Last night was First Friday in Richmond (I mean, it was the first friday of the month everywhere, but it was First Friday in Richmond), so we went to a couple of openings. The first was at the VMFA Studio School, where we got to chat with friends and look at art (some very nice prints, and I managed to more or less sell the one I liked best by someone I know to someone else I know). Then we headed on down to VCU for the opening of a neat show that includes two friends of ours-- Tiffany Glass Ferreira and Richard Garrett.
It's a small show, only a few artists, of which Tiffany and Richard are two. (Tiffany on the left and Richard on the floor).
And you may recall that Tiffany is the maven of the Real Small Art League. But you may not quite gather how small this art league is.
I thought it was about time to go back to Sontag. It's been years and years. Undergrad, when I had the four and a half hours of commuting a day, in fact. I'd forgotten how rich (and accessible) the essays are. And they hit the ground running. In the first paragraph of the first essay she says of photography that they teach us a visual code, and:
In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads-- as an anthology of images.
It's
quite an opener. So much to think about and I haven't even gotten to
the bottom of the first page. And I am struck by the question of
ethics, which is woven through each of these sentences, in relation to
photography. Because it is a topic-- an issue-- that I am both
interested and invested in. Because I wonder about the ethics of
photography-- because I worry about it, in the medium, in my own work.
Some of the ethical issues that I am most directly concerned about are
not addressed directly in that quote, but they are obliquely. But there
are other ethical questions raised here more directly that are also of
concern.
photographs alter and enlarge our notions of.... what we have a right to observe.
Apparently we have a right to observe celebrities frolicking in the surf with their significant others (or someone else's significant other) to whom they may or may not be engaged to or broken up from or pregnant by or whatever.To which I mostly say *shrug*. The cult of celebrity thing is mostly uninteresting (to me, anyway). But there is photography that I like, that I'm fascinated with,
I remember going to see the Nan Goldin show, I'll Be Your Mirror, a number of years ago at the Whitney, and being nothing short of mesmerized. Many of the images are quite beautiful, and many show a technical virtuosity. But the ones that stick most in my mind are, of course, the ones whose poignancy was not aesthetic, but of content. The images of drag queens-- her friends, her roommates-- were interesting, and I liked them, but the transgressive push of capturing a world beneath the surface of the one where most people live had already been crossed (Diane Arbus comes to mind.) Besides, I'd spent years moving in and out of various scenes-- club, music, art-- in New York. I had more interaction with drag queens in my daily life than I did with straight, married women (and that included people at college and work). The sexual images (most of which I think were in "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency") raise the question of what we have a right to observe. The images aren't really pornographic... or they resemble the kind of pornographic images that people make of themselves with their partners for themselves and their partners. (And there are images of the photographer and her long time boyfriend amongst these photographs).
The image I really remember seeing is of her, the photographer, bruised, her eye swollen shut, the title next to it saying "Nan A Month After Being Battered." It's a shocking image: I was shocked at the time. I remember being fixated by her red, red lipstick (I guess, Barthes-like, that would be my punctum).To my mind it is a thousand times more shocking than anything pornographic could be.
There is something about injury that seems to call out for cataloguing. I have images that I took of myself in the mirror in my bathroom in Phnom Penh, of the bruises that appeared across my breasts after a motorcycle accident (I'd slammed, chest first, into the handlebars. Ouch, yes). I've never shown them to anyone; this is the first time I've acknowledged that they exist. I guess to me showing someone a picture of my bruised nipple seems a little personal. And yet, I remember showing the actual bruises to my roommate and to a friend. Weirdly, the photographs seem more personal. Perhaps because in photographing the injury one is in some way confronting it? And that confrontation (of mortality? I'm not sure in my case. Of the choices that you've made; of the company you keep) seems somehow private.
Transgression is an important theme throughout Goldin's work-- sexual and gender transgression, but, more importantly, the transgression of private space. The internal is the external; the private made public, the spaces made contiguous. The unblinking eye that looks on transgressed sexual norms shifts the boundaries of the normative; it does the same for the boundaries of the interior, the private. We come to expect our photographic gaze to be allowed, invited, into space once open to no one.
