Junk for Code

Bill Henson#1

The Australian artist Bill Henson is commonly seen by the art institution as a passionate photographer of twilight zones: of the ambiguous spaces that exist between day and night, nature and civilization, youth and adulthood, male and female, light and dark.

His work does make me uneasy, despite the framing of the beautiful as a sexualised body. I find it disturbing, though not sensational. I cannot quite put my finger on why it is disturbing. Maybe it has to do with the passivity of the desiring female body? Why is she not calling the shots? Or has it more to do with the sexual desire of young kids? Why cannot 14 year olds have sex?

The unease goes back well over a decade:

Street kids juxtaposed to high European art. Easy to get, as is the juxtapostion of poverty and wealth. Yet the image is still disturbing in a different kind of way to the more sexual image above. In what way is it disturbing though?

Is it the indifference of the art institution to the condition of street kids that is disturbing? Is it the teenager's sullenness and angst tinged with melancholy amidst the beauty, youth and romance?

Or has it to do with the visionary romantic artist in a post-industrial age continuing the tradition of photographers pushing the boundaries of photography as fine art? That is more cliched than disturbing in these postmodern times. Maybe it is the romantic artist who puts the finger on what is disturbing in our civilization?

This text gives a brief overview of Henson's work. He was able to move photography out of its ghetto in specialist photography galleries into the broader art world. He is an artist not just a photographer.

The strength of Henson's work is that it generates more questions than answers. That is the appeal. The questions disclose what we find disturbing, and we struggle to put our finger on it and then to express it. It is the disturbing quality arising from the questioning that makes it art and not porn.

Bill Henson , Untitled #58, Untitled, 1998 - 2000

The images refer more to our sense of being in the world than the play of light on man made structures and nature.

next

bob hope

Sad to see him go. I accept that he was a master of the comic monologue and the topical wisecrack--a drug store wit with roots in vaudeville.

But I had no warmth for his peculiarly American persona of the streetcorner smart arse.

I never really liked his work as a comedian. I detested sarcasm of the oneline wisecracks. I did respect his many tours of duty for US troops. And he did good work for charity.

I can acknowledge that he was very influential re the development of American comedy.

But I recoil from American comedy, eg. Seinfield or early Woody Allen. It leaves me cold. And I loathed the road movies. And as for Drew Carey and Steve Martin, juk.

Its a cultural thing I guess.

Of course, some would call it anti-American. Yeah. He was a Vietnam hawk who backed Richard M. Nixon and taunted protesters.

Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others#10

The tenth part of Rick's project on Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others is concerned with the themes of beauty and shock. My comments on the ninth part of the project can be found here.

In this section Sontag says:

"It is one of the classic functions of photographs to improve the normal appearance of things…Beautyfying is one classic operation of the camera, and it tends to bleach out a moral response to what is shown."

Here is an example of the classical beautifying process of photography. It is portrait of a Tambul warrior from New Guinea. It was taken by Irving Penn.

Has the moral response been bleached out? Yes. Beauty is a historically product. The beauty in this photo is the beauty of fashion under the sign of art and Vogue. So we get an overlap between art and fashion in the form of style. Style is expressed though elegant lines and an elevated and aristocratic tone. Penn was a master of creating style as a spell of untarnished beauty.

When you put Vogue fashion and ethics together you come up with charity, the dictates of constant change in fashion or modesty. Still there is little point in banning beauty.

So let us accept Sontag's point about the beautifying process of photography. Sontag then turns to the opposite of the beautiful, the ugly. She says that:

"Uglifying, showing something at its worst, is a more modern function: didactic, it invites an active response. For photographs to accuse, and possibly to alter conduct, they must shock.” (Sontag, p. 81)

This bookwas once seen as ugly and shocking, then this. As Adorno puts it in Aesthetic Theory, "Ugliness is a historical and mediated category and when conservatives condemn such works as ugly they also mean decadent or corrupting. They tend to equate ugly with suffering.

And today? What photos do we find shocking today? This photo is considered shocking in the West. It is of Uday Hussein's body and it was publicly released to change conduct and opinion in Iraq:

Some do not find the photo shocking. Terry Teachout over at Arts Journal says the photos:

"...were broadcast on TV and scattered throughout cyberspace last week, usually labeled "warning—graphic photos," or words to that effect. And they were graphic, I guess…but I can’t say they shocked me. I’ve seen a lot worse (I used to work for the New York Daily News, after all). More to the point, the photos released by the Defense Department were tame compared to what you can see any day of the week by renting any reasonably violent Hollywood film released in the last 30 years or so, going all the way back to 1969 and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch."

Others do find them shocking. Update. For the Arab world see here

And even some in the West. Why?

Because the public release of a photo of individual dead body breaks with an unwritten military convention not to publish photos of individual dead bodies. The US government explicitly broke that convention by releasing the photographs to prove to Iraqi's that Hussein's sons are dead.

As Photdude points out, this tradition of not publishing photos of individual dead bodies is codified in the First Geneva Convention.

Article 15 says: “At all times, and particularly after an engagement, Parties to the conflict shall, without delay, take all possible measures to search for and collect the wounded and sick, to protect them against pillage and ill-treatment, to ensure their adequate care, and to search for the dead and prevent their being despoiled.”

Article 17 states: “They shall further ensure that the dead are honourably interred, if possible according to the rites of the religion to which they belonged, that their graves are respected, grouped if possible according to the nationality of the deceased, properly maintained and marked so that they may always be found.”

Photodude says that though the Third Geneva Convention is specifically about prisoners of war, it does say they must be protected “against insults and public curiosity.” He adds that having your death-deformed face broadcast all over the world might just qualify as “public curiosity.”

In a latter post Photodude comes back to working out why he is shocked. He is shocked because basic human respect and international law has been broken.

So let us accept Sontag's point, that if photographs are to alter our conduct they must shock. Ths leaves us with tension of beauty bleaching out morality and the ugly shocking us. Sontag's duality is problematic.

Then Sontag adds something extra---some difference. She says:

“Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.”
(Sontag, p. 89)

Below is a portrait of some plain country folk by Mike Disfarmer who worked as a photographer in Heber Springs Arkansas. The portraits that were taken from 1939 to 1946.

This photo is neither uglifying nor beautifying. It is haunting in its starkness and simplicity. Why haunting. Because the hard physical toil and suffering of rural Depression life is encoded in their bodies; as is their pride, stoicism and simplicity. Grief is expressed in these bodies--the photo expresses both grief and a sense of being alive.

The photos are also haunting because we understand that many of the portraits of country boys in uniform, with their mates and girlfriends just prior to them, will be going off to fight in WW11.The young men would be dead in a few years. The photo is a special event.

The young men would die in war. That is why these photos haunt us. They radiate a darkness that keeps beauty in check. The haunt us because they remind us of the affinity of art with death.

shopping malls

I've never been particularly fond of shopping malls. I felt trapped in them. I also intensely disliked the massive suburban ones, that were been built since the 1960s for the housing estates that were built far from the urban centre of the industrial city. I've more or less avoided the windowless warrens of chain stores that were scattered around a giant supermarket.

I have always preferred to do my shopping in markets where I could as the arcades in the inner city became a husk of their former selves and urban life atrophied.

So I was interested inthis piece about Victor Gruen, the Austrian architect who came up with idea of an enclosed shopping mall. It describes the design thinking behind shopping malls:

"As people left the cities for the suburbs of postwar America, what they missed was a central place for shopping, walking, meeting neighbors or just spending time. Highway strip malls were uninspired, dangerous and single-use. In designing the automobile-based environment, then, architects should restore some of the satisfactions of the old pedestrian city, with new climate control technologies, within the safe walls of a mall. "

Hence, the shopping center is one of the few new building types created in our times that provided a genuine and profitable alternative to downtown or strip shopping. The suburban malls elipsed the inner city, which pretty much died.

Victor Gruen has a dream. His innovative design envisioned the shopping mall to be a new town centre. It was to be a reinvention of the European public square. It would be the new centre in suburbia that would bring a vibrant community life to the motorized suburbs.

I never saw the dream realised myself.

suburbia

I have been writing a bit about the relationship between suburbia and the city. Since junk for code is becoming a more visually-orientated site I thought that I might upload some images of suburbia produced from someone living on the antipodean edge of the art world.

Here is a neon image of the exterior of Australian suburbia.

It is by Howard Arkley. Some information about the person as distinct from the painter is this text by the Melbourne writer Edwina Preston.

This Arkley's image of the suburban interior.

Suburbia is about house and garden, which is what makes it so different to innercity living.

It is a different image of suburbia to that of the 1950s painted by John Bracks. In this representation, suburbia was an existential wasteland peopled by emotionally impoverished people living a life of soul-destroying conformity.

That one was prior to television and the endless flow of images from elsewhere in the world that would eventually work its way into our dreams and thoughts and so shape our desires. It was a world prior to pop.

