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Extracts from: Peter Nesteruk, A Rhetoric of Time in the Arts: Eternity, Entropy and Utopia in Visual Culture (2011).
From: Chapter Three: Photography
and Identity:
The Image of Captured Time.
Contents:
Black and White Photography, the Washington Dome (Congress), 'Children looking
up at Ronald C. Moody's Midonz (Goddess
of Transmutation)', Robert Rauschenberg, 'Odalisque' (1955-1958),
'Monogram' (1955-1959), Anna Mendieta, Silueta
Works (1970s), Christian Boltanski, 'Demande au Père Mariano' (1994), Marcus
Harvey, 'Myra' (1995), Karen Finley, 'The Vacant Chair' (1993) and 'The Circle
of the Ancestors' (1995) by Amalia Mesa-Bains.
…The
special case of Black and White Photography.
Long after its time had apparently expired, when the time for its most
perfect -its ‘classic’- realisation had already past, the genre of black and
white photography continues to thrive. Why? What permits its survival into the
age of colour and digital reproduction? I want to suggest that this survival,
its charm and its force, is due to the particular sensitivity of black and
white photography to the representation of time. Just as in the history of art
many effects of meaning are traceable to the painterly use of time, so with the
history of photography.[1]
All photographs have a special relationship
with the past, this is their time of making (insofar has they have a
relationship with reality, a record of a referent) this might be called their
first meaning. However the significance of the image lies in its second or
figural meaning and so on the form of time it represents.
This sense of represented time
may come from within time (past,
present, future) or from ‘outside’ time
(the sacred, surreal or dream
time). So in temporal
terms the black and white photograph may be said to exist in five broad
modalities (after our, human, experiential relationship to time): Classic
(past); Documentary (present); Oracular (future); Sacred or
Sublime (the outside of time
as eternity); Surreal (the outside of time as the time of dreams, of the
imagination). These may be found in combination in different parts of the
photograph, or further nuanced by other factors (image content, context, title,
etc).
The ‘Classic’: the Past Valourised. This is the most popular form of
the black and white photograph in the West and those cultures influenced by its
cultural history (as attested to by the consumption of framed images, posters,
and postcards). The
potential pastness of any black and white photograph is first of all suggested
by its relation to its past history as an event that has always already
happened. Another reminder of the past lies in the history of the genre itself;
black and white was an early stage in the history of the technical recording
and reproduction of the image and so the first language of the documenting of
the past as past. The formal–rhetorical aspect of the black and white
photograph begins with its fundamental contrast with the colour image -colour
as the way we see the world and ends with the temporal ‘mood’ of the black and white
image as read from its content and its means of expression. If colour suggest
the present, then the distancing effect of black and white configures the
‘flavour’ of the past, rendering it as an image seen at one remove - an image
that mimics memory. If the actuality of the past (recorded event) is foremost,
then we are in the realm of the documentary image (the presence of the past as
present): if it is the temporal sense of the past that is to the fore, then we
have a ‘classic’. The ‘classic’ effect precisely consists of the predominance
or insistence of this memorial effect. An effect that is responsible for
creating the aura of the past, a sense, or illusion, of something that has
survived; a sense of (ever)lastingness; an island of the past in the present. A
capturing and transport of the past (the presence of the past as past), this
special sense connotes a record (which is actually a creation) of value. This
sense of pastness, of what survives in the memorialising process is accented in
black and white photography, where it comes to mean: what is worthy of
survival. What is valuable; what is ‘classic’. (As what is recorded becomes…
what is worth recording).
