It’s been too long

since I’ve posted. I have neglected my introvert workings. Just a brief note here to let you know I’ll be coming back soon, and that I will NEVER use the phrase “the human condition” in any artist statement or to describe my artwork in any way, EVER.

Whose Reality?

Sarah Jessica Parker’s, apparently. I may or may not go to this casting call tomorrow for a new reality TV show about contemporary art, produced and hosted by Sarah Jessica Parker. It’s quite an application and a lot of work just to go for the experience. I don’t exactly have a TV personality, in fact I believe that while I am generally a nice person, I am also a reserved introvert who might come across a bit bitchy on TV (I’m not a bitch, I just play one on TV!). I might also not be the kind of artist a reality show would want. Not enough flair? And would I really want to be on TV? It actually sounds quite awful. But the spectacle is oh so alluring, Mr. Debord.

It’s hard to stay positive with so much job searching and no calls for interviews, especially when I’m overqualified for most of the available jobs to which I’m applying. Attempting to write a thesis, auditing a class, taking another one, job searching, and thinking about so many possible applications… to the Fulbright, to PhD programs, to MFA programs, to grants, to residencies, to internships… I need an income. I also want to keep moving forward in my thought and my artwork, and the jobs currently available are simply depressing. A good time to apply to grad school again. The PhD / MFA split is especially tiresome, though. I do not fit with either but feel I must choose. Where on earth to apply? Where there is funding, apparently.

Translation

For several years I have worked mainly in the medium of photography, producing large tableau photographs in the manner made popular by Jeff Wall and the Bernd and Hilla Becher school of photographers. The works I made were constructed studio photographs produced with a view camera and were reliant upon metaphor and art historical references applied to contemporary social situations. Rather than continuing to produce stylistically coherent photographic series, in the past two years I began to produce images related conceptually, if not always in style or imagery, functioning as different facets of interrelated conceptual threads. I began to experiment with different media, including drawing, diagrams, painting, and artist’s books, to produce works related to the photographic work.

Currently my practice is in transition. I have become increasingly unsatisfied with making photographic images as well as with using the human figure. I have started to explore constructing objects and spaces and using images, such as pine trees, laden with symbolic references. Certain elements of my practice remain intact, such as the use of metaphor, working in multiples, and using theatrical lighting. I am interested in the correspondence of materials and the concepts and language they invoke, such as using pine plywood to create boxes for dioramas of pine forests, juxtaposed with photographs of forests. Minimalism and post-minimalism have been influential in my new work through taking the viewer’s bodily experience of the objects as the basis for creating the installation space and for engaging with a sense of theatricality. For example, in a recent installation the viewer must walk around the work to view each box; at each possible viewpoint the work faces the viewer, displayed as three little theaters joined physically around a center of light and illusorily through the mise en abyme of mirrors.

Translation is a series of sculptural installations based on the symbolism of forests and pine trees. The title derives from Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” in which he describes translation as shooting arrows into the heart of a forest to find the echo of the original text. I am transposing his metaphoric image onto the relationship between representation and referent while retaining echoes of fairytales and mysticism. Wood and pine trees are construction materials and are represented in images and models. The installations involve a deferral or displacement of the original, or perhaps original copies; they are a mixture of the present fake and the absent or constructed referent, forming larger compositions from multiple, similar parts: difference in repetition, sameness in multiplicity, the forest and its copies.

Translation One is a sculpture comprised of three identical pine-birch ply boxes, each placed on a four-foot white pedestal. They are installed back-to-back in a triangle with a light placed in the center of the formation. Each box has a horizontal gap in the back panel, creating an abstract horizon with the central light shining through, and the interior opposing walls have mirrors, creating a mise en abyme. The exteriors have a minimalist aesthetic, but the interiors function as dioramas of miniature forests, facing the viewer as prosceniums. The model pines are held in place by Styrofoam to emulate snow while not hiding the material’s nature. Previously Translation One was installed with two photographs of forests, but in the future it will be installed in a corner, equidistant from two walls covered in custom forest wallpaper. The sculpture will present a bright center in a somewhat darkened room.