I've never been terribly interested in the ethics of that transgression when the eye is turned on the privacy of sex-- but I am interested in the ethics of the violation of the privacy of suffering.But that's probably another three hundred posts....
(Originally posted at missivesfromthebirdcage.vox.com)
I went to see Fur yesterday with some friends, and... uhm... yeah. Visually, it was fascinating. Hold your attention for two plus hours fascinating. The set design and costume design folks deserve awards because wow. I deeply, deeply covet every item of clothing Nicole Kidman touched in that film (with one notable exception). But, uh.... hmmm....
What I realized when I woke up this morning was that if the filmmakers had not given it the subtitle they had given it, I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more. The story wasn't uninteresting... it was just odd. And at times silly. The silliness might have eventually gotten to me, only because the filmmakers seem to realize they're being silly, but carried on being serious even through some of the sillier moments. (D.A.: "Do you know what you look like under there?" Audience answers in unison, as though we were at the RHPS, "Robert Downey Jr?") But I found the fact that this was "An imagined portrait of Diane Arbus" distracting. If they hadn't set themselves up to carry the weight of a photographic legend... maybe maybe. But by inserting a real person into something, ahem, "inspired" by the biography of someone is asking for the audience to focus on how much of the real person is there, and how much is fantasy. She is there, the odd pronouciation of her name is there, her husband, Allan, is there, her two daughters are there-- and for reasons unclear their names have been changed (Amy and Doon are now Gracie and Sophie)... and then there is Lionel Sweeny, who turns himself into a coat and floats out to sea. Apparently one can trade in the sheltered life of chinchilla for the artistic bohemia of a human body wig. Human Body Wig = Artistic Awakening. Down with pretending to be Donna Reed! Et viola! You are now able to bare yourself, literally for your art! Drop your human wig and get down with the nudists!
It's visually tantalizing, and the story is totally weird in a way that I could have gotten into had there been more tongue in cheekiness about the silly-dom, and if they'd dropped the pretense that we were watching even an imaginary Diane Arbus. Because people, in a movie about a photographer-- even at the nascent stages, or the very naissance, of her career-- I gotta see her depress the shutter more than once.
(Originally posted on missivesfromthebirdcage.vox.com)
For a while I was writing a fair amount on reading about photography, but the last post I put up on that was in October (that's so sad). I've been slowly wending my way through Photography's Other Histories since then... slowly not because it's boring, but because I've been so wrapped up in work and work and work and novel writing and work, and well, work.
Anyhoo, in that last post I was thinking about Sontag's essays, On Photography, and thinking specifically about the idea of ethical viewing with relation to photography. More an issue of how we look at photography, rather than how we make photographs. It has particular resonance, I think, with the essays in Photography's Other Histories, as many of the essays in that book are at least as much about how photographs are looked at (and how that changes drastically depending on who is doing the looking) as they are about how they are made. They post-colonial studies focus on the colonial gaze seems to have swiveled-- now the gaze is turned on the knowing gazer. Yes, colonial officials made lots of photographs of colonial subjects that were filled with power relations, structures of social and political dominance, and sexual objectifications-- but many of those images are still made into postcards and consumed by people now-- and by people who are meant to "know better."
Though when I brought it up in the last post that wasn't where I was going with it (though, really, I rarely end up where I think I'm going to end up...) Anyhoo, where I started in that last essay was here:
In the first paragraph of the first essay she says of photography that they teach us a visual code, and:
In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads-- as an anthology of images.
And from that I was thinking about that breach of the private, made public through the (private) act of photography.But there are other issues raised in that opener to the first essay in Sontag's collection. I am very much interested in the idea that "photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at," for a number of reasons, some of which stem from my own work, some of which come from the work of others.
It seems tautological: photographing something makes it something worth being photographed.By photographing something one has looked, proving that the subject is something to be looked upon. The democracy of the camera-- where the socialite is no more worthy of having the eye cast upon them as the rag picker.