The ‘Documentary’
photographic image. Yet how does
the documentary photograph work in black and white, when our everyday reality
is normally perceived in colour? Technically the event of any photograph is
always already in the past; in this sense the black and white photograph’s
initial effect of ‘pastness’ is truer than the colour photograph’s claim to
immediacy – yet this effect should also count against the use of black and white photography to reveal the present. In fact, the black and white format -the
setting apart effect- confers value, in effect reframes the content, offering
it up to the viewer as important, worthy of selection, worthy of our attention, ‘newsworthy’ (an extension of the image-making
process itself). Furthermore the lack of colour conveys thoughtfulness (again
the sense of a remove), a seriousness colour images often seem to lack. The
remainder of the present effect is due to the nature of the image-content
itself. We are called to recognise the content as ‘timely’ in the sense of
present interest or of recent origin, so forestalling the temporal reading of
pastness (as the ‘usual’ meaning of black and white when opposed to the
presence of colour). These two semiotic aspects of the photographic sign
working together offer us a sense of the event captured, a kind of ‘present
preserved’ (or ‘pastness deferred’) where the relatively short time lag can be
forgotten in the construction of a picture of ‘what is going on’ – a kind of
documentary ‘event-horizon’ where the time taken for the arrival of the image
can be ignored (the event is chronologically well in the past by the time we
see the recorded image). The black and white image, here with its sense of the
‘reported present’ or ‘present continuous’, is the key to the ‘gritty realism’
effect; to presenting a present which is lacking in colourful embellishment, so
told in ‘black and white’ – the rhetoric of black and white as the ‘colour’ of
truth.
In summary, the origin of the documentary image
in black and white photography has bequeathed to us a code, a habit of thought,
of reading, that still remains even in our world of colour reproduction. This
code is anchored however in the lack of immediate presence (lack of colour) of
black and white. This effect is constitutive of the black and white
photographic experience and now (particularly in the West) usually points us
away from the image as a record of recent time (and so to the ‘Classic’ effect,
the past as art, or other effects such as the ‘Surreal’ - in effect to the ‘art
photograph’). With the documentary image however, this lack of presence (lack
of colour) is read as a proof of its existence as a record of the actual,
usually recent, past (black and white as the illusion of directness through
indirectness).
The ‘Sacred’ or
Sublime photographic image.
Often found supporting the classic effect of the black and white photograph is a sense of the
sacred. The picture is felt as ‘timeless’ – as if transcending history. However
this sense of the sacred is a sense ‘this side’ and not a pointer to a place
‘elsewhere.’ Access to the outside of time proper, a pointing to the impossible
category of ‘not time’ is found by reading space as pointing to another time, a
time outside of time, eternity (the difference perhaps between a
type of Beauty felt to be ‘timeless’ and the Sublime). This effect can be signaled by: the sky, the heavens, an upward
movement or diagonal (the image’s bottom right to top left) or line of sight,
an empty space, white space (or black space) and the varieties of horizon. The
reference point is impossible, is eternal; the genre is the ‘Sacred’.
The second genre reference to the sacred can be
found in the portrayal of the ‘micro-sacred’: the genre of finding transfigured
moments in the everyday, in unlikely places and details. This discovery of the
sacred in the details of passing life is also to be found in more intimate
examples of the landscape genre and ‘Still Life’ – as well
as the decorative images that the
latter has inspired.
Indeed decorative forms, patterns and images can also be read as carrying a
trace of the eternal in their formalisation, their ideal status as measured by
their distance from the concrete and temporal.
The ‘Surreal’. In some ways this form is as old
as experiment and juxtaposition in photography and had already achieved in the
‘thirties the notoriety that has given this category its name, ‘Surrealism’.
This is the genre of the unusual, the de-familiarised, or un-canny (familiar,
at home, yet frighteningly ‘not-at-home’, so unfamiliar). Recently exemplified
in the surreal back and white images of the internationally renowned Japanese
photographer, Kon Mitchiko, where fish and vegetables configure human and other
forms – resulting in an art of strange anthropomorphism whose effect upon us
can only take one name… the ’Surreal’.
If normally content-led due to its reliance on
defamiliarisation (content of expression), this category nevertheless uses the temporal
qualities of the black and white image (means of
expression) to push its sense of
removal in time even further away; from the past to the very edge of time, into
the time of dreams. The surreal-type photograph is formally identifiable by its
tradition-breaking juxtapositions. Structurally and semiotically speaking we
are presented with the double negation of ‘not-not time’
(neither inside nor outside).
