On Interrogating Venus: Or, The Trouble With Sally

Fig. 1. Sally Mann - Venus After School, 1992


'Pornography is a theatre of types, never of individuals.'

Susan Sontag

The Sheer Impossibility Of Being Absolutely Nobody

Fig. 1. Cindy Sherman - Untitled, 2007-2008


'Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder.'

Paul Ricoeur

Echoing Footfalls Aroused Her Slumbering Hysteria*

* Fig. 1. Jackson Twins - Echo of Footfalls Heightened Her Flourishing Hysteria, 2009


'The still must tease with the promise of a story the viewer of it itches to be told.'

Cindy Sherman

Violence Against Beauty Is, In A Way, Beautiful Too

Fig. 1. Joel Peter Witkin - Las Meninas, 1987


Melissa Holbrook Pierson: What is "taste"?
Peter Schjeldahl: Sediment of aesthetic experience, commonly somebody else's.

There Are Many Ways To Hate The Things You Love

Fig. 1. Sam Riley (as Ian Curtis) in Control - d. Anton Corbijn, 2007


'People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation.'

Elias Canetti

Addendum #1: Music Video (click)

Joy Division - Transmission

Addendum #2: The Sunday Six (Relatively Recent)

Fig. 1. Mohamed Bourouissa - La fenêtre, 2005

Fig. 2. Mona Hatoum - Nature morte aux grenades, 2006-07

Fig. 3. Jeff Koons - Girl with Dolphin and Monkey, 2006

Fig. 4. Doug Aitken - Migration (still), 2008

Fig. 5. Gottfried Helnwein - Red Mouse 2, 2008

Fig. 6. Wim Delvoye - Torre, 2009

Cindy Sherman: Through A Glass Kaleidoscopically

Fig. 1. Cindy Sherman - Untitled #424, 2004

'Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.'

Jonathan Swift

It's A Saturday Thing: The (Dis)enchantments of Love

Fig. 1. Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) - Untitled (under the skin, thin skin, skin deep, thick skin, skin tight, skinned alive), 2003


'Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.'

Roland Barthes

Clothes Are To Flesh What Dreams Are To The Mind

Fig. 1. Jean Paul Goude - Naomi in Bazaar, 2007


'Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.'

Henry David Thoreau

Games I Have Played With The Ghosts Of Innocence

Loretta Lux - Girl with Marbles, 2005


'I use children as a metaphor for a lost paradise.'

Loretta Lux

In Adulthood, It Is Tact That Is Golden, Not Silence*

Fig. 1. Walker Evans - Salón, West Virginia, 1935


'Never discuss the poem you contemplate writing. It's like turning on the outside spigot. It takes all the pressure off the upstairs bathroom.'

Robert Frost

* 'It is tact that is golden, not silence.' (Samuel Butler)

Reprise #6: A Place Between Certainty And Oblivion

Fig. 1. Robert Morris - Bodyspacemotionthings, 1971


'The Photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been. This distinction is decisive. In front of a photograph, our consciousness does not necessarily take the nostalgic path of memory (how many photographs are outside of individual time), but for every photograph existing in the world, the path of certainty: the Photograph's essence is to ratify what it presents. One day I received from a photographer a picture of myself which I could not remember being taken, for all my efforts; I inspected the tie, the sweater, to discover in what circumstances I had worn them; to no avail. And yet, because it was a photograph I could not deny that I had been there (even if I did not know where). This distinction between certainty and oblivion gave me a kind of vertigo, something of a detective "anguish" (the theme of Blow-Up was not far off); I went on to the photographer's show as to a police investigation, to learn at last what I no longer knew about myself.'

Roland Barthes

Reprise #2: But, After We've Smoked Another Silence

Fig. Nan Goldin - Nan and Brian in Bed, NYC, 1983

'To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.'

Quentin Crisp

Four Blind Ears: Or, The Art Of Listening To Pictures

Fig. 1. Alessandra Sanguinetti - Time Flies (2005)


'What the picture tells me is "itself" - I should like to say. That is, its telling me something consists in its own structure, in its forms and colours.'

Ludwig Wittgenstein

In Truth, Other People Are A Problem Worth Having

Fig. 1. Helen Levitt - New York, ca. 1940


'For there is but one problem - the problem of human relations. We forget that there is no hope or joy except in human relations.'

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Death Came To Them Daily In The Form Of Ideology

Fig. 1. Sungsoo Koo - Tour Bus (from the series Magical Reality, 2005-2006), 2005


'Works of art are often sites where the issues or questions a community or culture finds urgent, fundamental, or troublesome are elaborated and negotiated. In part, this is a matter of what Nelson Goodman calls the "cognitive efficacy" of visual representations: through representing or symbolising selected elements of "the world," experience is made susceptible to ordering and rearrangement; the world can be more completely grasped, ordered, illuminated. Visual representation is, consequently, a vehicle for the increase of knowledge, both scientific and nonscientific. But knowledge is ideological: what passes for knowledge at any given moment is radically conditioned by a complex of regnant interests, values, utilities. What may seem at first a pure discovery, an objective truth emergent in visual representation - linear perspective is a good example - is later revealed as a culturally specific, ideologically* engaged, contingent construction.'

