Jean Fisher, 'James Coleman's Box (Ahhareturnabout)'
In: Boxer: An Anthology of Writings on Boxing and Visual Culture. Edited by David Chandler, John Gill, Tania Guha and Gilane Tawadros. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996, pp. 55-57.
In September 1927, the American boxer Jack Dempsey met the world heavyweight champion, Irishman Gene Tunney, for a return bout. Dempsey, who had held the world title since 1919, had lost it to Tunney the previous year, in 1926. The return bout, however, resulted in a hung verdict, becoming one of the great legends of boxing folklore.
James Coleman took this historical scenario as the ostensible subject matter of Box (Ahhareturnabout), 1977, a black and white 16mm continuous loop with synchronised voice-over, to be projected in a manner which would evoke the public transmission of such a sports spectacle, one such possibility being a television over the bar in a pub. Box presents us with grainy fragments from original footage of the two boxers circling each other round the ring, the images intermittently interrupted by passages of black film leader. The voice-over, projecting Tunney's imagined interior thoughts during the fight, is one of the most extraordinary soundtracks to accompany a work of visual art. This acoustic space, composed of disjointed words and phrases orchestrated with a low pulse, whose frequency is reminiscent of a slightly accelerated heartbeat, together with expressive, non-verbal, bodily or guttural utterances (grunts, sighs, laboured breathing), captures us in an erotically emotional register, enclosing us as if we were in the mind and body of the boxer. The work's play on circularity - its pulsating, structural endlessness, the movement of the boxers round the ring and Tunney's circling thoughts - induces a near-hypnotic state of attention.
Tunney's interior monologue, as elliptical as that of dream or reverie, refuses our desire for linear narrative coherence; rather, it propels us into a labyrinth of associations whose threads weave together several possibilities of meaning. Fragmented utterances concerning the immediate task of the fight, oblique references to Anglo-Irish colonial relations, Ireland's nationalistic myths, anguished thoughts of public immortality and private death are nevertheless so deeply imbricated that to attempt to unravel them would be rather a futile task.
Box is a 'dramatised recitation', addressing itself to listening not reading, perhaps, somewhat subversively, alluding to an oral storytelling tradition. This is in part due to its employment of phonetic puns; but is also the result of its emphasis on the qualities of the voice itself to carry meaning, relying as much on what Roland Barthes called 'the grain of the voice' (the subjective inflection in the act of enunciation) as on those expressive gestures which are signifiers of 'character' in orthodox theatre. However, composed of heterogeneous, abbreviated and seemingly disconnected words and mental images, the text is saturated not with any determinable 'meaning' but with 'sense' - indeed, its effect is sensual in its uncommon ability to play on the rhythmic chords of the viewer's mind and imagination beyond the merely visual. Neither poetry nor prose narrative, this dialogical monologue may perhaps be analogous to Paul Willemen's description of 'inner speech': it negotiates the heterogeneous and contradictory impulses operating at the juncture of unconscious and preconscious -conscious processes and, as such, like the ego, far from signalling a pure and unmediated selfhood, is itself a "discursive process determined by the social and psychological histories that combine to produce that particular individual in that time and place". [1]
[...]
Coleman's work of the early 1970s assumed the analytic modus operandi of the time, but rather than draw on linguistic or philosophical models, it pursued an enquiry of the relations between perception, memory and anticipation, maintaining a position squarely in the domain of visual art and a critique of visual traditions, introducing a time-based structure that temporalised vision. [3] This work is, however, less concerned with phenomenological questions of the spectator's reception of art than with the processes of interpretation and the role of representation in identity formation, concerns that were to lead quickly to an incorporation of social and historical dimensions into the artist's formal exploration of the perceptual apparatus. What emerged in the mid-70s, through works like Box, was a multi-layering and cross-cutting of visual and verbal references, increasingly elaborated through (more often than not) a critical or parodic use of familiar narrative forms, whether they be popular narrative genres like television soaps, pulp novels and photo-romans, or Irish literature and storytelling.
[...]
Finely tuned in both verbal and visual register, Coleman's work understands the processes and uses of language and capitalises on the disjunction in sense that occur between the vernacular or personalised utterance and the institution of language. It creates zones of ambivalence, opening a way to layerings or slippages of meaning, and thus to little resistances. Box is indeed concerned with the politics of representation - with representation as a political act - where the self is in a perpetual struggle to decipher its own 'truth' against the seductive pressures of those institutional forces that seek to impose others' fictions.
[1] Paul Willemen, 'Cinematic Discourse: The problem of inner Speech', Screen 22, 1981, p. 89.
[3] For an excellent analysis of Coleman's work see Benjamin Buchloh, 'Memory Lessons and History Tableaux: James Coleman's Archaeology of Spectacle', James Coleman: projected images: 1972-1994, Dia Center for the Arts, 1994,
p. 53.
[NB: Coleman previously spelt in introduction as Colemen]