Phenomenologically, that is in terms of our experience, we perceive something
‘inside’, here before us, which feels ‘outside’, outside of the range of our
normal experience - perhaps ‘normally’ limited to the realm of fantasies or
dreams. Both ‘outside’, but also, ‘not-outside’. With no pointers guiding us to
the thought of infinity, we are left with an experience which is just unreal,
‘this side’ – the ‘Surreal’ effect.
Seeing the future; the ‘Oracular’ image. The
temporal genre of question and invitation, amelioration and hope - as well of
anxiety and foreboding. Formally speaking, the future can be found in the
abstract, the veiled and indistinct, in the sense of a lack of presence as
bearing future meaning – as carrying the feeling of an
anxiety for the future. As
well as the depiction of a situation yet-to-come, such photographs may also
suggest the sense of an ideal, of things as they should or could be, as opposed
to how they are. The black and white image as oracle. Extending this idea, it
is also possible to conceive of the oracular black and white photograph as an
interrogative voice, asking the question, ‘will it be like this?’
The
moods of black and white photography may well be reducible to codes of reading
established in the history of the genre; codes which nevertheless bear an uncanny
affinity to the temporal types of our being. The rest of this chapter will deal
with specific images as part of the wider role of the photographic image in art.
…Ana Mendieta.
I would now like to
consider the work of an artist, who, whilst continuing in the tradition of
marking landscapes, is in many ways regarded as the anti-thesis of (largely
male) land artists such as Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria, or Michael Heizer.
The topic for the remainder of this section will be the photography of Ana Mendieta,
who died tragically just as fame and reputation were beginning to reward her
art practice. Rather than focusing upon a single work, as with most other
analyses in this study, I will deal with the implications of a set of repeated
features that define a period in Mendieta's work (if not her collected work in
its entirety). To this end I will concentrate upon the Silueta Works of the 1970s.[2] Mendieta's art typically consists of
photographs and video footage of human shaped niches or apertures that she has
(often using her own body as a template) incorporated into various natural
landscapes. The role of these absences, of the niches, imprints, and tracings,
within her photography and of her photography as a form of absence itself, has
been discussed in primarily spatial terms, in terms of 'somewhere else' or 'not
here' and not (apart from the addition of a largely extraneous biographical
element) in temporal terms, where 'not now' implies some other time, or some
other kind of time.[3] A third, and crucial, form of absence is
unambiguously temporal, the absence of the making of the art work, the thought
of which making presupposes the past as the place of this activity. This
absence is especially important in Mendieta's work because the making is so often
linked to a ritual, which takes the form of a journey into the wilderness, and
which culminates in the making of, what often appear to be, consecrated or
hallowed places (her work on video, for example, consists of recordings of
'ritual' making).
In the photography of Ana
Mendieta, then, the viewer is presented with two absences: the presence of a
niche, an empty form implying an absent body, as depicted in the photograph;
and the photograph itself as an absence, as not the art object or event itself,
but as the record of the represented art-object or event. However both of these
spatial absences also refer to the past (Barthes has already divided the
photograph into 'reality' and the past, or memory, the real reproduction and
the absent event).[4] Indeed these absences are usually
experienced as having the function of a deixis 'pointing' elsewhere -
indicating a double origin outside of the text. The photograph acts as a record
of what happened 'before' (and may no longer exist): the empty space acts as record
of event/body that may have been there 'before' - both therefore refer the
viewer to the past. Lack of presence (as a definition of the photograph itself,
and of the significance of the form in the photograph), performs its usual
symbolic function of evoking time, of allowing the mind to temporalise the
forms before it. The absence depicted within the photograph permits one to
raise the general question of the photograph itself as an absence and of the
rhetorical effects this (non)relation may evoke.
