Jean Gagnon
Associate Curator, Media Arts
National Gallery of Canada



Over the last few years, George Legrady has created a number of interactive media and computer installations which have been widely shown in Europe and North America. This exhibition presents two of these, Slippery Traces: The Postcard Trail (1996), and An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War (1994), which we will examine more closely in this text. The autobiographical character of An Anecdoted Archive makes it unique in the body of Legrady's work, giving it the intimacy of a family photo album and the anonymity of historical iconography. The photographs dating from the 1970s and 1980s, on the other hand, exhibit qualities of the "conceptual image."1 This, according to Bruce Ferguson, attests to the artist's knowledge and, relying partly on the self-referential nature of the medium, moves so far away from photographic "naturalism" that it almost leads to the destruction of the image in noise particularly in the digitized photographs of the 1980s. Although personal in nature, the Archive includes other iconographic elements and texts, as well as such themes and headings as "Border Crossing," "Vogue and Sisley Fashion," "East European Store Windows," "Space Age Stamps," "Socialist Realism," "Koka Kola," and "Posta Bank TV Ads." Thus the Archive represents images of the media clichés that both East and West use to construct their respective media and cultural horizons, and that constitute the horizons of expectation for the social and historical subject.


The Floor Plan and the Archive
The full title of the installation is An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War: According to the Floor Plan of the Former Hungarian Workers' Movement (Propaganda) Museum Palace of Buda Castle, Building A, Budapest. The floor plan of this museum appears on the screen, marking out an itinerary for the viewer in which the various galleries correspond to particular themes and headings. The plan becomes a metaphor, "the metaphor of the interface" in Legrady's words. In the opening credits, a text superimposed on the plan alludes to those people whose history and identity were shaped by the political events of the Cold War. Immediately, the viewpoint is obvious: the creator of the work Legrady is referring specifically to the situation of the family of the artist-as-persona, which fled Hungary and settled in Montreal after the 1956 uprising; its story is woven throughout the sets of images and objects of the archives, documented and traced. The floor plan offers visitors several possible routes through the installation. If we can say, along with Pierre Lévy, that the interactive media call for an open reading which "always allows individual appropriation by a navigator,"2 the operative device in Legrady's work remains the intention of a subject, in the person of the narrator of the moment the artist-persona or others (father, mother, brother, aunts, uncles, etc.). And this subject is constantly evolving, shaped by the dimensions of historical narrative. The affirmation of a reading in the interactive media must also be thought of in terms of intersubjectivity and dialogue; the solitary navigator can never be more than singular, even if sometimes less alone.

Let us stop for a moment to peruse the floor plan itself, not for what it represents but for signs of its "status" as an artistic strategy. Right away we see that our path through the museum is echoed in the road maps presented in "Border Crossings," which is accompanied by accounts of experiences with customs officials. As an interface of the Anecdoted Archive, the museum floor plan ultimately becomes a media pathway, one foreshadowed, moreover, in the meanderings of the Situationists with their maps and atlases of urban itineraries, or in their pseudo-scientific psycho-geography. 3 In becoming urban wanderers, the Situationists were, in turn, following the example of the Paris Surrealists, who had sought a reading of the city and the urban environment. The Situationists were attempting a sort of "science fiction of urbanism," as Asger Jorn described it. 4 Guy Debord, for his part, has described wandering as a Situationist technique employed to move quickly through different ambiences, and thus find its own determinism and own relationships to the social morphology. 5 The notion of wandering applies directly here because the floor plan as an itinerary allows for a type of wandering that, like its urban counterpart, generates constant interactions with an iconographic and media-saturated environment which includes store windows, Soviet vinyl album covers, Eastern and Western fashion magazines, and the ubiquitous Coca Cola sign, among other things. By taking these pathways, by crossing borders in the "Border Crossing" section or observing toponymic changes in "Budapest Street Signs," we come to understand the degree to which territories are shot through with stories, the extent to which the narratives and words assigned to topography constitute marked-off horizons. To be of the East or West is to be of different horizons that are, nonetheless, constructed by the media and their propaganda machines, whether they are capitalist or communist.

In this regard, it is useful to look at a brief yet very fine text by Michel de Certeau, which addresses the relationship between archives and history. Archives, he writes, change the relationship with a received world on behalf of a world in the making. Further, the introduction of computers has modified the archive's function of appropriating the past, since programs recognize "series rather than a relationship to a referential 'reality'; research is confined to what was constructed prior to programming." 6 In this, De Certeau sees what he calls the perversion of time, brought about by data processing which, by its formal character, tends to predetermine a product to obtain rather than reinterpreting the past through a hermeneutics of objects received from the past. But this approach implies the existence of an historical "truth," one that has long been called into question by the dismantling of the great founding narratives, particularly those of Marxism and Revolution, and that has given way to the postmodern condition of codes.7 By being anecdotal, Legrady's archive enables him to refrain from making claims to this or any other form of truth; rather, his archive can be seen as a constant reconfiguring of an historical subject that threads its way through stories and narratives.


