The writer, broadcaster, visual artist and musician speaks with Alma Feigis about the routes of trauma, associative thinking as method, the limits of knowing, and the rhythm of Black Atlas — his new film that maps the absences of the archive.
Edward George speaks much like his films — with a pace and scope that is expansive and digressive, poetic and, unsurprisingly, rhythmic. I met him in a vintage-linoleum-floored, wide-wooden-desked, large-windowed office at the Warburg Institute, next door to the space where he has spent the past twelve months excavating the Institute’s Image of the Black archive. Developed in the sixties in response to the civil rights movement, the collection gathers documentation of thirty thousand artworks — created from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome through medieval and modern Europe to Western art of the mid-twentieth century — that depict people of African descent.
Black Atlas is the title shared by his solo presentation at the Warburg Institute and his new film. Both map these images and meditate on art as a mechanism of power, but also as a conduit of speculative thought capable of transcending such relations and drawing us closer to a humanist, anti-racist visual consciousness. At moments in the film, the artist speaks through these figures, animating them and reminding us that our dialogue with him and the individuals his voice for a moment possesses isn’t the sole exchange; the figures of the archive themselves converse with one another within the time-defying landscape that the film creates.
For a film — or, as the artist describes it, a “poetic image essay” — that unfolds through nothing but sequences of otherwise unrelated works from the collection, created centuries apart and strung together by George’s narration, it feels so complete and cinematic and, indeed, essayistic. At once a writer, musician, filmmaker, visual artist, and a founding member of the great Black Audio Film Collective, George’s constellation of interests and experiences pours into these new works, as does his fascination with the methods of Aby Warburg, whose associative assembling of images and ideas sought to uncover new kinds of cultural memory and art historical narrative. This is a fitting — there is an affinity between the genre of the essay and psychoanalysis, argues Thomas Karshan: the essay is a form in which the unconscious is charted, but more on that later.
Traversing anecdotes, shoutouts, musings, and references to low and high culture with joy and ease, George told me about Black Atlas and the process behind it.
Do you remember those old A-to-Z atlases? You’d look something up and trace your way to the map reference. How were you thinking about that form in the context of Black Atlas?
This is an atlas that uses somebody else’s idea of an atlas as its jumping point: Aby Warburg. He was an art historian — an “historian of the visual image” is what he called himself — and his last great idea was conceived in the form of an image atlas that evidenced a notion he had, part intuition, part research-based, that symbols from the past migrate through time and reproduce themselves. He called this project Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Warburg believed that you could understand a lot about the movement of time by following the passage of these motifs, and for him, it was all about giving proof that the grandeur of classical antiquity had its home in the Europe of the early twentieth century, just after the First World War. He cut across time and space with no borders, gathering and pasting all these fragments on a series of huge mobile boards, each of which represented the movement of these ideas and images through time. He had sold his soul to associative thinking, with all its dangers and pleasures. But the atlas was merely a form of conceptual note-taking — he was also going to write a narrative to explain the atlas, though this remained unfinished.
Do you think that if he wrote those descriptions, the abstraction and ambiguity would have been ruined, or would his style of writing have continued the suspension that you’re so interested in?
It’s hard to know — Warburg rarely put pen to paper and much of it isn’t translated into English. Yet you can tell much from his process. There’s always one more question, he never stops looking, he stays on something for a long time and still manages to produce meaning. That’s great, but looking at Mnemosyne and the way he places images next to each other in a concentration of space, I get the impression that something to do with his writing would have been changed by that relation to looking. He was developing a way of seeing that’s personal to him but generative in its difference, and this would have had an impact on how he thought about what writing should do. I think he would have come to the realisation that this visual stuff is a graphic system, but what he was doing with writing was a graphic system as well.
Warburg’s biographer writes that he had mental health issues, and one of the things that characterised his undoing, his unravelling, was screaming. He would scream in ways that grande bourgeoisie like him did not. Warburg’s screams, among other symptoms, were markers that all was not well. There was a relationship between time, art, and life that Warburg couldn’t consolidate. It became his trauma: an inability to separate the self and the world — a collapse. This collapse prefigures the silence that accompanies Bilderatlas, and that is a characteristic of it. Trauma manifests itself in the inability to recollect the moment of the impact of the thing that caused it. That’s trauma there, weirdly repeating itself.
Did you put yourself through a similar process of associative thought during the making of this exhibition?
I had to. When I began working with the Image of the Black archive, one of the things that became apparent was that what compelled the archive into existence was a response to segregation, to racism, to the iterative power of the originary moments of slavery and the trauma that is inseparable from those moments. There’s something to do with what’s held in abeyance, what’s held in suspension, but I couldn’t get away from the question of trauma once it presented itself to me. The characteristic of trauma, again, is that the recollection of memory is not there, so there couldn’t be a registration of trauma in these thirty thousand images. Anything that said it is, wasn’t. But I didn’t want to impose motifs for which I then had to search the archive for, so I leaned back and allowed the impressions from the work to hit me, and observed what was consistent, what just kept happening.
