COEN YOUNG’S 2020
Alan Cholodenko
Coen Young’s new work 2020 marks a major development in his corpus, building upon and extending his focus on and investigation of the diabolical nature and complexities of photography, mirroring and representation.
And more yet.
For the work not only engages history in multiple forms but brings a fatal optic to it, including to history, history as seen, known and written.
Here his title plays an ironical game in and as the work, 2020 needing only the missing mark, the forward slash, to delineate 20/20 vision and its impossibility today, the impossibility of seeing, and let me add knowing, history, indeed knowing anything as fact, truth, denotation.
Such an ironizing of 20/20 vision offers me this title for the piece, ‘Through A Glass Darkly’, drawing upon 1 Corinthians 13:12: For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (King James Version)
A glass, a mirror, drawing forth, animating, by means of photographs (Greek. drawings with light), a dark vision of not only history, culture and world today but vision itself.
Offering that vision to the vision, the perception, of the viewer.
In not only referencing, reanimating, the daguerreotype, an early photographic process employing an iodine-sensitive silvered plate and mercury vapour, but himself making replica, simulacral daguerrotypes on silver coated copper plates from shots he took off the web on his computer, Young takes his work back to the beginning of photography, spanning the history of photography down to today.
Which is to say that he has framed the transformation of the photograph from its advent in the precious singular object most often containing the image of a person held in the hand that is the daguerreotype to the impersonal, banal, indifferent, hyperproliferating, throw away, digital, computer hyperanimated photographs of today’s communication technologies and mass media and mass mediating industries.
It is a hyperanimated looking at photography as a form of animation, and reanimation, as a form of history and history as photograph(ed), from beyond photography, post-photography, after the end of photography, and history, too, as post-history.
For digital photography is hyperphotography, photography for the age of hyperreality.
It is total, pure and empty photography.
It can be said that, with this elegy to photography, Young has drawn to a close the book on the photograph with his hyperphotographic installation.
For his is a fascinated, cold look from beyond reality, from hyperreality, where memory has morphed into hypermemory, the total, pure and empty memory contained in and offered up by the computer (the three banks, as it were, forming themselves as akin to a bank of computers) and its extensions the memory of what was never experienced by the viewer, rather implanted in the viewer as their memory, as with Rachel in Blade Runner, the banks recalling, too, the monolith of 2001, dark, hard, cold, mysterious, impenetrable.
Telling here is Young’s reanimation of the work of Duchamp with this ‘Large Glass’–and yes, the reference to Duchamp cannot but intrude, including as well in the homage the work pays to Duchamp’s Etant Donnés, the peep holes in Duchamp’s door at once offering and occluding the sight of what lies beyond the doors, Young’s ‘large glass’ here marking at once passage and nonpassage, akin to Derrida’s notion of hymen.
Moreover, by placing the glass in front of the photographs rather than serving as the surface on which the photographs could be placed, he turns the glass into screen through which ‘one sees darkly’.
In other words, Young has inverted the relation of image and screen, making the screen the image, or better hyperimage, and the mash-up of framed photographs themselves supernumeraries, fractals, clones, screens, screens subordinate to the screen through which one does and at the same time does not see the photographs, themselves become, as Donna West Brett astutely notes, screens.1
And, as with Duchamp’s Etant Donnés, the viewer is positioned as voyeur whose desire is at once aroused and denied consumation, a masochistic position of endless unfulfillment, like Josef K’s in Kafka’s The Trial, waiting the rest of his life for the door to the Law to be opened to him.
Like what, in her critique of Laura Mulvey’s use of Lacan’s term the gaze–which is always in the field of the Other, never possessed by the subject, who has a look but not a gaze–Gaylyn Studlar, in her essay ‘Masochism and the Perverse Pleasure of the Cinema’, describes as a masochistic gaze incapable of possession of what it seeks to possess, i.e. the exhibitionist–a sad, mournful look.
Here, to reference Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, the punctum, the wound, is the glass screen itself, which vitrine-like structure denies full access to the photos, including by hand, as was integral to the daguerrotype.
A screen that feels and reads like an archive, a lost archive, of things lost in time, an archive of ghosts, of spectres–a mortuary even, not only for the photograph but for vision, a camera obscura obscuring vision.
