Aesthetic Thursday: Matthew Jensen's "49 States"

Matthew Jensen, The 49 States, 2008-9

Google Streetview in Art
I am addicted to Google Street View. I am going to Philadelphia this weekend and I have already seen on Street View what the hotel will look like, what the front of a restaurant I want to have lunch at looks like — all as if I will have already "done" the trip before I even go. Someone else has already been there. Someone has already snapped a photograph. There is nothing new under the sun. But I like what Matthew Jensen has done in the Metropolitan Museum of Art display of his work — he has taken a collage of images from Google Street View and organized them alphabetically according to State (e.g., the fifty states of the United States).

Jensen's Work at the Met Reminds Me of the Iconic American Road Trip
Seeing Jensen's work at the Met, as part of an exhibit on contemporary photography, I think of travel, the association Americans have with the road trip and snapping pictures. What is a road trip without a camera? Now that we have Google to take our snapshots for us maybe the camera is dead on the road. *sad face*. The images Jensen has collected are absent individuals but it seems easy enough to insert a human being into each State's slot. Look, there is me in New York. There is me in Connecticut. I look at my home state of Louisiana and compare it to Wisconsin. They both seem the same — and taken as a whole the image captures a unity of sorts, the kind of unity I get when traveling on the interstate where every exit is the same as the ones that came before it and all the ones ahead will look the same and so on. Is this a new American flag? Maybe so.

Stray Observations:

• Why are there only forty-nine states in Jensen's collage? I did not have time to figure out what state is missing.
• Did Google allow Jensen to use their images?
• I feel like Jensen's work would be better if every picture in the series included a person whose face is blurred out.
• I want this piece to hang in a doctor's office.

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Photographer's Lens: 7 Train Yard

 7 train yard in Corona Park, Queens

Image: Patrick X. Liu

If you take the 7 train line towards Flushing, get off at the Mets/Willets Point Station. From there you can cross over a pedestrian bridge that leads into Flushing Meadows Park in Queens. Around here is where you can snag a decent picture of the Corona Yard - a major train storage trackage for the IRT division of the New York City Subway system.

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Proust, the Photograph, and Chance in Literature

Involuntary memory is a chance
happening precipitated by an object

Voluntary and Involuntary Memories
      For Proust, time stands still, ”As though there had been no time there but seven o'clock at night” (p. 59). A memory like this is not a memory of the intellect, for Proust, a voluntary memory — a memory likes this preserves nothing of the past. To capture an involuntary memory is a chance happening precipitated by an object. Proust likens it to reincarnation, of souls lost in some inferior being — does a touch, a taste bring them out to play? I think for Proust the soul is a prison yearning to reach out beyond its own limits -- this desire for transcendence is a desire of the human soul but the sheer will is not enough. 

Adoration of the Material World
Proust adores the material world; he has faith in the world because it offers a promise. The past is hidden beyond the realm of the intellect. The material world promises a portal to that hidden realm. But the key is not readily accessible. Proust's heaven is in the immanent reality of the material world. Proust's object is a material signifier — something like the effects of literature, “of which we have no inkling” (p. 60) — only chance. I come back to this passage: “it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves die" (v. 1, p. 61).  What Proust calls “chance” Barthes call the punctum. Art depends largely on chance — this is what Proust means by involuntary memory. Every photograph is an imprint of the world. But not every photograph evokes something akin to what the madeleine cake did for Marcel. Why? It is not the cup, the cake, the photograph itself that constitutes the structure of the involuntary memory — it is the self's response to the world, both hidden and open, governed by chance, in which we hope to light upon something called truth before we die. The experience of involuntary memory is an "unremembered state" (v.1, p. 61). Neither the novel nor the photograph holds the memory inside of itself; the memory is "unremembered" by a chance encounter. 