I guess I wonder about that. The idea that the camera lens is somehow an equalizer, is democratic, in that it elevates the (often/previously/what have you) invisible to the visible, as though there were a contiguousness between all things that had been photographed. As though values ascribed to objects in an obvious way, and to humans in a less direct (but in many cases no less obvious-- prostitution being the most easy example), are somehow erased by the intercession of a mechanical, unjudging eye. The camera does not ascribe value-- to it there is no difference between Nicole Kidman and a bag of garbage sitting on the curb.
But part of me thinks this is just silliness. I think of Irving Penn's enormous later palladium prints of trash, of detritus. It didn't elevate the objects; it elevated the process. An empty cigarette packet is still an empty cigarette packet, no matter how many precious metal prints one makes of it. I'm pretty sure that once he'd done with photographing them he probably threw them out. I look at them and think, wow... palladium printing even makes garbage look good. Which is, perhaps, the point. What I do not do is say, hmmm.... that mashed cigarette packet is precious. Or, I should look at more garbage. Granted, one could take an archaeological approach (what does this say about ourselves as a culture?) or even a conservationist's view (think of the resources that went into making that stupid piece of packaging, designed to be tossed away to moulder into a toxic sludge seeping into the soil). But somehow I don't think that was where Penn was going. I freely admit that, while I love most of Penn's work, and I looooove palladium printing, these images have always left me cold. I saw the retrospective at the National Gallery last year, which was wonderful, but I would have been more delighted by it without these in it. But maybe that's just me.
Okay. It is maybe easier to think of this in terms of things, especially things whose value was negligible to begin with (like a cigarette packet). But what do we do with people?
I ask this of myself, as much as anybody, and ask it with the idea in mind that it is a dangerous question. Does the act of photography give value to what it captures, and if it does, how does that work with people?
In an earlier post I was talking about the discomforts of having one's image taken, and about Benjamin's statement that photography had finally freed one from the mirror-- the one was able to present the image found in the mirror to the rest of the world through self-portraiture. Then JJBT said something in a comment that made me start to think about that a bit more-- he said that self-portraiture is necessarily a representation of one's self as one would like to be seen-- "see me as I would like you to see me." ("paraît être nécessairement une représentation de soi, un 'package' (encore un anglicisme passé dans le français courant !) de ce que l'on voudrait donner à regarder. pu"regardez-moi comme je voudrais que vous me voyiez".--- I hope my translation isn't too rough).
In the midst of thinking about these things I saw this article about Scarlett Johannson.... Okay, it isn't terribly exciting news or anything. I think she's a good enough actress, and I enjoy watching her performances, and she's a pretty enough young woman.... but I guess I don't really get all the stir about her looks. I liked her Lost in Translation (a film I thought was a near miss), but to me, she bears a bit of a resemblance to the folks at the table in van Gogh's early painting, The Potato Eaters. Their shockingly more attractive cousin, of course, but still.
I found it interesting that she is questioning why there is so much focus on her physical being rather than on her interior being ("What about my brain? What about my heart? What about my kidneys and my gallbladder?" she asks, addressing all the hoopla about her curves in an interview in the magazine.") The obvious reason is that they are, generally, less photogenic. I get her point... but celebrity is a participatory event. It's hard to have people hoopla-ing over your curves if they are not offered up to the public.
The line in the article that took me aback, however, was this: "On the cover, she wears a bra and a white Calvin Klein mini-dress; In a series of photos inside (showing her as an "enigmatic trailer-park temptress," the magazine says), she wears cleavage-baring black lingerie paired with an open white robe, among other get-ups."
Enigmatic trailer-park temptress. Okay, what does that even mean? You know, this does not bring up a clear image in my mind. I guess it doesn't always have to.... but it's stated by the magazine as though this were some sort of.... type. I guess part of me-- the one that read lots of post-colonial theory and spent hours in archives looking at photographic typologies of colonized peoples-- starts to feel a little itchy at the sight of things that smack of typology. I'm also disturbed by what I feel like is some sort of underlying condescension... it's been bothering me since I read it, though I couldn't really identify what it was about that description that plucked a particular chord. Sometimes I worry that graduate school has tuned me into frequencies that sound like they are broadcasting when they really aren't.
