An Art of Getting Lost

This article analyses Patrick Clancy's photoscroll 365/360 (1985) as an important postmodern image/text investigation into the problematic of the moving still that plays between photography and film and challenges the medium specificity of the Modernist paradigm. 365/360 consists of a number of interweaving and open-ended micro-narratives conveyed (and interrupted) through six rows of images, two registers of text, and the spaces opened up between them. The micro-narratives principally involve the dispersed journeys of artists Arthur Cravan, Mina Loy, and Marcel Duchamp during the First World War. These are oblique avant-garde narratives that revolve around questions of travel (what produces images in motion) and that engage ‘the art of getting lost’, reflecting back on the viewer's own precarious situation at the borders of (non)sense and (dis)orientation when viewing/experiencing this complex work. The article maps the key figures of the winged hermetic, cataloguer of (photographic) grain, and nomadic browser embedded in 365/360. Keywords: Patrick Clancy (1941–)Arthur Cravan (1887–1918?)Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)Mina Loy (1882–1966)photoscrollmoving stillsmicro-narrativeschronophotography Acknowledgments I extend my heartfelt thanks to Patrick Clancy and Gwen Widmer for the stimulating discussions that we have had about 365/360 over the past two decades and for generously allowing me to reproduce these images. Notes 1 – For a further discussion of these festive days of potlatch and of empty time, see Dale Hoyt Palfrey, ‘Mysteries of the Fifth Sun: The Aztec Calendar’, http://www.mexconnect.com/articles/199-mysteries-of-the-fifth-sun-the-aztec-calendar. This framing of time of 365/360 in relation to excess, heterogeneity, and general economy (without reserve) owes much to the thinking of Georges Bataille's writings on the Aztecs and sacrifice. See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Consumption, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Zone Books 1988, 45–62. 2 – Ingrid Hölzl, ‘Moving Stills – Images that are No Longer Immobile’, Photographies, 3:1 (Spring 2010), 102. 3 – Edward Bryant, ‘The Recent Photoscrolls of Patrick Clancy’, Art Space: Southwestern Contemporary Arts Quarterly, 10:2 (Spring 1986), 11. 4 – See Christopher Burnett, ‘365/360: A Brief Summary (Material, Theme, Relevance)’, Visual Studies Workshop Exhibition, Rochester, NY, 18 September–13 November 1992. 5 – The first multi-media performance with Patrick Clancy, Gwen Widmer, Matthew Sommerville and Michael Cummings took place at the Diverse Works in Houston, TX on 13 December 1986. 6 – Bryant, ‘Recent Photoscrolls of Patrick Clancy’, 11. 8 – Burnett, ‘365/360: A Brief Summary’, 2. The reference to Roussel needs further explication. With its complex use of puns and its narration interrupted by multiple sets of parentheses, the final book of Raymond Roussel published in 1932 offers definite comparisons with 365/360 in its material structure. For instance, Clancy's compositional strategy relies at times on the transposition of puns (e.g. from verbal to visual registers) that become the engine for the plot. It is also important to note that Roussel's poems in Nouvelles Impressions revolve around various sites in Africa that reflect upon his travels there. This parallels the ways in which Clancy's micro-narratives are (interrupted) reconstructions of the voyages and adventures of Cravan and Duchamp (who was an artist also influenced by Roussel). See Raymond Roussel, New Impressions of Africa, London: Atlas Press 2004. 7 – Patrick Clancy, 365/360 (The Plowed Field), image/text photoscroll installation, 1985. All further references to its text are to be found in the body of the essay in parentheses. 9 – Ibid. 10 – Hollis Frampton, ‘Inconclusions for Patrick Clancy’ was printed on the occasion of Clancy's exhibition Marginal Works: Atopia – No Man's Land from 27 March to 11 April 1980 at Utica College of Syracuse University. It has been reprinted recently in Bruce Jenkins, On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, Cambridge, MA: MIT 2009, 292–5. 11 – Marcel Duchamp, ‘The Green Box’, in Salt-Seller: The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, London: Thames and Hudson 1975, 32. 12 – The use of the term ‘exscription’ is derived from Jean-Luc Nancy's essay on Georges Bataille. Exscription marks the outside of meaning but from ‘within the text’. For Nancy, exscription points to the ‘infinite withdrawal of meaning by which each existence exists’. I transpose Nancy's discussion from the question of writing to that of photography (or light writing). See Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Exscription’, in The Birth To Presence, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1993, 338. 13 – Ibid., 44. 14 – This reading relies on the distinction between smooth and striated space and the construct of the micro-narrative as articulated in Gilles Deleuze, Mille Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1987. For a recent Deleuzian reading of Arthur Cravan as a multiple subject subverting identity, see Dafydd Jones, ‘To Be or Not to Be ... Arthur Cravan: subject, surface, and difference’, in Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde, ed. Dafydd Jones, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi 2006, 200–21. 15 – In its resistance to Euclidian perspective, 365/360 takes its cue from the artistic practices of both the Egyptians and Aztecs, who signified distances among shapes by intervals in width and height and never by the diminution of perspective in an imaginary third dimension. 16 – Clancy leaves out ‘the substitute dark’ (another photographic darkroom reference) after ‘colossal absentee’ in the original verse of ‘The Widow's Jazz’. See The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, ed. Roger L. Conover, New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux 1996, 96

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