Comparing Barthes's Unary Image with Proust's Habituation

What Barthes calls the "unary" image," Proust would call habituation. What Barthes thinks of as the prick, the punctum, of the photograph is not far from how the Recherche confronts the problem of photography. Why does Swann prefer the daguerreotype of Odette? But Marcel disparages the Kodak snapshot? Why does Marcel study the photograph of Berma in bed, but is disconcerted by a photograph of Gilberte? Marcel cannot stand the vanity of his grandmother in wanting to have her likeness taken, but he concedes that his feelings are complicit with his own fantasy of a good night's kiss. The photograph promises a "supplementary prolonged encounter" (v. 3, p. 99). What is troubling about the photograph is the way it unsettles us.

A Cruel Trick of Chance

     In a "cruel trick of chance," Marcel sees his dead grandmother as a photograph (v. 3, pp.183-185). In this scene, the theme of the photograph is introduced without the actual presence of a photographic object. The grandmother appears "as a photograph." The grandmother is not there; she is absent, but Marcel perceives her similarly to a photograph, a spectral object, however, something akin to an hallucination or to a dream. The nodal point of the novel and the photographic image is the anticipation of an image not fully seen; for as Proust says, "We never see people dear to us except in the animated system, in the perpetual motion of our love for them, which, before allowing the images that faces present to reach us, seizes them in its vortex and flings them back upon the idea we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it" (v. 3, p. 183). What is striking here is that Marcel curses "the cruel trick of chance" that conjures up the image of his grandmother, as if his eyes were a photographic plate. Even in the moment that he sees his grandmother, a spectral image of her, sitting on the sofa — it lasts only a moment — he does not know her. "I who had never seen her save in my own soul, always in the same place in the past, through the transparency of contiguous and overlapping memories .... I saw [the spectral image of my dead grandmother] sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, day-dreaming ... an overburdened woman I did not know" (v. 3, p. 184).

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Disparagement of the Photograph in Proust

Man Ray. Harper's Bazaar, November 1936.

The Unkind Treatment of Photographs in La Recherche     Photographs are not treated kindly in Proust’s Recherche. In the “Mother’s Kiss” episode in the Combray section of Swann's Way, there is a humorous account of why photographs ought not to adorn the walls of Marcel’s room — for his mother found in them “vulgarity and utility” (v.1, p. 53). The sheer fact that a photograph is reproducible, that another child could have the same photograph hanging in his or her room as some other kid seems scandalous to Marcel’s mother’s aesthetic taste. A photograph is “common” since it can be reproduced mechanically. The photograph is vulgar since it “captures” objects in the world only to reproduce them as commercial banalities. The photograph does not get under the skin of everydayness. Photographs reveal nothing more than the banal surfaces of things and do not penetrate any deeper. To put it another way: the novel is concerned with animating reality, not the banal apprehension of reality.
According to Proust Photographs Point to Vanity     Proust also links photography to vanity. Saint-Loup takes a photograph of Marcel’s grandmother. Noticing she puts on her best dress for the occasion, Marcel reports he feels annoyed at his grandmother’s childishness in wanting to appear her best, a fact that surprises him for he had always imagined her to be freed from vanity (v. 2, p. 500). Proust is echoing the idea that “having one’s likeness taken” is offensive to a pure concept of beauty that ought to look deeper than surface appearances. However, Proust’s aversion to photograph goes deeper than a moralistic stance against vanity. It is not an ethical deprivation which is at stake in the photograph, but rather, what Proust seems to deride is the distraction the photograph promotes and the aura of unreality it promotes. Marcel is annoyed that his grandmother will sit for Saint-Loup to have her likeness taken but she will not spend time with him, a theme that can retrace itself back to the young Marcel in Combray waiting for his mother to arrive with the long-awaited kiss. The photograph gives a false promise, one of deferral, the promise of halting time, anticipation in the guise of distraction.