Autobiography and History

Legrady is justified in describing his archive as "anecdoted," and this aspect is what enables him to weave his narrative structures through private family chronicles and accounts of public and historical events. Thus, one reads in the archives that each family has its crucial events, which take on mythological proportions. In Legrady's case it is the escape from Hungary in November of 1956. In the section titled "Escape Story Narratives," the artist asked family members to depict the key events of the journey that took them to Montreal. Their often childlike drawings of harsh memories become part of the anecdotal, which also designates the interlocutory position occupied by someone telling a story or stories to someone else. The anecdotes are often light and insignificant after all, they represent merely a turning point in the history of the artist's family. For all that, they bear witness to History. The anecdotal tone is well suited to this interactive work, which invites the viewer to a meandering reading while linking history to personal life with all of its contingencies.


Autobiography and Self-portraits
Is the Anecdoted Archive autobiography or self-portraiture? This question arises insofar as Legrady's interactive and multimedia work, in its relationships with reading, shares certain traits with literature. On the one hand, texts presented as travel journals, letters, and written or filmed personal accounts wind through the narratives. At the same time, images, texts, words, movement, sound and music intersect in a construction reminiscent of montage in the filmic, or even Eisensteinian, sense of the word. Raymond Bellour's Autoportraits, a rigorous text on the self-portrait, reexamines the whole question of presenting one's own story. He opens by citing the literary definition of autobiography, which he considers impossible in the cinema, because the issue hinges on the expression of a subject, and hence an identity. Compared with language, film lacks the expressive means required to speak in the first person singular. Certainly, one of the difficulties film encounters when it attempts to become truly autobiographical pertains to the balance between "documentary truth and fiction," between "recording things just as they are and reworking the event" in violation of the principle of "truth value (which requires the author to speak the truth with respect to both the veracity of sources and the sincerity of intentions." Moreover, film apparently contravenes the "act value," which pertains to the responsibility of the author who is supposed to speak about him/herself. For, Bellour asks, "how can one particular image, as opposed to any other, be made to bear the imprint not only of the author's sincerity but also of his/her subjectivity and viewpoint?" Finally, "the identity value (which brings together the author, narrator, and protagonist in one and the same person)" is lacking in the cinema because "in the text, the I who speaks blends almost naturally into the I it is talking about, while in film there is an unbridgeable distance between the observer and the observed," between the fullness of presence in the image and the incommensurable absence encountered in the filmed image. 8

Perhaps it is to partly to break out of the impasse he is describing that Bellour turns to the examples of experimental film and video art, to Stan Brakhage and Bill Viola, to the "new and disturbing character" of the screenings that the film-makers attend in order to interact with the audience. This seems a dangerous route to follow, however, because to do so would be to glorify the ego of the expressionist artist in a sort of solipsism of artistic expression. Bellour makes a more serious attempt to break out of the impasse he has described by drawing upon the notion of the self-portrait and setting it against the earlier, literary concept of autobiography. In a language become familiar to late-twentieth-century ears, he defines the self-portrait, as opposed to autobiography, as the absence of sustained narrative, as a narration based on logical principles, as an assemblage or "bricolage" organized according to thematic categories. And he concludes by stressing that "the self-portrait is more akin to analogy, to the metaphoric and the poetic, than it is to the narrative." Initially, it would seem that the foregoing defines Legrady's Anecdoted Archive in a manner that resembles the artist's own way of speaking about his work, a topic we will come back to later. At the end of the third part of his lengthy article, Bellour once more hesitates between self-portraiture and autobiography, able only to acknowledge their mutual contamination, caught as he is between an attitude inherited from the "romantic-positivist critique and [one derived from] modern criticism." 9

He talks finally about the reconstitution of a life, in a way that leads more directly to Legrady's Anecdoted Archive (even if the artist himself does not do so explicitly), and about a work becoming the expression of a subjectivity constantly seeking its own nature within "the power of the impersonal" (for which the archive is a structured depository). 10 Thus the question of a starting point is partially displaced toward the reader or viewer, who must henceforth produce the work in a unique manner at each viewing. The problem shifts, therefore, toward the aesthetics of reception.


Even though in the end we do not care to trace exactly how Legrady moves between autobiography and self-portraiture, Bellour proposes that in such a piece there is "a moment in which [the work] is, as it were, illuminated from within by the 'new sign of value' that Lacan so aptly discerned in what he called 'small papers' (letters, journals, notebooks)." 11In effect, the Anecdoted Archive uses personal "small papers" of this sort to build up a unique memory that is, nonetheless, reshaped at each reading. The artist goes so far as to show old Hungarian passports from the 1950s and Canadian immigration documents. These are supplemented by iconographic records of public space, documents marked by the history of the great political regimes and their incarnation in what political theorist Louis Althusser dubbed the Ideological State Apparatus, and which we will call simply a techno-media complex.

