The lanterna magica consists of a light source, an image painted on glass—or a photographic plate, or later, slides—and a system of lenses to focus the projected image onto a screen. Although the unknown origins of the lantern are probably to be found in ancient China, it was in the nineteenth century in Victorian England that the magic lantern reached its greatest popularity in the illustration of religious, educational, artistic, and scientific material, as well as for the telling of purely entertaining tales. But no magic lantern show consisted of slides alone: it was always paired with other elements like music, audience participation, or the spoken word.

Even before they had seen Adam Putnam’s work, a lot of people in the art world had attended one of his magic lantern lectures. Purchasing old, unique photographic plates and an antique magic lantern in Internet auctions on eBay, Putnam created a collection with which he reanimated the nineteenth-century world and its ghosts for a contemporary public. The uncanny attraction and physical presence of the bodies of the long-dead Victorian people seen in the photographic plates recreate the depth and intensity that today’s successor of the lantern, the regular slide projector, can no longer provide. This is probably why the lanterns have been so attractive to Putnam and so important to his work for some time. Starting from the profound, three-dimensional perception of the depicted space itself and of the people appearing in it, Putnam has traced the relation between body and space in lanterna magica slides, despite the fact that, in his works, you hardly see any people. His gradual development away from his work as a performer led to a focus on the spaces left behind. Putnam has said, “I am interested in the experience of architecture. The spaces that get depicted become stages. Also the experiences usually lean towards creepy or anxiety ridden. My constant pairing of body and architecture cannot produce anything other than something that is uncanny.” In saying this, what at first seems like a contradiction becomes clearer.

What he is occupying himself with are the traces that bodies leave behind in spaces and places. How are these bodies inscribed into a site that they have left long ago? And why is the observation that these human traces produce the atmos­phere of the uncanny true? Well, first of all, the space that is empty and displayed becomes a stage; the empty stage is always a space which is left, because its only function is to gather people. Secondly, the lens of the lantern replaces the eye of the observer, who, due to the rise of film, requires that a projected image narrate a story. The missing people raise the question of why they may have disappeared. Connecting this to the beginning of the chain again brings us to the conclusion that the empty space makes us curious about the secret behind the disappearance of the human, as if the whole world could be deserted and no one be left behind, as in the famous science fiction movie The Last Man on Earth from 1964. When entering one of Putnam’s works for the first time, you might not immediately be aware of the strong sexual connotations of his works, which are seemingly abstract architectural spaces empty of bodies. Additionally, there is an implication that these ­interior and exterior spaces are stand-ins for the body, so the experience of “entering” them becomes sexually or emotionally charged, ominous, and inviting all at the same time.

Infinite Regress (2007) is a work that Putnam has been planning for a long time but only finally realized for this exhibition. The room’s four walls are entirely covered with magic-lantern-like projections of empty Victorian hallways. In the middle stands a massive concrete obelisk, which throws shadows on all four walls, thus connecting the actual space with the virtual one that extends past the walls and into time. Upon entering, the viewer is thus immediately placed in the middle of an almost ­de-realized space that completely unsettles the perception of location and time. Confronted with the phallic obelisk (which at the same time recalls state monuments), being left alone with it, all different kinds of sexual, historic, and spatial associations flash through the viewer’s mind and fail to lead to or suggest a specific place. When Gertrude Stein said in the 1930s that “there is no there there,” she was speaking exactly about this disappearance of identifiable places in which to speak and in which to act as a human being located within his or her past, habitat, and sexual identity. By exposing this uncertainty and making the viewer enter this space, which is, at the same time, a non-space, Putnam forces him or her to confront it.