Literary Photographs

Posted on Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 10:57AM by Registered CommenterJared in , , | CommentsPost a Comment

Laurie Dahlberg writes for the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston's exhibit on Xaviera Simmons:

Although the pictures’ juicy color and vivid camera detail are intensely descriptive (and therefore literal), there is a greater sense in which they evoke language. These are highly condensed images that read epigrammatically; they don’t tell stories as much as they suggest mottos, aphorisms, puns, and declarations.

Simmons' work does "suggest" various phrases, or perhaps more accurately, causes the viewer to respond to the image's suggestiveness with a mantra. See especially Simmon's "Intentional Nigger, aka Robert Beck".

SimmonsInternational.gif 

What puzzles me is what Dahlberg means by "epigrammatically."  It would help me to know more about her reference to Greenberg, which I don't. So my best bet is to read Dahlberg literally and say, she means the composition of Simmon's  images--their spatial organization, geometric forms, color composition, and the gestures and facial expressions of human models--function like words. That is, the sum of visual components "say" something, and specifically they say something that the photographer cannot say with ordinary language or through ordinary storytelling.

This ability to use images to "speak" is what confuses us and makes the photography interesting. We do not mean that  the picture of Robert Beck is meant to inform us of something; Simmon is descriptive without being explicit or coercive, like Barthes' spaghetti might be. Instead, the photograph "speaks" by (1) giving us a sufficiently realistic and (2) sufficiently expressive image to respond to, and (3) directing our response to a specific portion of the composition. Thus, our gaze is drawn to Robert Beck's face by the length of his legs (accentuated by the camera angle), the ceiling's imposition on the top of the frame, the negative space between Beck's body and the background (highlighted by the glare and shadow cast by what looks like a single, strong light source), and the curl of his right arm, which then splits our attention between his face and his hand, perhaps causing us to question his "intent".

Simmon's other photos are similarly ordered to direct our attention towards human representations as opposed to structural or figural presentations. Thus, what we are natually left with is a response to the human image (eg. Beck's face and hand), conditioned (or "condensed", to use the word Dahlberg uses) by the visual composition for a viewer's response. Hence, the images do "suggest"--they point us to that which is most expressive and evokes not words but the need for language as such.

I hope I get a chance to see Simmon's work in an exhibit near me.

"More Windows..."

Posted on Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 09:32AM by Registered CommenterJared in , , , | CommentsPost a Comment

Recently, I was browsing a Chicago art gallery with my girlfriend. The paintings were quite good, except for the fact that they were acrylic and not oil based, and had I several thousand dollars worth of disposable income (I don't) I would have purchased Kathleen Patrick's "Magnificent Mile".

Magnificent%20Mile 

As we perused further into the gallery, we saw the artist talking with two potential buyers. There were many manifestations of the Chicago skyline sitting around, and the clients were studying intently a piece not unlike the one below.

 Chicago%20City%20View

I eavesdropped on their conversation, expecting some interesting discussion of Patrick's expressionist interpretation of the Chicago skyline, albeit diminished in the second image you see here.

But what was the discussion? "I still think it could use more windows." I was incredulous. Here was a couple with the funds to buy a masterful painting, and they wanted to ruin it by putting in more windows and fixing the colors to match their apartment walls! I don't have many words for the buyers' impertinence, only disgust.

Please comment an tell me which of the two paintings you think is superior and why. Clearly, to me, the way the colors and shapes of "Magnificent Mile" blend together is much more emotionally engaging than the sterile segregations that "Chicago City View" offers. "Magnificent Mile" unifies the city and encourages knowledge of Chicago to distinguish between the many forms, whereas "Chicago City View" simply leaves the city structured around this empty unidentified gap--is it a park or Lake Michigan, or is the emptiness in the middle of the painting the lack of taste that would leave a buyer wishing for "more windows" in the menacing pile of buildings?

Absalom, Absalom!