However the relatively 'realist'
reading of the 'past' into these relations, where both types of absence are
marks or records of past events, does not exhaust the temporal options open to
the viewer. Nor do they explain the effect of the photographs, which seem to go
beyond being a simple record, or evocation of memory, or loss - whether of
consciousness, humanity, woman, or of implied author as fallen, as victim of
the fall into sexual division, or of the division between society, history, and
culture, and nature. The suggestion of a ritual origin would, at first sight,
confirm the reading of absence as an evocation of the past, however, as the
pre-eminent function of ritual is the unification -and self-recognition- of
self with community and cosmos, and not just its record, this unification must
also carry a futural intent. Indeed the rhetorical reading of time as presented
through relative absence in the text always permits the interpolation of a
future option - although this will always depend upon other textual and
contextual elements (for example, the event depicted as the product of ritual).
Photographing the future. A idea
ready-made for utopian (or dystopian) readings. What might this strange
formulation mean in the context of these photographs. If we read the presence
of each photograph as the temporal absence of the event, as itself an index of
the future, then we have, in effect, a photograph of the future; that is, a
photography of desire, of prophecy, of hope - a photography in subjunctive mood.
The utopian gesture is always implicit in such a reading; the rhetorical
anticipation of the future in the text is its condition of possibility. If this
consideration of the photograph as such provides the general grounds for a
futural frame, then the particular futural options available within this frame
will be indicated by the particular lack of presence as depicted within the
photograph. On this reading the figure of absence in the photograph signifies
future openness, a potential for development, and an index of possibility
within a more specific frame of reference. This reference may, as we saw with
the implications of the past option, indicates forms of gender politics (also
the personal politics of the artist as woman) along with numerous readings depending
upon the particular political frame. A temporal reading also implies that the
just placing, or appositeness of the context in which the absent figures may be
found, may be read as indicating a just place in time, or a just time, in which
the problematics indicated by the absent content may be resolved, a time which
is yet to come.
The two levels of absence and
their temporal deixis taken together carry an urgent sense of the potential and
possibility of cure and resolution. Yet if our experience, or anticipation, of
the future, and its locatability in the fabric of the text is especially
important to readings that wish to go beyond simple referentiality (in
practice, a reference to the past) to include critique and development - as
well as to explain the viewer's intuition of future implication, then there
remain yet other relations of time to help explain the impact of Mendieta's
work.
So far we have looked at the
land/mark opposition of the photograph as a ground/figure relation, where the
figure has been, however, more defined by absence than by presence, and which,
in turn, has led to the attribution of the temporal correlate of present to
ground and that of past/future to figure. However, the figure/ground relation
may also be itself read as a figure for the nature/culture opposition. On this
reading 'nature' becomes land, 'ground' in all of its senses, the natural
environment, leaving 'culture', by contrast, as that which employs a sign,
mark, or figure to communicate signification. Absence is read as a cultural
mark, or mark of culture, a contingent sign (with contingent meanings) as
opposed to nature's given or pre-existing forms. However the nature/culture
opposition also carries its own temporal significance; that of temporality and
its exterior: history and eternity. If the natural and the timeless are
intuitively felt to go together and are, as a result, often found together,
then they are usually employed together for their rhetorical function as
references to what is unquestionably good and true (that is, not dependent upon
contingency).[5] The photograph's recourse to eternity as
the ground upon which its inscription is made, may suggest that the meanings
which are being sought are also forever true, are eternally ethical or good.
Conversely, it may suggest that all human cultural striving is not only
transient, but that its beauty (like its truths and its ethics) may indeed
depend upon this contingency (both options are on offer). What is clear, is the
photograph's reliance upon temporality through the rhetoric of eternity and so
upon the sublime as a source of meaning as part of its general effect and that
any interpretation must come to grips with these factors.
