April 03, 2004
Guy Bourdin & re-enchantment
In an earlier post I briefly mentioned the rhetoric of visual culture. Here is a master of visual rhetoric:
Guy Bourdin, No title (Fashion illustration) 1975, French VOGUE May 1975 pp180-81
If there was a process of the disenchantment of the world (along the lines described by Max Weber) in modern industrial society then Bourdin suggests a process of re-enchantment in postmodernity. He suggests a magic, morality and narrative being allowed to enter the marketplace. This re-enchantment indicates the evolution of post-modern markets, as we exit from industrial society.
Guy Bourdin was one of France’s leading avant-garde fashion photographers. Critical to his work was his ability to subvert images of fashion and beauty by his knowledge that it is not just fashion but its representation that seduces and fascinates us.
This major retrospective shows a selection of his intense and dramatic photographs from the peak of his career, rarely seen films and hundreds of his unpublished private images. The Guy Bourdin exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria is sponsored by L’Oréal Paris and the L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival in association with Vogue.
Guy Bourdin, Dummy legs
A touch of surrealism to re-enchant the world?
Bourdin's narrative is darker than the standard account of fashion photography as art. We do have the standard objectification of women through the male gaze:
No title, French Vogue, May 1977, pp. 94-5.
We are dealing with markets here; with advertising images used to persuade. Markets work on persuading consumers to buy the tantalizing commodities. Consumer culture is crucial to markets working properly ---ensuring the linkages between supply and demand are not hit and miss. Yet the visual culture of competitive markets is overlooked by economists.
These often lead into images of death that remind us of how destructive desire can be:
G Bourdin, Hanging woman
[note -- sorry in advance for the long comment (with no warning) -- but you've been putting out some powerful stuff, and my strong reaction precipitated suddenly. So if it's any comfort, I was caught off guard, too. I didn't set out to write so much...]
I applaud your work exploring the propagation of pornographic gaze within our global visual culture. I have followed it with great interest.
I wonder, though, if there is another force concomicant with the one you discribe, a sort of pornographic anti-gaze? Isn't part of what fuels interest in pornographic images also a desire to see images which, in effect, un-ravel the "male gaze" by allowing a connection with the subject? (maybe by way of an identification with the disgusting?) I'm thinking particularly of extreme images, as well as some of the BDSM images you have discussed.
I think that part of what is sought is actually a pre-gendered, narcissictic body (witness the fecal and anal preoccupations); rather than the sexualized, violent, possessive "male gaze" you have so incisively attacked. It seems to me, in fact, that there we can read a radical de-sexualization of sexualized signifiers, and a glimpse of another kind of body than the paranoid one you discuss.
This desire is frequently and ferociously co-opted, with troubling consequences, and it hardly seem like an advisable method by which to try to see (a little like trying to use a slide as a ladder) -- but let's be real, aren't we starved for useful images (or, perhaps, diagrams) to help us construct new, less pained bodies?
I think this desire -- to discover bodily sensation within a ruthlessly shallowed visual culture -- forms part of the motor you analyze, along with its opposite: desiring to be un-moved, numb and impassive to the extreme image. There are tricky contradictions here, and the entire exercise is steeped in tragedy and social loss(perhaps it is even fatally flawed; it is certainly largely asocial), but can't we also find a legitimate struggle to disentangle the seeing body from the disasterous web you describe?
Posted by: sam on April 6, 2004 11:06 PMhow do you get noticed in a society thats seen everything.....?
Posted by: monish on April 20, 2005 06:52 AM