"...paperback originals with French flaps, using a custom serif typeface"

in re: the contemporary ubiquity of academic discussions of "images": the art of the past framed thoughtlessly in the language of the present. Benjamin returns us to the Gothic in more ways than one; focusing on immateriality and ideas—ideas are immaterial—takes us out of the world. 

A monk staring at an icon is looking for "truth". Painters like storytellers are craftsmen, makers of fictions, illusions, and "lies". "There’s no art more ironic than a Fra Angelico."  Historians are secularists; priests are sincere. Philosophy is so fucking reactionary. 

new tag: The Same Story About Barthes

I used to be fond of "subaltern" academics in the west, but they've become so successful that the outsider status has become aestheticized. Academia serves its own interests. The romanticism of the international hereditary PMC: a discussion of Egyptian political prisoners is a discussion of prison abolition, which follows a discussion of Egyptian architectural modernism. Utopianism is anti-political. Academia is a safe space for priests and pedantry.

Honoured to be launching (with visionary curator @lisa_g_dub) @alaa’s You Have Not Yet Been Defeated at this year’s Dublin Art Book Fair. In conversation with @AnniefletcherR and with readings by @asoueif @seanehewitt and @RonitLentin https://t.co/qRBxu12ItC

— Hussein A H Omar (@chebhocine) November 8, 2021

Put a pdf on the fucking web. Share it "for the revolution". Fuck "curators", "aestheticized politics", and "French flaps, using a custom serif typeface".  Fuck "Coffee table architectural favela porn.” 

And who gives a fuck about the fucking Queen?

on and on...

If visual art were taken to be like other arts, and stripped of the association with philosophy and finery, the age of mechanical reproduction would have begun with Gutenberg. The sense that a photograph can be said to act as an index, in Peirce’s terminology, now a ubiquitous reference, is the end of photography as art. It’s the definition of photography as illustration, the model of Gerome and Winterhalter and Madison Ave.

Using the terms of Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics, though the photograph appears to be an icon (through resemblance) and though it is to some extent a symbol (principally through the use of the camera as a codifying device), its proper sign type, which it shares with no other visual representation (except the cast and, of course, cinema), is the index, i.e. a sign causally related to its object.

The viewer is said not to be looking at the photograph, but at the thing depicted. To repeat what I wrote above: a Holbein portrait is first a painting, second a Holbein, third a portrait, and fourth a portrait of. According to the art theorist Thierry de Duve writing in the journal, October, in 1978, -theorists being neither historians nor critics but both and more - photography has succeed where all others failed in reversing that order. And what’s left?

How does one relate to a space of such precision? One thing is certain: it doesn't give way to a reading procedure. For an image to be read requires that language be applied to the image. And this in turn demands that the perceived space be receptive to an unfolding into some sort of narrative. Now, a point is not subject to any description, nor is it able to generate a narration. Language fails to operate in front of the pin-pointed space of the photograph, and the onlooker is left momentarily aphasic. Speech in turn, is reduced to the sharpness of a hiccup. It is left unmoored, or better, suspended between two moorings that are equally refused. Either it grasps at the imaginary by connecting to the referential series, in order to develop the formerly into a plausible chronology, only to realize that this attempt will never leave the realm of fiction. Or it grasps at the symbolic by connecting to the superficial series, in order to construct upon the here a plausible scenography; and in this case also the attempt is structurally doomed. Such a shock, such a breakdown in the symbolic function, such a failure of any secondary process -as Freud puts it- bears a name. It is trauma.

de Duve ends on a high note of grand intellectualism and cheap melodrama.

Hegel's prophecy that art was about to come to an end was published in 1839, the very same year in which Talbot and Daguerre independently made public the invention of photography. It might be more than mere coincidence.

His piece is a discussion of long and short exposures, time and snapshot, which he treats as distinct up to a point. If he were more of a historian and less of a philosopher he’d have noted that the advances that made the snapshot possible did the same for cinema and collage, both of which returned language to photography even accepting the limits of photography itself as he describes them. Long exposures have a compressed but visceral sense of narrative, and that narrative quality returns expanded exponentially in film. Photography though ubiquitous even after acceptance as an art was still kept apart, as a smaller form; collage was accepted as immediately as any of its competitors, while film emerged as the most important visual art of the century. Finally although it’s easy to blame the market for novelty for photography’s place now in contemporary art it makes more sense to argue that photography would never be fully integrated into the model of art comparable to painting until it was seen as independent from its role as index. It’s a sign of just have much we’ve changed, and how much we haven’t that the contemporary exemplars of the honesty of Manet’s Olympia are Cindy Sherman’s portraits of herself.

Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, includes a photograph from 1865, of one of John Wilkes Booth’s collaborators before his execution. Barthes’ caption reads, "He is dead and he is going to die ..." That is the base ground on which any photographer has to build if they want to make anything that will be remembered as anything other than one anonymous image among others. Barthes certainly would never wish that anonymity on his own writing. A couple of years ago as I was walking out of the annual show put on by the Association of International Photo Art Dealers, AIPAD, in NY, a well dressed couple were hurrying in, the man obviously on the prowl. As they walked by me the man turned to the woman, “Remember, it’s it not the image… It’s the material!” No serious connoisseur of photography, rich or poor, critic or collector, has ever been interested in photographs as index as opposed to art: the relation of formal construct to the world. Photographs on paper are physical things; until recently the prints were made by hand and eye, and nothing like the images in a book or on a screen. Film and video are immaterial, intangible, but made of thousands of images in series. Different forms have different capacities, strengths and weaknesses. Philosophers like to claim now to find exceptions, to discover or invent. Mechanically produced images and words are now the rule. Before saying they do new things you should be able to show they don’t do old things in new ways.

Also here.

Alexander Gardner: Portrait of Lewis Payne 1865
"He is dead and he is going to die ..."

The above approximates the layout of one page from Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida.

I've never forgotten seeing it for the first and only time, leafing through it at a bookstore in the mid 80s. It's the first time I understood the taste for cheap melodrama underneath all the pretensions of high theory. I was amazed. I was shocked.
Rewriting the paper. Nothing new except I'm reading the stupidity I avoided reading years ago.

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Fuck the war.

Fuck the war.
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Twice in the past week I've been told that I need to get off my ass if I'm ever going to get anything done—get whatever it is I'm supposed to want, or grow old safely—both times by someone with an admitted willingness to get on their ass for the same reason.

I have respect for the casual cynicism of women. I grew up around it, but I know it too well for my own good. I have a long memory.
At the Armory show last month, I passed by the booth of a Parisian dealer who recognized me as the man who had made a fool of himself in her presence in Madrid the year before. I'd refused to use the introduction I had to her, gone in cold and left annoyed by her indifferent response, only as I left spitting out that I knew collectors of hers, who had bought two large pieces of mine in NY. Why I behaved this way, I don't know. But now she looked at me from a distance with the mixture of condescension and pity that a teenage girl will reserve for a boy who's missed his chance. The woman's in her 50's and that she would strike that pose with the casual manner of a 16-year-old and pull it off is some sort of a testament to the rightful victory of tradition over pure reason. I was an idiot.

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Killing time: Reviews.

I went to a dance performance Friday night. Never having seen anything by the Living Theater, I'd never imagined a work of choreography could succeed in making male bisexuality seem entirely unattractive. After all, they were dancers, right? Get me Paul Taylor.

Andrea Modica at Edwynn Houk. The narcissism of the pedophile. Worse than Sally Mann, who doesn't really bother me. And worse than Diane Arbus, who does.

Review of art reviewers: Every once in a while I have a fantasy that Vince Aletti, the photography critic of the village Voice, was killed by the same truck that bumped off Roland Barthes. Nostalgia and a momentary aphasia are the two most basic responses to any photograph. The only choice worth making is to go in the opposite direction, as much as possible (which let's face it, for photography, ain't much.) "He is dead, but he will never die." I spent 3 minutes with Camera Lucida before reading those words in the caption to a 19th C. photograph of a man about to be executed. I threw the book away in disgust.

Jeff Wall at Marian Goodman (opens next week.) His work has taught me things I would never have known without it, and there's not much else by anyone alive I can say that about. If you can understand why someone would hate Peter Greenaway and everything he stands for, intellectually, aesthetically, therefore politically, you'll get the point.

Film by its nature is about absence, the shadow of the thing no longer -if ever- here. Most film, however, ignores the obvious, claiming to be about presence: of the story, of the characters and the objects in the frame. Indeed what is most interesting in the greatest film -and what is at the heart of all American film- is the presence of the dream, the presence of the illusion, in all innocence. This is also true, of course, of the worst film.

"All technical refinements depress me. The perfection of photography, the big screens, the stereo sound, all of it makes possible a servile reproduction of nature; and that reproduction bores me... The artist's personality interests me more than the copying of an object." Jean Renoir

The most wonderful thing about Renoir, or Mizoguchi, or Ford, was their ability to make illusion itself profound. By contrast Crimson Gold, like most serious films fights the illusion, fights the effortless narrative of film mechanics, so as to avoid the banality that any intellectual now recognizes -has recognized for 50 years- as a very American/Capitalist form of false consciousness. Crimson Gold is about absence. But then its makers do not claim to be innocent, so we sense a purpose when a camera is placed—as an eye—to look at an object or event; we sense the gaze of the lens carrying a moral weight that we do not experience often in American visual culture. It was the genius of Renoir and Mizoguchi and Ford to have carried that complexity, not without intellect or thought, but also not without a certain casual, and in a sense common, popular, grace.
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2021.  Barthes and photography.