     Take for example the magic lantern: an analog for the disparaged photograph which is linked to the mother’s kiss episode in Combray. It is important to note the unsettling feeling aroused by the magic lantern at the start of Proust’s masterwork for it serves as a prelude to the disparagement of the plastic arts throughout the work along with a distanced awe and astonishment. Where Proust disparages he also obsesses. Where photographs are mentioned in Proust, even in passing phrases, metaphors, or allusion to photography, there is often the anticipation of themes we are more familiar with in Proust, the anticipation of a kiss, questions of real and unreal, the sensory world and the world of ideas, insight versus mere appearance.

      Placed over his bedside lamp, the magic lantern entertains the boy Marcel by a show of several points of multi-colored light creating a luminous kaleidoscopic effect that evokes both the camera and the cinema, appearance, and reality, dark and light, all of which make Marcel uneasy. The iridescence is too much. Like light pouring through stained glass, the child’s magic lantern creates a “supernatural phenomenon of many colours,” causing an unreal effect to superimpose itself on the familiarity of Marcel’s childhood bedroom in Combray. Marcel is both awed and discomfited by the parade of lights the magic lantern produces, as it illuminates a story outside of Marcel’s own experience, thus limiting access to an inside inner experience. The magic lantern produces an unreal effect that shakes Marcel, the budding writer, and puts into question his desire to create uniquely and inwardly. “But my sorrows were only increased thereby, because this mere change of lighting was enough to destroy the familiar impression I had of my room …” (v. 1, p. 10). Proust’s point is to show how the luminous photographic and kaleidoscopic effects of the magic lantern discomfit and unrest the artist’s -- the novelist’s -- ability to capture reality. The magic lantern, and by extension, the play of light that is the photograph, an inscription of light on paper, is set against what novels can do, viz., what Proust feels he can do as a young artist, as a novelist.

Washington Square Park

Washington Square Park, New York City, 2010

Washington Square Park is like a postage stamp of New York City. It is opened up by a grand arch that honors George Washington. Fifth Avenue rams into the park at once — and then voilà, you're in what New Yorkers call Greenwich Village. Nineteenth-Century row houses line the Fifth Avenue side, while New York University's campus buildings line the opposite side. As a graduate student at the New School for Social Research, I spent many hours in Bobst Library — the largest building to border the square. The square itself is filled with life — chess players, performers, the homeless, and groups proclaiming a cause. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like if a subway line ran underground through the park and you could alight on a train from the fountain. And I do love the fountain. In the Summertime, you can step inside it, feel refreshed, take your shoes off and watch the zest of bodies, of allegria, of life.

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Monday Morning B&W Photo

Unfortunately, I'm not certain to whom I should cite the above photograph, but I post it anyway, as a valediction to Monday Mornings. People to see. Places to go.

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Photograph: "Make A Wish"

The Make-a-Wish Virgin

There are miracles around us. New Orleans is a city of the night. If you live here, it is imperative that you make your way through its streets with an open eye. You never know what you may find.

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Boy on Vintage MTA Bus

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:MTA Bus Festival, Boerum Place and Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, New York

Book Review: On the Punctum in Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida

    Unary Image

     In a world where we constantly make subjective judgments on the images we peruse — take for example, the host of websites that displays portraits of users that can either be voted as “hot or not” (I am ashamed to say I have indulged in this entertainment) — the object of the observer is to rate images according to subjective tastes.  Roland Barthes's idea is that the host of images flashed across our eyes on any given days are what he calls “unary” images. The unary image lacks a phenomenological “prick.” These naïve images are at the level of what Barthes calls “the pornographic” (41).  For Barthes, these images are “without intention and without calculation” (41).

The Punctum

    Barthes calls the punctum a “prick, sting, a speck, a cut, a little hole.” (27).  For Barthes there seems to be something at stake in the interplay between the photograph and the subject’s gaze.  What fascinates Barthes is that the photograph can lack its punctum, this sting that he calls it, between the image and the observer. This lack of sting is the unary image (41).  There is no shock, Barthes says, in the image that does not “shout.”  For Barthes the experience of the punctum is a purely subjective experience that designates a “I like / I don’t like” posture.

