SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

that those religious mysteries which brought back the dead, which put the initiate into a
narcotic state. Of course in the full presence of the gods that red figure were transparencies or
what Sir William Hamilton called, “Transparent shows” and black figure were “Shadow shows”
and the bat was of the origin of art. So, this deep sense you have it here, that’s late 19 th . It’s
Hooggstraten from his famous treatise on painting where he has his students, his apprentices in
the studio very simply just by casting, using a low position lantern creating this sort of primeval,
hirsute satyr-like group that captures this shadow world. We have forgotten these complex
connotations, this ominous spatial system beyond our control, which always lurks within
shadows. [Both please.] So, I’m suggesting that all of modern projection technologies, including
video, are the spectral descendants of this ancient shadow show that cast mobile silhouettes
first on natural walk faces and later on muslin sheets and translucent screens. In the case of
Indonesia, the Balinese puppets, a distinction has to be made. These were activated, by the way
by priests. It incurred an illuminated threshold and we have them exhibited that way in an
apartment that was divided. The men sat facing the front, that is facing the buffalo, of hide
figures that were gilt and painted. The women sat on the opposite side of the apartment and
saw the gods and the heroes of legend only in shadows.
[Both please.] This continued—I mean the power, if we can get the power work like Kara
Walker, for example, linking up to old machine, Au Chinoise. I’m showing you a satirical print
by [sounds like “Gombil”?] instead of Au Chinoise, it’s “Oeuvre Françoise” where appropriately
the Chinese are sitting in the audience looking at the French disporting themselves rather than
the other way around but I want to say that even in the satirical works of [sounds like
“Lucissa”?] Kara Walker and her mordant caricature the use of cut-out, the use of shadow in
its unnerving retains something about unnerving property that I think artists instinctively have
seized about this medium that is in the history of that medium. It’s both in the future medium
and in the past of it.
[Both please.] I want to move this issue forward and suggest that David Hockney is quite right
to see various 16 th and 17 th century lenses as having developed in part from mirrors and he’s
talking particularly about the concave mirror that I showed you here, Archimedes burning
mirror because these mirrors have the special, the wondrous property of projecting images as
well as reflecting them. Do you remember that phantasmagoria I showed you earlier? Here you
see how it actually is done with smoke and a very special kind of mirror. This amazing
painterly ability to thrust the three dimensional and even extra dimensional world on to a two
dimensional surface lurks behind a state of mechanized projections creating ghostly entities
separate from our bodies as Tony Oursler did, I think last Halloween in and about Central
Park. So, again reverting to an earlier technology and implicitly seizing some of its properties
that tend to become overlooked. [Both please.] In the world of the magic lantern first referred
to by the physicist, Christiaan van Huygens, was primarily used to amaze and edify in the 17 th
century where figures were painted on mica or glass slides and cast from a light emitting box so
as to make and I quote Huygens “to make strange things appear.”
[Next on the left.] Like the wundertrunk, these popular demonstrations in here, by the way
other meta-media this is very unusual. It’s quite large glass slide by the French 19 th century
painter [sounds like “Juanee”?] and you’ll notice it’s a glass slide that shows a magic lantern
demonstration with a demonstrator. So, it falls in this where media thinks about itself in this
meta way. These magic lanterns also opened up spaces of excess, of extravagant worldly and
unworldly powers. In Japan, they were called devil machines. The Japanese were quite
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