However, Arkley's suburbia is not John Howard's white picket fence suburbia. This is Australia of the 1980s and so we have this ritual amongst the suburban boys:

It is a world corroded by the effects of heroin addiction.

However, I know little about the contemporary art world over the past three decades in which Howard Arkley worked. This review of Eddwin'a Preston's biography by the art critic John MacDonald gives us sardonic insight into the Melbourne art world that was theorized by the Art and Text crowd.

A more positive account is given by McKenzie Wark Television and pop gave birth to a new Australian aesthetic sensibility.

After an Exhibition: a note on Australian landscape

Regionalism in art---such as representations of the South Australian landscape have a hard time being accepted in the art world. This painting of Waldegrave Beach (near Elliston on the Eyre Peninsula) by Siv Grava--

Siv Grava, Waldegrave Beach, Images Gallery, 2003, Oil on canvas

This regional art is confronted by being rejected as unfashionable in the metropolis. The art institution still thinks in terms of avoiding the literal image, defying figurative conventions, the avant garde and being self-referential about art. They are still bound up in the prejudices of the New York avant garde of the 1950s, which held that regionalism was trashed by the march of art history. For modernists regionalism meant backward-looking conservatism whilst being avant grade meant being authentic.

Being modern for photgraphers in America and Europe meant this kind of abstraction:

Paul Strand,

It did not mean this:

That is Australiania or kitsch.

In a globalised world regionalism is returning. What causes its rejection this time is that it is about the specifics of place: eg., Maslin's Beach by Siv Grava

Siv Grava, Maslin's Beach, Images Gallery 2003, Oil on canvas

The opening of Siv's exhibition at Images Gallery was last night. I slipped in quickly whilst passing by.

So anyone producing works to represent the specifics of their place risks being ensnarred in Australianness, Australiania, and postcard views. Those words mean one thing to the art institution:---kitsch. Today, kitsch means artworks that appeal to popular or lowbrow taste, artworks that are often of poor quality, and cliched artworks. Kitsch causes that aesthetic 'yuk' feeling in the art institution.

And the reason for the immediate recoil, if not repugnance, by the art institution to the specifics of regionalism. Art transcends the particularities of place. It does so by either meditating on the [spirit] of the Great Southern Land, or alternatively by becoming a colouristic exercise of aesthetic appeal.

An acceptable strategy to avoid Australiania is to deconstruct kitsch sunset photgraphs of Uluru for tourists. Such a strategy is deployed by David Hume:

David Hume, Postcards From The Rock, Acrylic on galvanised steel, Beneath the Beyond 2 exhibition, 2000.

This strategy is seen as okay by the art institution because it is art being self-referential. Being self-referential means that the artwork is not a cliche, and it prevents the artwork from become part of the flotsam of mass culture. To be a good modernist you must fear and hate kitsch. For modernists art stands opposed to kitsch.

What happened with modernism was a forgetfulness about place. Place was erased. "Erasure" denote the art institution's tendency to displace, deny, or unrecognizably alter its past; its history of being in a specific place. The traces of the past continued to remain even after the landscapes and buildings had been demolished. What occured was a burial, rather than a disappearance of regional representations of the past and place.

We are now begining to recover the old images of our region:

Hans Heyson,

The Hans Heyson representations of the Flinders Ranges, which were once high art, are in danger of becoming kitsch.

Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others #9

The ninth part of Rick's project on Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others is concerned with the beautiful in relation to what I came to call in my last Sontag post about photography and ethical criticism as the problem of evil.

Should photographers express human suffering in terms of beautiful images? The argument that Sontag introduces holds that beautiful images of human suffering seem to trivalize suffering (evil) by taming it and making the evil disappear.

Sontag approaches this in terms of a duality. She plays off photography as art with photography outside the art institution, such as photojournalism. She says:

"Transforming is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems "aesthetic"; that is, too much like art....Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.

In this view, a beautiful photograph drains attention from the sobering subject and turns it toward the medium itself, thereby compromising the picture's status as a document....A photographer who specializes in world misery (including but not restricted to the effects of war) Sebastião Salgado, has been the principal target of the new campaign against the inauthenticity of the beautiful.” (Sontag, p.76-78)

I do not know the work of Sebastião Salgado, but he has an extensive body of work. You can see some of his recent work on migration here. (There are three galleries of photographs). And here is a critical review of his first Latin American work, Other America's (1986) and his second book on Latin America, Terra: Struggle of the landless (1997)

Clearly this work shows human suffering on a mass scale and it poses the problem of evil in terms of the intelligibility of the world. Why so much evil?

You look at these photos and ask, Why? Why this human suffering? Why so much suffering? The problem of evil is not something natural (eg., the Lisbon earthquake); or that it has something to do with God and the existence of evil in divine creation. What we understand from Salgado's photos is that suffering has been caused by other human beings----to the large scale forces and institutions that human beings create. Here photography is a long way from philosophy which is still caught up in escaping the theological past.

In trying to come to come to grips with suffering on a mass scale Auschwitz haunts us, as does the Gulag. We understand the machinery of death at work here.

Now Salgado's photographs are elegantly composed and he has a poetic eye. He is a first class image makers and an excellent black and white photographer. Hence the beautiful image:

Does the beauty of the image undercut the representation of suffering?

I personally find the claim that "photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful" an odd criticism. You rarely hear the argument that a well written piece of prose undermines the depiction of suffering; that well-written prose draws attention from the suffering subject and turns it toward the medium itself.

So why is a photography different. Why does a well composed photograph----as Salgado's are----compromise the picture's status as a document? Why does a well-composed photograph---ie., a beautiful photograph---draw attention away from the suffering subject and to the medium itself?

It is not obvious that it does.

The criticism that a formally balanced image undermines the representation of suffering implies that the aesthetic is about the beautiful---ie., it is a theory of the beautiful. If form is a part of the language of art ---its inner logic--then the criticism implies a formalist aesthetic and, further, that there is only a formalist aesthetic and such an aesthetic has no content. Thus art is about itself.

It is not just the case that there is a continuum in the different kinds of photojournalism between the poles of information and expression and that that traditional (proper) photojournalism is more concerned with information and its images are documents; whilst the more expressive photojournalism becomes a fine art photojournalism in which its images are often symbols.

Two quick comments. The aesthetic cannot be reduced to the beautiful. It is also about the representation of subjects considered ugly and the sublime.

This ignores that the form of the photograph expresses the content, eg., conveying the estrangement between people through formal structures through beams and shadows that separate individuals from one another; or windows and doors that divide people rather than enable communication between them; or gazes that cross a space but do not meet. The formal structures are the language of through which a documentary photograph expresses the content.

A well composed photograph expresses the content of homelessness better than a badly composed one--shapeless and lacking structure.

Moreover, the photograph does not stand alone as it is embedded in a narrative. The Migration work is about millions of people in motion, seeking survival and a better life -- leaving the land for the cities, living in refugee camps:

and then living in impoverished conditions in the cities.

The indicates that the individual photograph is placed within an interpretative framework that makes sense of the accumulated meaning of the series of phootgraphs by providing an articulated historical context for the reader.

humanised geometry

In the Australian Financial Review of all places (subscription only, Review, Friday 18 July) there is a long article on Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photojournalist and cofounder of Magnum.

Cartier-Bresson's images are so well known:

that they have become a central part of our visual tradition and historical memory bank.

You can find the interview here in the form of a review of, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Man, the Image and the World, by John Branville.

A private foundation has been organized, a new book produced, and there is a retrospective exhibition at the Bibliothèque National in Paris.

In the lunch interview the 95 year old Henri says that he has no current interest in photography. He had given up his decisive moment photography that once captured a fleeting reality in terms of humanized geometry for drawing around 1970.

This is understandable, for Cartier-Bresson had always seen the Leica as a sketchbook for the poetic eye coded for aesthetic balance.

The historical image is that of the genius phtographer wandering the world intuitively discovering photographs in the historical moment. Yet he was also a photojornalist who made his living through his photos of major events.

As he was a both a photojournalist and an artist

the phrase humanized geometry is apt. It is a poetics that affirms life

This poetics undercuts the dismissal of photography by Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory on the grounds that it is a form of copy realism that cannot account for the moment of critical opposition in art.

Adorno says very little about photography. It is limited to a few quips about the flaw of photography is that it is too attached to thing-likeness; and that photography tried to legitimate itself by clinging to the model of the portrait. It is not autonomous art as it was to tied to reality.

Photography was a different way of seeing.

That is what Cartier-Bresson showed. It was what Adorno ignored.

For Adorno Photography was a part of the culture industry. By and large this commodity's regressive side dominates, and it is part of the new social cement of the capitalist system, rather than helping to crack the cement of the culture industry.

Derek Allen Interview #7

This is the seventh and last part of Rick's interview with Derek Allen on Malraux's theory of art. It was the post that I lost on the weekend, much to my dismay.

