OCTOBER, No.

120 Spring 2007

“The Artist as Historian”

by Mark Godfrey

1. Historical representation then and now

Until recently, it might well have seemed that historical representation, which in the mid-
19th century was considered the most serious role for art, had only peripheral importance
in contemporary practice. We were taught that the abstraction of modernist painting
prevented artists from addressing history, and that when pop art banished abstraction it
was only to address itself to the present. Though this kind of account is now under
scrutiny, with attention being paid to abstract representations of historical events, and to
pop’s address of specific historical experience, revisionist historians of abstraction and
pop would still hesitate before stating that historical representation was central to these
art forms. Since the 1960s, there have of course been crucial attempts by artists to rethink
and reinvigorate the legacy of history painting, with On Kawara’s Today series and
Gerhard Richter’s 18 October 1977 standing out; however, such series are best
considered not so much as commemorating events as indicating the difficulties of
commemoration in a world mediated by press photography.1

The emerging centrality of photography in conceptual art might have presented

opportunities for other artists to revisit the task of historical representation in new ways,
particularly since photo-conceptualists were less burdened by the weight and 20th century
eclipse of history painting. However, though various artists of the 1960s and 1970s
scrutinised the pomposity and irrelevance of monuments and traditional forms of
historical commemoration (think of Claes Oldenburg’s monuments, Robert Morris 1970
War Memorial lithographs, Robert Filliou’s Proclamation of Intent for COMMEMOR of
the same year), few photo-conceptual artists attempted to create new ways of confronting
historical events or addressing the various ways in which the past was being represented
in the wider culture. Douglas Huebler’s DM1 Variable Piece 70, made in Dachau in
1978, is one exception.2 Huebler re-photographed images he found in the Dachau

My account of Buckingham’s work owes much to previous essays, conversations with the artist, an
unpublished lecture by the critic Gregory Williams given at a screening of Buckingham’s films at the
Akademie der Künste in Berlin in December 2003, and conversations with Janice Guy. See for instance
Orla Ryan, ‘In Between Lost and Found: The Films of Matthew Buckingham’, afterimage, March/April
2001, pp. 16-17; Janet Kraynak, ‘Matthew Buckingham’ in Miwon Kwon (ed.), Watershed: The Hudson
Valley Art Project, (New York: Minetta Brook, 2002); Tacita Dean, ‘Historical Fiction: The Art of
Matthew Buckingham’, Artforum (March 2004), pp. 146-151. Parts of my essay are based on a previous
essay in the catalogue Matthew Buckingham: Narratives (Kunstverein Westfälischer and Kunstmuseum St
Gallen, 2007).
1
See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘A Note on Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977’, October 48 (Spring 1989)
and Jeff Wall, ‘Monochrome and Photojournalism in On Kawara’s Today Paintings’ in Robert Lehman
Lectures on Contemporary Art (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1996), pp.135-156
2
Another exception could be Bas Jan Ader’s work Untitled (Swedish fall), 1971, a projection of two large
slides. The images show the artist in a forest, first upright and then on the ground. Ader’s father was a

1
museum and juxtaposed them with his own photographs of older citizens of the German
town. This work – which seems to criticise the lack of attention amongst the Dachau
residents to the recent past of the town - is an odd exception in the context of photo-
conceptualism and this strategy, re-photography, came to be much more associated with
the ‘Pictures’ artists than with Huebler’s generation. Appropriation strategies once again
seemed to afford new possibilities for historical representation, but those artists who
appropriated archival images were more concerned with the opacity of such images than
with using them in order to explore aspects of the past. When Douglas Crimp described
Troy Brauntuch’s re-photography of a 1934 photograph of ‘Hitler asleep in his Mercedes’
in his essay ‘Pictures’, he was careful to point out that the photographs in Brauntuch’s
works did not ‘divulge anything of the history they are meant to illustrate’. If anything,
the work suggested ‘our distance from the history that produced these images.’3

Fast forward from 1979 to the present, however, and historical research and
representation appear completely central to contemporary art. There is an increasing
number of artists whose practice literally starts with research in archives, and others who
deploy what has been termed an archival form of research (with one object of enquiry
leading to another).4 These varied research processes lead to works which invite viewers
to think about the past; to make connections between events, characters, and objects; to
join together in memory; and to reconsider the ways in which the past is represented in
the wider culture. These tendencies are as prevalent in object based work (Carol Bove,
Tom Burr, Mark Dion, Sam Durrant, Renee Green, Thomas Hirschhorn, Ian Kiaer,
Simon Starling, Fred Wilson) as they are in photographic based work but here it is with
the photographic mediums that I am concerned.5 In recent film, video, and photography,
many different strands of historical representation have emerged.

member of the Dutch resistance executed in the woods by the Nazis in 1944 and some have suggested that
the work refers obliquely to this event.
3
Douglas Crimp, ‘Pictures’, October 8 (Spring 1979), p.85. Within the context of ‘appropriation’ work,
one major exception to my argument would be the works that Christopher Williams made in 1982 which
involved selecting and re-photographing press images from the Kennedy Presidential Library in
Massachusetts. As Thomas Crow has argued, in this series Williams suggested the reliance of the Kennedy
regime on press photography, chose images that revealed the vulnerability of the president, and linked the
regime’s reliance on publicity to its eventual collapse. See ‘The Simple Life: Pastoralism and the
Persistence of Genre in Recent Art’ in Modern Art in the Common Culture (London and New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1996), pp.197-199
4
See Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October 110 (Fall 2004). Foster’s notion of an archival impulse
has much in common with the subject of my essay but there are important differences. Though he writes
that ‘archival artists seek to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present’, (p.4)
his concept of ‘archival’ practice is not restricted exclusively to artists concerned with historical
representation. For instance, he describes No Ghost Just a Shell as an archival project. My examples are all
of art works specifically concerned with history. Furthermore, Matthew Buckingham, the core subject of
this essay, operates in a more directed manner to the artists Foster describes, whose work he characterises
as ‘an idiosyncratic probing into particular figures, objects, and events in modern art, philosophy, and
history’. (p.3) The connections Buckingham makes between past and present could never be described as
‘tendentious, even preposterous’ (p.21). (I am not attempting to valorise Buckingham’s work over the work
of the artists Foster covers in his essay; rather I want to point to the specific nature of his practice.)
5
In order to address the way in which contemporary artists working with objects have tackled historical
representation, one would need to think of a different context to that mapped out above. One could look at
Marcel Broodthaers’s 1975 ICA exhibition Décor, at Michael Asher’s 1979 installation at the Art Institute
of Chicago, and at those works by Lawrence Weiner such as SMASHED TO PIECES (IN THE STILL OF

2
First, one might consider the number of evocative films which portray locations touched
by past events, and particularly by calamities. Well known examples (both featured in
Documenta 11) include Steve McQueen’s Carib’s Leap (2002) which obliquely recalls
the mass suicide of Caribs in Grenada in the seventeenth century, and Zarina Bhimji’s
Out of Blue (2002), which looks back at buildings and cemeteries associated with the
Asian population of Uganda exiled by Idi Amin in 1972. Tacita Dean’s films tend not to
be made at the sites of such violent events but are still often associated with war (Sound
Mirrors (1999)) or death (Teignmouth Electron, (1999)). Sound operates in complex
ways in all these works, but precise information about the locations is not supplied in
soundtracks, and the works’ charge often comes from contrast a viewer makes between
the banality or apparent innocence of the portrayed location and the history associated
with it.