Translation Two is a tightly packed, geometric cone of pine trees, descending from the tallest tree in the middle to the cut tops of trees on the outer rim. They will be secured with wood crosses on the bottom of each trunk, and each trunk will be cut very short with the lowest branches close to the floor. The trees will slowly dry out over the course of the exhibition. The passage of time and scent will be strong components. Fallen pine needles may be swept up to the edge of the cone, forming a rim of dead needles around the work. The work will appear as a dark mass in a white room, with the central tree lit directly from above.

Translation Three is an installation of forest postcards hanging from the ceiling in a spiral cone shape, reminiscent of a chandelier. The room will be dark with minimal spot lighting. Each component piece hanging from the ceiling is comprised of two postcards placed back-to-back, sandwiched between two pieces of glass, secured neatly with black gaffer’s tape around the rim, and suspended from the ceiling with black string. The work will move with airflow, with the glass reflecting light and movement.

Translation One, Two, and Three join the investigation of materials with an exploration of the gallery as a space for metaphor, myth, and dream images. In viewing all three parts of Translation, the viewer will experience changes in light as s/he moves through the galleries, alternating from dark to light and back again. In Translation the symbolism of Christmas trees and references to the sacred through symmetrical compositions and dramatic lighting come together with the capitalism of Christmas tree farms, tourist postcards, and architectural tree models.

Claire Démar

In the Summer Institute I would like to concentrate on a new research project on Claire Démar, a radical feminist and a member of the Saint-Simonian “New Christianity” cult and utopian socialist movement in 1830s Paris. There are few biographical traces of Démar aside from a limited amount of correspondence and two manifestos she wrote between 1830 and 1833. Her writings, Appel d’une femme au people sur l’affranchissement de la femme (A Woman’s Call to the People on the Franchisement of Women) and Ma loi d’avenir (My Law of the Future), are currently published in French but have not been translated. The topics of her manifestos range from calling for an end of marriage and all blood relations to embracing the Saint-Simonian search for the Mother, or Female Messiah, needed to complete the “couple-pope” leadership of the Saint-Simonians. My interest in Démar originated from reading the “Anthropological Materialism” convolute in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, in which Benjamin collected quotes and information about Démar in relation to messianism and androgyny (which was, in the nineteenth century, conceived in terms of a dualism of male and female genders rather than our current understanding of androgyny as synthesis).

On several levels Performance Studies provides a constructive lens through which to pull together historical and theoretical threads concerning Démar and Benjamin. Many of Benjamin’s seminal ideas were expressed in his dissertation The Origin of German Tragic Drama [Mourning Play], which considered sixteenth to seventeenth century Baroque drama and which stood against notions of historicism and progress. In this work as much of his oeuvre, Benjamin attempted to use what he saw as the unfulfilled potential of history to address present social and political concerns. Looking at this and other works by Benjamin in conjunction with notions of social utopia and Freudian melancholy, gender theory, and performativity, I would like to consider Démar as a tragic, fated figure living in a post-Enlightenment moment when theater had moved from characters determined by godlike fate to possessing historical agency. Though Démar attempted to change the social and political discourses surrounding her position as woman in the aftermath of one of four major revolutions in France in the nineteenth century, she continually wrote about her suicidal fate with the bullet that would someday enter her brain. Beyond applying changes in dramatic form to historical circumstances and beyond Démar’s tragic end with her double suicide with her lover, a historical performative exists in the details of costume (many Saint-Simonians wore their jackets backwards so that another’s aid was required to dress, emphasizing community reliance over self-sufficiency), in the stage of (politically and industrially) revolutionary Paris, in the Saint-Simonian ruminations on gender as alternately essential or non-essential, in Démar’s pseudonym Emilie d’Eymard, and in the utopian search for the Mother (whom the majority of Saint-Simonians believed to be in the Orient, and whom Démar believed to be in America).

The results of my research will take the forms of written, visual, and possibly performative media. The lack of information on Démar may be an advantage in enabling play within the project, in all senses of the word. The Summer Institute will allow me to contextualize and delve into performance as an essential vehicle to making history present.

Another take:

I would like to situate Claire Démar in the lineage of mysticism and cults, as well as utopian socialism, and I am interested in unrealized potentiality, the desire for redemption, and the collapse of the utopian moment. Démar seems to be a wonderful figure to explore the contradictions of myth and progress in historical time (as a historical object in the passage of time), the utopia of America, and the figure of the Mother. For this project I need to gain the breadth and depth of historical knowledge necessary, a better understanding of Benjamin’s cultural theories of modernity, and a better command of the French language to read primary texts by or related to Démar that remain untranslated. I reread her manifestos and correspondence, and then I found an article that translates select passages from her writings. While I understood her writing in a literal way, in reading the select translations I realized I am often missing the subtext and style.