Sometimes I just need to tweak the tuner though. It occurs to me that this sort of thing-- dressing up models and actresses in outfits that might have gotten one labeled a hussy at an earlier point in history and then displaying them in locations that have as-of-yet-unpacked and unacknowledged class markings (i.e. low-rent motel room, red light district sidewalk preferably by street lamp, and oh, yes, the trailer park)-- has gained a certain popularity. I'm never quite sure what to think about it. Sometimes its visually interesting, but I'm often left feeling uncomfortable because I can't get a clear read on where it comes from. Other than to recognize that it doesn't come from the same place as it does when John Waters does it (for him, it comes from a place of love. Strange love, but love). But this is Esquire magazine we're talking about. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Esquire is not the most subscribed-to magazine in the average trailer park. Actually, I'm going to bet that regardless of where the average Esquire magazine reader lives, he sees himself as, you know, a guy that's going places, a professional, kinda slick, little money in their pocket... the kind of guy who used to put esquire after their name (and not in a Charles Dickens character sort of way). In short, he's a guy who sees himself as being of a particular class-- the kind that orders top shelf liquors and wears silk wool blend suits. I think the thing about it is the unacknowledged transgression of unspoken taboo-- Johansson, dressed as an "enigmatic trailer-park temptress," under the header screaming that she is the "sexiest woman on earth" is being offered up to the (fantasy life of the) reader. In order to play into that fantasy he transgresses class lines. I think it's something in the class play without acknowledgement that is bothering me. For a society that tells itself so often that it is without class distinctions, we are awfully obsessed with class markers.
Anyhoo.That wasn't really where I was going with that initially.....but in thinking about this stuff I also started to think about what goes on when you are a figure in the public who has their image blasted before people's eyes constantly, but who is almost never allowed to put forth an image that says "regardez-moi comme je voudrais que vous me voyiez." What happens when you are Scarlett Johansson and this week your publicly displayed image is that of an "enigmatic trailer-park temptress"? (Though I know nothing about her-- perhaps this is closer to who she really is? perhaps this is how she wants to be seen?) Publicity shots of celebrities to me always seem so... violent.
I love photography... I love looking at good photographs, I love making photographs. I love the feel of photographic paper and the thrill of holding negatives up to the light. But I am uncomfortable with their violence, their aggression. Susan Sontag has pointed out the semantic links between photography and hunting (the catch or capture and image, to aim the camera and shoot an image, even to take [steal?] a picture). So somewhere in the soup above I thought I heard my discomfort with photography's violence, my discomfort with having my picture taken (and it usually feels taken, stolen, snatched), and thinking about Benjamin's assertion that photography allows one to detach the mirror from dependency upon your presence (and allows you both to choose how you would have others see you, as well as allowing people to see you as you [at least sometimes] see yourself), I thought I felt a convergence.
But it could just be sleep deprivation.
As I was saying, before I so rudely interrupted myself a thousand times, Benjamin says something interesting about the relationship between audience and actor in cinema. "The audience's identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera.... What matters is that the part is acted not for an audience but for a mechanical contrivance-- in the case of sound film for two of them." He is speaking about film, and making a comparison between the acting that happens in a film versus what happens when an actor is on stage, in a theatre, with a live audience... he is taking issue with the intercession of the mechanical device between performer and audience-- a contrivance created in order to make mass reproduction possible, and to therefore reach a wider audience.
He does not assert the same thing for the photograph (in fact, he notes that the photograph of the human countenance, as it was created in the early years of photography is the final vestige of photography's mimicry of art's original purpose and task-- that of a cult object). But if one were to examine this comparison using the other mechanical means of reproduction that takes up half of his essay, theater acting would be to film as painting is to still photography; the relationship between actor and audience in a theatre would be analogous to the relationship between subject and painter... I see his point about the actor who performs for the camera's lens rather than the audience (or, to draw out the analogy, the subject who poses for the lens rather than for the painter's eye/brush)... but he eliminates the photographer, the cinematographer, the "operator," to use Barthes' term, which brings an awkward (and violated) intimacy in the performance/pose. Yes?
