From: Time and the Image: Critical Perspectives in Art History. Published By Caroline Bailey Gill. P139-148;197-198. Published by Manchester university press nov 2000 ISBN: 0719058147
From Laura Mulvey – Ann Banfield the imperfection of the lens of the camera-visual and
other pleasures by Laura Mulvey – remembrance of things past by Proust – Andre
Bazin Ontology of the photographic image. synthesizes various disciplines we can see something differently.
Laura
Mulvey: 1941-. British feminist
theorist. Oxford and Professor of film and media studies Birkbeck. She said
" It is said that analysing pleasure or beauty annihilates it"..The book ‘time and the image’ questions the old orthodoxies of the images as a formal object. Talks about the new condition of the image configuring relationships between these through an interdisciplinary approach. Between philosophy and psychoanalysis, art history, literary and media studies. Which applies to a wide variety of artistic practices. Cultural significance of the artist or photographer/author. (Bazins essay is an interdisciplinary viewpoint)
She wanted to reshape the filmic strategies of classical Hollywood with alternative feminist methods.
Visual Pleasure and narrative cinema (1974 essay became an article in the film quarterly 1990) helped shift the orientation of film theory towards psychoanalytic framework. She uses freud and Lacan as a political weapon. by using some of their concepts to argue the female on screen is an object from the 'males gaze". (wiki 7th nov) media studies
The indexical: aspect of photographic media: a return to the negative, the moment of exposure. Or the physical relationship between the object photographed and the resulting image.mix of media and psychoanlysis
“The art of the index”: Lev Manovich meaning its traditional identity lying in its ability to capture reality.
Jentsch intellectual uncertainty: when one becomes unfamiliar difficulty distinguishing between eg – a life size wax figure of a human in the dark and a real human. (p144 LM) This creates a kind of shudder of doubt between animate/real/lifeless/dead. Human uncertainty
Technological uncanny: being unable to rationalize how technology can produce something, for eg. electricity could seem irrational. No material trace of the natural hand.
mechanical uncertainty. anxiety.
Mulveys uncanny:
Reversal of nostalgia: when we have a photo taken of ourselves, we are looking directly into the lives of people who don’t exist yet? A paradox transformation of the opposite, of the viewer looking back at the photo to someone who doesn’t exist anymore. psychoanalytic existential.
Intractable uncanniness: difficult and alien. Psychoanalysis
Acheiropoietos: Not made with human hands
Freud’s interpretation of ‘Uncaany”: uncanniness may return in beliefs or thoughts that persisted from our pre-history. Something ‘actually happens’ in our lives which seems to confirm the old discarded belief we get a feeling of the uncanny. Psychoanalysis
Revulsion against the aesthetics realismLp139) repulsion that aesthetics should represent reality as it really is.
Deictic reference (p142LM): is a linguistic term that describes an aspect of certain words. Ie the meaning of ‘I, here and we’ is ambiguous depending on who, when and where that person actually is in the photo. Barthes applies this linguistic method, to how a viewer may see a photo which has no meaning for them because the person, the location and time are unknown to him. Linguistics
The photographs Tense: is by definition is the past. The Merging of past and present. (tense, a place in the time line the time where it refers to – present past future.) Barthes suggests that a photo combines the past with the present time “ emanation of the past reality” (p143LM). Linguistics
Salman Rushdies’s the satanic verses: p139L.M. How does newness come into the world? How does oldness come into the world? How does the new change the form of ones perception of the present so that it no longer belongs to the now.Through Novels
Links to Barthes CLp65: how will digital and modern media age in 20yrs time? how will it date, erode(pixels, speckles, fading, information embedded in the metadata of the digital image)? How will it evolve?, what will become nostalgia?. At what pace will we continue to need to update our technology? digital media approach
LM conclusion on PUNKTUM: affects us like a phenomenon of naturetouches emotion and fascination.
Ann Banfield (the imperfection of the camera lens essay) says the punktum leads one ” to confront in it the wakening of intractable reality’. A photograph can be a thought, unthought, unintended, involuntary, and without meaning. She also looks at Bathes through linguistics and literature. linguistics and psychoanalysis.