Démar’s letters are melancholic and heart-wrenching, especially when read in light of what the cult leader, Enfantin, wrote about her, but her biography remains a mystery, open for play (literally?). A large problem is posed in representation, as I am troubled by the idea of articulating her image or voice too much, as a bad interpretation of a book into a film. I could detail her situation in time, place, and discourse, yet she will remain a gap or absence (or better yet, an erasure, trace, or palimpsest) in the sketch. Different images come to mind – an empty chair symbolizing the wait for the Mother (as Enfantin had at each dinner table), the bullet of Démar’s dream and her later suicide, the Saint-Simonian costume with the waistcoat worn backwards to button in back, emphasizing fraternal reliance, the blood of patrimony, seamstresses writing “La Tribune des Femmes,” gaps in film and trains symbolizing progress – but everything still seems like flat symbolism. I believe the access to Claire may be through performance, perhaps the project even becoming a performance, seeing her as an ancient or tragic character in a modern, historical narrative, and looking at Benjamin’s Trauerspiel. Any aesthetic often seems absent from Claire’s writing, but metaphor is strongly presented even as she tries to free herself from it.

Cabinetmaking

The Cornell-inspired wood boxes (see photos in entry “Utopia Parkway” 3/21/09 below)

I have been thinking about visual work as theatrical, even while reading Michael Fried and his unending take on theatricality and absorption, heavily favoring Diderotian absorption and Jeff Wall aesthetics. The forest boxes are inspired by Cornell in attempting to create miniature theaters. The outside of the boxes evolved away from Cornell’s aesthetic to become more in line with Donald Judd’s style of minimalism, but the interior remains more surrealist, and the overall size (13.5” x 13.5” x 16.5”) is in line with Cornell’s little curiosity vitrines. Inside each box the opposing walls have mirrors, creating a mis-en-abyme, and the interior space is filled with a miniature forest of architectural model pines and spruces held in place by white Styrofoam, emulating snow while also not hiding what the materials truly are. The back panel of each box has a half-inch horizontal gap across the center, creating an abstract horizon line and a place to allow light through the box. The boxes are sculptures, but they are also anti-sculptural in becoming framed prosceniums and encouraging one viewpoint of the enclosed space. I am interested in this in-between area here and in Messager’s work.

The three nearly identical, handmade boxes are paired with two different photographs of forests around the Wisconsin Dells. Viewers are able to touch the boxes, sanded smooth and placed on pedestals. The pedestals put the boxes over four feet off the ground, placing them almost at head height. The boxes will be installed back to back in a triangle with a single light source at the center, and they will be in a corner of the gallery with enough room for viewers to walk around them. On each wall of the corner will be a photograph of a forest, one image lighter and one darker.

The installation involves a deferral or displacement of the original, or perhaps original copies; it is a mixture of the present fake and the absent real/referent: multiplicity and sameness in the forest and its copies. Wood is both a construction material used to construct the boxes (pine-birch ply) and is represented in the work through photographs of forests and in the architectural model trees. The boxes and the film are analog materials, but the photographic prints are digital. Each tree in the forest (whether real or fake) is similar yet different, like so many of Messager’s photographs of body parts, forming a larger composition from multiple, similar parts: difference in repetition, or multiplicity.

Connections between the boxes and photography: in Camera Lucida Barthes talks about photography as “a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant” (32), including the trouvaille (“lucky find”) (33). Cornell’s boxes were theatrical vitrines full of trouvailles from junk shops and flea markets; my boxes are proscenium shots of forests, though because of their regularity, the lucky find may have to exist in finding the minute differences between each one. Also in Camera Lucida Barthes points to the index finger, which triggers the camera shutter (a mechanical blinking, even in digital cameras), rather than the eye as the true instrument of photography, making photography into a tactile experience: “For me, the Photographer’s organ is not his eye (which terrifies me) but his finger: what is linked to the trigger of the lens” (15). Further linking the wood boxes to photography through Barthes: “at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood” (15). My field camera is a teak wood box with a metal lens plate and Fresnel glass back. Rays of light travel through the lens mounted in a hole in the front plate through the Fresnel back. My camera is a wooden light tunnel. My boxes let in light through the gaps in their back panels to illuminate the interior forests. The fronts remain open for the viewer. Perhaps they are interior cameras.