Next, there are projects which deploy photographs and films discovered after directed
searches in archives. Some artists explore such material in detail to indicate the histories
recorded in the images, whilst at the same time acknowledging the fallibility of the
archive and the inscrutability of the discovered images. An example here is Santu
Mofokeng’s astonishing The Black Photo Album / Look at Me (1991-2000), an archive of
rephotographed family portraits made by black South Africans between 1890 and 1950.
This has been presented as a slide show in which the photographs are interspersed with
text slides indicating the families’ histories, ambitions, and the reasons for their use of
commercial photo-studios. These text slides also direct questions to the viewer which
make them aware of the investments they might have in this material, and of the inability
of the archive to produce conclusive information.6 Other artists have shown found
material with less directed intervention: Fiona Tan’s Facing Forward (1998-99) overlays
films made by anthropologists, tourists, and colonialists in the early 20th century with a
soundtrack of excerpts from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.7

Another important tendency has been works in which artists address history through the
contingencies of their biography, including their own narratives in the work. Tan’s May
You Live In Interesting Times (1997), and Laura Horelli’s video You Go Where You’re
Sent (2003) are two important examples, but perhaps the most staggering work in this
strain has been Anri Sala’s Intervista (1998). The narrative begins when on a visit home
to Tirana from his studies in Paris, Sala accidentally finds a silent film of his mother
speaking in the late 1970s at an Albanian communist youth party conference. In finding
the words of her speech, and playing the subtitled film back to her, Sala opens up an
enquiry about the fate of Albania during communism and about its afterlife. All the

THE NIGHT), installed in Vienna in 1991. One would also need to consider the history of the ‘counter-
monument’ looking particularly at projects by Jochen Gerz and Hans Haacke.
6
For an account of this work, see Lauri Firstenberg, ‘Postcoloniality, Performance, and Photographic
Portraiture’ in Okuwi Enwezor (ed.), The Short Century (Munich: Prestel, 2001), pp. 175-179
7
Another example of the former tendency is Emily Jacir’s project In this Building (2002), a re-presentation
of images showing United Nations deliberations about the 1947 partition of Palestine; other examples of
the latter tendency include Rebecca Baron’s The Idea of North (1995) and Joachim Koester’s Message from
Andrée (2005), both of which include re-photographed images taken in 1897 by the Swedish Polar explorer
Nils Strindberg and only discovered beside his frozen corpse in 1930.

3
footage in Intervista from the 1950s and 1970s shows people talking and singing about
the future. In this communist era, historical representation itself had been banished: one
of the crucial aspects of the work was that Sala not only looked back but retrieved the
very possibility of retrospection.

If Sala’s work thus confronted the eclipse of a historical sensibility in the communist era,
by contrast, artists working in America or on American culture have addressed a situation
where historical representation, when prevalent in the wider culture, is often extremely
romantic or sentimental or spectacular. Here, I am thinking of works by Pierre Huyghe
and Omer Fast which are not so much concerned with examining repressed histories, as
with critiquing Hollywood representations of the past. The Third Memory (2000) looks
back to the botched bank robbery that took place in Brooklyn in 1972 and that was
dramatised by Sidney Lumet’s 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon: the work involves the bank
robber John Wojtowicz directing a scene which is both a recreation of the events of 1972
and a correction of the 1975 film. Fast’s Spielberg’s List (2003) was made around
Krakow and scrutinised the tourist industry that has emerged around the still intact sets of
Schindler’s List. Deploying tactics associated with Claude Lanzmann, Fast also
interviewed Poles who ten years previously had appeared as extras in Spielberg’s film.

Such works have unpicked the ways in which Hollywood turns history into fiction, but
other artists turn precisely to fiction not in order to evade historical representation but so
as to represent historical experience more adequately. This tendency is best exemplified
by the photographic projects and films archived and exhibited by The Atlas Group. These
videos purport to be real documents emerging from the Lebanese civil wars, but for the
most part the videos and photographs are newly created images made by the artist Walid
Raad. Whilst other recent artists have been concerned with the rather obvious project of
showing how documents can lie (the Londoner Jamie Shovlin is a recent example), The
Atlas Group are less interested in revealing the fallaciousness of the material they present
than in suggesting that it is only through fiction that an adequate image of the Lebanese
wars can be created.

The Atlas Group as a whole might be considered a kind of performance, with Raad
playing the role of a genuine archivist, but this work is distinct from the last tendency that
I want to mention, which is the historical turn in performance-based art. Here I am
thinking of recent projects which have involved recreating historical events through
performances that are documented either by the artists themselves or by associates.
Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave (2001) was a particularly interesting example:
Deller organised the re-staging of a clash between police and miners from the miners’
strike in 1984. The work resurrected the repressed memory of troubled period of recent
British history and by involving protagonists from the clash, Deller also triggered very
personal confrontations with the past. It was crucial that Deller used a battle recreation
society to help organise the event: such societies tend to be involved with English Civil
War recreations, and their use in the project pointed to the way in which English history
tends only to be addressed when romanticised and no longer deemed to be of political
impact. Another example of historical representation in performance-based art would be
Francis Alys’s 2004 recreation of the ‘green line’ drawn in 1948 by Moshe Dayan to

4
designate the eastern border of the new Israeli state. Alys walked through Jerusalem with
a leaking can of green paint, both ridiculing (by mimicry) the arbitrariness of Dayan’s
border, and resuscitating its memory at a moment when even Israelis on the left maintain
a dedication to a ‘United Jerusalem’.

Each of these linked tendencies of course deserves much more attention but this short
survey already gives some idea of the diversity of historical representation in
photographic and film based mediums.8 One cannot attribute the emergence of these
various practices to the fact that film and photography by their very technological nature
always show moments of past time, since these features of the mediums were surely
noticed by the generation of artists who began to use photography and film in the 1960s
without making historical representation so integral to their practices. But perhaps this
feature of photographic mediums has become more apparent to artists at the point that
when indexicality is under threat. In other words, perhaps it is the approaching
digitalisation of all photographic mediums that sensitises artists to the way in which such
mediums used to serve as records of the past – and this sensitivity provokes artists to
make work about the past.

It is important not to lose sight of the localised conditions that each of the above projects
confronts – for instance, of the way Intervista responds to the lack of historical
representation in communist Albania, and of the way The Black Photo Album responds to
the lack of attention to the history of its subjects in apartheid South Africa. Nonetheless,
one can identify a general and seemingly paradoxical situation in regard to the status of
historical consciousness in the wider global culture to find another way of accounting for
the centrality of historical representation in contemporary film and photographic
practices. On the one hand, globalised capitalist culture is increasingly amnesiac,
increasingly focussed on ever new markets, products, and experiences. On the other hand,
this very culture produces ever more spectacular and romantic representations of the past
– particularly in film. And in an era of political catastrophe, these representations appear
more and more politically suspect. In the age of Gangs of New York, Braveheart, and
Gladiator, Siegfried Kracauer’s analysis of 1928 has never seemed truer:

‘The numerous historical films that merely illustrate the past… are attempts at
deception according to their own terms. Since one always runs the danger, when
picturing current events, of turning easily excitable masses against powerful
institutions that are in fact often not appealing, one prefers to direct the camera
toward a Middle Ages that the audience will find harmlessly edifying. The further
back the story is situated historically, the more audacious filmmakers become. They
will risk depicting a successful revolution in historical costumes in order to induce
people to forget modern revolutions, and they are happy to satisfy the theoretical
sense of justice by filming struggles for freedom that are long past.’9

8
These various tendencies have been the subject of previous essays of mine (on Dean, Tan, Sala, Fast, and
Alys) and will hopefully be the subject of an eventual book project.
9
Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies’ in The Mass Ornament (Thomas Y. Levin
ed.), (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995) p. 293.

5
2. Introducing Matthew Buckingham

Over the rest of this essay I will be focussing on the work of Matthew Buckingham, an
artist who has also used photographic mediums and who situates his work in response to
these same general conditions mapped out above. Since the early 1990s, Buckingham had
investigated various histories through his work. Projects completed and first exhibited in
the United States have investigated the history of slavery (Amos Fortune Road, 1996), of
commercial and ecological exploitation of Native American people and land (The Six
Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, In the Year 502,002 C.E., 2002 and Muhheahkantuck:
Everything Has a Name, 2004); of American corporate involvement in South American
economies (Situation Leading to a Story, 1999), and of racial segregation in urban
planning (Traffic Report, 2005). Projects completed in Europe have looked at the
histories of physiognomy (Subcutaneous, 2001), at the emerging hegemony of the
English language after the publication of Johnson’s Dictionary (Definition, 2000) and at
the decline of the shipping industry in Liverpool and at the gentrification of its formerly
industrial city centre (Obscure Moorings, 2006). Though research on these subjects often
begins with an invitation to make work in a particular location, Buckingham’s work does
not really reflect on his own personal biography as a mobile artist travelling to these
various locations. His subjects tend not to be particularly esoteric or quirky or obscure.
Buckingham rather initiates his historical research because of the urgency of a particular
idea in the contemporary moment, and his research produces a politicised reinterpretation
of the present.