It is through its connection with history, by means of which narratives take shape, that the Anecdoted Archive is autobiographical in the confrontation of the subject, who is reshaped in the narratives, with what Bellour calls the power of the impersonal. But as recollection is similar in its form of interaction to Bellour's definition of the self-portrait, we can see the same archive shaping a subjectivity that is operative in the work of identity given over to narratives, an identity that is itself grappling with the media horizon of perceptions, values, and symbols.


Metaphor, Interface, Narratives
The salient feature in Legrady's discourse on his interactive works resides in a sort of shift or displacement of meaning between various ways of accounting for interactivity. In a text delivered at the ISEA '95 symposium in Montreal, he declared that by "knowing 'the story' or the metaphor one can successfully navigate and orient oneself while having access to information." But what is the relationship between a story and a metaphor? In a text accompanying the Paris exhibition, Les hypermédias, Legrady pushes this sort of semantic shift even farther by speaking of "the interface as metaphor" and stressing the "as if" of metaphor. 12 The shifts are understandable insofar as the interface between human beings and the multimedia apparatus is a symbolic cognitive form that opens new possibilities for travel: viewers can go wherever the data links take them. Thus it is hard to designate the type of relationship that prevails between relational models imposed by the software and the structures of a database, on the one hand, and the openness of a system, on the other. If he is to speak of his life and history in relation to History, the artist must himself, at the system level, embrace the limits of the symbolic structure that he sometimes calls the metaphor of the interface, a structure that, above all, concerns the need for narrative and storytelling. For this he requires a means of translation that will enable him to move through different levels of possibility of technology, of historical reality, of historical narrative. We will return to the crucial question of historical narrative below.


Shifters and Metaphor
To escape these shifts of meaning, we will borrow Roland Barthes' concept of the "shifter," a term that serves as a title for one of the most important videograms of the Chilean-born video artist Juan Downey. There is nothing incongruous about this reference to Barthes, applied as it is to our discussion of a photographer and an artist who has long played with text and images "à la Barthes" and who has sometimes drawn upon his work. More fundamentally, the idea of the shifter enables us to account for the necessary translation across the levels of technology, historical reality, and historical narrative. Barthes defines shifters in his book, The Fashion System, where he shows them organized into three different structures that do not operate according to the same rules. Thus, paraphrasing Barthes, we will say that interactive interfaces are based on a transformation activity and that there is a transition from the technological structure to iconic and verbal structures. Barthes writes: "Yet this transition, as in all structures, can only be discontinuous." An information bank or numeric database "can only be transformed into 'representation' by means of certain operators which we might call shifters, since they serve to transpose one structure into another, to pass, if you will, from one code to another code."13 The elements that correspond in the interface to the "sewing pattern" of the fashion system are the program and the relational structure of the database. Thus the prime shifter in the Anecdoted Archive is the museum floor plan, which enables the artist to symbolize the structure of access to the database.

It is interesting to recall here the definition of metaphor given in his typically scholarly and aphoristic style by Marshall McLuhan in 1964 in Understanding Media a book profoundly marked by the sense that the electronic media, and particularly computers, permit translation from one structure to another.

The word "metaphor" is from the Greek meta plus pherein, to carry across or transport. In this book we are concerned with all forms of transport of goods and information, both as metaphor and exchange. Each form of transport not only carries, but translates and transforms, the sender, the receiver, and the message. The use of any kind of medium or extension of man alters the patterns of interdependence among people, as it alters the ratios among our senses. 14

In these transpositions of metaphor, the interactive interface is no longer defined only in the structural terms foregrounded by Barthes, but also in the interaction between the senses as they respond to images, sound, and text. Thus the interactive interface, in its symbolic functions, also facilitates the transpositions of the senses, which ultimately spring from an interpretative hermeneutic attempting to make sense of the discrepancies between things, events, and human actions and passions.


Narratives in the Interactive Archive
The artist's intention is clear: the interface, in being structured like the floor plan of the museum, enables the narrator to come into contact with "History." For him, "the thesis of the Archives is this: to inscribe one's personal history in History is to deny that the latter is unified, but to concede that it is a compendium of disparate narratives that contradict and refute one another." 15The important point here is the need for narrative in this task of thinking about History and the subject of History. Although a precise narratological study of the narrative positions of such a work remains to be written, what Legrady says is in fact not very different from Ricoeur's description of the basis of all narrative mimesis that is, the faculty of taking discontinuous and disparate events and including them in a continuous story. 16 In every narrative position we must recognize the action of an agency that collects facts and data, a controlling concordance that includes the discordance by means of which the world of human actions and passions enables stories to be told and to move us. Legrady points out that "the amalgam of disparate elements [in his archive] brings into being a narrative and a biography in an identifiable time and place." 17 While contemporary debate continues to make much of identity in relation to its displacements, the constantly reconfigured subject has not finished with identity or the identifiable. Likewise, History cannot be simply emptied of meaning when it is made plural by individual histories. The Anecdoted Archive invites us, rather, to apprehend the interactions that exist between the subject in search of a perpetually fluid identity and the History that emerges from narratives.