Posted on Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 01:08PM by Registered CommenterJared in , , , , | CommentsPost a Comment

This coming Sunday (July 6th) will be the 46th anniversary of William Faulkner's death. In no relation to that date, I have recently finished reading Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (Potential spoilers follow. However, as with any truly great work of art, someone else's comments on it shouldn't spoil your own encounter with it.)

One of the earliest things I picked up from Absalom, Absalom! was the way in which the narrative and its variety of voices concerned itself with questions of knowledge. Quentin Compson needs to know the life story of Thomas Sutpen. While many commentators focus on Sutpen's role as a God-like father figure to the families entangled in his "design" (see especially Carolyn Porter's essay "(Un)Making the Father" in The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner), I quickly became engaged in my reading with the possibilities and frustrations of "knowing" Sutpen. This very particular engagement with the text was enforced by the accessible but by no means clearly laid allusions to Old Testament figures and situations. Towards the end of the novel I had collected in my imagination a whole slew of such allusions: Sutpen as Abraham, as Israel, as David; Charles Bon as Ishmael and as Able; Henry Sutpen as Isaac, as Cain, and, of course, as Absalom from 2nd Samuel--and the comparisons go on. If not weakened by their sheer number, the allusions to the Old Testament are weakened further by the difficulty of making them stick as interpretive aids. Why call Absalom, Absalom! a Biblical work of art? What do I mean by "Biblical" in this literary context, and what do knowledge questions have to do with such an aesthetic characterization?

The accessibility of literary comparisons between Faulkner and the Bible does not mean that such comparisons are accurate or even helpful in interpretation of either texts. For instance, Shreve constantly interjects into Quentin's narrative the words "the demon" whenever the unnamed subject of Quentin's recital can be identified as Thomas Sutpen. Later in the novel, when the narrative shifts to concern itself with Charles Bon as Sutpen's firstborn son, Faulkner clearly marks where Shreve does not clarify the subject of the narration. The fact of Shreve's interjections should suggest that whatever initial celebrations of Thomas Sutpen as patriarch are suspect to immediate revision; and the "unspoken" understanding of Charles Bon's status should suggest that the initial ambiguity of his character must be either incorporated into the narrative family, and thus left unquestioned, or repelled. Nothing of these literary identifications compare to denominational understanding of the Bible--one must instead offer a critical examination of the religious text and uncover conceptual grounds for understanding certain acts. It is by knowing how a type of story can be told that we are able to interpret our telling of it.

Thus, once we know how to tell and to read a "Biblical" story, we know how to tell and read similar stories. And by way of this knowledge, the comparative details of two stories lose critical importance. Accepting both the Bible and Absalom, Absalom! as texts, we can interpret the one in terms of the other without referring to the other as a template or basis. What I mean by this (that comparative interpretation need not rely on postmodern "ungroundedness" to complete its task) can be the subject of another post, but suffice it to say that the primacy of Absalom, Absalom!'s biblical import--as opposed to psychoanalytic, historical, or sociological import--comes from the fact that the conditions for the novel's narrative are related to the conditions for the Bible's narrative. Both the Bible and Absalom, Absalom! are told from a variety of sources and authors in an effort to reconstruct a lost knowledge. For the Bible, this lost knowledge is the image of God; it is understood to have some relation to and genesis for the figure of man, and therefore the narratives of the Bible recite the histories of men most related to the image of God. Likewise, the lost knowledge of Absalom, Absalom! is the full story of Thomas Sutpen; and the characters of the novel--even Sutpen himself--understand their genetic truth to reside somewhere in the narratives of Sutpen's relatives.

By placing the conditions of knowledge in a recantation of familial histories, Absalom, Absalom! does what the Bible does to recall the unknown and thereby earns the description "biblical". It helps that the characters of Faulkner's novel read as gigantic figures, such as Sutpen's arrival to Jefferson on horseback, or as images conjured from faith, as in Miss Rosa's description of Charles Bon:

 I dont know even now if I was ever aware that I had seen nothing of his face but that photograph, that shadow ... even before I saw the photograph I could have recognized, nay, described, the very face. But I never saw it. I do not even know of my own knowledge that Ellen ever saw it, that Judith ever loved it, that Henry slew it: so who will dispute me when I say, Why did I not invent, create it?