In a recent lecture, Buckingham explained a principle that drives his approach to history.
‘There’s a notion that can be found in Walter Benjamin’s writing’, he said, ‘that is quite
central to what I try to work with. It’s a very simple but challenging concept. Benjamin
describes the vanishing point of history as always being the present moment. This
formulation of history – thinking about the present moment as the point where history
actually vanishes – is an interesting way of reversing the more received notion of history
as something which seems to be vanishing somewhere behind us, vanishing into a non-
existent time, a time that no longer exists. I think that by switching [this notion] around
and placing [the vanishing point] in the present moment, we activate our sense of history
and our sense of the past. [Benjamin’s notion] forces us to confront history as a
construction. It implies that when we reconsider past events, we’re not so much going to
another time and retrieving material or events. We are restaging those events here and
now in order to think about what’s happening here and now, to think about the present.’10
Reading through the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ and the section ‘On the
Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’ in The Arcades Project, many other of
Benjamin’s fragments resonate with Buckingham’s sensibility: the notion that ‘for the
materialist historian, every epoch with which he occupies himself if only prehistory for

10
Quoted from a lecture at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, November 2006.
Buckingham takes the idea of the ‘vanishing point’ from Susan Buck-Morss’s reading of Benjamin. She
has written that Benjamin ‘understood historical “perspective” as a focus on the past that made the present,
as revolutionary “now-time”, its vanishing point.’ See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing
(Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1991, p.339.

6
the epoch he himself must live in’11; and that ‘to articulate the past historically does not
mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’. It means to seize hold of a memory as it
flashes up at a moment of danger.’12

Now, in addition to the various practices that I have mentioned above, one other
prevalent aspect of historical representation in contemporary art involves the research
into and explicit referencing of works of art made roughly between 1965 and 1975.
Examples are not hard to find: Tacita Dean, Renee Green, and Sam Durant’s works about
Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed, Pierre Huyghe’s projection of Gordon
Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect, Dave Muller’s and Matthew Antezzo’s drawings after
works by Robert Barry and Mel Bochner; Jonathan Monk’s re-visitations of Ed Ruscha’s
photo-books and Sol LeWitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes and so on and so on. There are as
many different reasons for these re-visitations as there are works, and whilst some
practices appear convincing, opening up past works to new readings and contexts, others
seem melancholic and indulgent. Such differences are not the subject of this essay
though: I merely want to mention these practices as a point of contrast with
Buckingham.13 For unlike these various artists, Buckingham has not made art that
directly quotes or revisits particular works from this period.14 However, his work has
consistently deployed forms and practices that emerged precisely between 1965 and
1975: slide projection; photographs placed in disjunctive relation to text; films installed
in particular ways to sensitise the viewer to the material presence of the screen, light
beam, and projector; spaces divided to make different viewers aware of their presence
together. Buckingham has sited his work outside galleries and museums, on bus benches
for instance, and has distributed work as postcards and in magazine projects. Clearly
these formal strategies, mediums, modes of display and of distribution are inherited from
such artists as James Coleman, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Dan Graham, Daniel
Buren, Eleanor Antin, Mel Bochner, and others, even though these artists did not use
such strategies, mediums, and modes to make work involved with historical
representation.

Whilst the attraction of these artists is unsurprising given his interests, and whilst the use
of such forms distances his work from the heralded new medium of the ‘video essay’15,

11
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2002)
p.474
12
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992) p. 247
13
For an early discussion of some of these works, see James Meyer, ‘Nostalgia and Memory: Legacies of
the 1960s in Recent Work’ in Painting Object Film Concept: Works from the Herbig Collection (New
York: Christies, 1998).
14
There is a project of Buckingham’s which features images of works by Adrian Piper, Douglas Huebler,
Vito Acconci, Yoko Ono, and others. This is his visual essay ‘A Man of the Crowd: annotated associations
with Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Man of the Crowd’ published in Untitled (Experience of Place) (London:
Koenig Books, 2003). This project shows Buckingham’s research for his film installation A Man of the
Crowd.
15
One ‘video essay’ that indicates some of the problems of the genre is Sleepwalkers (2003) by the British
artist group Inventory. This examines a British Americana festival whose participants indulge in antiquated
reconstructions of 1950s and earlier American life. Inventory scrutinise the ‘special relationship’ between

7
Buckingham finds these forms useful (I would suggest) because they serve a purpose
that is absolutely bound up with his approach to historical representation. In approaching
each new subject, Buckingham is as concerned with researching particular events or
stories as he is with researching the way in which such events have formerly been
narrated or indeed ignored in received historical writing. Following historiographers such
as Hayden White, he has been attentive to the ideologies concealed in various kinds of
narrative – to what White termed ‘the content of the form’.16 Buckingham acknowledges
that fluent historical narratives tend to conceal the power of the narrator and tend not to
make explicit what is selected or not selected for inclusion. When he addresses subjects
of urgency to the present moment, he recognises that it is not just necessary to present
new revisionist narratives, but to reconsider the very role of narrative in historical
representation. The formal strategies and modes of display and distribution inherited from
art dating from 1965-1975 are put to use in Buckingham’s work to break up and
reconfigure narrative, and especially to make viewers aware of their role in the
reconfiguration.

Before looking at particular projects, I think it is worthwhile being more precise about the
forms of Buckingham’s work. For though, as I have indicated, he is indebted to strategies
that emerged from 1965-1975, it is more accurate to say that he has put these strategies to
work to create his own language. In each new project, Buckingham decides which forms
and mediums will be appropriate, and unlike many of his contemporaries he has not used
the same exact format over and over again, double-screen projection for instance.
Nonetheless, three main recurrent devices have emerged, and together they could be said
to constitute his language.17

The first recurrent device is the use in each work of two distinct elements. Most usually,
the two elements are image and text. The image can be presented as a film, a video, a
photograph, or a slide. The text can appear adjacent to a photograph as a long caption, or
in Letraset on a wall beside it, or as a voiceover to a film or slide projection, or as

Bush and Blair through the lens of this festival. The artists’ opinions and analyses are presented in a
voiceover that spans the film. Never once does the narration allow the viewer to question the speaker’s own
absolute authority. This uncritical adoption of narration unconsciously reproduces the very power structures
that the artists seek to question. Buckingham’s approach could not be further apart; indeed one of his
works, paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, explains the problems of such documentaries: ‘a written text is the
death mask of the thought that produced it.’ (Definition). For an account of some more nuanced video
essays, see Ursula Biemann (ed.), Stuff it: the video essay in the digital age (New York: Springer, 2004)
16
See in particular Hayden White’s critical historiography in Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins Press, 1978) and The Content of the Form (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1987)
17
There would seem to be two ways to approach the idea of the medium in Buckingham’s work. On the
one hand one might conceive a medium as a support or technology and see how Buckingham treats each
medium he uses differently: film, photography, video, the internet, etcetera, addressing both its formal and
economic determinants. On the other hand, keeping in mind the three recurrent devices that I’ve mapped
out, one might argue that these three as a whole constitute his ‘medium’. One might argue that his medium
is ‘fragmented, spatialised narrative’. This second approach to the question of medium would recall
Rosalind Krauss’s idea of ‘re-inventing the medium’. See the essays, ‘ “… And Then Turn Away?” An
Essay on James Coleman’, October 81, Summer 1997; and ‘Re-inventing the medium’, Critical Inquiry 25
(Winter 1999).

8
subtitles.18 In one project, a text appears on the internet while the accompanying part of
the work is on a bus bench (Detour). Rather than one element neatly complementing the
other, each of the two elements competes for the viewer’s attention, and operates in a
different register: one element can seem very simple, the other very complex.

The second recurrent device is the internal fracturing of each element. This can be hard to
sense immediately – one might assume that the division in a given work by Buckingham
is simply the division into the two obvious parts, text and image for instance. However,
as soon as one spends time with a work, one realises how each element is itself divided.
A voiceover, for instance, whilst read by a single person, might include totally different
kinds of writing or voices (as well as different themes); a film might include still images
as well as moving ones; a photograph might appear in the guise of an old analogue black
and white print, but reveal itself as a digital composite.