Over and above the reference to
culture as general human history, the photograph appears to focus upon feminine
history - or rather its absence- as indicated by the manner of the forms
employed and their relation to the artist. If women's history is in question,
then women's time is pre-supposed.[6] The embedding of these forms in nature,
in eternity, now suggests a re-appropriation of nature as eternity (as a
reference to last things or to the most general horizon available), and
therefore of the sacred as a defining element of the eternal. The special sense
the depicted figures and their contextual grounds convey, a sense of being out
of time, as partaking of the eternal, also indicates, insofar as Mendieta's
figures are figures of herself, that we read her art as a re-sacralisation of
the self, and perhaps even as a commentary upon personal identity - whether as
individual or human identity, or as female identity - as dependant upon the
sacred. It is here that the temporal route to the sacred joins the connotations
of ritual and of the hallowed or uncanny effect of the shapes Mendieta employs
- reminiscent as they are of empty graves, and therefore suggestive of a death
in the past and a resurrection into the future. The photographs where Mendieta
included herself enclosed within a grave-like niche further reinforces the
sense of last rites and a gesture beyond - it is interesting to note that, in
such photographs, she obscured her own identity, putting it into question and
retaining the sense of absence featured in the other photographs of the Silueta Works series (Inside the Visible, p. 164).
The lack of presence
implied in the forms employed in Mendieta's photographs and their concomitant
sacral connotations are the primary source of effect, and so of the
photographs' affectivity, for the viewer of Ana Mendieta's art. In this discussion,
these effects have been approached by a questioning of their temporal
co-ordinates. I have tried to show how any meaningful interpretation of the
photographs and their impact (their aesthetic value), must rely upon a
combination of temporalisation (the ascription of past, present, and future)
and the rhetoric of eternity as time's sacralised beyond in its ideological or
cohesive form (without sacrality 'eternity' simply remains a theoretical
postulate of experimental physics, a sense not productive in aesthetic
interpretation).
The question of the photograph
-the artwork as we receive it- as itself a representation, and so as a window
upon time, has been addressed in terms of its relations of temporal absence, of
the latter's possible valencies, and of their impact when allied to similar
relations within the text. The function of framing within the frame of the
photograph and the temporal implications it may carry, has also been examined;
the appearance of uncanny or enigmatic spaces and enclosures had lead to a
linking together of various forms of temporality and the notion of the sacred.
The findings of this discussion has implications for the interpretation of
windows, pictures, televisions (a mise-en-abime), or other such forms of
interior re-framing within the artwork (the implications of this issue will
reoccur in the chapter on architecture which follows). The sacred, identity,
and temporality are again found to exist in a relation of interdependence. The
theme of the re-appropriation of the sacred as a political value for minority
and identity politics is everywhere implicit in Ana Mendieta's work. This issue
remains pertinent in the art of the 1990's and beyond into the twenty-first
century and this chapter will conclude with the contrasting of recent works
involved with the question of identity against other, more traditional -and
more commercial- forms of art (1990's post-conceptual, 'shock conceptualism',
as exemplified by Saatchi's 'Sensation' exhibition).
…
Marcus
Harvey,
Marcus Harvey's painting of
Myra Hindley, '
Two effects with definite
temporal significance may already be noted. First, in the artwork under
question, the past is re-used for present shock: no future pay-off is found
(unless it be the simple confirmation of the viewer's superiority to the person
represented). Second, this relation is not only a effect of borrowing from the
past, but also a result of the mimicking of, as well as borrowing from, the
discourse of reportage, where, despite the artistic techniques employed, the
relation to time remains the same. The process of putting-into-art has not
given the work a future value, or moral lesson, nor has it begun the work of mourning,
nor working through, nor even does it constitute a memorial to the victims; it
simply engineers a shock effect by juxtaposing genres, or mixing discourses.
Simply blowing-up the picture would have been sufficient to achieve this effect
(however this had already been done with other atrocities dating back to the
era of the Vietnam war). Like the Hindley picture, the Jamie Bulger picture
also was aestheticised by the additional use of colour (change of tone or
tinting) and texture. However, these manipulations are usually associated with
visual pleasure, which is felt to sit uncomfortably with the subject matter of
the Hindley picture and its origins (as also with the Bulger picture). The
artist has also included a temporalising effect through the techniques he has
employed to render the Hindley photo-portrait into an art work.