For a world post-ontology, a world where ontology has metastasised into oncology, a world post epistemology, too, a world of the cancerous hyperproliferation of images–whose only goal is more images, as Jean Baudrillard was wont to say–total, pure and empty images–images subverting fact, truth, meaning itself, a world Baudrillard designated hyperreality, a world of at once too much images and too little meaning, time, and perceptual and cognitive capacity to take them in.
A world devoid of 20/20 vision, a world of radical, irreducible uncertainly.
Rather, these photographs and what they image–and the glass in which they are kept like butterflies pinned to a board– look at the viewer, who is their invention, their animation, taking the viewer in, into their world–in a sense the revenge of the mirror people, making the viewer one of them, a ghost, a spectre, a haunted house, a crypt.
The mass of images in 2020 appear to have a structure, to be organised by a system, even offering the viewer the opportunity to construct proto-narratives.
Yet the more one looks, the more that all unravels as the system destructures, desystematises, itself, leaving these photographs suspended in mid-air, floating, weightless, in a state of suspended animation, devoid of gravity.
A dark vision for a dark world, a world I nominated the ‘Age of Endarkenment’ in my essay ‘“Like Tears in Rain”: The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Animation and Memory in the Era of Hyperreality’.
This work is a crypt, a haunted house, of and for photography, a figuring of my Cryptic Complex of the uncanny, the return of death as spectre, endless mourning and melancholia and cryptic incorporation in the wake of memory morphing into hypermemory and time into hypertime.
And reality into hyperreality.
Young’s dark glass, his dark mirror, literalises seeing through a dark glass, a dark mirror, as what vision has metastasised into, hisan exquisite, lustrous, scintillating dark vision of vision, a fatal vision, a vision fatal to sight, to the optical, a dark vision apt for the dark reality of today’s world, a vision of what vision can no longer serve to see, to know, if it ever could.
The ‘white noise of history’, as Young dubbed it, but not only of history, of the hyperculture and hyperworld animated by mass media in which the subject, the human, is the special effect of the media.
Notes
1 Donna West Brett. ‘Coen Young: 2020’, floor sheet accompanying the show of this work at Mais-Wright Gallery, Sydney, 26 June 2025.
© Alan Cholodenko 2025
And more yet.
For the work not only engages history in multiple forms but brings a fatal optic to it, including to history, history as seen, known and written.
Here his title plays an ironical game in and as the work, 2020 needing only the missing mark, the forward slash, to delineate 20/20 vision and its impossibility today, the impossibility of seeing, and let me add knowing, history, indeed knowing anything as fact, truth, denotation.
Such an ironizing of 20/20 vision offers me this title for the piece, ‘Through A Glass Darkly’, drawing upon 1 Corinthians 13:12: For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (King James Version)
A glass, a mirror, drawing forth, animating, by means of photographs (Greek. drawings with light), a dark vision of not only history, culture and world today but vision itself.
Offering that vision to the vision, the perception, of the viewer.
In not only referencing, reanimating, the daguerreotype, an early photographic process employing an iodine-sensitive silvered plate and mercury vapour, but himself making replica, simulacral daguerrotypes on silver coated copper plates from shots he took off the web on his computer, Young takes his work back to the beginning of photography, spanning the history of photography down to today.
Which is to say that he has framed the transformation of the photograph from its advent in the precious singular object most often containing the image of a person held in the hand that is the daguerreotype to the impersonal, banal, indifferent, hyperproliferating, throw away, digital, computer hyperanimated photographs of today’s communication technologies and mass media and mass mediating industries.
It is a hyperanimated looking at photography as a form of animation, and reanimation, as a form of history and history as photograph(ed), from beyond photography, post-photography, after the end of photography, and history, too, as post-history.
For digital photography is hyperphotography, photography for the age of hyperreality.
It is total, pure and empty photography.
It can be said that, with this elegy to photography, Young has drawn to a close the book on the photograph with his hyperphotographic installation.
For his is a fascinated, cold look from beyond reality, from hyperreality, where memory has morphed into hypermemory, the total, pure and empty memory contained in and offered up by the computer (the three banks, as it were, forming themselves as akin to a bank of computers) and its extensions the memory of what was never experienced by the viewer, rather implanted in the viewer as their memory, as with Rachel in Blade Runner, the banks recalling, too, the monolith of 2001, dark, hard, cold, mysterious, impenetrable.