In the interview Rick mentions that Derek has recently presented a paper entitled ‘André Malraux and the Function of Art’ to an aesthetics conference at Sydney University organized by the Sydney Society for Literature and Aesthetics.

The paper is not online. None of the conference papers are. Neither are the major academic journals online. Even though aesthetics has become rich and varied aesthetics remains a closed academic shop--an academic speciality. The exceptions are Contemporary Aesthetics and Canadian Aesthetic Journal There is still a lot of work to be done to overcome traditional aesthetics as an academic discipline and develop a critical theory of the image.

The topic of the interview is the function of art. Is there one function of art? asks Rick

Derek says that 'function' in his paper meant the creative act. However function also has a another meaning----the end of art practices. So what can be said about that.

Derek responds by highlighting the way that Malraux breaks with traditional aesthetics. He says that:

"..it is certainly true that, in Malraux’s view, the creative achievement that we today name ‘art’ has not always been directed to the same end. Indeed, he insists very strongly on this point. In Ancient Egypt, for example, as he points out, the concept ‘art’ was non-existent and the purpose of those objects from Egyptian culture that we now call art was, quite specifically, to promote the well-being of the departed in the Afterlife. That was their function, their very raison d’être. One can find many similar examples in other cultures."

Derek adds that:

"Malraux wants a theory of art that fully acknowledges this – a theory that does not try to fudge the issue by claiming that, irrespective of what they may have said or done, the Egyptians ‘really’ saw their Pharaoh’s image in his mortuary chapel as what we term ‘art’, or, as some try to argue, as an instance of ‘the beautiful’".

This is break away, or a rupture from traditional aesthetics. It represents an overcoming of aesthetics. Derek then adds:

"It is, to my mind, one of the key questions facing aesthetics today, and one to which it has so far failed to give a good response, or even to raise in clear, unambiguous terms. Malraux is seeking – and to my mind successfully finds – a theory of art that deals with this."

Rather than fudge the issue Adorno made some steps along these lines. He saw both art and science evolving out of magic with art aiming at mimesis. It is only a step because in Aesthetic Theory he mentions that:

"...the autonomy art gained after having freed itself from its earlier cult functions and its derivatives depended on the idea of humanity. As society becomes less humane art becomes less autonomous. Those constituent elements of art that were suffused with the ideal of humanity have lost their force." (p.1)

Hence the place and function of contemporary autonomous art has become uncertain.

So though art steps out of magic Adorno sees the cultural practices of Ancient Egypt in terms of the cult function of art or its derivatives. And again, when talkign about art's wound:

"Having disassociated itself from religion and its redemptive truths, art was able to flourish. Once secularized, however, art was condemned, for lack of any hope for a real alternative, to offer to the existing world a kind of solace that reinforced fetters autonomous art had wanted to shake off."(ibid, p. 2)

Adorno's main concern is with the function of autonomous modern art. When talking about the origins of art he mentions prehistoric art. So he sees art as changing, rather than art being born in a secular liberal society. But he gives it a twist that brings him close to Malraux:

"Works of art become what they are by negating their origin. It was only fairly recently, namely after art had become thoroughly secular and subject to a process of technological evolution and after secularization had taken hold, that art aquired another important feature: an inner logic of development." (ibid, p.4)

Art sees art as a process of becoming. he then says:

"Art should not be balmed for its one -time ignominous relation to magical abracadabra, human servitude and entertainment, for it has after all annihilated these dependences along with the memory of its fall from grace."
Malraux is much sharper. The concept ‘art’ was non-existent in Ancient Egypt and the purpose of those cultural objects from Egyptian culture are not art. I think that Walter Benjamin is more radical than Adorno on this and so is closer to Malraux.

to be continued.

modernist urbanism

I came across this phrase---modernist urbanism---and it caught my fancy. What does it mean?

traffic flows and freeways, skyscraper landscapes, garden city suburbs, inner city decay, the dominance of the car, the end of inner city urban life, the shopping mall as the mediator between the decay-of-the-inner-city and the rise-of-the-suburb and machine living.

It means shopping. department stores as a ladies delight. high art/mass culture split, the wealth of a nation as a ‘wealth of nations’ an immense accumulation of spectacle of consumer images. the expansion of desire.

junk space. lots of trash. human debris

airconditioning. paralysed historical imagination. a nightmare of being eternally trapped in a shopping mall.

In the end there is little else to do but shop’.

Modernist urbanism. A mode of urban life in decay.

corporate architecture

Lear's Shadow is a fantastic site. I came across it courtesy of wood s lot

This project called Discovery Walk in Kafkatown goes way beyond my few meagre insights into modernist architecture in Australia (here and here). It works with a very sophisticated account of modernist architecture and corporate power in Toronto.

In part one Douglas downplays place in favour of a modernist copying/emulating of the New York skyline in Toronto. He is right to do so. Being modern was being like New York in the second half of the twentieth century. If your city did not look like a cut down version of New York, then it was not modern. Hence Sydney was modern. It had the skyline. Adelaide is not modern. It has no skyline of note. It remains pre-modern.

And Douglas is quite right to suggest that the modernist, commercial office building (ie., the glass skyscraper) has surpassed the civic and religious architecture of our time in monumentality. As he writes:

'Mies [van der Rohe's] style sent the rectangles skyward, seeming both to signal and to reinforce the role of "the commercial" as the successor to religion, and even to civil society itself in North America.'

Toronto got its very own Mies Tower. That is prestige and status for Canadian capitalism. Sydney had to make do with its homegrown Harry Seidler. His roots were also in the rejection of decorative adornments, frivolous subjective trimmings and traditional built forms.

There is a refusal to compromise in the buildings built by these high modernist architects. But their corporate towers in the CBD do signify the projection of power on a massive scale. That is the historical truth this kind of art discloses.

I just cannot read this art work as being oppositional to society. As Douglas says its aesthetic rationality has more to do with homogeneity, hierarchy, and human beings as functional units of a larger, more significant corporate whole that functioned like a machine. That is the political function such buildings have in our society and they are experienced as oppressive forms in terms of the way they function in our lives.

This sort of ahistorical modernism should be dethroned as it's aesthetic brushes the past into the gutter as just so much rubbish; and its buildings fails to offer an alternative vision-- the last conceivable refuge for a different understanding of nature, culture and society to that embodied in the instrumental rationality of corporate Australia.

Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others #8

The eighth part of Rick's project on Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others is centred around the large format photographs taken in the American civil war. The photographers Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan are mentioned by Sontag though not Mathew Brady. Brady as a photographer-entrepreneur, organized Gardner and Sullivan, who were the core of Brady's Photographic Corps and were the makers of many of the well-known pictures.

In many ways the names are less important than the discursive space. For what we have entered into is what can be called a photographic archive: that repository or collection of nineteenth photographs over time that exists outside of the boundaries and tentacles of the art institution. The art historians mine the archive and reassemble bits and pieces within the modernist categories (genre, landscape, oeuvre, artist, work) that are previously constituted by art and history.

Bits of Timothy O'Sullivan's work has been so reassembled---within the aesthetic as fine art---- whilst his photographs in the achive that functioned as reportage, documentation, evidence, illustration and scientific information has been displaced. His landscapes (in the archive these photographs are called views) now serve to ensure photography's new found autonomy as an art form that can distinquish itself in its essential qualities from all other art forms.

The war photos are left in the archive--that set of practices, institutions, knowledges and and relationships ---to which nineteenth centry photography belonged have escaped the categories of the art museum which make photography a medium of subjectivity. Outside the art museum/gallery we can read the civil war photographs as a part of the American history they were a part of and signified. Reading here involves interpretation, interpreting the photographs that were originally organized into albums shaped as narratives with the help of written texts. Texts like Brady's Photographic Views of the War, plus Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the War and Barnard's Photographic Views of Sherman's Campaign functioned as contemporary histories, with the photographers working as historians.

The bit of Sontag's text that is montaged to the photos refers to the face: Sontag says:

"With our dead, there has always been a powerful interdiction against showing the naked face. The photographs of Gardner and O’Sullivan still shock because the Union and Confederate soldiers lie on their backs, with the faces of some clearly visible.” (Sontag, p.70)

What we see in some of these photos are not grand history celebrations of heroic actions; but depictions of rotting corpses, shattered trees and rocks, wounded soldiers and they depict the reality of violence, the effects of shells and bullets on flesh and bone. These are not just corposes; the bodies have faces and so are they individual human beings: someone's son, lover, husband or father. Here is a response to the images when they were first shown in New York. And another by Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is photography as historical documents, not painting, that lends a voice to human suffering. Painting was concerned with myth and the theatre of war.

The standard discussion to the sequence of war photographs has been around the truth of what they depicted, given that many of them were staged. But you do not need 'true representation' (as correspondence to reality) as a way to gain an understanding of ethics of these war photos.