Finally, I want to draw attention to the Buckingham installation methods – the third
recurrent device in his work. One film installation comprises two rooms with a projector
sending the image from the divide between them onto a wall, so that the film is only
visible in one space (Situation); in another work, a slide is projected on a wall reached
only by walking up, around, and down a ramp (Definition); a photograph is installed with
a time line stretching four metres away from it on the wall (The Six Grandfathers…); a
mirrored screen is placed in the middle of another space so that a film projected through
it to a far wall is reflected by it to hit the near wall in reverse (A Man of the Crowd).19
Buckingham’s installations are spatially complex but always reveal the technologies that
they deploy (projectors, for instance, are never hidden) and this means that he avoids
spectacular and immersive displays that encourage the viewer to forget their real location.
By drawing the viewer to sense their present tense, phenomenological encounter with the
work in this way, Buckingham also emphasises the present tense importance of the
history with which the work is concerned. Buckingham’s installations also create social
spaces in which viewers become aware of each others’ presence: not simply to join
together in a romantically sociable way, but to consider what it means to think through a
subject as a temporary community.

Each of these three devices (division of the work into two parts; internal division of each
part; installation), which Buckingham has described as ‘tactics of de-familiarisation’,
serves a double function in regard to the way a story or subject is presented. The fluidity

18
In two recent films, A Man of the Crowd and Obscure Moorings, the ‘text’ is further dislocated from the
image. These works do not have voiceovers or subtitles, but they do suggest in various ways the presence
of the fictions that in part prompted their creation – short stories by Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville.
The attentive viewer will read the film comparing what they see with what they know of these literary
works.
19
Though not addressed at length here, I have suggested elsewhere that the installation of A Man of the
Crowd can be productively compared with Dan Graham’s Public Space /Two Audiences (1976).
Buckingham’s film shows one man in pursuit of another, and viewers might experience something akin to
this relationship as, standing either side of the central mirror, they are prone to block each other’s views of
the film. See Matthew Buckingham: Narratives.

9
of the story is broken up and the authority of its presentation is questioned.20 In tandem
with this, the viewer recognises their situation in regards to this process – both physically
and in terms of their responsibility in deciding what to make of the story or subject of the
work. In turning now to individual works, it is possible to see how these devices play out,
how they help Buckingham avoid didacticism and how they contribute to the new mode
of historical representation that has emerged in his work.

3. Seven Works

Amos Fortune Road (1996) was one of Buckingham’s first major films and already
evidences historical concerns and formal tendencies manifest in his work since. Broadly
speaking, the film concerns a present day encounter with the history of slavery. But the
work does not merely show how its protagonist confronts the past: it places its viewer in
an analogous position to her in regard to both the textual traces of history, and the
possibilities of historical understanding.

‘Sharon’ is spending the summer in New Hampshire teaching in a drama school, in part
to get away from her difficult relationship with her girlfriend in New York. She is
looking after one of the students called Maryanne. Driving to the school, she passes by a
meagre cast iron historical marker. She is only ever able to read its first two words,
‘Amos Fortune’, and, intrigued by this figure, tries to find out more. She learns from
Maryanne that Amos Fortune was a slave who bought his freedom and started a leather
tanning business sited near the historical marker. In the local library Sharon finds receipts
from Fortune’s life, including the one for his freedom. After discovering his grave in the
same cemetery as Willa Cather’s, she returns to New York and finds that the two books
on Amos Fortune are in the fiction section of the New York Public library. She learns
that the historical marker was only erected as part of a 1920s initiative to attract motor
tourism. Looking at a map dating from 1795, Sharon discovers that the roads she drove
on during the summer were the very same Amos Fortune travelled two hundred years
before.

This plot would be adequately conveyed through a naturalistic film but Amos Fortune
Road has an incredibly complex texture. It includes images recorded in a car and
passages filmed in forests, on and by a lake, and in the school and cemeteries that Sharon
and Maryanne visit. Sections shot inside the car were filmed with Super-8, while those
taken outside were on 16mm, and the two stocks appear are visibly different. Moving-
image passages are inter-cut throughout with still photographs and black leader. The
accompanying soundtrack was recorded separately. Sometimes sound seems to
correspond partially with the image; sometimes it indicates absent events (for instance,
the sound of schoolchildren is audible when the image is a photograph of an empty
school room). The camera viewpoints often correspond with the narrative, but
occasionally render it fictional. Sharon and Maryanne are supposed to be the only

20
Matthew Buckingham, ‘The Archive’, unpublished artist’s statement. For a discussion of other Brechtian
tendencies in recent art, see George Baker, ‘The Storyteller: Notes on the work of Gerard Byrne’ in Gerard
Byrne: Books, Magazines, and Newspapers (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2003)

10
characters in the car for instance, but the camera is often positioned on the back seat,
implying the position of a third passenger. There are inter-titles throughout the film, some
white text over black screens, some white text over images. A viewer reads them to
assemble the story, but becomes increasingly aware that they are making their own links
between words and images. The different types of footage, the soundtrack components,
and these titles interrupt the narrative flow, serving as a constant reminder of its
construction, of the construction of all we ‘know’ about the past.

This deconstructive tendency reaches a climax at the end of the film. Sharon is driving
back to New York when the image of the freeway tunnel freezes while the sound of
traffic continues over the ending credits. The first credit appears - ‘A film by Matthew
Buckingham with Sharon Hayes and Maryanne Cullinan’ - and with this, the whole
understanding of the film shifts. Having assumed that the characters were fictional, one
now discovers they are real people like the named filmmaker, Buckingham. But if
‘Sharon’ is the artist ‘Sharon Hayes’, how does this revelation square with a sense of the
film’s fabrication? If the events of the summer actually happened, has this been a kind of
reconstruction, with Buckingham in the car alongside the two women? Did Buckingham
script the whole thing, and ask the real Sharon Hayes to play a character called ‘Sharon’?
Are the credits simply a ruse to provoke these questions? As it becomes impossible to tell
fact from fiction, a bibliography appears. Four books are listed: two histories of New
England, and the two biographies of Amos Fortune. The bibliography serves as both a
sign of the artist’s working process - showing as part of the film the research
Buckingham did for it – and an invitation for the viewer to explore the histories further,
perhaps to question or corroborate the ‘facts’ of the narrative.21

Amos Fortune Road demonstrates that the past is always impossible to know ‘the way it
really was’, but it does not leave its viewer in a mire of uncertainty, and conclude that
historical understanding is rendered totally impossible. Benjamin writes that the historical
materialist ‘grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier
one’; Buckingham’s film suggests that profound historical understanding (if not objective
knowledge) can be achieved through various kinds of sharing.22 Reading between the
lines of the inter-titles, the viewer assumes that Sharon shares a level of exclusion with
Amos Fortune, and this is part of her attraction to his story. Secondly, there is a sharing
of textual encounters. In negotiating different kinds of images and texts and trying to
determine what is fact and fiction, the viewer shares with Sharon her situation vis-à-vis
Amos Fortune. Finally, there is a sharing of physical space. Though the facts of his life
remain opaque, Sharon retrospectively realises that she shared something very profound
with Fortune: a spatial experience, the roads they had both driven. Amos Fortune Road
was made before Buckingham began to specify installation conditions, and is usually
screened in cinemas, but nonetheless the viewer shares something of the space of the road
by virtue of the camera angles, which are often from Sharon’s position in the car.

21
Bibliographies also appear in Subcutaneous, Absalon, Definition, Detour, and One Side of Broadway.
22
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p..255

11
As we have seen, the narrative of Amos Fortune Road commences with the chance
discovery of a formerly unacknowledged ‘historical marker’. Buckingham has taken
other more well known monuments as the starting points for his works. One example is
Image of Absalon to be Projected until it Vanishes (2001) which he researched in
Copenhagen. The 12th century warrior-bishop Absalon was the first Dane to realise the
importance of narrative history in forming national identity and an equestrian statue was
erected to his memory in 1901. Buckingham projects a single slide of this statue over the
course of an exhibition so that the image gradually fades into invisibility. The projector
bulb burns away Absalon’s figure and this disintegration implies a critique of the kind of
nationalistic narrative that Absalon wanted to construct; meanwhile a text framed on an
adjacent wall tells the story of the monument’s construction. Reading this, the viewer
learns as much about Denmark in the early 20th century and the fraught history of the
monument as they do about Absalon. Another work by Buckingham which uncovers a
repressed history of a monument (rather than the figures commemorated by it) is The Six
Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, In the Year 502,002 C.E. (2002), whose subject is the history
and projected future of the mountain known to the Sioux as Paha Sapa and to most other
Americans as Mount Rushmore.