What is left is affect: whimsy, play, reverie, nostalgia, aura, the uncanny.

Here is Every.

Notes from two visits to Here is Every. Four Decades of Contemporary Art at MoMA (3/22 & 3/23).

The strings in Mes vœux are reminiscent of trees in a forest. Where the twine ties off at the top resembles branches, then the twine gets thicker and hangs straight with the weight of the photos, finally giving way to the black of the photos and framing tape towards the bottom of the work. In terms of landscape, the wall showing through at the top of the work may be sky, the mass of string trees, and the black of the photos towards the bottom the ground (earth).

Then again, everything in Mes vœux bears a relation to the body: the work is roughly the height and width of the body with arms outstretched; the photos are of body parts, are taken with a hand held camera, and are printed by hand; the words are handwritten; the work must be laboriously installed by hand; and the images are just about the size to hold in your hand and were bound by hand with tape. So many prepositions and so much touching! Touching through prepositions. Other associations: hair, stringed instruments. Associated sounds: whispering, chimes, tinkling of the shiny and multiple reflections.

Light emanates from the center of most of the photos, reinforcing a circular shape- the shape of a lens. Heavy shadows, theatrical moments, selective focus, shallow depth of field, sharp details and fuzzy moments. Not absorption (sorry, Mr. Fried, a few eyes look out at us, the viewers), Messager presents this to us (she gives us the artwork to be shown, and perhaps as it is a work comprised of photos but is not a photo, we do not regard it as a representation?).

Comments overheard: “That’s original.” Is this strange in considering that the photos are all copies, or multiple originals, or perhaps it’s the work as a whole that’s original and not the individual photos? Difference in repetition. “Ça, c’est magnifique, vraiment.” Why do people love this piece? Unity of composition? Technical feat of installation or production? Photos of bodies? Size of work (in relation to the body)? Symmetry? Aura? Dramatic lighting? Contrast? And the viewers point, and laugh.

There is much to say on mis-taking and re-cognition of the represented body parts, like a game of hide and seek. “Is that the back of a head? Oh no, an armpit?” Someone made a humorous and playful sound while pointing to a photo of a tongue sticking out. Is this some sort of mimetic behavior?

The work bears a strange relationship to minimalism in the strong, contrasting assertion of dark circle on white, rectangular wall space, yet the photos represent a near infinitude of detail. Perhaps these representational pieces serve to hold the viewer in front of the work longer? I have noticed that even in a non-representational work like Robert Morris’s installation at MoMA – which has so much texture, detail, and plays with reflecting space and trompe l’œuil in mirrors (see image at bottom of post) – viewers seem to stay longer, walk around, and look from different angles than a minimalist or post-minimalist work with less mass and texture, or a simpler form.

There is a nod to wordplay, a light reliance on text, in a conceptualist manner. Does the writing overlaying the photos overlay a meaning onto the images, or create a context for them? Is the exact placement of the text akin to a poem? Is it the color of the words or the words themselves that are important in placement? Does the order of reading, or seeing, matter?

Messager loves to invoke cinema. The work does not enforce a temporal order of looking (Metz), but it does force the eye to move like a movie camera. The regard zooms in on details, zooms out to the whole, jumps to different frames. Viewers come up close to the piece, then back away to see the whole again, moving in and out and around the work, side to side. The vertical, parallel strings draw the eye up and down, and the circular mass of images encourages the eye to wander around the perimeter and into the center. While the movement of the viewer’s body and eye are similar to movements of the camera and edits in cinema, the individuality of her viewing experience draws the work away from the experience of cinema.

The body may be fragmented in the individual photos comprising the work, but the work as a whole is completely unified, symmetrical, geometric, and centered. The viewer does not feel the need to look at every photo, but only a few that catch her eye. The shape and unity of the whole is what matters. Do most viewers realize, though, that not only the represented bodies are divided into parts, but the reflected bodies of gallery visitors are fragmented into pieces in the glass frames?