The ethics arise from the images creating an aversion in its readers, due to the shock of war being waged on human flesh; an aversion because the readers found some of the images to be so repulsive, that they retreated to the language of martyrdom and redemption to bury the grim images. So we have the struggle of comprehension of what Walt Whitman called "a seething hell and black infernal backgrounds of countless minor scenes" in his Specimen Days.

I have highlighted language, representation, and the metaphysics of presence of these civil war photographs. Despite the textuality of these images/texts we have is the immediacy of the ethical response that conveys a sense of the urgency and complexity of ethical problems and is able to make contact with our own questions about our lives. What these images dramatize in a vivid way is how the images of mutilated human beings in the Iraqi war were not presented in the mass media. They were avoided, censored out. We had to go to find thembecause they were deemed to be too confronting.

We do not read these images as if they are a novel and so look for the ethically salient interactions of character and circumstance; nor do we read their intertextuality for a textually immanent ethic. Nor is the ethical encountered to lie in one's face-to-face encounter with the presence of another person. It is an ethics understood "through language"; an ethics that engages with what philosophers usually call the problem of evil as a way to make sense of the horrors in human history.

What Sontag has done counter the "fancy rhetoric" that downplays the reality of war and pretends that everything has turned into spectacle. She counters it by showing that at the heart of the issues concerning war photography and conscience there are real people, actually suffering.

Yet we should not speak of reality becoming a spectacle as breath-taking provincialism because the 1991 Iraq war was a spectacle on television: the fireworks lighting up the night sky over Baghdad is what we citizens were allowed to see by the US military. It was organized as a spectacle.

photographic criticism

Yesterday's post on photographic criticism picked up on some previous remarks about photographs being a part of the museum without walls, photography as a process of signification (or signifying practice) and photography between high art and popular culture. It tried to set the scene for part 8 of Rick's Sontag project.

What the post suggested was that if we are to understand photography's place in the world, then photographs need to understood as cultural messages; not as well or badly composed artistic images of the artist photographer engaged in a political fine art practice or documentary pictures of reality made by heroes and activists.

It then argued that photographic discourse can never be properly aesthetic and that it has borrowed the categories of aesthetic discourse (eg.,orginality, subjective expressiveness, formal unity, style and tradition, uniqueness of art object). That late modernist art discourse placed the emphasis on autonomy, purity, and self reflexivity of the work of art that was produced by promethean artist. That discourse, which evolved in New York with the abstract expressionists eventually shifted photography from being social documentary to a medium of privileged subjectivity, whilst accepting its mechanical mode of production.

There is an option to accepting Greenbergian formalism and then thinking of other kinds of photography as art corrupted by commerce, pictures of reality (eg., photojournalism) or kitsch. We can accept that we are surrounded by a world of images as signsand that we live among elaborate systems of images that feedback meaning through a network of images. These images often construct particular kinds of reality (eg., the freedom/bush bashing advertisements for 4 wheel drives) that then shape the way we view our life. From this perspective outisde of the art institution we can see that there are many diverse kinds of photography----aerial, medical, police, anthropological, advertising, family snap shots etc etc.

What is the implication? That a photograph has many different meanings depending on the context and use. Various institutions (the art institution, advertising) authorize certain meanings and dismiss others. Hence we have a politics of interpretation.

But that way of looking at photography leaves the ethics of interpreting photos graphs to one side; one that was traditionally associated with an ethics of narrative or story telling of a Eugene Smith. This kind of ethics is one in which we come to our sense of value in a particular narrative by experiencing them in context of others that are like and unlike them. We rely on our past experiences to make judgments and we confirm our judgement by making comparisons and through conversations with others.

testing testing testing

Due to the recent server changes at Movable Type----what the tech support notice says is the migrations of all ARTEMIS-based accounts to the new network operations----I lost all of yesterday's posts. There was a post on development and heritage along the southern coastline of Australia; one on the Derek Allen interview, one on Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of the Pain of Others and one on photography.

A full days work has gone down the tube. I'm deflated rather than rejuvenated. I will never be able to reproduce them.

I will endeavour to give summaries of them. A summary has been added to an earlier unfinished Sontag post.

Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others#7

The seventh part of Rick's project on Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others is centred around Goya's suite of eighty-three etchings called the Disasters of War. These depict the atrocities committed by Napoleon's soldiers who invaded Spain in 1808 to quell the local insurrection against the imperial French rule of their country. As such they stand in opposition to the French paintings that glorified Napolean and celebrated the heroism of the French troops in the Peninsula War (1808-1813).

The text that Rick attaches is Sontag comments from her book. She says:

"Goya's art, like Dostoyevsky's, seems a turning point in the history of moral feelings and of sorrow -- as deep, as original, as demanding. With Goya, a new standard for responsiveness to suffering enters art." (Sontag, p.44-45)

Art and morality. How often they collide. This terrain is a minefield. A lot of it surrounds the issues of censorship and freedom of expression and many hold that asking art to serve a moral, or any other end except aesthetic quality, is to make an illegitimate demand on art. On the other side, there are those who see art as providing a form of moral education. The relationship between art and morality has been a frustrating debate historically, and it has preoccupied contemporary philosophers, such as Iris Murdoch.

By and large, ethical criticism is generally associated with literature and not the visual arts.

Sontag cuts through a lot of the confusion about ethics and art with the Goya suite of images of human suffering.

Update

The continuation of this post was lost due to the change of server at Movable Type.

The post was about the value of ethical criticism in relation to the ethical tensions in an image without embracing the literary humanist idea of particular sort of moral enlightenment as character-improvement, moral uplift and an aesthetic education that teaches us to become more compassionate toward the others.

This ethical criticism connects an ethical response to human suffering represented by Goya's image to eudaimonia or human flourishing. It is a rupture from the old Enlightenment/Romantic tradition in which a radical distinction is made by the scientific Enlightenment between an instrumental reason on the one hand and on the other hand emotion and imagination. The Romantics merely inverted this hierarchy. Instead of seeking to use reason to master and control feeling, they liberated feeling and imagination from the tyrannies of reason. They did so by disconnecting feeling and imagination from accountability to the public sphere and allowing them soar free. They wanted radical autonomy.

Goya's etchings reconnect art to the public sphere and reconnect feeling and imagination to reason---an ethical reason that talks about a particular historical event: the brutality fo the French occupation of Spain. Here the artist is inside the republic ---not banished as with Plato; nor celebrating their banishment as with the Romantics, who wanted freedom from anyone telling them what to do with their art.

What Goya points to is a robust critical public culture in which one is prepared to question authority in the name of morality that gives voice to human suffering, rests on respect for reason whilst appealing to human emotion.

Derek Allen Interview#6

This post picks up on the sixth part of Rick's interview with Derek Allen. In this part the issue of art's historicity is placed on the table.

Rick refers to this in terms of being ‘time-bound’, ‘subject to change and potential consignment to oblivion’, and he suggests that Derek regards this as ‘the most radical challenge Malraux represents to the way the art institution understands art.

At first this seems to be a bit over the top since German philosophy and aesthetics (Hegel & Nietzsche) in the nineteenth century went historicist in reaction to Kant. From this perspective it is modernist, Anglo-American analytic aesthetics that went formalist in the early twentieth century, and so repudiated the historical nature of art. Malraux could be interpreted as standing in the continental aesthetic tradition and reworking it ---as Adorno did.

Derek's reply is very informative. He refers to the dilemma in which aesthetics now finds itself where this question is concerned.

"On the one hand, we have the longstanding aesthetic tradition suggesting that great art is timeless or eternal. On other hand, there’s the powerful stream of thought originating with writers like Hegel and Taine, and carried forward by various post-Marxist writers (Eagleton is a well-known current example), that art, like all other aspects of human activity, is part of historical experience."

That's good. Derek then says:

Both theories, as we know, run into major problems... So we quickly reach an impasse."

It would be nice to know what the major problems of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory are, but we'll let it go. Derek then introduces the way Malraux deals with the question of art and time. He says:

"For Malraux, a work of art is by its very nature ‘born to metamorphosis’ as he puts it, whether its creator is aware of this or not....He is not dismissing the context in which the work of art comes into being. To that extent, the work does have ‘one foot in history’ so to speak – whether it be the world of an ancient civilisation or of a more recent period. But that, for Malraux, is only the work’s point of departure".

Then comes the key bit. From this point of departure the art work:

"...then sets out on its journey of metamorphosis – which may sometimes result in it being consigned to oblivion for long periods (as Egyptian art was for two millennia, for example) and at other times lead to its rebirth, though always in a different form – as the Pharaoh’s sacred image is now reborn as a ‘work of art’ for instance."

Well we can get that. The work produced by women disappear from history and were forgotten, until they were recovered by feminists as art in the 1970s and 1980s. The 1940s and 1950s work of Joy Hester in Australia comes to mind. (More works here.) The work of the French photographer Eugene Atget would be another example. Many of these were not considered art works when made.