Again this is a work in two parts: this time, a digitally produced C-print photograph and a
text arranged as a timeline printed directly on the wall next to it. The image shows how
‘geologists believe the Six Grand-fathers … will appear in 500,000 years’ and the
timeline charts the geological history of the mountain, the eviction of the area’s Sioux
during the European colonisation of North America, and the employment between 1926
and 1941 of the K.K.K. affiliated sculptor Gutzon Borglum who carved the presidential
portraits. The timeline continues with sections on the late twentieth century tourism boom
around Mount Rushmore, the campaigns of the Sioux to retrieve their land, and, in a
return to geological history, the projected fate of the mountain and the erosion of the
sculptures.

The timeline very literally recognises that ‘there is no document of civilisation which is
not at the same time a document of barbarism’23: Buckingham exchanges the history
memorialised at the ‘Shrine to Democracy’ with a tale of exploitation and commerce. The
accompanying image has a different tenor though, and adds a less didactic, more
imaginative register to the work. The vision of the eroded mountain obviously deflates
the grandiosity of Borglum’s memorial and renders futile his efforts to inscribe the
presidential forms in stone for eternity. The image also contrasts the linearity of the text
by collapsing future, present, and past. To produce this image of the future, Buckingham
worked with contemporary digital programmes as well as with precise geological
research which indicated just how the mountain will erode.24 He also aimed to make the
image recall the Park Service photographs that were the first to represent the site in the

23
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992) p. 248.
24
Of course the projection relies on the fact that the erosion of the mountain will continue along lines
predicted in 2002. It is harder to guess what would happen given different ecological conditions. Given that
the work was made the year after Bush refused to ratify the Kyoto accords, the predictions of
Buckingham’s photograph might not be so trustworthy.

12
1940s. Another allusion is surely to the photographs of Robert Smithson’s Asphalt
Rundown (1969).

As much as the work stages the erosion of Mount Rushmore, Buckingham’s image also
erodes the very logic of photographic temporality. Barthes’s ‘this has been’ is replaced by
a compression of tenses; the image recalls and looks forward at once. This erosion is
linked to the burning away of the slide in Absalon. Buckingham’s decision to represent
monuments with unstable photographic devices (disappearing slides and digitally
constructed images) rather than with straight photography suggests a double edged
critique of photography. First, Buckingham recognises that photography has often been
used to provide misguiding representations of history. As Alan Sekula has written, ‘the
widespread use of photography as historical illustrations suggests that significant events
are those which can be pictured, and this history takes on the character of spectacle.’25 By
avoiding straight photography, Buckingham also avoids spectacularising history. Second,
Buckingham suggests that ‘normal’ photographs share with monuments not just a
temporality but a certain kind of authority. Both command their viewers to recall that
‘this has been’, and implore them to ‘remember!’ Since he aims to question the authority
of monuments, he has found it necessary to question photographic authority at the same
time.

Imaginative as Buckingham’s critiques of monuments might be, it would be much more

challenging to formulate a new kind of monument. This is the task he set himself in
Detour, made in Los Angeles in 2002. Buckingham made a poster printed with the date
‘September 4, 1781’ and with a URL below it in a smaller font size. The poster was
pasted onto a bus stop bench, and the second part of the work could be accessed on the
internet by entering the URL. A text at the website described the founding of the city of
Los Angeles on the named date. One learnt that the land had been inhabited by
indigenous peoples for 13,000 years, and that the city was founded under Spanish
instruction by a community comprising Native Americans, African Americans,
Mexicans, and Spanish. The unacknowledged founders of Los Angeles, that is to say,
came from communities now making up much of its underclass.

Buckingham’s work attempted to address the amnesia of contemporary Los Angeles with
a reminder of its colonial origins, and furthermore this address was directed to the
specific social groups who might have most investment in this memory: the poster was
positioned near the site of the original city centre, at a bus stop bench whose users tend to
come from a working class population. But Buckingham stepped back from proposing a
new, problem free, easily accessible, utopian form of memorial or ‘public art’.26

25
Allan Sekula, ‘Reading the Archive’ in Brian Wallis (ed.), Blasted Allegories (New York: The New
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1987), p. 122.
26
Detour could also be considered in relation to another work realized in the same kind of site in Los
Angeles – Daniel Buren’s Bus Benches, first installed in 1970 and subsequently in 1982 and 1995. By silk-
screening alternating blue-and-white vertical stripes on fifty bus benches, Buren provoked two questions.
What does it mean to see an art work outside as opposed to inside an institution? And, what does it mean to
place a non-commercial image in the site of advertising? (The benches were usually covered with adverts.)
These questions are implicitly explored in Buckingham’s work but there are two additional poles in play:

13
Although access to the bench was unrestricted, many of the people who sat with their
backs against Buckingham’s poster might not have had fast access to the internet; indeed,
one might ask, how many could even read the English text on the website? Fragmenting
his work between cyberspace and the physical space of the street meant that this question
necessarily became pressing. Thus, while he suggested a new form for a monument,
Buckingham also articulated the conditions of any attempt to address a public, and
showed that attempts to restore memory are often compromised by existing economic
inequalities.27

Situation Leading to a Story (1999) marked the first time Buckingham specified
installation requirements for his films. A viewer enters a first carpeted room expecting to
see the film but only finds two speakers and a projector, pointing through a hole in the
wall to a room beyond. The soundtrack is audible here, but to see the image, the viewer
must leave the room, walk around a corner, find another entry point, and walk into the
second carpeted space. Once inside, s/he can see the film emitted by the projector
occupying the bottom corner of the far wall. The projection is a sequence of four films
lasting twenty minutes in total. Buckingham found the films together in a box on the
street in Manhattan. They were of different lengths, and except from slowing them down
and editing part of the third, they are shown in the work exactly as found. The first is a
home movie of an affluent family at a garden party in an undisclosed location. The
second shows the construction of a cable tramway in the Peruvian Andes by the Cerro de
Pasco Copper Mining Corporation. The third has more construction scenes, this time of
additions to the house seen in the garden party, and the last depicts a bullfight in
Guadalajara.

The voiceover starts just after the garden party film begins, and finishes just after the
bullfight ends. The narrator first describes how he found the films in Manhattan. Seeing
the name Harrison M. Dennis on one of the rolls, he attempts to locate his home but
forgets the address and gets lost in Ossining, New York. Trying to understand what links
the films, the narrator then finds codes on their edges which date them to the 1920s. This
discovery initiates a portion of the narrative about the early home movie industry and
Kodak’s marketing of movie cameras.28 The voiceover then turns to the subject of the
tramway film, continuing for some time to articulate the context of the construction
activities pictured, and their impact on the environment and later politics and economy of
Peru. At the end the voiceover returns to the narrator’s final attempt to locate the owner.
Once again, the narrator fails to properly contact Mr. Dennis.

his work explored the difference between real space and cyber space, and real time (the time waiting for a
bus) and remembered time.
27
Buckingham’s work might be productively compared with other recent examples of ‘public art’ such as
Thomas Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument (2002), which articulate the contested character of public space.
See Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110 (Fall 2004).
28
There is a particularly interesting connection between Morgan Fisher’s Standard Gauge (1984) and
Situation: in the film, Fisher looks at the perimeters of found film reels to determine their date and
constructs a narrative around a continuous shot of found fragments.

14
In a few points in Situation, where the narrator is describing the images visible on screen,
the relationship between image and voiceover are relatively simple. There is even one
deliberate and rather beautiful correspondence: the narrator explores the etymology of the
French word ‘maintenant’ just as two people in the garden party are walking hand in
hand. But for the most part, the image/text relationship is particularly complex in this
film because of the temporal differences between the viewer’s and the narrator’s
encounters with the same images. As the viewer watches the films in the ‘present-tense’
for the first time, the narrator describes his earlier encounter with them in the past tense.29
The narrator describes scenes that the viewer is yet to see, or treats ones they have
already watched. As one tries to concentrate on what is visible on the screen, one also
anticipates what is coming or recalls what has just past. Future and past are compressed
into the viewer’s present and it becomes simply too demanding to attend to the narrator
and the image: either one gives up on the images and tries to concentrate on the
voiceover, or one lets the words float on and attends to the interest of the images, which
are sometimes extremely enchanting. (I have found that I want to watch the films many
times, and each time I do, I see sections as if for the first time.)