Why is that? Benjamin dismisses the question of whether or not photography is a true art form without engaging the question: it is a waste of time to engage, in his view ("Earlier much futile thought has been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question-- whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art-- was not raised."). He seems to see it as purely mechanical, its affect on (real) art the only question truly worth engaging. He sees only its function as indexical, and fears that with each reprinting of the indexed object that the aura of the original is a little diminished. I guess I'm beginning to see more tension in this essay that I remember seeing when I used it for my dissertation. But, then again, I'm now coming at it from a very different perspective than I was at the time.
For my
dissertation I read this article simultaneously with Benjamin's essay
(from the same volume) on translation, "The Task of the Translator." In
some important ways these strike me as tandem essays that are really
focused on the same ideas. I haven't reread "The Task of the
Translator," but I remember the crux of it as being that there really
wasn't anything such as a "true" translation, but that all translations
rendered such a tremendous break from the original, language being so
embedded, that translations became entirely separate objects from the
original. To my mind, in "Art in the Age..." seems to be saying that
the photograph is, in some way, a translation of the original object
into something that is infinitely reproducable, and that that final
product, like the translation, is an entirely different entity. In both
cases, something is lost from the original during the translation
process. At least in the case of photography Benjamins seems to be
saying that something is lost in the original because of the
translation process (the photographing, reproducing, and
disseminating).
But, and here was my question, what happens when the original work of art is
the original? Is a print of that negative the same, meaning-depleting
reproduction as it would be if the original were a sculpture? And what
of things like this photograph? It is a photograph that I made in
December of 1994 in the museum in Athens. My intent was not
indexical. It may have indexical qualities to it (were the slide
collection of the museum to be destroyed I would have a copy of the
sculpture, which was sitting in that room in the musuem in Athens in
December of 1994), but I did not make this image in order to record the
mere existence of the statue, nor was it a matter of recording the
statue for the purpose of reproduction and dissemination. This is the
first time anyone other than myself has even seen this image (I
recently scanned the negative. I'd never had prints made). I'd made the
image because the light was beautiful falling on the carved stone. I
made a photograph; which is different from making a record.
In my mind the photograph is as much the art work as the statue
pictured in it. Do the auras of both diminish when reproduced? (N.B. I
never really got behind the whole aura thing, though I get what he's on
about).
I guess I just don't buy into the idea that the original object's "authority"-- or its essence or aura-- is diminished by photographic reproduction. I think, like the translation, it is a different object all together. One that references the original, surely. But I just don't buy the idea that the existence of that separate object detaches the object from its tradition. The photograph above doesn't remove the sculpture from the tradition of ancient Greek sculpture. Furthermore, if there is any "detachment" that has happened to that object (whether that refers to detachment from its original "cultic" purpose, detachment from its original cultural milieu, or from its original site), it happened long ago: the ancient Greeks did not place it in the museum. I guess I'm more concerned with the kinds of detachment that has occurred to objects like the "Elgin" marbles than I am with what might occur when someone takes a picture of them.
Indeed, it is a strange feeling to see one's self in photographs. I'm always far less disturbed by self-portraits (in which I was participant. The sole participant.) than in photographs from other people. In that second, before you catch yourself, you are forced to see yourself as you are seen. The images is not simply what someone else might see when they see you... it is, exactly, what someone else saw when they saw you. (Barthes' noeme once again)... the photograph is always that which has been....
Interestingly, Benjamin, writing in the interwar years, seems to pre-sage both things like blogging and things like flickr, which is (to me) related to this issue of photography's power to allow you to detach your mirrored self for presentation in public (because a blog does something similar, just not visual, no?). He isn't terribly kind about it (these methods of detaching one's self from the mirror and creating a package for public consumption)... as someone who both blogs and posts to flickr, I think I need to meditate on that for a bit longer....
For anyone who hasn't yet heard the news, Artomatic won't be taking place this year, but will be pushed back to next year. There are evolving plans for smaller projects involving both performance and visual arts, taking place over the next year which should give everyone a chance to keep the organization rolling, and which will give artists a chance to show their work. In some ways it's kind of a bummer-- I think we were all looking forward to it-- but I haven't had the time to get together the project I was planning to do for it, so this should give me the chance to get it together... well, if I actually take the opportunity rather than filling in the time I would have spent working on Artomatic with working on my work... of course there is the great danger that it will get filled with flarn (you know, the lint of life... the dust bunny equivalent of responsibilities: paying bills, balancing your checkbook, calling the landlord about the broken light... the stuff that takes up an enormous amount of time, but gives no satisfaction).