Sontag and Barthes

This lack of a “sting” in the photographic unary is probably what Sontag has critically noticed.  For Sontag and for Barthes, the unary image offers itself only to be consumed by the observer.  This leads to desensitization.  And a lack of empathy in the suffering of others.  This is the “pornography” that Barthes talks about as a quality of the unary image.  What the unary image places before us is the hope of a gift.  This is the punctum and what Barthes calls precisely eroticism.  This is the photograph’s ability (or inability) to evoke a response that rises above the level of sentimentality or at the risk of becoming over-stimulated by the image.

     The Good Photograph 

     For Barthes, a particular photo, for example, of Napoleon’s brother, that he mentions in the first lines of the book (but does not offer an image) is insufficient to tell us anything about what photography is in of itself.  What we are struck by is the eyes of the emperor’s brother.  But the eyes simply point.  And it hopely goes beyond the tedium of the studium.  When I see a photograph in a magazine or in a family album, I am drawn to the image as a particular image, chosen out of a seemingly infinite array of images and I am distracted by the particularness of the image which evades the eidos (the idea) of the image itself.  What Barthes seems to be saying is that I can never get at the being of photography for photography is written in a deictic language, he says, that by its very essence can only refer.  The picture of my cousin Zack which hangs sits on my bookshelf is an image of Zack, a particular shot of him taken at a particular moment in time. His eyes are looking awry outside of the borders of the frame.  And his mouth is formed in a slight smile.  He is posing.  His look shows that he knows that a photograph is being taken of even though he gives this recognition away only minimally.  I cannot, as Barthes says, remove the photograph from the image nor can I remove the image from the photograph.  The photograph has meaning only because I can situate the picture within the point of view of an observer or from the subject observed.  The good photograph, for Barthes, is the photographer having found the right moment, the kairos of desire” (59).

    The Studium

    But is there a capture of the image from the point of view of eternity? Apparently, for Barthes, the image always evades.  It always points to something — like desire points to an object or essence to existence, but to grasp the thing-in-itself is impossible.  But, it seems, what Barthes is really trying to say. is that the image cannot be thought of in this platonic way. The image’s something “has triggered me, has provoked a tiny shock, a satori, the passage of a void (it is of no importance that is referent is insignificant)” (49).  The studium of the image is its landscape, it is the broadened face of the image that can garner our interest, even our passion, but in the banalest of ways.  The studium is the part of the image that is “anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies” (57).  It is the punctum — the image’s tiny shock — that grabs our attention and attracts us to the picture.
                                                                The Hope of the Punctum
    The hope of the punctum — if I can call it a “hope” — is to stumble upon the image that goes beyond the stagnancy of the studium.  The viewer hopes to stumble upon an image that proves a “punch”!  If I take an image that Barthes uses as an example at the end of the book, I can take this a little further.  The image is a striking, handsome image of a young man.  The caption reads, “He is dead and he is going to die …” (95).  The image is Gardner’s photograph of Lewis Payne who was condemned to die for the assassination of the Secretary of State Seward in the late 1860s.  His hands are cuffed and he sits abrasively against a prison wall.  For me. the eye of the subject provides the punctum.  His eyes at first seem vacant, but on a second look, coupled with his strange wan smile, and a thick neck.  But for Barthes, it is the knowledge that he is about to die — or that he is dead.  The point of departure that brings the image to the level of the punctum is that the man is going to die.
    What this means then, and I think is the weakness of Barthes’s book is that the punctum rests on something outside of the image — that he is dead is the knowledge that we glean from the text.  The punctum — which is supposed to prick our consciousness is exterior to the experience of the photography itself.