The chief technique used to
render the photographic image into a painterly image is the use of the repeated
form of child-sized hands. The Hindley image is made-up out of children's
hands. The very construction of her image refers to her crime. However the
reminder is surely superfluous. The very infamy that made the image use-worthy
means that no-one capable of responding to the painting would not also know of
the history of the person represented. The hands do refer back to the past
crime in a kind of cause and effect relation (the effect of the hands points
back to the cause of the crime; a kind of metalepsis,
in rhetorical terms). The crime is figured by the presence of the hands in the
picture; but what kind of reference back is this? The present shock of the
image is, by these means, only reaffirmed; it is a matter of reinforcement of
affect, and not the (always partial) release of remembrance and learning that
leads to futural precaution. Furthermore, as the semi-present element in the
picture, the hands also refer to the past on a formal or experiential level:
the image of Hindley is present, and the, harder to discern, images of the
hands are less present, are 'behind' the image, are its background, its past.
Again reinforcement of affect (the picture's effect) seems to be the only
result of this presence of a past horror. If there is, perhaps, a moment of
memory, it exists only to refresh the impact of the picture as the breaking of
a taboo. Myra Hindley's image is now juxtaposed to its own means of rendition.
Might not the semi-presence of the hands have a futural figural deixis?
Formally this is certainly possible. Yet the effect of this temporalisation is
only to suggest more of the same, more of the same tragedy, more of the same
kind of crime, given the absence of a purifying temporal frame that would
re-contextualise the events alluded to by the picture. (But such a frame would
precisely rob the picture of its shock value, and so of its notoriety).[8]
It is precisely through the
reference to children's, that is the victims', hands, then, that the picture's
shock-value -also its financial value- is constructed. The past is used to
bring horror to the present. The future exists in no recuperable rhetorical
form except as repetition; we are returned to horror. If the painting's message
and its temporal implications end in the eternal now of the outraged present,
this is also a part of its shock value (as of its exchange value). What ever
might be said about the tabloid press and their (ab)-use of this image and the
attendant moral outrage for purposes of circulation (and much could be said on
this issue), it is important to note that the outrage the art-work provokes has
to do, precisely not with the person, Myra Hindley, nor with the original
event, nor with the suffering associated with it (continuing in the persons of
the relatives left behind), but with its blunt use to gain notoriety. The
public protested against the collapse of the complex moral temporality of loss
into the simple now of shock. The market has not yet entirely sundered the
memory of pain into a pure commodity.
Even by means of the transmission belt of art.
If the Hindley picture contains
the germ of an interesting idea, it stops short at pure shock, is satisfied
with pure novelty. No further re-positioning is attempted. In fact the picture
mirrors precisely the use of the image made by the tabloids; it differs only in
its aestheticisation and its art-institutional position. At best, then, one
might argue that the picture highlights the tabloid, or popular cultural,
appropriation of the Myra Hindley photograph (one in which, in
contradistinction to other photographic images of her, she looks particularly frightful)
as populist folk-devil (or, that difficult formulation to resist, the
deserving, or already guilty, scapegoat), and that the artwork only highlights
this appropriation. However this highlighting is achieved at the cost of
blindly repeating the tabloid operation - its complicity must therefore be
regarded as total.
This complicity extends to many
(but not all) of the works classifiable as the 'Young British Art' of the
1990s, and accounts for pretty-well all of those works which have achieved public
notoriety. If these artworks can be referred to as a kind of post-conceptualist
trend, it is as a trend this time shorn of politics, as of the original
path-breaking, or institution-busting, of Dada, or of Conceptualism proper.
Lacking is the historical freshness which was such a notable feature of the the
(pre-first world war) avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde (the 50s and 60s) of
which the current trend is a clear echo (along the lines of the Neos of
Abstract and figural Expressionism or painting, and the continuation of
found-object Minimalism, both of which have now been joined by Post-conceptual
trends - in America represented, in their different ways, by Jeff Koons, Bill
Viola, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley - to indicate a continuation into the next century
of the late twentieth century's major artistic trends, themselves only the
latest aspects of the twentieth century's main aesthetic innovations).