The relationship of image and text is obviously fractured, but, less obviously, the text
itself is also broken. Though everything is narrated in one seamless voice, the text shifts
between registers, from, for example, the anecdotal (where the narrator describes finding
the four films), to the objective-informative (‘In 1901 a group of New York
industrialists… began buying bankrupt copper mines in Peru’), to the aphoristic-
theoretical (‘Narrative is a chain of events in cause and effect relationship occurring in
time and space.’) Woven with different strands, the voiceover is a text in the true sense.
For this reason one cannot assume that Buckingham’s own position corresponds to the
position of the speaker, even though he reads out the entire text. Just as a novelist might
create many different voices in a book, so Buckingham has created several kinds of
narrators, and the viewer must work with the text rather than submit to the coherent
authority of its speaker.

Negotiating the complex relationship of text and images, and the inconsistent registers of
the text itself, the viewer might feel just as lost as the narrator had been when trying to
locate Harrison Dennis. This effect is accentuated by the installation, since when the
viewer enters the first room, they feel as if they have not found Buckingham’s film. (The
installation also spatialises the disconnection between sound and image since the
speakers are visibly separated from the projection.) Narrative fluidity is so effectively
disrupted, and in so many different ways, but does this produce a situation of random
confusion? No: working with the material, viewers come to distinguish between different
kinds of information, so that though initially disorientated, they discover particular
narratives with confidence. To rephrase the work’s title: getting lost is the ‘situation’, but
there is a ‘story’ to which this getting lost leads.

29
This is a strategy famously used by Hollis Frampton in Nostalgia (1971), in which a viewer hears a
sequence of narrations and sees a sequence of photographs, each narration describing the next photograph
to be seen.

15
Two stories, in fact. Though the story of the films’ owner is never resolved, other stories
are clarified. The first is the story of home cinema, of how Kodak manufactured
expensive home cameras and film-stock in the 1920s, and of how these new products
were marketed to the upper class alongside other commodities such as the automobile.
The discussion of the home-movie industry is one of the most incisive aspects of
Buckingham’s work. Whilst many artists work with found images and footage, often in
nostalgic ways, Buckingham presents found images and explores their cultural and
historical determinants simultaneously, asking who could afford to make such films at
this time. It could even be said that Buckingham provides a meta-critique of the indulgent
use of found imagery in recent art practice in Situation, and by taking found film as a site,
relinquishes a formalist investigation for an institutional one.30 In so doing, he does not
deny the charm of the images (the ‘garden party’ film remains very touching), but
encourages viewers to understand the conditions of their enchantment.

The second resolved story is the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation’s. This is a story of
the North American commercial exploitation of South American workers and natural
resources from the beginning of the twentieth century, of the displacement of people from
their land, of the internal conflicts these activities caused between the Peruvian
Revolutionary Government and the people living around the mines, of the sale of the
Corporation to that government, and of the continued American financial control of the
Corporation. This is a story of the origins of ‘globalisation’, and its continuing impact.
Globalisation neither emerges as an image, nor as a recent phenomenon, but as a
historical process.31

Whereas Buckingham was unable to discover Harrison Dennis’s whereabouts and the
reasons why he discarded the four rolls of film, he was able to carry out extensive
detailed research on Kodak and the Peruvian mine. The unresolved, private story of
Dennis is therefore set apart from the two resolved stories, which are distinguished first
by their public character and second by their significant impact on the present. The story
of the birth of home movies is told from the vantage point of the use of found footage in
contemporary art; the story of Cerro de Pasco from the vantage point of the global (rather
than simply trans-continental) expansion of such business activities. Noting this
distinction, the importance of the installation can be rearticulated. The carpeted rooms
allude to private domestic space but the installation requirements of the work insist on
exhibition in the public space of a museum or gallery. As much as the viewer’s initial
experience is one of getting lost, eventually he or she finds the material. If the eventual
meaning of Situation Leading to a Story involves the separation of public stories that
impact on the present from private ones that do not, this separation is precisely reflected
and achieved by the installation.

30
As a comparison, one could cite Bill Morrison’s film Decasia (2002), which features degraded old film
stock, and indulges its viewer in over an hour of ruined beauty.
31
Pamela Lee has recently written that many contemporary artists content themselves with ‘merely
portraying’ sites of globalization – her example is Andreas Gursky’s photograph of Schiphol. Buckingham,
on the other hand, considers the historical formation and processes of globalization, and refuses to image
any particular contemporary site. Pamela M. Lee, ‘Boundary Issues: The Art World Under the Sign of
Globalism’, Artforum (November 2003), pp. 164-167

16
If Situation examines the pre-history of globalised capitalism by focusing on corporate
activities, in Definition (2000), this same subject is addressed by looking at the global
expansion of the English language following the publication of Samuel Johnson’s
Dictionary. The work is an installation featuring a single slide and a six minute sound
recording. The viewer walks onto a ramp which slopes up, turns a corner, and slopes
down again, delivering them in front of the projected image. Speaking in the language of
the exhibition venue, a voice announces that the slide ‘probably [shows] the room in
London where the first dictionary of the English language was written.’ Johnson, the
reader intones, ‘imagined a social and political unity achieved through a common
language which might stop the wandering history of meaning.’ The narration goes on to
detail the progression of the Dictionary, but slowly inserts it in a context that is less
comfortable than that of the Enlightenment. It transpires that Johnson’s publication had
particular socio-economic determinants. By the mid-eighteenth century, increasing
economic ties between European countries prompted an anxiety that national languages
would be corrupted. A canny London businessman exploited this anxiety, commissioning
Johnson to write the Dictionary, knowing that ‘the hunger for linguistic standards had
created a market…’ Produced by the impulse to secure and define a national language,
the Dictionary, despite Johnson’s own opposition to colonialism, would become an
‘essential tool in the export-trade of the English language’.

Definition initially seems to be a rather depressing reflection on the linguistic foundations

of colonialism. In addition, when listening to the opening sections of the narration in
London, one cannot help connecting the nationalist fervour of 18th century London to the
present time, where opposition to a single European currency and to immigration is
growing. However, as the work continues, the emphasis shifts away from a focus on the
constraining power of dictionaries and definitions, and away from an emphasis on the
repetition of conservative political tendencies. First, the narration moves on to Malcolm
X, who read a dictionary word by word and recognized ‘the secret of dictionaries, that
they are really encyclopaedias in disguise.’ Then, as one listens to this part of the
narration, the image grows increasingly nuanced. It shows a window, an architectural
aperture rather than a point of definition. The slide begins to recall images of other
scholars by windows (for instance Carpaccio’s St. Augustine in his Study (1502-04)), and
suggests the possibilities of open thought rather than of constraint. Finally, at the end of
the narration, the text itself opens up. All along, there has been some doubt as to the
authority of the narrator, who has failed to define the image’s location with much
certainty. Nonetheless the listener has assumed throughout that the reader is the author of
the words. Yet at the end they hear that ‘Even these words, are not my own. After being
read and spoken by someone else, I have no idea if you're really hearing what I said or
thought.’ The ‘I’ here seems not to refer to the speaker but to the author, which suggests
that the text can no longer be accepted as a fluid utterance from a single voice; it is a kind
of fabric that the viewer needs to unpick and reassemble. Importantly, the authority of the
text breaks down in the most dramatic ways at the ending - at its limit, or point of
definition.

The voiceover also draws attention to the spatial situation in which the viewer encounters
the work. As mentioned, the reader initially says that ‘this is probably the room in

17
London where the first dictionary of the English language was written.’ Slightly later the
statement is qualified in the line ‘this is a room in one of the houses in London where
Samuel Johnson lived.’ Towards the end the narrator says that ‘Definitions are merely
provisional, fictions which are never truly definitive, changing slightly and constantly
with the contexts they travel through.’ Holding true for all definitions, this last statement
has particular purchase on the word ‘this’ which later linguists would call a ‘shifter’.
Through repeating the phrase ‘this room’ in the narration, the narrator not only draws the
viewer’s attention to ‘the room in the slide’ but also points back to the room of the
installation. Thus Definition constantly refers back to the place in which it is encountered,
reminding viewers that their encounter takes place here, now, just as its content reminds
them of the continuing impact of history on the present.