The conditions of knowledge in Absalom, Absalom! are conditions of faith, of engagement with a design or plan that both admits of free will and demands total subjugation. It is a knowledge that could be grasped by staid analysis, as in the lawyer's reports on Sutpen's progress, or with "levity," as with Shreve's reactions to his own curious involvement in the retelling. But to have full strength as a meaningful work of art, Faulkner's genius is shown in his ability to pull from an otherwise straighforward story the woven wistaria of Sutpen's Hundred.

Acknowledging Aesthetics

Posted on Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 10:00AM by Registered CommenterJared in , , , | CommentsPost a Comment
If film is an art of realism, then our desire to see a good film is “wishing for the condition of viewing as such” (Cavell, The World Viewed 102). I do not wish to explore, as Cavell aptly and adequately does, the ontology of aesthetic experience as it pertains to cinema; what I want to do with this short essay is approach a definition of “good” as a qualifier for art in general, and film specifically.
For starters, the qualifier “good” in this case is attached to its referent by an act of judgment, and this act is supported by the aesthetic mode of action called interpretation. Unlike, say, a moral judgment that (in my view) describes an action as “good” when it is undertaken in a way that either aims to or adheres to a form of self-presentation, an aesthetic judgment is most compelling when it acts on—rather than merely describes—its referent. This means that judging a work of art necessarily alters, enforces, or discredits the value one had placed on it before the interpretive act; and this further means that, in aesthetic judgment, the author's task is, for starters, placed aside to allow for the critic's task. (As opposed to moral judgment, where I take it that one's interest is placed in one's own actions, such that one asks not “what do I like about this?” but “how should I go about doing this?”) And so it would seem that Cavell's concept of autonomism is in the first instance a critical concept, designed for the extraction of meaning from a work rather than the creation of meaning in a new work. This should strike us as strange and against our instincts as we read on in the chapter.
Taking this critical route, we notice that our hypothesis drawn from Cavell's text, that our desire to see a “good” film is “wishing for the condition of viewing as such,” forces us to distinguish our “good” film from the fantasy-desiring movie experience, where one seeks a comfort from the “real world” (Adorno's complaint) or seeks entertainment as a supplement to or replacement of her worldly life (many plaintiff's here; not the least of which is Plato and his now-crowded cave). It is a major feature of our hypothesis that film be considered, along with everything else, a part of what is “real.” The cinema is; it exists. We can talk about it and we can talk about the effects it has on our lives. To dismiss the cinema's reality, to call it part of the modern manufacture of cultural delusion, is to refuse to be a critic at all. By either viewing films as an escape or suggesting that films force us out of reality, we do not even discredit films as valuable artworks; we effectively refuse to study films as art and therefore cannot begin to judge. It is also a major feature of our study that the very necessity to judge, when confronted by art, suggests quite explicitly an inseparableness from the aesthetic experience. We must judge an artwork when we encounter it, or else in some sense we are not quite tuned-in to the world we inhabit.
Art, I take it, is not merely supplemental or decorative, but integral to one's seeking and thinking of (“acknowledgment of”) the world. Hence, Cavell writes, “It is our fantasies, now all but completely thwarted and out of hand, which are unseen and must be kept unseen” (102). To see one's fantasies is to no longer see the world; in one's fantasies one sees only the impalpable content of one's desires, the conditions and actualities that one would have if she could, but cannot. She cannot have her fantasy fulfilled both because it is the nature of fantasy to be impossible and because, if it were to be fulfilled, it would no longer be desired—instead the now-palpable content of desire becomes loved, appreciated, disappointing or regrettable. Art, and cinema included, is not fantasy; art is real. As a reality, it is loved, appreciated, disappointing or loathed—and the point is precisely that we always respond with an emotion somewhere on that gradient of loving/loathing, therefore making art very present and addressable by our ordinary thoughts and feelings.