Meanwhile, I headed back to Benjamin's essay, "Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction." Reading this was a revelation in grad school
(for whom I have my friend Amanda, Mistress of Critical Theory, to
thank). It's a really interesting essay for thinking about
photography-- both despite, and because, its discussion is not about
the photograph as art or even as final product, but is about
photography's impact on other kinds of art. The conception of
photograph as art object in an of itself never seems to enter the
discussion-- which isn't terribly surprising, since this conception is
pretty recent, and I'm not sure has completely taken hold as an idea.
(Benjamin was writing during the interwar period).
Benjamin
raises the question of how the reproduction by mechanical means (by
which he means specifically photography) will affect the singular work
of art. His worry is that this mechanical reproduction-- the ability to
reproduce the original work ad infinitum (as opposed to, say,
a painting student creating a copy in the same medium as a master
painting)-- will have a negative impact on the essence of the original
(something he calls the "aura"). "...that which withers in the age of
mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art... the technique
of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of
tradition. By making many reproductions it substututes a plurality of
copies for a unique existence." He connects the "unique existence" to
the object's (the original artwork, not the photograph of it)
"authority"-- (the authority is commanded by its authenticity as not
just an artwork, but the artwork) something which
rises from it's place within the "tradition." ("The uniqueness of a
work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of
tradition.")
As I'm reading the essay I'm remembering the issues I had with it, and also the things I thought brilliant. (Note here: it was an important part of my dissertation). Reading the lines above brings me back to reading Malraux. (Yes, Andre. Whom everyone seems to have forgotten outside of France. Yes, I know, I find some of his fictional writing a wee bit overwraught-- but not all of it-- and his writings were, shall we say, of their time... meaning that they are not politically correct. That said, you might be surprised if you went back and read The Human Condition. I must admit to having an affectionate place in my heart for Malraux, who was a first-class liar who created histories for himself that allowed him to make real histories, which he then fictionalized. I put him in the same category as Robert Capa: people who churn their lives out of the air and get away with things you can't even imagine. I'm sure they both would have driven me nuts in real life; but reading about their exploits is pure pleasure. And yes, Malraux was in my dissertation, and I wrote a couple of papers, taught classes, and wrote an article about him, his long-forgotten novel La voie royale, and his Cambodian exploits). Not Malraux's fiction, but his Museum without Walls (La musee imaginaire) in which he takes a completely different approach to the entire idea of the impact of photography and its reproductive abilities on the other arts. I've always been pretty fond of Malraux's idea of photography as being (when it comes to what Bourdieu would later call "cultural capital") an equalizer. (Note: I'm going on the Malraux from memory, as I can't currently put my hands on my copy of La Musee, so it's possible I'm misremembering...) For him, one of the wonderful things about the possibilities of mechanical reproduction of art (using photography) was that those who do not have open access to museums (and here he was talking about proximity, but, via Bourdieu, on might also point out that proximity is not the sole barrier when it comes to the accessibility of cultural capital) would still have access to the art. Granted, this is not true access to the art (being in the presence of the original object is, inarguably, different from looking at a photograph of a work of art-- which I assume is all part of Benjamin's "aura"), but it is certainly more access to it than would be possible otherwise.
The point where I remember Malraux going (in my mind) awry was the value he placed on the (perhaps arguably violent) decontextualizing, and then (here's where I go apoplectic) recontextualizing that is possible through photographic reproduction. He was all about seeking something like "genius" in works of art, and bringing these objects that reflect that genius together, regardless of their cultural, religious, or geographical contexts. This really is where he loses me. I'm all about someone in South Dakota being able to "see," through reproduction, Gustav Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (which was just purchased by the Neue Gallerie in New York). But I disagree with Malraux's mix-and-match approach to art appreciation in which the Klimt portrait would sit, in one's "museum of the imagination," next to a Chola period bronze and a Jasper Johns flag. By no means do I believe comparisons shouldn't be made (I'm an art historian, after all... I spent years writing essays for exams that compared slide a with slide b)-- there are wonderful, cross-era and cross-cultural comparisons to be fruitfully made: The Klimt portrait with Byzantine icons or with some Edo period screens, for example. But I guess I want a discernable rationale for these comparisons-- ones that I think come out of a contextualized reading of the images. For me, Malraux's "museum of the imagination" is a pick list. I like a, I don't like b. We all have them; and we should. But the value of context should not be forgotten.