What I found was monkeys. Who knew? Dogs. How about that? There are obvious things like the human face, but also mirrors. There’s a lot of sex, which surprised me, but it’s polymorphous and perverse. It’s queer as hell. I’m not sure whether you have to have a queer eye for it, or whether it presents you with a queer eye, but something’s going on. These things have meanings that you’ll only know when you stay with them. What you get is a mapping of the routes of trauma, which have to be misdirections. The film is a map of things that aren’t there but for the presence of other things. It’s as much a map of absences and how you could give shape to absences, as a map of things that are identifiable only by going around them, as a map to dead ends. It’s a peculiar kind of atlas in that regard.
AF: You’ve been working on this project for a year, during your residency at the Warburg Institute, so quite a long time.
EG: Yeah, and every so often someone will ask what I’m up to and whether it’s to do with radio. When I explain that it’s a film, they ask what it’s about, and when I tell them Aby Warburg, they sometimes ask if he’s a footballer or an architect. You can see the disappointment in their eyes when I tell them he’s an art historian. To make matters worse, once I explain who he was and that the film is made of stills from this archive, they ask what it’s going to be. It’s then that I have to make something up, because everything that I’ve just said has nothing to do with the work — it protects me from having to say anything about it. That’s important because the guiding thread for all this associative thinking is improvisation. Associative thinking is a characteristic of improvised methodology — the way of making things by way of improvisation. The insistence on knowing all the cards is the undoing of associative thinking, which in practice meant that I had to build blocks of not knowing into each stage of the process. You can’t even allow yourself to be privy to the unknowing of knowing, what the thing that you write is going to do with language, with history, with presence, with memory, with forgetting. All that you know is that this thing is a map where unknowing is safe and housed.
Although your practice behind the film was rooted in not knowing, there’ll be a two-day academic conference happening in correspondence with the show. You’ve worked across disciplines and genres for a long time, and now this project sits in relation to the institute’s archive, bringing in scholars to speak alongside it. Has that changed how you think about the boundaries between art and research, or how this work sits in an academic context?
I’m at a bit of an advantage with these folks. I have a live presentation series at Cafe OTO, The Strangeness of Jazz, and I just did one on Quincy Jones and Otomo Yoshihide, two artists with seemingly little or nothing in common. I wondered what would happen if you rubbed the two against each other, historically speaking, and also because Otomo had done a gig at Cafe OTO three weeks after the death of Quincy Jones. Time and space had brought them together. If I were a journalist, I’d find ways of talking about them with the understanding that neither would be in the room, but what I tried to do is think as though they were there, sitting in the back, in the dark, and the audience was out front. They’ve had their drinks and their sandwiches, and the lights are low, and all is well in the world. Quincy and Otomo are sitting there, listening across time to each other’s music, feeling that something of an idea of their experience has been elaborated on and given a space to resonate. And in the instance of Black Atlas, in the place of Quincy Jones and Otomo Yoshihide, you have a cast of thousands of people. They’re Black and they’re white, but the Black folk are often the products of a white technology, practice, imagination. The hell they go through — for the technology, for the art, for the history — resists the idea of agency: that they could serve as the basis for a presence of then and now, or be evoked as fictions through which a truth was lost for a great historical cause.
There is a moment in the film of a bust portrait of an enslaved African, and that image has historically been used for abolitionist or historiographical purposes. What you don’t get are two things: that he himself is a subject that loves and that was loved. Part of that love can’t have a historical reference itself. He cannot be missed, he cannot be loved, and he cannot miss, and he cannot love. This figure, by nature of his necessity for abolitionist causes, is somehow outside of desire — a desire that locates itself in time, and a desire that, if viewed in a certain way, could comprise the archive of abolition.
After you watch this man in the film, you then see in close-up image of a slave ship, and the little dots that are supposed to be human figures. When we zoom in, they’re suddenly silhouettes. They become real people who loved and who lost and who miss and are missed. That’s the proximity to the present that you want to invoke with these characters. The way in which the horror of these images becomes something that you can live with is if you invest in it something of the human by way of an oscillation between fiction and actuality, your voice and someone else’s, through citations — of Derrida, Lacan, Fred Moten, Sadiya Hartman — and let the figures in the images sit with you and hear and see themselves. That’s doable, but you can’t know that until the last minute. That knowledge isn’t downstairs in the archive right now. It’s not a dub thing, where you can extract that knowledge from the pieces.
Well, speaking of music, can you tell me a bit about the sound in the film?
What I wanted for the film was something that didn’t respond to, or was indifferent to, genre. I like improvised music because it can sound intimate if played between certain people. You get that in the work that Crystabel Riley and Seymour Wright do together. I thought, because I feel comfortable being in a group with those two to begin with, that it would be interesting to see what happened if their music narrativised a sonic framework for the film, around which my voice sat. The intimacy took its own shape. They came into my little studio, which is next door to the office we’re in right now. I had these cardboard sheets to give me a sense of the scale of the installation panels. Crystabel and Seymour had brought their instruments and they just started playing, playing and recording. I had all the images from the archive in folders — one for monkey, one for face, one for dog, one for sex, mirror, blood, things, space — and they worked through them. The first thing they played became the opening of the film. What they did was perfect.
