Dissolve Function

The alluring obsolescence of 35mm. slides.

Fifteen years ago, while at a Saturday flea market a block away from my studio in New York, I found two metallic boxes containing anonymous, large format slides which had clearly been taken by a professional photographer and with no other description than a red DYMO label with the words “ Extras 1967 -C to York”. The slides document what appears to have been a road trip through the English countryside. One day I decided to write a short story using the exact order of the slides as they were arranged in the tray, and have kept that practice for a number of years— purchasing discarded slide collections belonging to strangers and using the slides in the exact order they were found as my marching orders to produce a coherent forensic text.

Unidentified photographer, Extras 1967-C to York

What motivates me is not so much an amateur detective desire to learn something about the anonymous owner, but rather the question of what could be gleaned from a sequence of images that exist somewhere between the artwork and the artifact.

As member of the last analog generation I have always had a genuine fascination with the tangible, evidentiary aspect of mechanical documentation, and not so much the one offered by the digital mediums— rows of zeros and ones that are hard to visualize, let alone grasp the way in which those lineups result in images, sound and more.

My family, like many others, had a slide projector and boxes of slides which, like home movies, generally documented special but common events in a family life: birthdays, weddings, vacations, etc. —the oldest of which were collections of photos that my grandfather had taken in 1951 during a trip to Europe which he kept in metal boxes and whenever he had the opportunity would bore his guests at dinner parties he organized with long lectures of his travels (the slides are always unpopulated, with not a single photo of himself, and one interesting image of the Village of Helguera in Cantabria, Spain, which he visited).

Village of Helguera

It was perhaps those kinds of biographical connections in addition to my interest in the physical qualities of the analog what drew me to phonographic recordings as opposed to blue ray,  and eventually face-to-face approaches of art making instead of long-distance communication. Yet for all practical purposes the 35mm slide was one thing I gave up rather quickly just like most others who, like me, existed in the art lecture circuit.

The demise of the slide projector can be traced to April 20, 1987, which was the day of the launch of PowerPoint, a program created by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin for the software company Forethought, Inc.  and later made in versions for both Windows and Macintosh. But it still would take a while for the art world (not as much in the forefront of technology as we would like to think we are) to catch up.

35mm slides were an unspoken but uncontested province of art historians. I can still picture my old professor, the late Bob Loescher (who has made many appearances in this column) sitting at the John Flaxman Library of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago organizing his slides for his legendary lectures. The library collection contained tens of thousands of slides of every period, made to order by generations of professors who used them to teach their courses, so the slides indirectly documented the pedagogical and aesthetic preferences of each institutional period. In an interview, Loescher once recalled how in the early years the emphasis of the slide collection was so euro-centric and excessively dominated by decorative arts: “When I arrived at the Art Institute and asked to see the slide collection they mainly had slides of 18th century English teacups”. He then ensured to diversify the collection, adding a significant amount of  Pre-Columbian, Latin American, Baroque, Queer, and food- themed art (he was the first Latin Americanist to teach at the Art Institute, and also the first one to teach a course on Queer art).  

I also often associate slides with art historian and Guggenheim curator Robert Rosenblum, who was known both at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts  and the downtown campus for deploying his uncanny mnemonic abilities while using that medium – recognizing every artwork and every artist in every slide reproduction. It seemingly was a game he thought his students should also learn to play. As a past student remembers, “on the first day of the undergrad class he showed us slides and asked us to anonymously identify them. This was in order to tailor his lectures to the knowledge of the class.” Scholar Anna Yndich-López, who also studied at NYU, remembered this about Rosenblum: “I remember vividly that although he had an official office in the undergrad art history department, he camped out in the slide room where he had a corner to himself and often occupied a share of the slide table where the profs would prepare their lectures.  One day in the late 1990s when I was a grad student, I was preparing a lecture on 19th century Latin American art (including some Colonial art) and had my slides strewn on the table.  Prof. Rosenblum noticed the slide of a Cuzco school archangel (from afar! ) and proceeded to identify the work and the collection (New Orleans Museum of Art). He was a veritable walking art history encyclopedia.” 

Speaking of the Guggenheim, this museum holds one of the most famous post-war artworks made in the 35mm slide genre:  Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque—a ruined hotel  in Chiapas, Mexico that Smithson photographed in 1969 and turned his tourist experience into a semi-serious formal analysis in the form of a slide performance lecture. (Mexican curator Pablo Leon de la Barra, who now actually works at the Guggenheim, actually went in 1999 to Chiapas revisit the construction, still extant, then already turned into some kind of artistic/archaeological pilgrimage).

Robert Smithson, Hotel Palenque, 1969-72. Slide projection of thirty-one 35 mm color slides (126 format) and audio recording of a lecture by the artist at the University of Utah in 1972 (42 min, 57 sec). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

35mm slides have a peculiar magic of evocativeness and intimacy— partially because of the compelling warmth of the projected image. This is how the 1980s are also in many ways encapsulated by another major body of work of nearly 700 images often shown in slide format: Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. The presentation of those images through a slide show gives Goldin’s images a power and weight that truly meet her stated objective in an interview: “I knew from a very early age, that what I saw on TV had nothing to do with real life, so I wanted to make a record of real life…That included having a camera with me at all times.”

However, it must be noted that the use of the slide projector by non-photography focused artists (mostly for lecturing) was less artistic.

