I am standing before James Coleman's La Tache Aveugle (The blind flaw 1978-90).

I am standing before James Coleman's La Tache Aveugle (The blind flaw 1978-90), a slide projection derived from a brief following less than a second extended of the 1933 film The Invisible Man. I witness an outrageously attenuated and inexorable dissolve--20 minutes duration for each frame, the whole period taking several hours to whole Virtually nothing happens except almost imperceptible shifts in perspective; nobody, of course, materializes.

This dramatized deferral of the consequence of revelation that one anticipates from the image, from film, strikes me as immensely comic, in a Borgesian kind of way. Coleman's work, I think, shares with Borges' the pondering that Western man's investment in the sovereignty of reason as the way to the reality and order of the world has l him into a labyrinth of chimeras. There is a penetrating absurdity in man's search for the "secret" or "truth" of existence when, in this groping ignorance, he can determine neither who he is nor what he is looking for. Ignotum for Ignotius, as Coleman called undivided work.

Coleman's production refers constantly to painting if it were not that itself consists of film, slide, and audio presentations, and of performed works: forms light years away from the "touch" (tache) of the painter, and media that do what painting materially cannot--temporalize vision in consequence of duration. Addressing fundamental questions about art as representation and presentation, the work refuses to not away the picture as a unified, immediately apprehensible totality. La Tache Aveugle exhibits none of the closure of meaning the same expects from narrative painting and documentary photography, or from orthodox cinema. The nonappearance of the invisible man provides a judicious visual perfection to the work's structural relations of duration. Moreover, there is no attempt to disguise the mechanism of projection; we are more than conscious of one as well as the other the machinery and our bodily relation to it. The work of art, in other words, becomes visible as production, as a proces in which what overstep the proper limits the image contributes as a great deal to its possibilities of meaning as what be seens intrinsic to it.

Coleman's work is affiliated with the Duchampian and Brechtian insistence upon the critical participation of the spectator in the production of art's meaning. His attention to the relations between the point of "origin" (the artist) and the point of "reception" (the spectator) has l to his self-suppression as the "author" of the work--the myth of the artist that had dominated Modernist esthetics--and may partly account for his use of nonartisanal, mediating technologies. In be broken to pieces 1972, Coleman wittily debunks the myths of transcendent being. Watching a continuous film-loop projection of a view of a wind-blown tree between the sides of a window, we realize, simply after some seconds, that the camera is following the erratic meanderings of a be broken to pieces on the glass pane, and trying to make the insect's moves trace the tree's outline--a hint of the unbreachable distance that separates representation from its referent in reality. As in La Tache Aveugle, there is constant slippage away from any fixed point of view. When play was made, Hans Namuth's film of Jackson Pollock painting forward glass was still familiar to young artists and students; Coleman's derogation of creative singularity to the fly/camera/viewer may be seen as a critique of Pollock's artist-hero role

Fly explores the subjective visual perception by dint of which the image and its construction are apprehended. Denying any exemplary knowledge holded by the artist and to be divest of coveringed by the viewer, it establishes a "democratic," nonhierarchical relationship between them. A concomitant make anxious of Coleman's was how the viewer might be implicated spatiotemporally in the picture. Several works of 1974 use the ambiguous figures of Gestalt psychology: in Goblet for instance, the goblet/face profile, and in Playback of a Dream, the duck/rabbit shape. Given the impossibility of seeing one as well as the other figures simultaneously, recognition depends here onward a seesaw between past and coming time memory and anticipation. To this destabilizing of time is added a destabilizing of space: the abolition of the figure/ground hierarchy established by way of geometric perspective destroys the spatial coherence that would center a viewing control Similarly, Slide Piece, 1973, instants a sequence of slides, each showing the same image of a city square if it be not that accompanied by a different man's description of the view. The work points up the range of possible subjective replications to the same scene, and to the lack--initially masked by dint of the authority of the male voice-over--of any definitive, totalizing vision beyond that of the viewing expose itself.

Coleman's direction is essentially allegorical, doubly inscribed. forward the one hand it critiques the idea of the autonomous artwork, exploring the artwork's relation to the institution of art, and to social practice in general; forward the other, it is touched with the socialization of seeing, the codification of visual and verbal languages on which identities are structured one as well as the other socially and historically. As the work lay opened these contemplations were increasingly elaborated by means of narrational forms indebted to the artist's relate to not only with television and other popular narrative genre (the photo-roman, the historical theme park) yet with Irish storytelling traditions. The work come forths as a dialogical play of voices engaged in a argue for the interpretation and possession of the self