Which comes back to the Benjamin. Taking off from the quote above ("the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition."), he goes on to say that "permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind." Apparently, photography is the ultimate iconoclast. But only if we accept the museum as a church (as, I vaguely remember, Bourdieu says it is). Because by declaiming the appearance of the object (by means of mechanical reproduction and the portability inherent in it) into the beholder's "own particular situation" (his home, the subway, the park, whereever it is that he encounters this "detached" artwork), he implies that the proper place for the object is somewhere else without stating where that might be. I don't think this is really where he was going with it, but to my ear there is within this the implication that art's proper place is in the museum, a place that is inherently invested (both in the literal and in the figurative) with hierarchical (oh god, not class!) distinctions. (And I've come right back to Bourdieu).
I always liked Bourdieu.
And somehow I've written such a long post and haven't even gotten to the thing that got me started to begin with: why I'm finding it interesting to think about photography as photography in relation to the Benjamin article. Another time, perhaps.
"Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory.... but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory."
I finished Camera Lucida on the bus this morning. It was really nice to read something that I associated entirely with graduate school anew... no longer fraught with all of the horrible stresses of graduate school interpretations, to read it without my thesis supervisor hovering like a spector over my shoulder (I could use it like this, but what would my thesis advisor say?) It's so much more interesting to just read it, and contemplate the meaning, as you see it. What an idea.
It's the first "intellectual" reading I've done since I filed. I'm contemplating revisiting a lot of those texts that were so incredibly loaded when I was writing up... I'm curious how I will see them or hear them now that it's just me in my head (so to speak). I've got Benjamin's Illuminations sitting on the kitchen table.... I remember enjoying "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." I hope I still do.
Reading the Barthes I was struck by the quote above... I keep wondering about it. Do photographs really block memory? I think maybe they do, or at least that they replace memories. Haven't we all had false memories created by photographs? You, as a child, as a baby, in that little yellow jumper... in the room in the house on Maple Street where you were too young to remember anything, but that you "remember" the wallpaper and the shag carpet. And yet, if the key charateristic of a photograph is its indexicality (the telescoping of the object and its referent)... is it really a false memory? Is it false because we only remember it as a photograph, despite the fact that, as the photograph testifies, what is pictured really happened-- you were there, you wore that jumper, the wallpaper and the carpet are as you remember... a false memory of a real memory?
I saw my friend Cindy last night for the first time in almost two years, which was pretty awesome. She lives back in Edmonton now, which isn't exactly on the way to anywhere that I've been going lately, Alaska not currently on my regular itineraries. The last time I was up there was for New Years 2000-- yes, I spent the millenium drinking way too much at the Black Dog in a place that I think is closer to the North Pole than it is to New York. We had a rockin' time, went down to Banff and to Lake Louise for a whole lotta x-country skiing in the Canadian Rockies, which I highly recommend. I miss seeing her at least a couple of times a year-- I used to drive out to Illinois or to Wisconsin a couple of times a year, and as she reminded me last night, we used to be on the Southeast Asian studies conference circuit, along with a lot of other people whom I haven't seen for many years, so we were pretty much guaranteed to be in the same place and up for a romp through San Diego or Chicago or wherever that year's conference might be. It sort of made me realize that I've been missing the social aspect of the whole conference thing at least as much as I've missed the intellectual inquiry part of it.
Which is what pushed me back towards rereading Barthes in the first place. I'm now reminded as well of some of the issues that I took with it to begin with. I guess I never quite invested in Barthes' intertwining of photography and death. I find it interesting that in addition to connecting photography and death, he connects photography and theater (which I can really get behind), and then theater and death, and then theater, photography, and the tableau vivant. ("...Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.")