 For decades my job was to be the steward of these instruments during artist lectures in museums. On one occasion, in 1997 at the MCA Chicago— my early years as a museum public programmer— a very famous  (and famously mean) up-and-coming painter  was to give a lecture about her work. The theater technician that night told me at the beginning of the lecture that he would have to leave right after the beginning of the program due to a personal commitment and asked me to stay inside the projection booth to monitor the projector just in case—‚ but assuring me that everything should run smoothly. My deeply technologically inept self thus nervously stood there, hoping for the best.

But lo and behold, somewhere in the middle of the lecture the artist pressed the forward button too fast and the slides got stuck (something that was a common flaw of slide projectors). As I tried to dislodge the stuck slide in the projection booth she kept impatiently pressing the forward button, making matters even worse while starting to complain about the inept technical staff  (i.e., me).  Now desperate, with the pressure of 300+ impatient audience members and the artist, I ripped the carousel off the projector and had to manually pull out the five or so stuck slides, tearing them all into pieces. Finally, I got the projector to work and the lecture ended with me in a cold sweat and nearing a heart attack (I don’t think I ever talked to the artist about it, but I am sure she must have been furious to discover later that five or so of her slides had mysteriously disappeared).

Slides were of course not just lecture material but presentation cards for emerging artists who were trying to get opportunities (residencies, exhibitions, grants, and so forth). The process of making these collections of slides was tedious and expensive, including the incredibly annoying process of figuring out how to print tiny identifying labels onto the slide (using return address sticky labels and inefficient word templates to input all the information on each). We all had different systems to make duplicates, one of which (used by true insiders) included visiting a slide duplication service run by an Indian man working from a minuscule office near Grand Central Terminal (his service was by far the fastest and cheapest).

During those years, hundreds of tons of slide sheets mailed by hopeful artists descended onto the galleries in SoHo and Chelsea (even when they would clearly stipulate that they did not accept unsolicited submissions), the vast majority of which must now cover a dozen or so acres of the Fresh Kill Landfill. Sometimes they were also delivered in person, not always artfully.

Once, circa 2001, I was at Whitebox —the famous alternative space run by the colorful and adventurous Juan Puntes— then on its Chelsea location on 26th Street. As I was conversing with Juan, a pushy young artist brandishing his slides asked to talk with the director. After Juan identified himself, he gave him his slides and told him he was an artist interested in showing there. Juan then asked him if he had a chance to see their current exhibition. The soliciting artist said no — he was too busy right now—nor did he appear to be at all familiar with Whitebox’s program. “Do you know what I am going to do with your slides then?” Said Juan. He took a trash can and threw the slide sheet in there, adding something to the effect of “you don’t fucking come to my place asking me to spend time with your work when you don’t even have the basic decency to look at what we show here.” The artist was deeply humiliated and embarrassed, spent an hour afterward carefully looking at the current exhibition and then sheepishly left— probably to never return again to Chelsea.

Today, and now that they are considered archaic technology, slides are often used by artists as archaeological artifacts and for their cultural significance. As Claire Bishop noted in 2012, “Today, no exhibition is complete without some form of bulky, obsolete technology – the gently clunking carousel of a slide projector or the whirring of an 8 mm or 16 mm film reel.”

But the best of those works go beyond the mere nostalgic reminiscence. An example is Jean Shin’s 2018 projections, an installation that serves as a reflection about that era of art history where slides where the official method of documentation.

Jean Shin, Projections, 2018. 35mm slides, carousels, lighting, and metal pins
Dimensions variable. Installation at Cassilhaus, Chapel Hill, NC, 2018

As the slide format started descending into obsolescence I started appreciating the qualities of this otherwise impractical medium. Slides today are plentiful and cheap, and art history slide collections have by now largely vanished ( I checked with the Art Institute and all their slides were scanned by 2014 and the physical slides are no longer in their collection).  Remnants mostly languish in thrift shops, along with View-Masters and Adorama keychain slide viewers, and family collections that document the usual special events in a family: weddings, birthdays, vacations.

In 2019, film curator Ron Magliozzi organized an exhibition at MoMA of home movies, the film version of these family iconographical narratives. It would be interesting to one day see a similar exhibition on homemade slides. Slides represent an archaeological account of private life, as Magliozzi said of the home movies, an “unregulated, democratic form of personal filmmaking”.

Two decades ago, conversing with new media artist Perry Hoberman about the preservation of new media (which was all the rage at that time) he argued that he wasn’t necessarily a fan of the imperative of preserving works. “Some technologies simply should be allowed to die”, I remember him saying.

Which is something I wholeheartedly agree with. I have no desire to go back to clunky and noisy projectors and the exasperation produced by jamming slides. But even while I am not a film purist who hates the digital format, I cannot overlook the richness and depth of the 35mm slide projection, and in particular the dissolve feature which was introduced by the Kodak company in the 1960s to produce a fade-in and fade-out effect, originally with the use of two synchronized projectors.

Which is why many artists fond of defunct practices and yearning for some kind of image authenticity (even if we are not clear what that might mean) still incorporate slides in their work, even as this near-extinct medium slowly, elegantly, definitively fades into darkness.

(with thanks to Vivien Greene)

Unidentified photographer, undated, Porto Alegre, Brazil