Junk for Code

the dominant male scopic regime

The link is courtesy of Evan Jones over at Alert and Alarmed. Evan's references to Kurt Nimmo's photographs caught my eye. Working through the online material I came across Kurt Nimmo, Voyeurism, 2005, from the collage series.

This is a good illustration of the dominant male scopic regime of a phallocentric culture: the women is the passive object of the voyeuristic male gaze that constricts and tortures the female body.

The state of otherness produced by the male gaze is always a condition of inferiority and baseness.

In this visual regime of male representations women are figured as a lack, an absence, a default; as a inferior version of male subjects.

Why not smash the mirror and step through the screen of male representations to an underground world hidden from the surveying, voyeristic, categorizing male eye.

Why not step onto the dark continent beyond this visual regime?

I look at the above image and text and wonder: can we develop a healthy dialectic of the visual (image and visual language) in response to the privileging of the eye of reason, without radical rejecting vision or embracing an antivisual purism?

The anti-visual discourse is a reaction to pure perception; to the picture as a window; to the mind mirroring the world; to the image as a mimesis of a real or ideal world; to representation as an enframing that turns the world into a picture that can be viewed from afar.

Hence the hegemony of the eye. It is the master sense of modernity.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at February 5, 2005 12:31 PM | TrackBack