Ernst Jentsch ’On the Psychology of the uncanny (1906) :
Andre Bazin Ontology of the photographic image: 1960 (p142 LM) Bazin says the metaphysical study of the nature of being and existence is an important aspect on photographic media rather than just the temporality of the photograph. He also defines art is a making of likeness to overcome death. (p143 LM) I think this depends on the cultural, political, historic significance, of the contents and who the artist is/was. Death is the victory of time. Preserving snatches death from the flow of time. Making images today, is more than survival of death, it is the creation of the ideal, to have the last word with death. art is the resemblance of realism. Art provides a natural explanation. All a plastic realism. Art is a balance of the symbolic and realism. A painting is aesthetic and psychological ( to lay bare the realities) . Photography frees plastic art from likeness. The photographer’s personality enters the photograph through its composition and technical knowledge/set up/ quality of the outcome. The object in the photo is freed from conditions of time and space that govern it, despite its colour, degradation. Photography actually contributes something to the order of natural creation instead of providing a substitute for it.
Looks at cultural significance of the artist through an historical approach.
Convulsive catalepsy: spasmodic loss of sensation and contact with surroundings. (p8 Ontology of the photographic image).
Marcel Proust, remembrance of things past: fictional autobiography. The story has 2 voices- young boy and an older man recalling his youth. Despair at the corroding of time. Feelings and memories can be released through a work of art. The ‘Proustian equation’ is his main subject of the book – time and transience, a double headed monster of damnation and salvation – time. The self and others, things and places are transient and ever changing. Memories are located in time, not space. Art allows us to see the world multiply itself rather than just in our own way. Through novel literature he looks at time, self others and transience.
My questions:
·
Is she improving/transforming/reframing
Barthes Camera Lucida(1981) by looking at it from Andre Bazins' essay “Ontology
of the photographic image” published 9yrs after Barthes CL in 1960 by film
quarterly vol 13. No 4.
·
Is the photograph,
painting/piece of work a resurrection of something?
·
What is the
being and existence of my work? What is its ontology? (P146)
·
What is the
existential bond between fact, image, world and film that is most relevant in
my work? Is this my aesthetic priority and interest rather than mimesis
·
How do I
Acknowledge/consider the passage of new inventions and technologies if now and
the future, in my work and essays and thinking?
·
How will my work
age? What effect will the sun, damp, smoke, time, history, modernisation, new
concepts and perceptions have on it?
·
How will my work
continue to exist?
·
How does my work
record absence and presence simultaneously for me?
·
What part of my
work extends the subject?
·
Where does the
past present, future(tense) and gesture meet/combine with my reality, in my
work?
·
What is my
motivation to capture a chair in mid air?
·
Do I exploit
intellectual uncanny in any way? (ghostly photos, mysteriously made).
·
“..The realists,
of whom I am one…do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an
emanation of past reality” a magic not
an art”. Quote LM p147 the index and the uncanny.
·
Has
postmodernity and poststructuralism aged Mulvey’s text? Challenged it and
broken it down?
·
Where is the consideration
that an artist may use the camera as a medium, that a photographic image could
become a small aspect of a piece of art, be in a collage, or a photograph can
now be put onto fabric, wood, doors, glass.
A painting acknowledges the body, a reality, a photo is a reproduction,
a painting can be seen as a direct raw original.
·
Where is the
evidence that, Barthes and Andre Bazin have considered the possibility that
their theories and art at the time of their writtings, may become “what has
been”. Because CL was written in 1981, Bazin 1960 and LM has written this in
2000. Acknowledging the the passage of new inventions, technologies.
·
Does art/photo
embalm time? Rescue time?
Rosalind
Krauss, ‘The photographic conditions of surrealism 1981: from p166 of beauty, documents of contemporary art. The camera eye sees
faster, sharper, at stranger angles, close-to, microscopically, with
transposition of tonalities, xray penetration. Camera seeing is an
extraordinary extension of normal vision, one that supplements deficiencies of
the naked eye. It acts as a kind of
prosthesis, enlarging the capacity of the human body.When did LM write this essay? I was unable to find it anywhere?
How can we depend on the photograph by considering the index?
Do i want to believe in some kind of truthness/evidence that i exist?
This is about the instability between notion of truth and evidence.
'The chair is in an uncanny environment.
It is displaced. Not in its natural habitat.
The ocean usually chooses what it takes, and usually wins.
I am deciding what is destructive in my life, for a change.
A Paradoxical transformation'.
