Meet Animal Meat - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Bastien Desfriches Doria Daehwan, Mammal Thoughts, 2005, 30x40 Lightjet print © Bastien Desfriches Doria 14
constitutionally unable to embrace its bodily condition, and is thus condemned to existential ambiguity. What is then central to the writings of The Visible and the Invisible is the argument, close to Heidegger’s ontology, that we need to reinterrogate our visual understanding of the world on the premise that ambiguity necessarily prevails in it. The meat visible in the photographs of the Mammal Thoughts series embeds such questions. In fact, it literally asks and answers them chiasmically, in accordance with one’s decision to read it from the portrayed individual’s perspective —where the meat manifests the world and the subject’s invisibility to itself — or on contrary if one invests the image as a representation, pounding the indexical weight of the meat on ambiguous metaphorical meanings. Even if Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the bodysubject and his emphasis upon a pre-reflective body don’t advocate a return to simple and spontaneous relations with the physical world, or to put it differently don’t exalt a nostalgic desire to rejoin some primordial inherence in Being, his “indirect” ontology of the Self doesn’t resolve the difficult question of how one needs to interpret his body’s materiality. If one cannot understand what roots existence and thus what provides meaning to it, except through the fundamental communication — if not stasis — of his body with the rest of universal concreteness, a non-space of philosophy may be legitimately called upon to fill Merleau-Ponty’s gap. In the perspective of freeing oneself from what he calls “the paradox of transcendence in immanence”, the temptation to simply abdicate the seemingly secondary term of the body-subject — being a subject — and opt for a radical bodily ontogenesis is not insignificant. But the resulting existentiality, filled with carnal meaning and constituted out of intercorporeality instead of intersubjectivity, would however presuppose the annihilation of self-reflexivity, and thus the death of individuality. Such a radical perspective certainly doesn’t concern my present work, but its picturing has consistently inspired controversial works since the very beginning of photography, mainly in the asubjective directions of pornography (from Auguste Belloc to Cindy Sherman’s “Sex Pictures”) and morbidity (from Weegee to Joel-Peter Witkin). Historically, the body as either object or subject of visual interpretation has persistently foregrounded explorations of the fundamental relationship between physicality and Self and their inextricable interdependency. The notions of ‘being’ and the meaning of ‘body’ have only recently extended into the psychoanalytic and the linguistic arenas, interrogating unsuspected 15 complexities beyond the body-mind dualism traditionally prevailing in Western culture’s philosophical and representational definitions. Even the recent post-structuralist incursions in photography didn’t fundamentally change our conception of the body, while nonetheless acknowledging its deconstructive nature through the subject’s historicity and the social prism of sexuality, as in the works of Robert Heinecken or Richard Hamilton. The ontological wonder at the body and at its ambiguous belonging to both subjectivity and the object world hasn’t changed or been resolved. Aside from early kinesthetic, anatomical and pseudo-anthropological uses of photography, and not considering the modernist lyricism of formal purity and its long lineage of practitioners (up to Lucien Clerge, Barbara Crane and Ralph Gibson), body representations often branched between morbid, sexual or racial convolutions (Hans Bellmer, Robert Mapplethorpe, Lynn Davis), social observation or conceptual reappropriation (Humberto Rivas, Rineke Dijkstra, Bruce Nauman), a literal adherence to the body’s material essence of hair, flesh and skin (Robert Davies, Yves Trémorin, John Coplans, Holly Wright), and eerie scenarios inherited from the Dada and Surrealist traditions (from Oscar Gustave Rejlander to Jerry Uelsmann), the latter group mainly succumbing to the great temptation of dematerializing the body toward its identification with unconscious, soul or mind. The point of such an analytical — albeit arbitrary and probably too rigidly categorizing — account of the photographic body, is that the fabric of vision still problematically relies on the mind-body dualism, which in the philosophical perspective of the Mammal Thoughts doesn’t coincide with the integrative fabric of the body’s reality. However, few artists successfully managed to incorporate in their work the body’s ontological and ethical ambivalence as both subject and object of the world, and so not only developed an entirely different aesthetic of that relationship, but more importantly inscribed its viewpoint upon the viewer’s position. Lucas Samaras, who consistently embedded the body image within the material texturality of the Polaroid print through his manipulation of the film’s layers, appears to me as one of them. The fact that most of his work consists in self-portraits literally illustrates my argument for an envisioning of the subject by the seer as neither simply corporeal nor transcendental. Photography here embeds the artist’s impossible vision of a disembodied selfreflection, what Merleau-Ponty would term a hyper-reflection, that same existential modality of perception that the characters of the Mammal
Page 1 and 2: Antennae Issue 15 - Winter 2010 ISS
Page 3 and 4: EDITORIAL ANTENNAE ISSUE 15 I In 20
Page 5 and 6: CONTENTS ANTENNAE ISSUE 15 6 Mammal
Page 7 and 8: Bastien Desfriches Doria Stephanie,
Page 9 and 10: Bastien Desfriches Doria Eric, Mamm
Page 11 and 12: Bastien Desfriches Doria George, Ma
Page 13: means I have to go unto the heart o
Page 17 and 18: I ntroduction: Ceramic Containers,
Page 19 and 20: with clay becomes a ‘naturalized
Page 21 and 22: Patz Fowle The Revenge of Other Whi
Page 23 and 24: Hirotsune Tashima Family Dining, 20
Page 25 and 26: Bonnie Seeman Untitled, Gravy Boat,
Page 27 and 28: 27 MEAT: FLESH-POTS DIGESTING AND T
Page 29 and 30: Cara Judea Alhadeff Mirrormappings
Page 31 and 32: The eye is a wound which suggests i
Page 33 and 34: Cara Judea Alhadeff Mirrormappings
Page 35 and 36: Cara Judea Alhadeff Cara Mirrormapp
Page 37 and 38: energy and sensual and political po
Page 39 and 40: [7] “Shiva is the link between li
Page 41 and 42: S imone Racheli has developed an in
Page 43 and 44: Simone Racheli Asciugacapelli, (Blo
Page 45 and 46: Simone Racheli Telaio di Bicicletta
Page 47 and 48: Progressive”. The central inquiry
Page 49 and 50: Gunter von Hagens Blood Vessel Conf
Page 51 and 52: about reality, occasionally led to
Page 53 and 54: Gunter von Hagens The Bear © Gunth
Page 55 and 56: Gunter von Hagens The Giraffe © Gu
Page 57 and 58: Gunter von Hagens The Ostrich © Gu
Page 59 and 60: Edenic world. Such claims about the
Page 61 and 62: mankind, in the garden of Eden." [x
Page 63 and 64: Damien Hirst 63 Some Comfort Gained
Page 65 and 66:
active in specific materials. The l
Page 67 and 68:
Damien Hirst The Impossibility of D
Page 69 and 70:
uncovered and deprived of their env
Page 71 and 72:
http://www.mummytombs.com/mummyloca
show all

Meet Animal Meat - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?