“Woman. Kicking”

Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, 1887

John Szarkowski (Looking at Photographs. 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1973) characterizes Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion (1887) as “a collection of 781 plates that describe, in sequential frames, human beings and other creatures engaged in diverse characteristic activities” (42). To wit: kicking a pith helmet in the buff, the subject of the above photograph in Muybridge’s collection.¹

Plate 367 consists of 36 sequential frames arranged in 3 tiers of 12 frames each. Each tier unfolds, frame by frame, moments of a locomotive act; namely, as the title laconically states, “Woman. Kicking.” Contrary to Western readerly conventions, the sequencing of frames within each tier proceeds from right to left. Frame 1 depicts a moment in the process arguably identifiable as “the beginning.”² Similarly, frame 12 shows us something akin to “the end” of the process. Frames 2-11, in turn, mark points along the inexorable trajectory of the helmet, from foot to floor. The staccato effect of the sequenced frames is not unlike the decidedly brusque and unceremonious title. In fact, both title and frames are rather like a truncated syntagmatic chain, bluntly acknowledging the crude rendition of lived perspective.

At first glance, the arrangement suggests three successive enactments of the figure kicking an object. But closer scrutiny reveals not three but only one enactment, depicted from three different angles. We are confronted, then, not only with the issue of temporal succession (one frame after another), but as well with the issue of spatial contingence (the sequence seen from this angle, then from that angle, and finally from a third). Or, to put it another way, we are faced — from side, front, and rear, and at 12 equal intervals — with the irreducibility of temporality to spatiality.

The three parallel perspectives remain incomplete. A viewpoint from below is absent — probably not only because it would require a transparent floor, but perhaps also for reasons of decorum. A viewpoint from above is similarly absent, as is the viewpoint from the wall to the woman’s right. Ultimately, these additional perspectives would have only postponed the inevitable, namely the fact that the hat will, yet again, fall. A wider scope would not alter the fundamentally closed system that constitutes “Woman. Kicking” — the (re)iteration of the act through different perspectives, suggesting, slyly, the eternal return of the same.

It’s not only quirky play, but at bottom also the execution of a task: that is, setting an object in motion. Now, we know the exertion of force on an object over distance to be an act of work (albeit a rather whimsical piece of work in this case). In the context of the laws of thermodynamics, work is an expression of energy, which can be neither created nor destroyed (the first law). The act of kicking increases the entropy of the isolated system that is the 36 frames (the second law). Within this closed and irreversible system (although the pictures could be read “backwards,” the kick cannot be undone), the helmet invariably comes to an inconclusive rest, topsy-turvy, on the floor. In other words, in the universe of “Woman. Kicking” everything remains slightly messy and imperfect (the third law). Or, in keeping with the mischievous notion of booting around a helmet in the buff, we might say with C.P. Snow: You can’t win (the first law), you can’t break even (the second law), and you can’t get out of the game (the third law).

Save

Save