But then Derek introduces the hard stuff:

"A key point to note, going back to the point from which I started out, is that the work of art for Malraux is neither eternal nor embedded in historical time. He is offering us an entirely new conception of the relationship between art and time."

How can that be? How can artworks be historical through and through and yet not embedded in history? Derek leaves it there for us to puzzle over. What can be made of it?

It's a hard one and I have not read Malraux.

One suggestion that can be made is Adorno's idea of autonomous art. It is historical and socially mediated but its autonomy enables it to mount crucial resistance. Hence its social significance.

Such art works belong to a society where exchange has become the dominant principle of social relationships. Like other commodities they hide the labor that has gone into making them, and they appear to have a life of their own. They appear to be superior cultual commodities that are detached from the conditions of their economic production. And they appear to serve no use beyond their own existence.

Adorno does a dialectical twist here to dig out the autonomous nature of art.

By appearing to have a life of their own works of art call into questrion a scociety where nothing is allowed to be itself and everything is subject to the principle of exchange. By appearing to be detached from the conditions of economic production, works of art acquire the capacity to suggest changed social conditions. And by appearing to be useless, works or art recall the human purposes of production that instrumental (economic) reason forgets.

Is that dialectical interplay between autonomy and social character a way of understanding Malraux's idea of art works being inside history but not embedded in it?

Tim Blair's big disgust

I see that Tim Blair has had another sneer at the masses at Adelaide's Festival of Ideas. The image he constructs is one of ideas festering. It seems that the smell from the putrid ideas offends him. No attempt is made to sift the ideas. What is putrid is the festival.

Tim Blair reminds me of the story of madman who runs into the marketplace with a fully lit lantern shouting, "have you heard, have you heard, the gravedigging masses are discussing ideas. Be warned, be warned, we will lose our culture."

The people stop their shopping for a moment, look around, pause, see the madman, then wonder what is going on. "Who is this madman?", they ask? "Why is he stirring things up?" Is he a fly of the marketplace?"

"Be warned", says the madman. "Darkness will soon fall. Space will bcome empty again. It will become colder. Can you not hear the noise of the gravdiggers in Adelaide burying our culture?"

The crowd laugh. "Have your lost your way, they ask? The asylum is that way. And they point to the disused abbatoirs called the Dollar Sweet.

The right wingers who read Tim Blair's weblog mutter amongst themselves as they huddle together away from the bright summer sun.

One says, "He's right. Where the unclean rabble drinks all the wells are posioned.

Another mumbles, "The rabble have damp hearts and dirty delights."

Another, who wears a white hood, says, "Their filthy words choke me. And I have to hold my nose when they pass me by."

Another says, "The wind from Sydney will blow the filthy rabble on the Adelaide plain away. Lets all spit into the wind."

interesting photographs

This is a very interesting online photographic magazine. The latest issue of 28m has a series of photographs by different photographers. Each of the indvidual series are all worth exploring.

In reading them I can see that the world wide web has given photography a new lease of life. The internet means that it is no longer necessary to work away towards a gallery exhibition or a book. Though I spent a lot of time doing photgraphy in the early 1980s when I had a studio, the traditional trajectory of an artist career was what stopped me from taking photographs. I stopped for most of the time that I was teaching and writing philosophy in the academy.

I stopped for two reasons. I could never get the work together for an exhibition. Secondly, I had to earning a living and I did not want to do so by being a commercial photographer, or working in a factory as I and bought an inner city cottage. So I became an academic. The photography was reduced and eventually it stopped. What was the point of photography? I was on an academic track. So I gave up the studio, I stopped taking the black and white urbanscapes with the 5x7 view camera, and eventually put the old Lecia in a drawer.

I started up photography again when I wanted some pictures on the bare walls of the electronic inner city cottage and to replace all the rustic gum trees at the beach shack in Victor Harbor. I shifted over to colour and landscape and started exploring the SA region. But, as I found film all very expensive I didn't produce that much:----what I could do on my holidays or on the odd weekend when at Victor Harbour.

But I had done enough over the last couple of years for me start to think about working in 5x4 sheet film for the landscapes with my old Linhof. However, I had reached a bit of a dead end as what would I do with the photos. You can only enframe so many photos for the walls of the house.

When I looked at the work in 28mm and read about the photographers new possibilities opened up. I can see that it is now possible to regularly publish the images on a weblog with a scanner, or more ambitiously to use the scanner to build a virtual gallery attached to a weblog. No need for an exhibition in an art gallery or a book.

An excellent example of what can be done is provided by Kurt Easterwood's hmmn: musings from the far east(erwood). It provides a model of what junk for code can aspire to over time.

So I've decided to buy a flatbed scanner this week. In the short term I will scan snaps such as this:

This is Agtet, one of our two standard poodles. The location is between the towns of Woomera and Andamooka. It was taken with a Leica M4p on a trip in 2001. The image is called Xmas Greetings as I had used it for Xmas cards in 2001.

That particular desert trip included a weeks holiday in the opal mining town of Andamooka, which is just north east of Roxby Downs. It was there that I started taking landscape photos again. I eased my way back into photography after a decade with my old 6x6 twin lens Rolleiflex.

A scanner would give me reason to print more of photos that I taken since then 1991. Scanning them into the weblog and organizing them into some sort of gallery is much better than having the contact sheets and negatives sitting in a filing cabinet. That was the dead end I got into---it is what is happening at the moment. That had saddens me as I enjoy photography. But I felt trapped and frustrated.

Until I saw the 28m work online. But making the aspirations reality will take time as I do not have the technical knowledge to set up a galleryon the weblog. I'm a digital luddite.

Walter Benjamin: just a note

I briefly mentioned in passing on a previous post that Clement Greenberg's late modernist relationship between avant garde painting and photography as kitsch had been undermined by the mechanical reproduction of photography. I also briefly mentioned that an effect of photography had been to change our understanding of art.

What I had in mind was the work of Walter Benjamin and his argument that technological reproduction alters the way we look at reality. Benjamin argues that because of mechanical mass reproduction, art has lost its "authenticity" in the capitalist-oriented culture industry of the 20th century. This shift in attitudes to art from the hollowing out of art's traditional aura is the result of the introduction of mechanical means of reproduction.

Benjamin also emphasized the liberating, democratizing influences of the new techologies---still photography and film. The new mechanical means of reproduction of art undermined the foundations of traditional setup of one-off paintings produced by artists for their patrons in which the means of artistic production remain in the control of the rich and powerful. This was radically altered because mechanical reproduction meant that many more people could acquire the means to either take photographs of a work of art, or to be able to buy a cheap photograph, postcard, or print of the work.

This new media had the effect of fundamentally altering the relations between signifying systems in society as it eased the rigid divide between the art institution and the culture industry in which art protests the vulgarity of the market. The products of the culture industry could no longer be dismissed as kitsch, artistic trash and bad taste; or more politely, as the dross of art caused by art compromising itself with the market.

Another way looking at this transformation is in terms of the primacy of visual culture. This is best expressed by John Berger in his Ways of Seeing. Here he argues that our ways of seeing have a history:

"Today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way."

In many ways what Benjamin was exploring, the historical transformation of art due to the mechanical reproduction of photographic images, is a history that we have been living through. This episode in the history of our visual culture has run its course, as we are now living through another one----the digital reproduction of images. In the digital era, with its computers, virtual reality, and the everyday circulation of images the digital form of image making takes on a life of its own.

In this world of the musem without walls there both an ongoing and infinite (re)production of images, and an endless change of these images. Not only is authenticity almost irrelevent the idea of authorship is almost obsolete.

its good to know where you stand

Here in little old Adelaide we have just had a popular festival of ideas around the themes of hope and fear. The smorsgboard of ideas was herald as a homegrown success due to the attendances being around 30,000.

It was not a success for the Anglo-Australian Sydney conservatives though. They sneered. Sydney may be looking rather tired, dirty and tacky these days, but its conservatives can still shrug their weariness off, free themselves from their disgust and raise a bit of their big contempt for the people.

I have previously mentioned the scorn of Tim Blair, who called the festival of ideas a carnival of the left-wing rabble. Now Gerard Henderson has also got in the contempt act about the people at the carnivalof ideas.

Henderson tells us that Adelaide is the place which laps up strident anti-Americanism; it is the home of a luvvies' collective where everyone (or almost everyone) agrees with everyone else; and it is besotted with cosmopolitan ideas of the future prospect of a world parliament.

Why it was a only yesterday that Adelaide was being denounced as the home of protectionism, populist resentment, anti-development, a lack of get up and go and suburban stupor. And South Australia is being mocked as a 'not-in-my-backyard' state because it resists being a repository for low level nuclear waste.

Poor Adelaide. It can never win a trick. But at least its not provincal anymore. The suburban masses have stirred, and they embraced cosmopolitianism.

Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others #6

Rick's sixth post on Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others is another juxtaposition of image and text. This time it links Jacque Callott's suite of eighteen etchings called The Miseries and Misfortunes of War. These depict French soldiers committing atrocities against civilians in the province of Lorraine. This suite of images is juxtaposed with Lorrain Adam's review of Sontag's text.

Adams points out that in Regarding the Pain of Others Sontag reverses her thesis in On Photography. This held that photographic overexposure to atrocity shrivels our sympathy and conscience as readers and interpreters. Her thesis held that a photograph of war horror at first makes war more "real"; but that after a surfeit of such images we grow emotionally numb. In the langauge of Adorno there was no truth in photographic works. By that is meant that they did not challenge the status quo and disclose human aspirations. They are not autonomous art.

It was a popular thesis, if I remember. I recall that I was not convinced by it when I read On Photography. At the time I was running a photographic studio, doing undergraduate studies in philosophy and visual arts, and struggling to understand Clement Greenberg's wriytings on modernism and the avant garde

That was about the time that photography was struggling to be accepted by the conservative high art institutions, and had gone very formalist to establish its modernist creditionals. I got enough from Greenberg to understand that photography had no hope of being a part of the painting avant garde, and so it was kitsch. I sort of understood that this devaluation of photography was part of the long tradition of painters (ie., those with imagination) and their apologists kicking photography because it was produced by a machine and chemicals. Some arts were more art than others and photography was, at best an instrument to document the activities of painters and performance artists. (The latter were the new avant garde).

So I more or less interpreted Sontag's text as part of the high art attack on photography as a popular art; as an anti-photographic text by an aesthete working in the literary institution. I was puzzled by the attack on the visualscape that was then forming around us, and I put it down to modernist distaste for the popular, mass produced art and kitsch. But I did not have the tools to engage with Sontag even though I suspected that photography was in the process of undermining the nature of art. There I left it.

So we come back to the present, where Lorrain Adams points that Sontag has reversed her earlier position and now treats photographic images with more respect. What is she saying according to Adams?

Adams says that Sontag acknowledges that photographs, like any other way of conveying meaning, can be put to many uses and that harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. As the Iraq war indicated, photographs can be taken as evidence to marshal opposition to and action against the atrocities they represented.

Sontag says that we accept these as evidence even though we know that many war photographers were embedded in the military machine during the Iraq war, and we understandd that war photography has had many intended and unintended distortions over the course of its history.

Sontag says, Jacques Callot's 1633 etchings "The Miseries and Misfortunes of War," which represent atrocious suffering endured by a civilian population at the hands of a victorious army on the rampage" are different. These images are like Goya's The Disasters of War, a series of 83 etchings depicting Napoleon's soldiers' slaughter of civilians in Spain in 1808.They are a synthesis of what happened in the past not evidence. As they were made public long after the events they depicted, so they could not be taken as evidence to marshal opposition to and action against the atrocities they represented.

If we accept Malraux's museum without walls plus the network of images in cyberspace, then too much can be made of Sontag's photography (evidence) and painting (synthesis) distinction. Both photographs and etchings are images that interpret the suffering of war; and both require interpretation by readers to understand their meaning. If you like they are historical sources (traces of the past ) that we use with other texts to understand our own history. Photographs are more traces of the past than pristine fact; the traces becomes evidence when they are used in an argument to say that killing civilians is bad.

Sontag seems to imply that war photos as evidence can give us an objective account of the past; that these photos like facts in empricist history speak for themselves. They are unbiased and reveal the truth whereas art creates the truth. Sontag is not alone in this. Kurt over at hmmm: musings from the far east(erwood) mentions the primacy of the image over the text. In a post on moblogging he says that there is something:

"....that bothers me about this primacy of the image, and I think it relates to concepts of truth and authenticity that I like to question from time to time. There seems to be this idea, not just among mobloggers but among society in general, that if a thought or statement or report isn't accompanied by some visual representation, it is somehow less true or valid."

He then mentions, as an example, the photographs that circulated through the media vectors during the Iraq war.

"Take the embedded reporters in Iraq and the coverage from the major TV networks. More often than not, the images that were beamed back from Iraq to accompany the reporters' stories were artifacted, digitized, highly abstract visual accompaniments. They were, for all intents and purposes, worthless in terms of communicating information, of news, or even propaganda. Yet they were shown night after night. Why? Because they symbolized a kind of truth, a visual statement that said "we're in Iraq right now covering this war."

Image is king. There is something in that. I recall ressponding quite strrongly the photographs of suffering children and the video footage of riding with the tanks as they roared across the desert. There was an immediacy there that the words did not capture.

Yet, to be meaningful photos, like facts, needed to be embedded in interpretative discourses. We read both the image and the text; these readings, which are the work of readers/critics, place the image and text in a variety of other interpretations. These interpretations (pro-war anati-war etc) are then contestedas are the images. Criticism, (ie., the work of Sontag,) eases the passage between the image and the reader; it elaborates the images so that they may be more easily understood by readers.

Derek Allen Interview#5

The post picks up on the fifth part of Rick's interview with Derek Allen over at Artrift.In this part of the interview Rick picks up on an important idea in The Voices of Silence, the idea of the ‘Museum without Walls’. In the interview Derek makes three points.

1. Much of what we regard as art cannot physically be moved into museums even if we wanted to eg, the Sistine Chapel, aboriginal desert paintings or the rock paintings at Cave of Lascaux. It is not longer art as Greek and Roman art plus Western art since the Renaissance. It is now the art of all cultures and all times. So the ‘musée imaginaire’ is an imaginary one that contains all the works we regard as works of art no matter where they might be.

Thus is born the democratic museum or art gallery Malraux effectively liberates artworks from the stuffy setting of the established white-walled gallery that functions as a place of reverence.

2. Our ‘musée imaginaire’ is made up of those works that are important to us--- – works that we respond to, admire, and love. This implies that a colonial painting hanging a regional art museum does not necessarily mean it belongs in our ‘musée imaginaire’ – because we may be indifferent to it, as we often are. And secondly, your ‘musée imaginaire’ may differ somewhat from mine, or from someone else’s. This implies that we would now see the art in the art gallery for what it is --a particular cultural construction.

So many of us would include photographs, films, videos and CD-roms into our museums without walls. And we include digital works So a state-of-the art virtual Museum is a reworking of Malraux's musem without a walls. It has radical implications.

3. The phrase 'our museum without walls' does not collapse art into individual opinion or judgement. Derek says that Malraux holds that there are large areas of agreement about what we would all admit to our ‘museums without walls’.

The pathway opened up by Marlraux's museum without walls leads us out of the art institution into the broader visual culture way and so beyond what Adorno called the culturescape----ruins of historical buildings. It also historicizes Adorno's aesthetics with its focus on the social significance of great works of autonomous art standing in opposition to the culture industry and heteronomous art (eg., everything from religious icons to tribal masks, advertising and commercial cinema). Malraux's museum without walls highlights that the categories of aesthetics have been developed in terms of high art and are not that good or useful for analysing, interpreting and evaluating popular art works (eg., a film or cartoon).

Adorno regards autonomy as a precondition for truth in art and made truth the ultimate criterion for the social significance of any world of art. Adorno's reflections on art are pre 'the musem without walls', as they privilege modernist avant garde artworks at the expense of other forms. After Malraux we see that Adorno's reflections on autonomous art works presuppose the art institution and the way that Adorno thinks within this institution. Malraux undermines Adorno's distinction between autonomous and heteronomous art by challenging the tight connection between autonomy, truth and social significance.

Heteronomous art (eg., the popular art of a cartoon in a newspaper) may be truthful and challenge the status quo, and it may be more socially significant than autonomous works. Autonomy need not be a precondition for truth in art.

Nor need truth be the sole critieria for the social significance of art. In Australia the popular series Sea Change on the ABC was socially significant due to the power of public image making. Dallas is even more so. This indicates that there are a variety of reasons for art's social significance.

What is problematic with Malraux's museum without walls is the loosening of aesthetic norms in artworksWe all have hour own. But why are we elevating one kind of art into our museum and not another. On what grounds? Malraux is not convincing at this point----he simply says that there are large areas of agreement about what we would all admit to our ‘museums without walls’. This implies some form of normative historical aesthetics but it is not clear what. Which bits of the culture industry? Which bits of indigenous art? Which bits of the built environment?

What are the standards and critieria being used to select the bits for our museum? Is it popularity? Commercial success? Cultural heritage?

making cities work

Adelaide is in the midst of a festival of ideas. Tim Blair, keeps his iconoclastic image intact by calling it Adelaide’s Carnival of Sour Left Wing Rabble. The carnival for lefties that is supported by the SA Government, has a diverse program, including an urban theme that links into the ongoing concerns of the thinkers of residence programme about making cities work.

