David Peat

The End of Representation 99In George Orwell’s 1984, newspapers of the past were constantlybeing written in accordance with the current proclamations of BigBrother. If party members were disgraced, their names disappearedout of newspapers and the record books. If Big Brother claimed thatsteel production had increased (when of course no such thing had happened)back numbers of newspapers were rewritten to show muchlower production figures in earlier years. 1984 was a work of fiction,but have you noticed that many of the great figures of the past are nolonger smokers? Once the cigarette and the haze of smoke it createdwere romantic images for an actor, writer, or musician. Today smokingis downplayed, and many of those old photographs have now beencarefully treated to remove the cigarette! The U.S. Postal Service, forexample, removed the cigarette from the photograph of Jackson Pollockused for its 33-cent stamp. In this way, writers, composers, andfilm stars have become, retroactively, nonsmokers. How much more ofthe past will be re-imaged through the eyes of the present? 2Photography and cinema are relatively new inventions, so if wewant to take a broader focus on the way societies have representedtheir world it must be through painting. Paintings on cave walls andpottery are among the earliest records of human existence. Paintingscan be found in nearly all of the world’s civilizations—on plasteredwalls, the desert sand, wood panels, sarcophagi, furniture, papyrus,parchment, paper, and, eventually, canvas. Looking at paintings fromdifferent parts of the world and from different historical periods tellsus something about the world in which people lived. Paintings fromTibet and India speak to a world of powers and energies. They are notso much depictions of particular gods as diagrams of spiritual energiesently shot at the precise moment the tower collapsed into rubble in 1902, and YvesKlein’s “leap into the void” from a Paris window, were both created out of a montageof photographic images.2Some years ago the magazine BBC Music had a cover of Leonard Bernstein atthe piano with a cigarette in his mouth. The accompanying editorial explained thatfor a time they had considered removing the cigarette and its wreath of smoke but, inthe end, felt that heavy smoking was so much a part of Bernstein’s image that, despite“political correctness,” it just had to stay in.