TAP TO ENLARGE
A Note on Pearls Before Swine
While working on Pearls Before Swine, I thought about calling the images “plates,” after Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations. In his preface for the manuscript’s first publication, Paul Verlaine wrote that “the word Illuminations is English and means gravures coloriées, — coloured plates,” adding that this was the subtitle Rimbaud had given the work. Yet Verlaine’s syntax leaves unresolved whether “coloured plates” was Rimbaud’s own English subtitle or whether Verlaine supplied gravures coloriées—“coloured plates”—as his own interpretation of what “illuminations” meant.
If the latter, Verlaine's gloss established an important interpretive frame, locating the title within a specific nineteenth-century visual culture: that of mass-produced, hand-painted prints. If, however, Rimbaud himself used the English phrase “coloured plates,” then the word “plate” opens onto a field of associations wider than those suggested by gravures coloriées: not only nineteenth-century painted prints or, through another of Verlaine's formulations, the “painted plates” of illuminated manuscripts, but other illuminated and image-bearing surfaces.
Working with photographs, I found myself entertaining the possibility of another kind of plate: the delicate glass plates used in the nineteenth-century wet plate collodion process. Balancing the glass plate on his fingertips, the photographer tilted it so the collodion—a syrupy solution of nitrocellulose in ether and alcohol—flowed evenly toward each corner. The plate was then submerged in a bath of silver nitrate, transforming it into a light-sensitive surface, loaded while still wet into a light-proof wooden holder, and inserted into the camera.
To expose the image, the photographer simply removed the lens cap. In order for a clear image to be produced, the subject had to remain still during the long exposure. The photographer then returned immediately to the darkroom to develop the plate before it dried. Once developed, it could be brought into the light and fixed in a bath of potassium cyanide, a poison, then washed, dried, and varnished to protect its fragile surface.
Each stage of this process unfolded in heightened, volatile time: an alchemical duration in which routine procedure and time itself promised to open onto life’s evanescent presence, even as distortion, toxicity, and ruin threatened at every turn.
If the images of Pearls Before Swine are plates, it is perhaps because they share with Illuminations a quality of precarity, vibrance, and stickiness. They are photographs of photographs, overlaid with appropriated and original colored text composed directly onto the image through the sometimes unforgiving interface of Windows Paint. Rather than attempting to produce pristine images, I allowed them to remain blurry, distorted, and grainy. The effect—reminiscent of the gravures coloriées after all—was simultaneously intimate and sublime, trashy and lyrical.
Alongside Rimbaud, I also had in mind Harmony Korine’s fanzines, Tumblr, and the work of Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sherrie Levine, and Luis Gispert, among others.