Telling here is Young’s reanimation of the work of Duchamp with this ‘Large Glass’–and yes, the reference to Duchamp cannot but intrude, including as well in the homage the work pays to Duchamp’s Etant Donnés, the peep holes in Duchamp’s door at once offering and occluding the sight of what lies beyond the doors, Young’s ‘large glass’ here marking at once passage and nonpassage, akin to Derrida’s notion of hymen.
Moreover, by placing the glass in front of the photographs rather than serving as the surface on which the photographs could be placed, he turns the glass into screen through which ‘one sees darkly’.
In other words, Young has inverted the relation of image and screen, making the screen the image, or better hyperimage, and the mash-up of framed photographs themselves supernumeraries, fractals, clones, screens, screens subordinate to the screen through which one does and at the same time does not see the photographs, themselves become, as Donna West Brett astutely notes, screens.1
And, as with Duchamp’s Etant Donnés, the viewer is positioned as voyeur whose desire is at once aroused and denied consumation, a masochistic position of endless unfulfillment, like Josef K’s in Kafka’s The Trial, waiting the rest of his life for the door to the Law to be opened to him.
Like what, in her critique of Laura Mulvey’s use of Lacan’s term the gaze–which is always in the field of the Other, never possessed by the subject, who has a look but not a gaze–Gaylyn Studlar, in her essay ‘Masochism and the Perverse Pleasure of the Cinema’, describes as a masochistic gaze incapable of possession of what it seeks to possess, i.e. the exhibitionist–a sad, mournful look.
Here, to reference Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, the punctum, the wound, is the glass screen itself, which vitrine-like structure denies full access to the photos, including by hand, as was integral to the daguerrotype.
A screen that feels and reads like an archive, a lost archive, of things lost in time, an archive of ghosts, of spectres–a mortuary even, not only for the photograph but for vision, a camera obscura obscuring vision.
For a world post-ontology, a world where ontology has metastasised into oncology, a world post epistemology, too, a world of the cancerous hyperproliferation of images–whose only goal is more images, as Jean Baudrillard was wont to say–total, pure and empty images–images subverting fact, truth, meaning itself, a world Baudrillard designated hyperreality, a world of at once too much images and too little meaning, time, and perceptual and cognitive capacity to take them in.
A world devoid of 20/20 vision, a world of radical, irreducible uncertainly.
Rather, these photographs and what they image–and the glass in which they are kept like butterflies pinned to a board– look at the viewer, who is their invention, their animation, taking the viewer in, into their world–in a sense the revenge of the mirror people, making the viewer one of them, a ghost, a spectre, a haunted house, a crypt.
The mass of images in 2020 appear to have a structure, to be organised by a system, even offering the viewer the opportunity to construct proto-narratives.
Yet the more one looks, the more that all unravels as the system destructures, desystematises, itself, leaving these photographs suspended in mid-air, floating, weightless, in a state of suspended animation, devoid of gravity.
A dark vision for a dark world, a world I nominated the ‘Age of Endarkenment’ in my essay ‘“Like Tears in Rain”: The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Animation and Memory in the Era of Hyperreality’.
This work is a crypt, a haunted house, of and for photography, a figuring of my Cryptic Complex of the uncanny, the return of death as spectre, endless mourning and melancholia and cryptic incorporation in the wake of memory morphing into hypermemory and time into hypertime.
And reality into hyperreality.
Young’s dark glass, his dark mirror, literalises seeing through a dark glass, a dark mirror, as what vision has metastasised into, hisan exquisite, lustrous, scintillating dark vision of vision, a fatal vision, a vision fatal to sight, to the optical, a dark vision apt for the dark reality of today’s world, a vision of what vision can no longer serve to see, to know, if it ever could.
The ‘white noise of history’, as Young dubbed it, but not only of history, of the hyperculture and hyperworld animated by mass media in which the subject, the human, is the special effect of the media.
Notes
1 Donna West Brett. ‘Coen Young: 2020’, floor sheet accompanying the show of this work at Mais-Wright Gallery, Sydney, 26 June 2025.
© Alan Cholodenko 2025