Gravity: the composition fully acknowledges the weight of gravity. It depends on gravity for the framed photos to weigh down the twine and create its form, for the smaller photos to be more buoyant and protruding than the larger ones. The composition is falling, but frozen in stasis on the wall, like a photograph of motion captured (link to poetic ekphrasis and ideal of stasis?). The pictured fingers and toes all point down, as do the sexual organs and most of the eyes, and the feet carry the weight of the body. The piece progresses from twine on white wall on top, moving into brown twine covering black photos, and ends with the heaviness of black photos with very little twine on the bottom, with white points indicating flesh in the photos scattered throughout.

Photo composition / collage / sculptural object: Mes vœux is composed of flat images but exists sculpturally in space, that is, the same space in which the viewer’s body exists and not the illusory window of the photographic surface. It could be described as being composed with a collage aesthetic, combining many images to form a new one (Frankenstein’s monster), but the work also presents itself as a collection of related image-objects. A photograph exists only by virtue of its referent, and so it represents its referent. A sculptural object may be non-representational (there is also abstract photography, but not photography created without a referent or index, but I will not address this now), and thus present itself, existing of its own accord in the same three dimensional space of the viewer’s body. Mes vœux exists in between these positions, with photographic referents and sculptural presence. It is both more than its referents (a photograph alone is its referent) and comprised of referents. Does this lead to a more corporeal engagement with the object by the viewer than solicits a photograph on its own, which bears a relationship to the body only through contiguity, that is, through its referent and through the viewer’s memory?

Personal photograph may conjure deeply felt bodily responses in a viewer with memories attached to the pictured subjects, but it will not be so for everyone else (think of Barthes’s Winter Garden Photograph). Mes vœux is an artwork (thus not holding personal memories or attachments for the viewer), but it is comprised of images from Messager’s personal photographic collection, which she uses over and over in many artworks. The photographs in Mes vœux are intimate with closed, narrow, cropped views of naked bodies, and yet they remain anonymous to the viewer. Thus we are presented with photographs of abstracted, unknown, anonymous referents, while fully knowing that each photo was of a real person at a specific moment past. The viewer must supply the referent. The referent of the photographs comprising Mes vœux is simultaneously the real photographic referent (the real bodies photographed in a past time and place, only known to Messager), bodies re-membered by the viewer (lovers, friends, relatives), and bodies imag(e)-ined by the viewer (fantasy, curiosity, desire, repulsion). The viewer’s remembered and imagined bodies are projected onto the surface of the photographs, and metonymically, the surface of the pictured bodies (skin)… in short, the viewer’s projections form a palimpsest on the surface of Messager’s vœux (wishes, vows, desire).

Photographing the senses. I realized towards the end of my visit that most of the photographed body parts are organs of sensation: noses, eyes, mouths, ears, sexual organs, fingers…. There are images of feet (perhaps sensory?), expanses of skin (touch), and less definable parts, but overwhelmingly they seem to be photos of touch and sensory contact. Are the bodies in contact with each other? With the viewer? With Messager? Skin, touch, contact: body to body, light to body, light to eye, light to film, light to print, contact print, chemical revelation of the latent image of touch.

How many times has this work been (re)photographed? To really reflect on the work I must look away, and see the afterimage (Camera Lucida).

Some thoughts on art/artists while in the gallery:

You have to get over a lot of aesthetic enthusiasms to be a great artist, so as not to let your visual biases and habits get in the way of good production.

People are obsessed with how much time it takes to put an artwork together: time as money, labor as commodity, capitalist take on artwork. If it doesn’t take a long time to produce it, the artist must be deemed a genius and thus produce work beyond the grasp of the layman for it to be valued.

Some art seems to use so much sound, video, light, and jumbles of stuff in non-centered compositions and A.D.D. flashes that either it reflects our media and communication systems well or simply must compete with them for our attention (thinking specifically of the current installation in MoMA’s open space on the 2nd floor). Art as spectator sport where nothing happens, really. (I want quiet, reflective compositions… usually.)

Robert Wilson: drawing as notation

William Kentridge (my favorite mark maker): the stage as camera

I am finding a new love for post/minimalism and Eva Hesse.

And Robert Morris.

Have you ever noticed that everyone is wearing black in the galleries while all the walls are white? Is this something to do with art or New York? It almost seems planned.

