grow weak and facile captivity until a few determined birds succeed escaping the net and soon thereafter those remaining seek to follow. The story is an allegory for the containment of the soul (the spiritual world) the body (the material world). It is the remembrance of the protected park (heaven) that invests the bird with the longing to ascend and eschew captivity. Avicenna states that the gain of metaphysical knowledge reminds the soul of its origin and longing, signalling its desire to return to the Divine. This early Islamic idea differs radically from the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin that was generated from the famed consumption of fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Guilt is not associated with the ingestion of knowledge, according to Avicenna. It is the abuse of intelligence that Avicenna finds fault. Feast is an ark for the secularized documentation of a sacred event. The project provides a protected park within which the photographic emanations might be safe. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] According to Roland Barthes, in photography, the presence of the thing (at a certain past moment) is never metaphoric (4) (emphasis added). Barthes used that dangerous, inflexible word never order to bar the allegorical fixity inherent when one assigns symbolic status to a photographic image. For Barthes, a photograph was a register of representation, not a substitution of one material object for another. …