Now is where things should start feeling strange: can we not say that a film that I might not call a film “good” that you really love? Can you love something that I judge unlovable, because it is not “good”? Or is it that beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, thus making my judgments sometimes unintelligible to you when they conflict your natural responses? The effect of this objection is to suggest that the viewer's response to a work of art is our primary factor in attributing it a qualitative value. If the attribution is proper—that is, if it is describable as an aesthetic judgment—then we could venture to say that our love for a film is to encounter within that film a “condition of viewing” to which we can adhere to as our own. We love a film because it is developed from a “condition of viewing” closely similar to the “conditions of being” from which we have developed as humans. We recognize something in the loved film, and this recognition evokes a need to confirm its validity—the aesthetic consummation of an empirical desire, or, in other words, the bringing together in art the things of our world that had previously been unacknowledged. (Think of the Divine Comedy; Dante starts with an absence of what he does not know, or is not certain of. At the end, he has seen, by Virgil's guidance, the guidance of a poet, an artist, the disparate things of everyday life, organized in horror around the great maw that refuses to acknowledge unity of being, and so chews everything that gets close to its own callousness. Dante then ascends to see the tapestry of the stars and proceeds in the next book to bring together yet more familiar, worldly things and actions; his guide then becomes the erotic image of Beatrice, who leads him up to the final consummation—the pure light of God which fills all. These are not simply religious tropes, they are aesthetic devices that create values from things that are already familiar to us.)
Thus, I do not think I'm tripped up by the fact that some people love Shawshank Redemption but dislike or at least lack the desire to see The Trial. Those persons have not encountered within their realm of experience or developed for themselves a "condition of viewing" that is exhibited by The Trial, and therefore cannot, ontologically, call The Trial a better film than Shawshank Redemption. To make such a claim requires the development of condition of viewing "as such," the appropriate exposure to the two films, and a recognition of said conditions such that one may perform the proper evaluative act. This is why we say that critics must be properly trained, must review a variety of works, and must make their most important statements a declaration of praise--otherwise we would not be able to tell what makes a work of art "good" and thereby become cynical in our responses towards critics and artists alike.
What, then, does the filmmaker as artist strive for? As an example of the modern art, film can be explained by how Cavell characterizes Modernism on page 103 of The World Viewed: "Modernism signifies not that the powers of the arts are exhausted, but on the contrary that it has become the immediate task of the artist to achieve in his art the muse of the art itself." That is to say, the tradition (Modernism) from which film springs as a medium becomes self-supporting, automatic--and my favored example is of the scene in The Trial where Orson Welles and Anthony Perkins are juxtaposed to one another against the light of a projector and of a screen. Welles stands beside the projector and Perkins is framed within the screen, thus calling on our own predicament within the cinema and our own relationship, not to a literary device transcribed to film, but to the instance of artistry with which we are engaged at that very moment. Welles, as both director and an antagonist in all his films including The Trial, is not just showcasing himself. He is actively finding his muse by entering into his art, like Dante in the Divine Comedies or Velasquez in Las Meninas.
Just how this works is still something of a mystery. We do know that it does work, that art is possible, and that it is integral to our lives as humans, a kind of life that is difficult to grasp and describe in its entirety: "Only an art can define its media...for separate creatures of sense and soul, for earthlings, meaning is a matter of expression; and that expressionlessness [of Modernism] is not a reprieve from meaning, but a particular mode of it; and that the arrival of an understanding is a question of acknowledgement" (107).
What is the "good" in and of art? It is precisely what we are looking for when we seek an aesthetic experience in the first place; it is what works to fulfill our need for meaning and acknowledge us as seers of the world.

Welcome!

Posted on Sunday, June 22, 2008 at 03:30PM by Registered CommenterJared in | Comments1 Comment

I have changed sites yet again, and thanks to the technology provided by Squarespace, this will be the last relocation. Here, I will bring together my webspace meanderings in one location. I hope you find the media I publish informative, engaging, and fun!

 You can visit my old blog and its archives here.

Page | 1 | 2 | Next 5 Entries