From the point of view taken in
this study the works of this recent trend are 'low' on time, are 'thin' on
temporal effect, and so on temporal affectivity. Such artworks are limited
precisely by their short-term impact, which delimit or refine the aesthetic
experimentation of modernism -or the continuation of these trends into
postmodernism - to pure novelty. It is as if the strictures of Formalist
criticism on newness or defamiliarisation (first current at the beginning of
this century, then disseminated as Structuralism) have returned to haunt
current art-practice. Art has become simple shock, has become the crudest
defamiliarisation; as a result art comes to rely evermore upon current social
taboos to provide it with its subject matter. In this way art comes to echo the
evolution of the media 'sound-bite' and the tabloid pun in becoming a
'image-bite' or a kind of dumbed-down rebus. However, the test is not only that
these works act 'immediately' and 'in an instant' - finally an art has occurred
that actually works, or achieves its notoriety, by working, or attempting to
work, in this way, by exemplifying the ideology of the instant. The rub is that
such works also begin to age immediately. Much of this trend has now become
collectable, has become institutionalised, and has become the new canon which
is now taught to, and imitated by, art students across British institutions of
Fine Art. As a result the most daring works by Damien Hirst have come to be
regarded within a very few years as trite and dated. Their power to shock has
dissipated, and they now appear -somewhat ironically- as merely another in a long
line of monuments along the ever receding path of shock. Such works witness no
more than yet another stage in the catholic process of the broadening of what
can be called art - a mere spreading of the boundary of the acceptable without
any other intrinsic value. Hirst's cows, shorn now of their original impact,
invite only the repetition of tired critical allegories of Nature and Culture
(current at least since the event of Pop-Art), and somewhat obvious comments on
the relationship of the inside and the outside and their revelatory inversion
in such works (loosely borrowed from deconstructive rhetoric).
See also: Articles of Black and White
Photography on Website.
Copyright, Peter Nesteruk, 2011.
[1] See Peter Nesteruk, ‘Black & White Photography
in
[2] Examples of the Silueta Works can be found in Ana
Mendieta; A Retrospective, Exhibition Catalogue, (New York: New Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1987), and Inside the
Visible: an elliptical traverse of 20th century art , Exhibition Catalogue,
(London: MIT, 1994).
[3] See 'Bloody Valentines: Afterimages by
Ana Mendieta,' Inside the Visible: an
elliptical traverse of 20th century art , Exhibition Catalogue, (London:
MIT, 1994) pp.165-171.
[4] 'What the photograph reproduces to
infinity occurred only once', Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, (London: Flamingo,
1984), Trans. Richard Howard (p. 4). Barthes’ view on time and the
photograph remain in general caught between the present thing and the presented
past event; the future (or the future of the photograph's original event as
present consumption) points only towards death - future readings of the photograph
remain therefore in the realm of the eternal repeatable present of the
photograph as thing (pp. 94-97). Barthes does indicate in one place what the
role of temporality in the reader's experience might be when he describes the
effect of looking at a photograph of the road to 'Beith-Lehem' : '...but three
tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of Jesus, and that of the
photographer...' (p. 97).
[5] Of course, nature is also cyclic -a type
of time- and therefore, like the river banks or snow Mendieta employs, is also
transient. As noted 'eternity' is a rhetorical or strategic value and not a
referent.
[6] See Julia Kristeva, ‘Women's Time’
in The Kristeva Reader (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1986) pp. 187-213. Regarding some of the 'feminine' content used in Mendieta's 80's work,
these are
representations of,
or resembling, female primary sexual characteristics, openings, etc, and so not
absences in the same way as the work under discussion - it would therefore be
incorrect to make too many analogies between them.
[7] Marcus Harvey, 'Myra' (1995), acrylic on
canvas, 396 x
[8] The effect of recontexualisation away
from YBA, and 'Sensation', and a recontextualisation in a collection or
exhibition where moral justice was the major theme could, in theory result in a
reading of the work as one promoting the remembrance of the children victims
and not produce mainly shock effects. Whilst this reversal is theoretically
conceivable, the absence of features which work through the picture
would appear to deny this option. Indeed when the picture was shown in