Making cities work is topical issue in spite of Tim Blair's disdain and anti-intellectualism. Despite the big shift to innercity living, the global city of Sydney, for instance, does not work well. Many people are leaving it because of the expensive housing, the 3-4 hours daily travel time to work and a polluted urban environment.

Adelaide, as Charles Landry, a thinker in residence points out, is too spread out to work properly. Though bounded by sea on the west and hills on the north, it is unbounded north and south. So it becomes a suburban spread with all the smaller communities becoming a vast expanse of housing with the southern beaches merging into one.

Adelaide is half the area of London yet has a seventh of its population. As a city Adelaide lacks the vibrant hubs and nodes around train stations and shopping centres where people can interact because of the multiple use: civic, retail, offices, services, cultural, entertainment. Consequently, shopping centres such as Marion, are often a building mass in an ocean of car parks; whilst some trains stations are not even connected to the shopping centre. It lacks the hubs and nodes where people stop, linger, and lead a public life rather than retreat into white picket fence domesticity.

Tim Blair may pour scorn on planning and aesthetics but bad urban design affects our lives. Adelaide started of well with the great colonial grid and became a town of rectangles with parks.

Looking back to the 1950s from now, we can see that Adelaide's progress or development was badly designed. There was lack of imagination then--it was all about cars, factories and public housing. There was little sense of urban joy, poetics or commitment to place. Suburban modernity in the Playford era was the Lucky Country: buying a home, planting a lawn, establishing a garden and washing the car in the driveway. The house was functional but it stood for quality of life. Those living in a wholesome suburbia turned an empty shellor box into some sort of place-bound home that stood for a flight from the stench, disease and squalor of the inner city.

What is now acting to make cities not work well? All the talk is about efficiency and we do not connect cities to place.

Today, bad urban design continues, because architectual design is disconnected from sustainablity and there is a lack of eco-friendly urban development. The urban ecologist, Herbert Girardet, another of Adelaide's thinkers in residence, has pointed towards sustainable dwelling. He has rightfully argued for solar hot water systems and rain water tanks to be made compulsory on all new buildings.

However, the ideas being tossed around about making cities work better have yet to be connected with dwelling.Or the lack of dwelling as the dark side of modernity. The form of glass skyscrapers of Mies van der Rohe signifies the indifference to poetic dwelling.

What we do is seek the traditional beachside shack to regain dwelling in the sense of belonging and rootedness in an unstable and constantly changing society. This stands for tradition, security and harmony. It guarantees wholeness and meaningfulness in a homeless world.

Or we turn to place as eco-rural living ecotone, as exemplied in Living at the Edge with its deep concern about protecting wilderness of Tasmania's old growth forests in the Tarkine from logging. From this perspective dwelling and urban life are opposites.

This forgets that place is a basic concept of architecture.It refers to the relationship between the built form to the landscape.

living with dogs

For those who share their lives with dogs. I just love that sign. It is so different to the authoritarian signs on South Australian beaches that increasingly ban dogs from roaming free on beaches with their guardians. Even deserted beaches in mid winter.

The phenomenon of dog attacks is increasingly being used to ban dogs from public places. There are less and less places where dogs can run free in a city, such as Adelaide. They are less free than the violent, abusive homeless kids who roam the city streets destroying houses and cars. It is the dogs who are monsters not the kids.

The above link is via Joseph at reading and writing. He has a lovely post on having dogs around, being included in their animal lives and living with them like an animal in the world. He expresses a way of living with then in a shared world. I have yet to Santayana's Animal Faith and Spiritual Life. But here is a link to a book by a philosopher writing about living with dogs.

Here is a photo of Ari, our apricot standard poodle, taken at Secret Beach Mallacoota.

The photo was taken when we were on holidays in May of this year.

And this is Agtet, our grey standard poodle.

The place is Petrel Cove in Victor Harbor. The photo was taken just prior to going on holidays.

Ooops, Suzanne says that the photo was also taken at Secret Beach in Mallacoota. And she is right.

literary culture vs visual culture

I've never thought of it before. That a high romantic literary culture would have been opposed to the emergence of a visual culture that was informed by photography and its concern with the real. I had always thought of photography in terms of its relationship to painting and it developing into a visual culture (cinema, television, digital reproduction and manipulation) that became the modern mode of representation.

This book review (via wood s lot) suggests the need to consider photography in relation to ra romantic literary culture. I had completely forgotten Baudelaire's protestations that photography leaves no room for the imagination. The romantics we continually condemned the images that began to form the visualscape around them.

Regarding the Pain of Others#5

Rick's fifth entry on Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others is about our horror at human suffering. The image selected is Titian's painting, The Flaying of Marsyas.

A description of the painting is here. In the painting Marsyas is being skinned alive. The painting expresses horror in the form of is a myth. This is the sublime in Edmund Burke's sense. Burke associates the fear of death, dismemberment, terror, and darkness (e.g., a howling wilderness) with feelings of the sublime. This account transforms aesthetics and this powerful current leads to Adorno's shudder.

Sontag makes the following remark about the sublime as horror:

"An invented horror can be quite overwhelming....But there is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it; say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken; or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be."

We do not need myth. We have plenty of examples of historical horror that readily come to mind. There are those of innocent people killed in war (from nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima) or of people being brutually tortured. We think of the Gulag of the former Soviet Union, the German Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia and Rawanda.

So there is a role for art to express the horror of the twentieth century. There is no doubt that instrumental economic reason needs to create spurious irrational enclaves (criticism, populism etc), and it treats art as one of them in its seemingly rational world. However, as noted in a previous post, the language of asethetics lends a voice to human suffering. If art's conception of truth is couched in the language of suffering, then it ought to speak about the big historical horrors. It is a form of knowledge.

Let me give an example from Australia in the form of the deep suffering of indigenous people, due to genocide. By this is meant the destruction of people by white Australia through systematic violence and systematic racial discrimination. That has yet to happen. Consequently, the white Australian nation is haunted by its history, and shamed by the revelations of the Bringing Them Home Inquiry. The ghosts of the past do inhabit the nation, and will do so until the unspeakable is expressed. Art can express the suffering contained in the words Genocide, Trauma, Guilt, Shame, Willful Forgetting, Denial

That is the historical example of horror that resonates with Australians. Each people would have their own historical horror.

The writing of history often aims at 'calming the dead who still haunt the present, and at offering them scriptural tombs' through the technique of 'that was then and this is now'. It renders the past at once quite strange and quite inconsequential through some form of forgetting. So art can speak.

What is missing in Australia are the great works of art that express the suffering and horror of the destruction of a people. Modern art has yet to give expression to this suffering. For the sake of the argument let us say that we have a great work of art that expresses, or lends a voice, to the historical suffering of indigenous Australians.

Sontag is right about shame. As Kay Schaffer observes in relation to The Bringing Them Home Inquiry:

"The shame experienced and recounted by the victims is an altogether different phenomenon from the shame experienced by white respondents to testimonies of oppression. For indigenous Australians, shame comes from becoming a mere object for another, rendered inarticulate, constantly under surveillance, yet never acknowledged, being discounted, ignored, and trivialised by people in authority, reduced in their daily lives to an abjected or an objectified status, seducing them to a kind of non-existence. Their shame was not only effected by the gaze of their oppressors and the internalisation of values that structured their difference as inferiority but also, and significantly, through the practices of non-recognition by the dominant Australian community that shamed them in to silence."

Shame is different from guilt.

Where I differ from Sontag is at the point of her recoil from the horror. I suggest that we should confront the horror.

My point of difference with Sontag is with her claim that:

"Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it."
.
A particular response that Sontag does not mention is concern. Concern is triggered by great works of art. In Aesthetic Theory (pp.346-7) Adorno says that:

"Concern is not some repressed emotion in the recepient that is bought to the surface by art but a momentary discomfiture, more precisely a tremor during which he gives himself over to the work. He loses his footing, as it were, discovering that the truth embodied in the aesthetic image has real tangible possibilities...experience congeals in an instant, and for it to do so the whole of consciousness is required rather than some one-dimensional stimulus and response."

Concern as tremor is not a pleasurable experience as it gives rise to the ego being shaken up and to the historical shudders. Our historical shudders have primal roots in a fear of the horrible that is coupled to a sense of helplessness. The historical memory of shudder needs to be translated and the strangeness that grips us made understandable.

As Adorno puts it, art "remains loyal to shudder not by reverting to it, but by preserving its legacy."

Derek Allen Interview #4

The post picks up on the fourth part of Rick's interview with Derek Allen over at Artrift.

Rick picks up on the calcified assumptions that underpin the way we regard artworks, artists and critical reflection from within the art institution. He asks whether these assumptions act to displace and marginalize Malraux’s account of art. Derek says that "...by its very nature Malraux’s account of art is neither art history nor aesthetics as those terms are generally understood today."

He then rightly says that this falling between two academic stools is not good grounds to disqualify Malraux’s account of art:

"The onus in such a case is surely on scholars to look beyond the boundaries of their existing systems of thought and try to come to grips with Malraux on his own terms."

