DEAD_DOUBLE // sketches + research + notes: July 2013

We operate under the assumption that the photo-object forms a relation with the being-present-as-event. This assumption then contributes to a learned history of object-events, diffuse throughout culture, simultaneously and paradoxically both representing and creating culture.

This assumption, in semiotic terms, the indexical nature of the photograph, forms and pervades all of our assumptions regarding representation. This assumption needs to be interrogated further, as archeology suggests new understandings of the nature of the transmission of culture.

An approach that seems to make sense for a discussion of the photograph, and its transmission of culture is a combination of evolutionary and diffusionist approaches.[1] It seems most useful to think of the object in terms of its relation to time within the cultural context. Wissler’s age-area hypothesis notes (bringing together diffusionist and evolutionary paradigms) that objects in a culture tend to move from the center outward, with the oldest objects being located at the periphery. In this model, the evolutionary leaps tend to happen in the center of the culture, and then diffuse throughout the periphery. At the periphery of culture, then, are the institutions, where normative behaviours and ideologies are located, as objects/cultural material (in our examples, the photo-objects and their implied contexts) transmitted and located themselves.

The problem, of course, with the photograph is that it folds itself back into culture in ways that other historical objects do not, reappearing and redeploying itself as an indicator of power relations. The photograph functions as a visual text itself, its veracity shored up by its history as index, and also situates itself within culture through the context in which it appears. This relates directly, of course, to how we encounter the art-object (and the context in which it is placed as it is photographed). One doesn’t have to look any further than ArtForum to encounter a particular semiotic of art display, with art being displayed in clean, white, well-lit rooms, organized in a rational synthesis of design and educational strategies. The diffusionist function of art has been bolstered by the presence of the photograph, which states (through a circular logic): this is how things should look when one looks at things. This awareness of looking and its reproduction (in cleanly designed magazines, monographs, etc.) has led to a transformation of the gallery space, from salon to “white cube” to an ostensibly newly hybridized (but no less ideologically driven) space.

Problems in the representation of artwork parallel the questions of archeological representation suggested by Stephanie Moser in “Archeological Representation.”[2] Moser’s semiotic read of the work of representation conjured the question of objects being seen in contexts. She notes, “archeological representations ‘make meaning’ because they employ devices that are not used in written and verbal communication. These devices can be described as conventions that appeal to our sense of reasoning in ways that text cannot.”[3] We have seen this critiqued in ethnography and film; Michael Taussig writes of both in his discussion of Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo:

Then what of Werner Herzog’s delirious effort in his film Fitcarraldo, set in the early twentieth century Upper Amazonian rubber boom and constructed around the fetish of the photograph, so tenaciously, so awkwardly, clutched by Fitcarraldo, the visionary, its great ear-horn emerging from under the armpit of his dirty white suit, Caruso flooding the forests and rivers, the Indians amazed as Old Europe rains its ecstatic art form upon them. Bellowing opera from the ship’s prow, it is the great ear-trumpet of the phonograph, an orchid of technology in the thick forests of the primitive, that cleaves the waters and holds the tawny Indians at bay as the patched-up river-steamer wends its way into this South American heart of darkness.[4]

The “delirious” re-contextualizing of the art-object (in this example both Caruso and the phonograph) serves as an site of power. Therefore, it is not merely the culture-object which is moving/diffusing throughout cultures, but it is the power structures and Western ideologies which are being attached to the object. We see this same recontextualizing in the contemporary museum experience, in which the culture-object is presented less as an object, and more as a force that “holds” us (in the utopic parlance of the visual designer), and more often than not “holds us…at bay."

[1]I am most interested in Steward’s work suggesting a distinction between a “cultural core” determined by environment and evolution, and the “total culture”, which contains elements of culture susceptible to diffusion (Barnard, 56).

[2] Moser, Stephanie. “Archeological Representation,” in Archeological Theory Today. Ian Hodder, Ed. Pp. 266.

[3] Ibid. pp 268-9.

[4] Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity. Pp. 203. New York: Routledge, 1993.

DEAD_DOUBLE // sketches + research + notes

Sunday, July 14, 2013

End century tableau

c.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Holding the Great Ear-horn

The Latest

Saturday, July 6, 2013

torus

from "On Certainty" by Ludwig Wittgenstein