Utopia Parkway

Excerpts from Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell by Charles Simic:

“Shadow box / Music box / Pill box / A box which contains a puzzle / A box with tiny drawers, / Navigation box / Jewelry box / Sailor’s box / Butterfly box / Box stuffed with souvenirs of a sea voyage / Magic prison / An empty box” p. 35 (“Matchbox With a Fly In It”)

“Cornell loved Houdini, who was famous for escaping from ingeniously constructed boxes. The boxes had secret trapdoors and exits… That art is called illusionist. Illusionists make it seem… There are two points to make about this: (I) philosophically, illusionism is a theory that the material world is an illusion; (2) illusionism is a technique of using images to deceive. It raises the question of whether perception can give us true and direct knowledge of the world… ” p. 38 (“Birds of a Feather”)

“The little box gets her first teeth / And her little length / Little width little emptiness / And all the rest she has // The little box continues growing / The cupboard that she was inside / Is now inside her // And she grows bigger bigger bigger / Now the room is inside her / And the house and the city and the earth / And the world she was in before // The little box remembers her childhood / And by a great great longing / She becomes a little box again // Now in the little box / You have the whole world in miniature / You can easily put it in a pocket / Easily steal it easily lose it // Take care of the little box.” p. 40 (Vasko Popa, “The Little Box”)

“The work is of wood [continued Viglius], marked with many images and full of little boxes.” p. 53 (“The Memory Theater of Guilio Camillo”)

“He [Camillo] pretends that all things that the human mind can conceive and which we cannot see with the corporeal eye, after being collected together by diligent meditation, may be expressed by certain corporeal signs in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind. And it is because of this corporeal looking that he calls it theater.” p. 53 (“The Memory Theater of Guilio Camillo”)

“As the curtain goes up we see a forest with tall, fantastic trees. It is night. There’s a moon half hidden by the clouds. Blue mist drifts through the trees. The forest is a place in which everything your heart desires and fears lives.” p. 55 (“The Moon is the Sorcerer’s Helper”)

“Many people have already speculated about the relationship between play and the sacred. The light of reverie, let us note, is a dim light. The near darkness of old churches and old movies is that of dreams. Our memories are divine images because memory is not subject to the ordinary laws of time and space… Images surrounded by shadow and silence. Silence is that vast, cosmic church in which we always stand alone. Silence is the only language God speaks.” p. 57 (“These Are Poets Who Service Church Clocks”)

“There are really three kinds of images. first [sic], there are those seen with eyes open in the manner of realists in both art and literature. Then there are images we see with eyes closed. Romantic poets, surrealists, expressionists, and everyday dreamers know them. The images Cornell has in his boxes are, however, of the third kind. They partake of both dream and reality, and of something else that doesn’t have a name. They tempt the viewer in two opposite directions. One is to look and admire the elegance and other visual properties of the composition, and the other is to make up stories about what one sees. In Cornell’s art, the eye and the tongue are a t cross purposes. Neither one by itself is sufficient. It’s that mingling of the two that makes up the third image.” p. 62 (“The Gaze We Knew as a Child”)

“Every art is about the longing of One for the Other. Orphans that we are, we make our sibling kin out of anything we can find. The labor of art is the slow and painful metamorphosis of the One into the Other.” p. 64 (“Totemism”)

To connect with making the little forest boxes: cabinet and box making to photography (Camera Lucida); tactility of the boxes to the index finger as the true instrument of photography (again Camera Lucida); enclosure, framing, proscenium; the present fake and the absent real/index/referent, minimalism and space/presence; multiplicity and sameness in the forest and in the copies; wood as building material and as represented; analog materials, digital output; original copies, displacement of an original; whimsy, play, reverie, nostalgia.

Ontology vs. Epistemology

I want to think about the desire to know. Specifically I’m thinking about the photo theory seminar I’m taking, and photo theory in general. It seems that there is a divide between being interested in the photograph itself (what it is) and being interested in what we can know through the photograph (what it can do). I think I fall on the ontological side, and my professor on the epistemological side, though of course they are imbricated. Just a thought, but one worth following either to affirm or explode.

