The Secret Message in the Image

Julien Bismuth: Steganograms
The Box, Los Angeles
19.09.15 – 31.10.15

Think of the ways one might send a message securely: mail a letter, have a conversation in a busy restaurant, make a call on a random payphone – if you can find one. Then again, maybe you have no reason to send a message you have no reason to hide. Of course. In Steganograms, at The Box in Los Angeles, the artist Julien Bismuth, through a series of new photographs, texts, video, collage, a sound piece, conceptual projects, and a performance that happened before the show opened, seemingly has nothing to hide. But this show successfully explores the fascinating ways in which hiding information can be intriguing, and interpretation subverted.

The main bulk of the works in Steganograms is encrypted photographs. Bismuth came up with this neologism based on the practice of digital steganography, which is a form of cryptography in which a text, or image, is embedded within another image through coding. Bismuth made photographs with a 35 mm camera, digitised the images, wrote texts, and then combined them together with a programme designed by his cousin, Vincent. Each digital image has a code of bits representing the colours of the image, and if you alter some bits for other bits – say, a legible text – at varying levels, the image is more or less abstracted with visible or imperceptible digital noise.

Bismuth exhibits his steganograms framed on the wall, and then shows the original image along with the text that has been embedded in vitrines in the centre of the gallery. As you are looking down into the vitrines, the corresponding steganogram hangs across the way on the facing wall, with varying degrees of grained and pixilated abstraction. This makes the encryption process very transparent – far from the usual sort of steganography that has been used for everything, from film studios sending out film screeners that they want to be able to trace, to Al Qaeda transmitting messages through videos. A well hidden message, in steganography, will show nothing out of the ordinary if you don’t know the message is there.

The texts on display read like automatic writing, the coded language of the unconscious. Bismuth writes in the text to Steganogram II that he is composing as if he were writing an email, ‘so as to feel as if I were addressing someone or something’. These are haphazard notes, with memories, repeated explanations of the steganography process, and snippets of dreams. Rarely do they address what the photographs are of: a white duck on the bank of a river, a heap of compost, pig carcasses in a slaughterhouse, or an insect in mid-flight. As Bismuth puts it in the press release, each image has been ‘coloured’ by the text, and this is what fascinates him. Seeing all of Bismuth’s ingredients, however, and the intentionality of grainy abstraction, provokes one to seek deeper meanings and codings. One might ask: Is there something else embedded in these images, along with the text? We may never know for sure.

Studying and puzzling over Bismuth’s creations, we begin to notice the recurrence of certain details that demonstrate Bismuth’s feelings about abstraction and comprehension. The performance that happened before the show opened had Bismuth in front of an audience, writing on a piece of graph paper that was projected onto a screen, for all to see. The video of this is displayed on a piece of frosted glass perpendicularly mounted to the wall, with the actual written-on graph paper posted to the back. He writes on the graph paper about losing his bearings in Los Angeles: ‘That is what I think abstraction is, when we speak of abstraction in an image. It is a loss of one’s bearings.’ And in the text for Steganogram III, he writes: ‘I only really start to see an image once I forget what it’s about.’ And in Steganogram IX: ‘All the things we cannot see, we see in images.’ And, finally, in Steganogram X, in writing about his cousin’s software program that he uses to encode the image, and on computers in general: ‘The blindness of a processor is the purest, as in most unsuspecting, form of blindness.’ The works in this exhibition imply that to see is not to know; it’s only when we start asking questions, and forgetting sight, that we begin to experience what is there. But what comes after this ‘beginning’ can continue as a series of beginnings, with no end.

On the whole, there is no whole here. The show is a series of fragments that are difficult to make sense of together. Along with the steganogram sets and the video/graph paper, Bismuth includes another video on a flat-screen display of a hand waving around over  a scan of two pages of the mathematician Kurt Gödel’s philosophical notebooks written in a nineteenth-century form of German shorthand called Gabelsberger after its inventor. The voices in the video are translating the text, which relates to time. The readers lose their place and have to begin again. ‘Time is thus both the topic and the protagonist of the video’ writes Bismuth in the press release. The show also includes Bismuth’s Titular Works  – works that are based on titles but have little overt essence other than actions, words or punctuation. For example, two holes cut in the gallery wall, a giant colon, are titled ( 2015 ). There are also vast expanses of wall that Bismuth calls 555 by 1280 cm ( 2015 ) and 35 by 199 inches ( 2015 ) which are just that – units of measurement between other works. In the press release, Bismuth remarks that he keeps ‘wanting to fill these vacancies with something else: a title, a reference, an allusion. But I think I’ll try to leave them vacant for as long as I can.’ In my correspondence with Bismuth he did mention an allusion for the larger of these works: the exact dimensions of Paolo Veronese’s Feast in the House of Levi ( 1573 ), a work originally titled Christ in the House of Levi, but the painting was too filled with ‘sinners’, and so Veronese changed – or perhaps coded – the name.

What’s essential to viewing this show is having an open mind – one might want to definitely avoid looking for answers in a review like this or, to any satisfaction, the press release. On first glance, the surfaces here are not exactly aesthetic, the photographs on the wall not much more than well-presented snapshots. There are more ideas than attractions ( although I must say, the sound piece Helena Valero ( 2015 ) is quite beautiful in its simplicity – a pair of headphones hanging from the ceiling, from which a woman’s voice sings unintelligible, ghostly songs, which the press release advises one to research further, using her name ). Each piece in this exhibition comes with a story that raises more questions than it answers, and this why the exhibition has merit. There is something innervating and stimulating here that tells me that knowing it all may just turn out to be a dead end. If we can keep searching for the codes, the ciphers and the source, life will continue feeling very full. One day we may realise that our greatest intelligence is that there is no explanation, and no algorithm, to solve it all.