"L'empreinte." - various artists, Centre Georges Pompidou, France

ArtForum, Summer, 1997 by Richard Shiff

CENTRE GEORGES POMPIDOU

The strange objects assembled by the exhibition "L'empreinte" (the imprint, imprinting) compelled me to think creatively, so I silently thanked organizer Georges Didi-Huberman and cocurator Didier Semin for the occasion. But "L'empreinte" often failed to coordinate the materials on view with the concepts elaborated in the accompanying catalogue. From room to room (with heady 300 items), I thought repeatedly, Why include this object?

Much more coherent than the exhibition is Didi-Huberman's catalogue essay. It attaches theory to his twentieth-century oddities and provides some history as well to his overarching theme of "resemblance by contact" - from fossils and archeological remains, to the shroud of Turin and death masks, to Auguste Rodin's casts of body parts and Marcel Duchamp's Female Fig Leaf, 1950-51. This last serves as an emblem for the entire show, which investigates the direct physical transference of a form or configuration from one surface or material to another, as in molding, casting, and imprinting.

Female Fig Leaf is a curiously shaped cast that Duchamp presented in several different guises, including a photograph in which concavities appear as convexities. This object, or set of objects, materializes ambiguity. Female Fig Leaf might well derive from a cast taken externally from the female sex organ. This consideration would immediately entail some wordplay in French, where moule in the masculine gender means "mold," while moule in the feminine can, by analogy with its proper referent "mussel," mean "vulva." So we are left with something like a mold (un moule) of a "mold" (une moule). The ambiguity of moule hides nothing, yet the object Female Fig Leaf would hide the sex organ, fitting close to it, masklike. Or, as a mold, it could be used to reproduce the sexual form itself. Yet its own form might have been molded from any thin surface or membrane in use as a "fig leaf." Whatever the case may be, because the female sex organ is a cavity, anything malleable used to fit, cover, and conceal it will assume a convex profile, revealing the form otherwise hidden by its own interiority. The mask - by contact - thus resembles and reveals what it masks. "Resemblance by contact": this is the principle of the imprint, which might be conceived as the negation of a negation, where the two negatives (the sexual cavity and its convex reversal) never result in a positive. The mold of a cast of a mold becomes yet another reversal, another negative.

I am not reproducing Didi-Huberman's arguments but writing in something of the same spirit. Is what I'm saying, or what he's saying, "theory"? Or is it pedantry? Perhaps the matter gets too complicated too quickly. Yet, when it comes to representation, there's nothing simpler than molding, casting, and imprinting. Twentieth-century artists have been intrigued by the arbitrary order that such mechanistic and mindless techniques of representation create. This may be a way of coming to terms with modernity's increasingly evasive reality, a way of investigating the crucial difference between reproduction (where the model's value determines the copy's) and simulation (where the copy's value determines the model's). Too complicated again? Perhaps no such difference can be articulated, however much it may be sensed: to pass from mold to cast to another mold is to experience an intangible difference, but only from within the persistent, transferable sameness of the imprint, a difference-in-sameness as difficult to represent as the inside of a glove or, for that matter, a moule. Molding (with plastics) and casting (with liquids that solidify) are processes easily exchanged; the French uses a single word, moulage. Imprinting by either mold or cast can occur at any time and needs no author (posthumous casting by foundry workers is commonplace in the history of sculpture). Didi-Huberman revels in the anachronism of the imprint, its timely timelessness, which he relates to Walter Benjamin's notion of history as "constellation," the chance alignment and perceived congruence of elements of past and present, as if one were the mold and the other the cast, an anonymous relationship that fortuitous events can materialize at any moment.

One of the exhibition's most provocative images is a sequence of photographs of Jasper Johns taken by Ugo Mulas. The painter is shown rotating his head and pressing it against paper mounted on a wall. In this strained act of imprinting, Johns' concern was not the head per se, but the body more generally, and especially its envelope, the skin. Johns uses his head mindlessly - not to think but to transfer and imprint a form. The image, Skin, 1964, was hung adjacent to the Mulas photographs that reveal how it came into being. The relationship of Mulas to Johns is symptomatic of the structure of "L'empreinte," which featured both material imprints and representations of them, often in the form of photographs or elaborate schematic drawings. The first type of object is indexical, whereas the second is an iconic display that takes indexicality as its theme.