Looking to be touched

Katie said this beautiful phrase, seeming to sum up so much. We were trying to find what it is about our respective research subjects (which are museum objects) that holds us, and which we would like to draw out in our performance. Looking to be touched in an encounter with the object, to be moved or acted upon by the object, I look at Messager’s Mes vœux (My Vows/My Wishes). As Barthes before me, I am looking to be touched by photography, and in turn, like Mavor, touch photography. Following are some thoughts concerning photography, touching and tactility, and looking to be touched.

Originally I began my research on Messager for a commissioned essay with the theme of space. I thought of the physical space of Messager’s installations, the space of encounter between the art object and the viewer, the space between the visual and verbal, the space between the photograph and its referent, and the (lack of) space Messager allows in her photographic compositions. She photographs bodies in extreme close-up, parceling out the body into pieces like Catholic ex-votos. This will tie into possession and sympathetic magic below.

Analog photography is a tactile medium par excellence. Light reflected from the subject enters the camera and is recorded on film when the shutter is released by the touch of an index finger; later in the darkroom, light passes through the exposed film to expose light-sensitive paper, and the paper is bathed in chemistry to reveal the latent image. We then see, through a controlled series of photons and chemicals touching and penetrating various light-sensitive surfaces, the seemingly alchemic result: an indexical image, the relayed rays of light that touched the subject (or for Sontag, as Barthes quotes, the photograph of the absent body touching us like the delayed rays of a star. Camera Lucida: 80-81). The language of analog photography lends itself poetically to this process, especially in French: papier sensible, révélateur, cliché, planche contact.  Messager is aware of the implications of this process and its surrounding language:

“C’est une manière de les toucher aussi, de les effleurer, que de les photographier. Et sur ma planche contact, je les redécoupe encore, vraiment, je les possède, tous ces homes et ces femmes que je photographie.”(Messager, Mot pour mot: 364).

“Just taking their picture is a way of touch-ing them too, of skimming their surfaces. And on my contact sheet, I crop them again, really, I possess all of these men and women whose pictures I take.” (Messager, trans. Vivian Rehberg, Word for Word: 364).

Possession. So much is held in a single word here. Messager holds possession to be a form of protection: “Collection = protection = possession” (Mot pour Mot: 360). She creates a collection from her negatives, printing the same images repetitively, though sometimes in different sizes, with different exposures and cropping, and uses the same images in many artworks. Multiplicity and repetition forms “an endless collection born from 1/60th of a second” (Marcadé, “Interview,” in Word for Word: 405). It is interesting to note regarding this remark that 1/60th of a second is the slowest shutter speed at which one can safely hand-hold a camera without visible camera shake… from breathing, from the heart beating… our bodies are not still until we are dead, or photographed.

But how does Messager possess her models in photographing them? In being a mimetic technology, photography can be allied with sympathetic magic, also known as imitative magic or correspondence, in which influence is sought over something by creating or obtaining its representation, with the power resting in the analogous relationship between representation and object: do something to the representation, and it will effect the object as well (think of voodoo dolls). Photography is inherently mimetic in that it does not exist without what it represents having existed at some point, unlike a painting or puppet. This helps explain the superstitions and taboos against destroying or throwing away photographs, or maybe why someone would rip a photograph to eliminate an ex-lover or indicate (or effect?) the end of the relationship. Why does Messager feel that possessing these correspondences affords protection, and from what? (Though this seems rhetorical: the world, perhaps more specifically the masculine artworld Messager has managed to survive and thrive in since the 1970s) As to why, I still am unclear, apart from her influences in Catholicism (ex-votos, whether wax body parts, metal charms, paintings or photographs, depend upon correspondence to call upon saints to heal the body or to give thanks for an answered prayer) and her predilection for magic, desire, and ambiguity.