Michael Leja

* 'Ideology designates a rich "system of representations," worked up in specific material practices, which help form individuals into social subjects who "freely" internalise an appropriate "picture" of their social world and their place in it. Ideology offers the social subject not a set of narrowly "political" ideas but the fundamental framework of assumptions that defines the parameters of the real and the self; it constitutes what Althusser calls the social subject's "'lived' relation to the real."' (James Kavanagh)

Tell Me When You Think You Know Where I'm Going

Fig. 1. Jaroslav Krupka - Path near Police nad Metují, c. 1930


'If I'm free, it's because I'm always running.'

Jimi Hendrix

A Song Is Anything That Can Walk By Itself, He Said*

Fig. 1. Bob Dylan - Scotland, possibly Princess Street, 20 May 1966 Edinburgh (p. Barry Feinstein)


'A person is a success if they get up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.'

Bob Dylan

* 'A song is anything that can walk by itself.' (Bob Dylan)

The Sunday Six: I Was Not There, I Am Not Here, Alas

Fig. 1. Anselm Kiefer - Erotik im Fernen Osten oder: Transition from cool to warm, 1977

Fig. 2. Beth Van Hoesen - Bay Boats, 1988

Fig. 3. Toshikatsu Endo - Allegory III, 1988

Fig. 4. Obras Escogidas Kcho - (Selected Works), 1994

Fig. 5. Ingrid Pollard - Untitled, Ceramic, 2008

Fig. 6. Sean Gutowski - Burning Ship, 2009

'My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.'

Truman Capote

Your Ears Will Orgasm #58: The Ship Song - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (MixPod Player)

Unpublished Reflections Of A 584-Year-Old Camera

Fig. 1. Laurie Simmons - Big Camera, Small Camera, 1977

'One day in 1425, Filippo Brunelleschi walked out onto the Piazza del Duomo in Florence. Standing at the main doors to the cathedral, facing the baptistery across the piazza, he set up a small wooden box on a stand. He had invited various influential friends and cognoscenti to witness his experiment. One by one they stepped up to this curious device and closed one eye to stare through a small hole in one side. To a twentieth-century observer, the only interpretation of this scene could be that of a photographer demonstrating a new camera. By expanding the definition of photography perhaps more than is acceptable, Brunelleschi's box could be considered a crude camera. For a citizen of fifteenth-century Florence, the effects of looking into this device were as mind-boggling and astounding as if seeing an actual camera for the first time. Peering into the small hole, they first saw a direct monocular view of the baptistery across the way. Then, by the flip of a lever, a mirror was moved into position and a small painting of the baptistery appeared, exactly in line and proportional to the direct view. In fact, with regard to geometry and form, the two were barely distinguishable. Brunelleschi had made a sharp right-hand turn out of the Middle Ages.

That Brunelleschi's demonstration seems so obvious to us today is a measure of its intellectual achievement - the more a revolutionary discovery shifts or even shatters the world view, the more commonplace it seems to the observers of subsequent ages. What he accomplished that day must have seemed to his contemporaries to be at the very limits of knowledge, as incredible, for example, as some of the quantum physicists' descriptions of our world seem to people of today. Prior to 1424, no one had ever painted an image that way. Historians describe this event as Brunelleschi's public pronouncement of the laws of linear perspective, which he is credited with discovering. There is certainly no doubt that his new system, along with its formalization and publication by his friend Leon Alberti twelve years later, irrevocably altered the history of painting and accelerated the development of techniques of artificial image making.

Describing Brunelleschi's breakthrough simply as the discovery of the vanishing point, however, places an inordinate emphasis on the picture itself as the locale of this revolutionary change. What Brunelleschi achieved was the personification of the image, the creation of a "point of view" and its identification with a place in real space. In doing so, he elevated the position of the individual viewer to an integral part of the picture by encoding this presence as the inverse, in absentia, source of the converging perspectival lines. The picture became an opaque mirror for the viewer, and the viewer, in turn, became the embodiment of the painter, "completing the picture" as art historians like to say, with the two points of view merging in a single physical spot. The painter now says when he or she paints, "See things as I see them. ... Stand in my shoes." Consequently, the picture plane and the retina became the same surface. Of course, "Whose retina?" was the key question, as the manipulation of the viewer, an early form of behaviorism, was added to the list of artistic techniques.

In the dialogue between viewer and image, there were now three entities where formerly there had been two, or possibly even one. (One in the sense that most images, as thoroughly two-dimensional diagrammatic and/or schematic representations, were previously used as a sacred vehicle to achieve a state of union between the viewer and the divinity.) The image was to be taken to heart within the individual, with the concurrent loss of self-identity so common to religious experience, thus forming the single image of "self/deity." It was an evocation rather than a description (the picture evoked the god or goddess within, it did not describe him or her without).

With the new identification of the viewer with the painter, rather than with the sacred object, came the placement of both of them relative to a third entity, the nearby physical object(s) or subject of the painting, and along with this possibly the inauguration of the process of encroachment of the individual ego (i.e., the artist's) onto the image in the visual arts.

In the Brunelleschian world, the mechanism is perception, the image retinal. When the emphasis is on the act of seeing at a physical place, then time enters the picture as well ("if it's here, it's not there - if it's now, it's not then"). Images become "frozen moments." They become artifacts of the past. In securing a place on earth, they have accepted their own mortality.'

Bill Viola ('The Temporal Image' from Video Black: The Mortality of the Image)

The Eyes In The Backs Of Our Heads Aren't Our Own

Fig. 1. Jo Ann Callis - Woman with Wet Hair, 1978


'The self is not the cumulative result of repeated surrenders to the demands of rationality.'

Wayne Froman (from Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics and the Sublime)