As its title indicates, the intersection of language and commercial expansion would again
be a crucial theme in Muhheakantuck: Everything Has a Name (2003), the last work I
will discuss. The film was made on a helicopter trip that started and finished near the
mouth of the river now known as the Hudson. Buckingham flew upstream for about
twenty minutes, covering sixty miles, and then turned back, all the time angling a 16mm
camera out of the helicopter so that the recorded shot is divided in three, with the river at
the bottom, the land in the middle, and a horizon line and sky at the top. For the first half
of the flight, the camera pointed east over Manhattan and Westchester, and for the second
half, it pointed west, over the cliffs of the Tallman Mountain State Park and down to
Jersey City. Though attached to a moving object, the camera itself was held still. There
are no pans, zooms, or shifts in focus: the film comprises two twenty-minute takes with
two cuts joining the two shots into one projected loop. In gallery spaces, Muhheakantuck
is projected through a pink filter onto a low floating screen. This coloration hardly
produces a nostalgic image – even though nostalgia is often described as the tendency to
look to the past with ‘rose tinted spectacles’. Rather, Buckingham wanted replicate the
appearance of degraded 16mm colour films. If the pinkness of the image tempts the
viewer to suppose that this film dates from the late 1960s, the views of Manhattan –
including ‘Ground Zero’ – soon reminds them of the work’s real date.32

32
Buckingham has always wanted to show the work in a floating cinema on the Hudson. A boat would
travel along the river, picking up audiences from the towns on its banks, returning them home after the
screening. This proposal adds new dimensions of reflexivity: Muhheakantuck’s reflections on the history of
the river would be offered to those who currently live by its banks. The role of the horizon would become
even more significant. On board, Buckingham’s potential viewers would not be able to see a distant
horizon – just the banks across the river and upstream. They would experience a kind of blindness not
dissimilar to Henry Hudson’s. But inside the boat’s cinema, these viewers would look down towards the
horizon, and the horizon in the image would be all the more compelling. This proposal recalls Robert
Smithson’s ambition to screen his film Spiral Jetty (1970) on the Staten Island Ferry. Smithson also
included sections filmed very deliberately from a helicopter, and in fact the circling movement of the
helicopter in the film replicates the structure of its subject. Despite these connections, there are important
differences concerning Smithson’s and Buckingham’s attitudes to history. As Jennifer Roberts has
suggested, Smithson situated his work in opposition to the nearby monuments celebrating the triumphant
progress of the modern American nation. ‘Smithson’s crystalline model of time disregards linear,
progressive, or triumphalist models by imagining time as an opaque encrustation around a fault or fracture.’
(Jennifer Roberts, ‘The Taste of Time: Salt and Spiral Jetty’ in Robert Smithson (Los Angeles: The

18
A voiceover commences a few minutes into the film. It is read out in one voice
(Buckingham’s), but once again different strands of content and register interweave in the
narration. At times the narrator is objective, at times authoritative, sometimes self-
questioning, sometimes aphoristic. The main strand of the narration concerns the history
of the river imaged in the film and focuses on the early activities of the Dutch East India
Company here. In the early 17th century, just prior to the moment of colonial activity,
Henry Hudson was employed by the Company to find the Northwest Passage, a fabled
trade route dreamt up by Europeans who hoped for a way of shortening journeys between
Europe and China. Buckingham’s narration attends to the way representation preceded
reality as much as recorded it: cartographers drew the passage on maps to prompt
navigators such as Hudson to search for it, and just as map-makers ignored actual
geographical conditions, so too Hudson ignored the Lenape people he encountered on his
journey, and their linguistic representations of their land. The Lenape name for the river
was ‘muhheakantuck’ – the river that flows in two directions. The narrator explains: ‘As
fresh water empties out into the ocean, sea water surges more than 150 miles up the
middle of the river.’ Had Hudson attended to this name, he would have understood from
the outset that he was sailing up a river, not the sea passage to China. Instead he
continued upstream until the river grew too shallow for passage, at which point his crew
skirmished violently with ‘the people of the country’. Hudson returned to the Netherlands
without having found the Passage, but the East India Company was nonetheless
impressed by the furs he had procured from the Lenape. Company men returned to the
river, establishing settlements in Manhattan, initiating more trade, spreading disease, and
persecuting the indigenous peoples. During the forty year life of ‘New Netherland’ ‘more
than twenty-three thousand Lenape died.’ Toward the end of the narration, just as the
helicopter looks out over Jersey City, the narrator describes the massacre perpetrated here
by Willem Kieft, the third Governor General of the colony.

Buckingham seems to have been drawn to Hudson’s story because the narrative provides
a prehistory of the present. The text describes how the capitalist rather than nationalist or
religious interests of the Dutch East India Company led to decimation of indigenous life
and the destruction of ecologies, economies, languages and cultures, and such conditions
prevail today. But there is also a specific contemporary motivation for Muhheakantuck.
Near the beginning of the film, the narrator mentions that Hudson’s voyage began on
September 11 1609; at that very instant, the helicopter peers over lower Manhattan, a site
now tied to the same date. Just before this moment, the narrator reflects on the ‘arbitrary
and systematic’ nature of dates and how they are ‘made meaningful because most of us
agree to use them.’ Though coincidental, the fact that Hudson’s trip began on this date
prompts the viewer to consider the history and repercussions of this voyage through the
lens of the present. 9/11, one realizes, was preceded by a much earlier, and much more
brutal assault on this place, one perpetrated by white Europeans on an indigenous
population. There is also a suggestion that the hostility toward America manifested in

Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), pp. 96-103). Like Smithson, Buckingham is sceptical about the way
in which history is constructed in the wider culture but refuses to see history merely as a ‘futile series of
turnings’; indeed he demonstrates the value of acknowledging forgotten histories: the possibility of
imagining other futures.

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9/11 might have its roots and explanations in the historical barbarism of western capitalist
activities.

The histories of the Dutch East India Company and the Lenape must be confronted for a
proper understanding of the present, post-9/11 moment: this insistence is the political
message of Muhheakantuck. But to foster the viewer’s imaginative faculties, Buckingham
needed to resist an overly didactic presentation of his material. He had to generate in his
viewer a sense of expansiveness about the subject of the work in order to encourage a
consideration of possible futures in tandem with a reflection on barbaric histories. This is
accomplished most obviously by the fragmentation of the narrative, which contrasts
powerfully with the free flowing river in the image. Different stories are woven together,
one breaking up the flow of the other; different kinds of voices interrupt one another.
Neither able to settle into the film, nor to trust the narrator’s authority, the viewer is
encouraged to subject all conveyed information to questioning. Indeed in many places the
narrator insists on the contingency of knowledge, reminding the listener that none of the
stories told is objective or factual – that each is learnt via other representations, that each
is told for a reason, that each is told through language with its attendant histories and
imprecision. If the contemporary moment necessitates the work of memory, at the same
time it requires us to question all received knowledge.

The form and content of the voiceover creates thinking space, but the openness of
Muhheakantuck is most powerfully achieved through the form of the image – an aerial
view looking down at an oblique angle towards a distant horizon. Right from the
beginning, the voiceover subjects this viewpoint to historical and theoretical scrutiny,
reflecting on what it might be to make such an image. Initially, whilst describing ancient
toy proto-helicopters produced in China, the narrator muses that ‘the dream of vertical
ascent and hovering flight is a dream of suspending time through distance – of cutting
one’s self off from ordinary measures of time – surface time.’ Clearly this ‘dream’ is not
realised in this film - the aerial view hardly leads to a timeless perspective on the river.
Later on, the aerial viewpoint is connected to the military use of hot air balloons. Aerial
transport has facilitated surveillance and control, and in Vietnam the ‘maneuverability [of
helicopters] …was a major factor in the US decision to go to war.’ The aerial viewpoint
is also connected to the cartographic gaze: ‘By capturing land on paper, maps always
construct their worlds in the image of a society, placing the unobtainable within reach –
drawing places in order to possess them.’

The aerial view has many problematic associations, but these are all clearly articulated so
that the specific viewpoint offered in the film can be differentiated more powerfully.
Whilst a map-maker or fighter-pilot would look down to survey the river beneath the
helicopter, Buckingham looks across to the horizon and thereby refuses the authority and
the possessive zeal of the cartographic, militaristic gaze. ‘It’s easy to forget that it is our
eye that makes the horizon’, the narrator notes just before the end of the film. Were the
camera ‘seeing’ from lower down, the horizon would be nearer; from higher up, farther.
The inclusion of the horizon in the image of Muhheakantuck reminds the viewer that the
camera only sees what it sees because of the position it is in, just as ‘we know what we
think we know’ only because of what we happen to have read and heard. As importantly,

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the horizon acknowledges within the image the presence of the space the camera cannot
see. To use a term from the narration, the horizon testifies to the ‘unknown’.