Taxidermy and photography : death and surface. In interviews Messager has often compared photography to taxidermy. A phrase applicable to both is la vie arrêtée (arrested life); both are indexical, pointing to past life that really existed, and mimetic in imitating that life, each a “double of life who is death” (Krauss, “Corpus Delicti,” October 33 (Summer 1985): 72). Taxidermy comes from taxis (arrangement) and derma (skin), essentially being an arrangement of skin stuffed with artificial material to take on sculptural form (Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=taxidermy). Nothing is left of the animal but its surface, and without its stuffing and glass eyeballs, it would barely be 3-dimensional, with the exception of teeth (here may I play with transferring or translating Barthes’ punctum to taxidermy?). Messager has worked with taxidermy in many of her installations, and one of her earliest works, entitled Les Pensionnaires (The Boarders), was comprised of mummified sparrows she found dead on sidewalks. She knitted sweaters for them, punished and rewarded them like children, and housed them in her apartment. She points to the source of uncanniness in taxidermy birds:

“Les oiseaux, c’est la liberté de partir, de voler vers l’inconnu, l’étranger. C’est pourquoi un oiseau immobile, empaillé, c’est la contradiction totale. Le malaise vient de la familiarité des matériaux. Je voudrais toujours être entre deux” (Mot pour Mot: 372).

“Birds represent the freedom to leave, to fly toward the unknown, the foreign. That’s why an immobile, stuffed bird is a complete contradiction. Malaise comes from the familiarity of the materials. I would always like to be in-between ” (Word for Word, trans. Vivian Rehberg: 372).

Correspondence is in-between, and this familiarity is uncanny. Photography is also made of skin: the photographic surface, stuffed with our memories and projections, as well as the inseparable referent: “A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed” (Barthes, Camera Lucida, 81). The uncanny specter of the familiar but absent body remains in photography, and the surface of the photograph becomes a proxy for the skin of the absent body. Photography is thus linked to death in always showing the past, what has been, sometimes what is no longer (Barthes 85).

Last week I reread Camera Lucida. In the first part of the book Barthes takes the essence of photography to be contingency and the referent, as the referent is inseparable from the image, the that-has-been (77). Barthes is pulled back and back again by the umbilical cord into searching for his mother in photographs: “There she is!” (emphasis mine, 99). Indexical language, indexical image. Yes, it always comes back to index. “Index, index, index,” one of my professors said in my thesis proposal defense. That little finger keeps pointing to bodies in photographs, to our past selves and to absent bodies and to displaced places, uncannily, indexically present; our tongue continues to utter those ever-shifting indexical phrases, “here, there, me, she” (or as Gertrude Stein said, “he, he, he, he, he”).

All this is to build up to thinking about Messager’s Mes vœux. She fits these thoughts and she doesn’t. Her photographs are indexical yet remain anonymous, parceled into unidentifiable parts. They do not point to a beloved, absent body. They pull us towards projection, creating space for both Messager’s and our desires to be projected onto the amalgamation, the (elegant) monster created from many bodies. In viewing Mes vœux in MoMA (for we must remain grounded in the concrete experience of looking to be touched in a physical space), there are the photographed bodies, there are the reflected bodies of museum visitors, and there are the conjured bodies of our desires and memories. The photographed bodies I have well discussed at this point, as to indexicality and correspondence. But since the photographed body parts move toward anonymity, may we take the photographic correspondence not only indexically, but also as corresponding to analogous re-membered bodies, which in actuality are not Messager’s re-presented bodies? This takes into account the viewer’s (my) embodied experience of the work, conjuring bodies and experiences I re-member. Seeing remembered (or projected, desired) bodies in the work connects to seeing the shadowy reflections of museum visitors on the surface of the work. The reflections in Messager’s work resemble the reflections visitors to the Vietnam Memorial see of themselves as they approach the wall. These are the reflections of present bodies, but they read uncannily as absent bodies, or the dead, thus conjuring remembered bodies. The museum visitors’ reflected bodies act as palimpsests moving on top of Messager’s photographed bodies, mingling (or collapsing) presence and absence, the familiar and strange.

To be continued:

Her photos feel more like objects, but why? The sculptural installation? By virtue of being the correct size to hold in your hand? By the string suspending them, or their multiplicity?

Aura fits in here somewhere. Messager’s work has an auratic presence in person, drawing MoMA visitors in much more closely than most any artwork I’ve seen in a museum. Does aura relate to the uncanny? It relates to a religious feeling, again stemming from the influence of Catholic aesthetics and church architecture.

Also to consider aesthetically and in relation to objecthood is the minimalist feel of the black circle on a white wall (albeit contradictory to the sheer multiplicity of representation in the work).

To reread (excerpts?): Carol Mavor’s Becoming, Bergson’s Matter and Memory?

And to read: André Breton’s Mad Love, C. Nadia Seremetakis The Senses Still (excerpts?)