Ein Bild / An Image

Relief image of Zeus and Hera

From Harun Farocki, Ein Bild (An Image), 1983

We are beginning Eye & Idea Fall 2013 with the endless question, “What is an image?” Lately I’ve been thinking of the relationship between image and object and how tenuous and closely knitted the two are – and rolling around in my mind since our discussion in last week’s class has been this bit of mythological drama on the image:

There is this incredible story of Zeus and Hera - they are fighting, as they usually are. Hera goes into hiding to torment Zeus - he looks everywhere for her and can't find her. He's totally despondent, while the world itself (according to Roberto Calasso) "will soon fall apart" when a goddess goes into hiding. So Zeus must to trick Hera out of retreat by pretending to marry someone else. He creates a phantom bride, installing a wooden artifact, a copy or image of a bride into a chariot and has his servants parade the mock bridal procession through the streets. Hera is enraged at this perceived rivalry, comes out of hiding, leaps onto the "bride" and tears its veils to shreds. When she discovers it is a mere copy, an image, Hera erupts into laughter. However the ritual has already begun and she must complete it. She marches the mock procession into the mountains. Hera bathes the copy – the mock bride –  in the river as if it were an actual living bride, then installs it on the top of a huge bonfire. The animals from the procession are heaped into the fire along with the wooden icon, and the whole thing is lit in flames. This ritual is played out in the village by the community over and again for many years.

In this story of Zeus and Hera's marital issues, the image is both a surplus that stands for something (wooden statue in place of a bride), and hides something (Zeus's attempted deception), and in the end turns as a hinge to knit together two very extreme acts—the ritual and the sacrifice. Even the parodic act of parading an effigy carries with it the consequences necessitating completion - in place of a real rival Hera discovers a copy, however this discovery of bride as image does not make the image any less powerful of a rival, and does not stop Hera from killing it.  The copy, the image, has a dynamic effect no less powerful than the real itself.

This metaphor of turning like a hinge is important to the question "What is an image" -- the image holds with it the action of turning, becoming both surface and surplus, which is a very powerful moment I think. This weekend I watched again Harun Farocki's 25-minute film documenting the tedious process of photographing a Playboy model for a nude spread, titled, “Ein Bild/An Image” (I love that the German word for image - bild - sounds like "build" - reminding of the construction of images, as if an image has inherent in it a sort of assembly). I love the Farocki piece as it speaks to this idea of image as a certain sort of ritual - in this case, the preparation and "building" of the centerfold - revealing the attentive, really quite boring qualities of this process... Farocki never reveals the eventual photo proof—the eventual image—of the shoot, and he doesn't need to - the making of the image IS the image, similar to the Zeus/Hera story. View the Farocki piece on Vimeo here: http://vimeo.com/62879563