Maybe I'm just being easily distracted by the idea of the tableau vivant, which is something that has always fascinated me... where did this idea come from? The art form has been around for centuries, and has infused performances and parlor games, and particularly in the nineteenth century, photography. I'm fascinated by them, particularly the motivation for creating them... regardless, I see the idea of the photograph as an image of the tableau vivant... to an extent. I read that quote in the Barthes about a dozen times yesterday and I think maybe the thing that is bothering me about it is that I wish I'd talked about the tableau vivant aspect of the photographs I wrote about in my dissertation. This is a dumb thing to get annoyed about since the diss is filed and packed away, but I think it's part of what is nagging me about the quote.
It does make me wonder about some of the implications in that for the role of the photographer, particularly when he's pointing directly not to tableau vivant photographs (which often recreated or reinterpreted well known paintings), but street photography. Should the photographer be understood then to be directing the scenes? I've always been interested in the role of the photographer in creating images, and how easily forgotten his or her presence is, particularly in reportage, the photographer is so often elided, folded within the action. What impact does the photographer's presence have on creating the scene that is ultimately captured? What would the scene have been without that presence?
Certainly not new questions... but I don't think any less important for having been asked before. Maybe I'm just bothered by my own presence in the photographs that I make. Barthes' list of photographer's alibis struck home for me ( the "functions" of the photograph, "which are, for the Photographer, so many alibis. These functions are: to inform, to represent, to surprise, to cause to signify, to provoke desire.") When I was an undergraduate back in Brooklyn I had a painting teacher who asked me why I painted. He was a cranky and bitter old man who hadn't been the painting sensation he'd seen himself as becoming when he'd been younger; he'd spent many years leaping around the edges of artistic greatness, knowing people who'd achieved what he'd aspired to... but in the end he just wasn't there. He'd retired from teaching, but kept coming back every semester, haunting the halls and forcing everyone to paint fruit and vegetables (which is what he painted). I hated him. He hated me. Halfway through the semester we declared open war on each other. One day, as he stood looking at a painting I'd made to fulfill and assignment, adhering to the letter of the law, but not the spirit of it, so to speak, he turned to me and said, "Why do you paint?"
He'd said it in order to wound me. He'd said it with disgust, and a student nearby gasped. There was silence in the room. Realizing that he'd overstepped his bounds he tried to pull it back into real inquiry instead of just the barb he'd meant. "What is your motivation? What do you get out of painting?" The room exhaled; people went back to what they were doing. The initial question had pissed me off, and I was surgically focused on it in my anger. But the follow up questions have vexed me ever since (and he didn't even mean to ask them). Less so in thinking about painting (which I haven't really done much of over the last decade) than in thinking about photography. Why do I feel compelled to make images? What is my motivation? Perhaps what I am most keyed into in Barthes' list of alibis is that they are, in fact, alibis; that an alibi includes, by definition, an implication of guilt... that perhaps contained in the guilt is the recognition that photography is both a violent and a selfish activity. I steal souls with my mechanical eye... and enjoy it. And for this, I need an alibi.
But discrepencies or no, many of the issues and ideas that he raises in his rather lyrical description of his interaction with his recently deceased mother by means of the medium of photography made a tremendous impression on me. I thought of many ways in which I might have incorporated some of these ideas into my dissertation, but worried that they would all end up being picked at, with the trends of academic thinking, and my own issues with regards to theory (it is not my area of expertise and felt very much like an uncovered chink in the armor). But in teaching and listening to the ways in which my students responded to photography, among other experiences, I realized that some of what Barthes is talking about speaks to the way in which most people react to photography. Consider this description:
I call "photography referent" not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often "chimeras." Contrary to these imitations, in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past...... what I see has been here, in this place which extends between infinity and the subject (operator or spectator); it has been here, and yet immediately separated; it has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred..."
It was something at work (a program that needs a reading about monuments and preservation, which prompted me to return to my dissertation readings on monuments, place, and memory) that brought me back to Barthes. It isn't the first time I've contemplated writing something on the questions that engaged me in the first place... but it has started me thinking. I'm just not sure I'm ready for it yet.