Experience of the Photograph   

    The penetration of the image relies on the experience of the photograph and not the photograph itself which Barthes states clearly at the beginning of the book.  But this is a problem and I think what Sontag seems as lacking in the punctum — that the observer has to rise to the level of the punctum.  If we do not have the aesthetic or phenomenological capacity to rise about the photographic landscape, or even beyond the intention of the photographer. there is no “punch” to be gained.
    The photograph, then, cannot stand on its own — and what gives it status then, is not its essence — but what the image points to is important.  If the image’s essence cannot be apprehended, then, the punctum of the image, then, relies on the capacity of the observer to be pricked.  This, I think is a high call.  But, an admirable one. 

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Photograph: The Sheriff at Papa Johns

In this post, I post a photograph of the reigning sheriff of Papa Johns.

I think she ordered breadsticks and then hit the mean streets.

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Jean Mohr's Photographs of Boys in After the Last Sky (with Edward W. Said)

in After the Last Sky:

The Palestinian boy in Jean Mohr’s photograph elicits sadness just by looking into his eyes (WOR 623). He is of unknown age, so the caption says, because we are not sure if he is even a child although he is small enough to be a child.  His child-sized tummy, poking out from beneath his tight Grease t-shirt is tiny like a child’s. He doesn’t have a man’s beard.  Nor is he a toddler.  He has a playful half-akimbo pose with his left arm perched on his hip, a boy’s shaved head like a London chimney sweep and his body semi-contrapposto – but his face is veritably adult looking with those sad sad eyes.

  “You see it in our children who seem to have skipped a phase of growth or, more alarming, achieved an out-of-season maturity in one part of their body or mind while the rest remains childlike” (623).  Said has similar impressions to my own.  Except Said is writing in the first person plural “we.” “Our children,” he says.  A Palestinian himself, Said is not only looking at a boy marked by deportation, war, and strife but looking at one of his own exiled children, a child who has grown up too fast, as the clichéd expression goes.  This assertion of “we” makes his already poignant comments – and the photograph itself – an intimate expression of the pain and loss of the Palestinian exile.  This is the portrait of a child whom the Palestine’s enemies say,  “Kill them before they kill you” (623).  This is a child that the enemy says could be a potential terrorist; they say in Lebanon you should kill the children because they’re the ones who’ll kill (623).  The child in the picture is lost.  The real child who suffers is lost in a bungled list of population reports and military strategy.

But how can you justify that kind of statement when you look at this photograph – or any of the photographs in the After the Last Sky?  What kind of sloughing off of humanity do you have to do until you reach the point of disregard for human life?  Is the point of no return when you can believe that “there are no Palestinians” (623)?  Insert any group here for “Palestinian”.  When you can strip the Palestinians of identity like, “Non-Jews. Terrorists. Troublemakers. DPs. Refugees.  Names on a card.  Numbers on a list” (624)?  It seems to me, once you strip a people of their sense of place and identity you can then place upon them labels sufficient to your own cause.  The Palestinians have nowhere to call Palestine, no stable place to call home (although there has been an attempt by Palestinians like Said to refer to this disposed land as Israel/Palestine).  The boy in Mohr’s photograph, ill-fitted in his American style t-shirt – what is he thinking?  What is he trying to tell the observer?  What can be read in his face?  If anything?

Jean Mohr, photographer

He is similar to another boy who appears later on in the book.  This time a young villager is peering into the window of an Israeli officer in Kalandia, near Ramallah in 1967 (640).  In a series of photographs by Mohr that illustrate the juxtaposition of two worlds: one Israeli and the other Palestinian, in this one he captures another Palestinian boy caught by the photographer peeking into the quotidian life of the conqueror’s den.  The photographer is taking the photograph from the inside capturing the child looking inside.  The soldier is oblivious to the child and lost in thought (640). The Israeli officer has one hand on his chin and the villager has one hand on the windowpane, a look of shy curiosity imbued in his eyes. He has been caught by the gaze of the camera and looks downward just enough to give himself away as the forgotten one.

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