By using a viewpoint that initially seems so suspect, Buckingham performs a powerful

act of détournement, substituting a different kind of visual regime for the expected ones.
Just as history must be acknowledged to understand the present, Muhheakantuck insists
that it is necessary to recognize the inadequacies of knowledge and vision, and instils this
recognition through its verbal and visual form. Muhheakantuck thereby places its viewers
in a position of uncertainty and humility and it becomes possible from this position to
imagine relations and futures that are different from the present – to imagine a future not
just as a series of mounting disasters, but as a time of understanding and cohesion
between the different peoples residing in the depicted land. Whereas Hudson ‘falsely
assumed the unknown not to exist’, now, ‘the unknown is more than an occasion for
possibilities; it is a provocation that propels us on a journey, a route of unknowing in
which we experience many of the ways that we do not know something.’

4. The artist as historian

With a good understanding of some of Matthew Buckingham’s works, we can now return
to the title of this essay and re-consider what the formulation ‘the artist as historian’
might mean – both for contemporary art and indeed for history. I want to conclude with
three comments about the implications of Buckingham’s practice. First, the artist as
historian is just as concerned with a particular historical subject (be that Henry Hudson’s
contact with the Lenape or the Cerro de Pasco Copper Mining Corporation) as they are
with addressing the history of their mediums and forms. Indeed they situate these
mediums and forms in political, economic, and philosophical contexts. Buckingham has
researched the history of home movies (Situation), and of the aerial viewpoint
(Muhheakantuck), and has probed the history of monumental sculpture whilst at the same
time looking at historical conventions of photography of such monuments (The Six
Grandfathers…). The history of language, another crucial component of the work, is
directly addressed in both Definition and Muhheakantuck. Recently, these enquiries have
become more prominent. Ultramarine (2003), a project made for Cabinet magazine’s
series ‘Colors’, links the use of lapis lazuli in Renaissance painting to the cessation of
mining of the mineral in present day Afghanistan following the responses to 9/11. (A
timeline is accompanied by a photograph of a blue mussel shell). One Side of Broadway
(2005) investigates the history of photography and early cinema in and of New York
City, taking as its starting point Both Sides of Broadway, a book published in 1910 by
Rudolph De Leeuw. Here Buckingham reveals the connections of early photography to
commercial advertising and spectacular entertainment, but undoes photography’s early
totalising ambitions to provide a representation of the city by only photographing a
partial view of the street. Even more recently, the artist has begun a project focusing on
Louis Le Prince, who invented a moving image camera prior to the Lumieres. By
addressing the history of mediums and of forms, Buckingham produces an astonishing
kind of medium reflexivity. This is quite distinct from the modes of reflexivity at work in

21
the structuralist film of Michael Snow or the photo-conceptualism of John Hilliard, to
name two artists who addressed the technological properties of photographic media.33 At
the same time, this reflexivity has meant that Buckingham has avoided a criticism that
has been made of one of the historiographers whose work has been informative for him.
Reviewing Hayden White’s Tropics of Discourse, Dominick LaCapra complained that
White ‘assumes the mastery of “logocentric” philosophy over rhetoric.’ White might
convincingly critique other historians, but ‘he writes from a position itself constituted and
secured after an important battle has seemingly been won and without inquiring into the
casus belli.’34 White’s own forms, LaCapra suggests, should be subjected to scrutiny.
Buckingham never presumes that the components of his work are ahistorical and exempt
from inquiry: self-scrutiny pervades his practice.

The second concluding point about the artist as historian concerns methodology. Coming
to historical representation outside the context of academic history, and aware of the
critiques made of this discipline, the artist as historian is able to work with a
methodological freedom and creativity without sacrificing rigour. As has become clear,
Buckingham carries out extensive research in libraries and archives, but at the same time
other research methods have informed his work. One thinks of his receptiveness to found
objects (the film canisters that propelled the making of Situation, the ‘marker’ that
‘Sharon’ comes across in Amos Fortune Road); also of the importance of sites of
memory, whether Absalon’s statue or ‘Mount Rushmore’. These sites are often distrusted
by historians because of their centrality to nationalist narratives but for Buckingham they
prompt enquiries about such narratives. Buckingham also posits that new forms of
monuments might foster memory for particular social groups, as the work Detour
suggests, albeit with some hesitation. In more recent projects, Buckingham has used other
research methods – for instance, carrying out interviews with retired sailors before
filming Obscure Moorings, but the most interesting turn in his recent work (though
predicated in Amos Fortune Road) has been towards fiction. Both A Man of the Crowd
(2003) and Obscure Moorings (2006) begin with historical works of fiction – Edgar
Allen Poe’s The Man of the Crowd and Herman Melville’s novel Redburn and short story
Daniel Orme. In the first case, Buckingham re-created Poe’s tale (setting it in Vienna) to
think through the histories of urban representation and subjectivity; in the second case,
fiction was used as a starting point to address the recent history of shipping, the fate of
the docking industry, and the associated gentrification of Liverpool. The point has not
been to intertwine and confuse fiction and documentary modes of representation so much
as to treat works of fiction as themselves historical documents which are as valid starting
points for reflections on present conditions as ‘conventional’ documents might be.

Introducing a recent book by Reinhart Koselleck, Hayden White has written that ‘the
critical historian must proceed on the basis of the realization that she has to invent a
language adequate to the representation of historical reality for her own time and place of

33
Marine Hugonnier has also addressed forms in this way. In the trilogy of films Ariana (2003), The Last
Tour (2004), and Traveling Amazonia (2006) she has considered the ambitions of the panoramic shot, the
aerial shot, and the tracking shot, paying particular attention to the kind of power that each presumes.
34
Dominick LaCapra, ‘A Poetics of Historiography: Hayden White’s Tropics of Discourse’ in Rethinking
Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), p.76

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work.’ This reflection brings me to the final points about the artist as historian. At a
moment where the critique of master narratives seems urgent once again, Buckingham
has managed to use the modes of art to invent such an ‘adequate language’. His work can
represent stories about the past, and often previously unacknowledged ones – all the
while subjecting conventional modes of narrative and historiography to critical scrutiny.
But what makes his work so compelling, and what perhaps differentiates it from critical
work of a previous generation, is that the deconstructive tendency is a starting rather than
an ending point. Buckingham will fracture narratives, he will draw attention to the
construction of knowledge as much as to the fabrication of his work, but will not leave
his viewer in a pessimistic situation of relativism or utter scepticism where it might seem
that all interpretations and representations of the past are arbitrary and equally valid.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has described ‘the greatest gift of deconstruction’ as
‘transforming conditions of impossibility into possibility’ and this is the gift Buckingham
takes.35

And so I want to end these thoughts by recalling the way the future is represented in
Buckingham’s work, and by suggesting that the artist is a historian who can open up new
ways of thinking about the future. The future is one where the histories of the
dispossessed are acknowledged, whether they are the Lenape or the founders of Los
Angeles. The future is one where nationalistic monuments fade into air and crumble
away. Previously under-recognised stories are told, new visions are created, but equally
important is the work set off by Buckingham’s projects and how this work creates new
futures, how his forms act as an impetus for ‘transforming impossibility into possibility’.
I am thinking here of the way he encourages viewers to re-assemble narratives after their
decomposition, so that, for instance, the prehistory of globalisation can emerge as an
urgent narrative from what had appeared as a random collection of information and
events as described in Situation Leading to a Story. I’m concerned with the way he
presents the horizon in Muhheakantuck as an acknowledgment of what cannot be known
and as an impetus for unlearning. I’m concerned with the radical openness of Definition.
Though necessarily disorientated at first, viewers are encouraged to reassemble for
themselves, and Buckingham’s work would be nothing were it not for this reconstruction.
Since he does not go down the increasingly well trodden path of revisiting unrealised
utopian dreams of the past to imagine new futures, Buckingham’s work might seem
pessimistic, especially since his work revisits moments of calamity, dispossession, and
violence. But his is work orientated to the future, and avoiding both nostalgia and
despair, it remains ever hopeful.

35
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’ in In Other Worlds:
Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), p.201.

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