Derek then makes some critical remarks about art history. Deservedly, because this particular discipline is one that gives the humanities a bad name. I remember art history as being about the mania for documentation, a cult of fine discriminationand very little interpretative criticism. Its academic practitioners were deeply hostile to theory (aesthetics, social science or the interpretation of texts), and they used biography to indicate autonomous art's social determination.

Thomas Crowe says that:

"...the received image of the discipline is of a genteel, barely intellectual pursuit, untouched by theory or even self-reflection, more about black-tie openings than shirt-sleeved intellectual debate, tainted by snobbery, social climbing, and the art trade, historically the soft option among the humanities."

This is downside of the humanities. Those like Invisible Adjunct, who righly defend the humanities in a corporatised university, do not consider that some of the disciplines of the humanities are not actually worth defending.

What the discipline of art history gives us is the linear development of art within closed sequences of an autonomous history of genres. This presupposes static social structures, which is an untenable presupposition today.

There is little chance of them reading Malraux and critically reflecting on their understanding of the aesthetic as there is of them reading Adorno's Aesthetic Theory But things are changing for the better with recognition of the body as a legitimate way of knowing.

This loosening up of calcified assumptions may open up possibilities to explore ways of treating the history of images in a fundamentally different manner than we are accustomed to.

Regarding the Pain of Others#4

Rick's fourth entry on Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, is very brief.

It consists of an image (an engraving) entitled The Dragon Devouring the Companions of Cadmus by Hendrick Goltzius, a Baroque engraver and painter.

Under this engraving is a brief sentence from the Sontag text.Rick quotes Sontag thus:

“It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked.” (Sontag, p.41)

And Rick asks:

"Is Ms. Sontag right about this? "

It is hard for me to answer this question. I do not have sufficient knowledge of art history. Nor am I an art historian. And I have just been advised by my bookshop that it will take six weeks for Sontag's book to arrive.

So I am going to take a different tack and bring art and aesthetics together by briefly highlighting the way of knowing of the aesthetic in relation to other ways of knowing (eg., science)

The first tack starts from what I find most striking about the Goltzius image: it is an image of the sensuous human male body. This image shows that the concern with the body is not just the concern of a fashionable postmodernism. The body is a traditional part of the concerns of art.

The centrality of the body in art is what is implied by the Sontag quote.

And aesthetics as well. It was born as a discourse of the body with Alexander Baumgarten. This modestly opens up the world of the material body not mind or the theoretical and abstract reason; the body as the site of lived, sensous experience. It recognizes that the world of perception and experience based on the world striking the body cannot be grasped through abstract scientific laws; it has its own way of knowing through the desiring body as a sensibly experiencing organism.

Normally, bodiliness in art is about (masculine) pleasure and desire. In the Hendrick Goltzius engraving we do not just have a powerful beautiful body:--we have a mutilated body, one that has been wounded from being devoured.

It is, if you like, wounded from the inscription of social power on the human body.

My second tack is to turn to Adorno to uncover the significance of the mutilated body in art. Why Adorno? Well he argues that the language of asethetics is to lend a voice to human suffering; it is the expression of suffering in a damaged life. In his Aesthetic Theory Adorno says:

"...rational cognition has one critical limit with its inability to cope with suffering. Reason can subsume suffering under concepts; it can furnish means to alleviate suffering; but it can never express suffering in the medium of experience. For to do so would be irrational by reason's own standards." (p.27)

Art's conception of truth is couched in the language of suffering.

So what we get with Adorno is a form of systematic theory (aesthetics) that is integrated with expressive concerns.

Derek Allen Interview: Part 3

Rick over at Artrift has posted the third section of his interview with Derek Allan from the ANU.

This section discusses the reason for the discipline of aesthetics not taking up Malraux's ideas on the historicity of the western understanding of art and the revolutionary shift in our understanding of art. Derek says that:

"The discipline of aesthetics has a fairly long history now and has tended, I think, to leave a deposit of familiar ideas that have in certain cases hardened into something like dogmas. Ideas like, for example: that art must necessarily have something to do with beauty, or that art is in some way a ‘representation’ of reality, or that the artist ‘sees the world’ more perceptively than the rest of us, or that he/she is necessarily ‘more sensitive’ than the rest of us, or that the artist ‘expresses’ himself in his work, or that works of art ‘reflect’ the historical period in which they are created, or that a work of art is the product of various artistic or psychological ‘influences’, or that the history of art is in some way a series of ‘advances’, or that art as we understand the idea is a human constant, common to all cultures at all times."

This list captures a lot of the key ideas of aesthetics---or what is left of it---and includes many of the habitual, or taken-for-granted ways that those in the art institution regard art, artists and the creation of art works. These contradictory ideas which we use to think about art form the sedimented common sense of the art institution. Yet there is little critical reflection upon them. Hence the need for philosophical aesthetics.

In large part the commonsense ideas indicate a problem in aesthetics, or the way we currently think about art, the way it changes and mutates. If we take what Malrauz says is true (ie., the inclusion of non-western cultural objects into art), then aesthetics has fallen behind art. Aesthetics lags behind art and this is why it is widely distrusted. In lagging behind it acts to cover up what is happening to art works and so it fails to understand artworks today. Aesthetics becomes traditional and it ends up in a prescriptive role to art imposing alien concepts or norms on art.

Hence there is a need for critical self-reflection on the works of art in the art institution. It is the only hope that aesthetics has to survive. It is what Malraux invites us to do: moving beyond commentary on specific works of art that take the concepts for granted to thinking about the concepts. A modern, as opposed, to a traditional aesthetics, should dissolve the conventional aesthetic categories.

The above commentary is limited. It is less exploring the ideas than bringing Adorno's Aesthetic Theory into a dialogue with Malraux and Allen. Why do this? Because Adorno's aesthetics unmasks the pretence of traditional aesthetics that its aesthetic norms are eternal and immutable; develops a complex model of the social mediation of art; and argues for the social significance of autonomous art.

living wrongly in modernity

Do you have that sense of living in a house that is one's home but is not really home?

More deeply, do you experience a sense of wrong living?

I do. It occured to me as I walked into a city bookshop to try and buy Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others. (No luck. It has to ordered from the US and it will take six weeks.)

As I walked north through the city's side streets to Hindley Street, I became increasingly aware that I was livng a modern urban life that generated a poverty of genuine experiences. I have a sense of a disintegrated urban life.

There was little sense of joy, adventure, growth, transformation on the streets. They felt dead. Full of cars. The concrete urban spaces create a profound sense of discomforture and unease. The heritage Leigh Street, which was restored and marketed as a thriving, dynamic ands active precinct, was dead.

Does modern architecture embody any hope for a better kind of life? It designs home and gives it form.

It occured to me that I live in an expensive trendy inner-city apartment that celebrates its modernness (innovation) against the tradition of the heritage cottages. But a house is not just a work of art. We have to use ithe building and dwell in it.

Yet the building has no sustainability built into it. It is all air-conditioned. There is no solar power. There is no recycling of storm water.

Apart from the built-in security against the anxiety created by the violence of the chaotic street, this building has no sense of the contradictions, dissonances and tensions of modern life.

And this is in a city that is on water restrictions,located in the driest state in the driest continent, and dependent on an increasingly salty river for its drinking water.

It is living wrongly. It is a wrong sort of life.

Then I came across this from from Adorno's Minima Moralia:

"Dwelling in the proper sense, is now impossible.....Wrong life cannot be lived rightly." (pp. 38-39)

And most of my income is now going to pay off a mortgage for a life lived wrongly.

This whole city is living wrongly. I have an uncanny sense that I am living a life that has been imposed upon us by the socio-economic process of modern capitalist civilization. Our architecture has been shaped by, and is a part of, modernity.

It is not a critique of modernity. It's modernist culture is complicit. Dwelling fades into the distance.

Our culture is one of forgetfullness.

Regarding the Pain of Others: Comment 3

The third entry in Rick's Sontag project is here. It is a photo of a mother at a land settlement meeting in the Spanish province of Estremadura in the 1930s, by the photojournalist and co-founder of Magnum Photos David Seymour (Chim). The mother has a baby on her breast, is apprehensive and is looking warily up to the sky.

The historical context is land reform in 1930s Spain. It was a pressing problem, especially in the south and southwest where absentees owned almost all the land. There, the landless farmers were virtually indentured. In Estremadura sixty thousand peasants had occupied fallow lands. Seymour was a concerned photographer whose work appeared in magazines, and so his images were a means to tell stories of people, places, and events. But his work has been culled from the culture industry, decontextualized from its orignal narrative and reframed by the art institution as exemplary photojournalism. Seymour's photograph then becomes an object worthy of aesthetic appreciation and a collectible object.

In responding to this image Sontag says:

"The photographer's intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it." (p.39).

Rightly so. We have no idea of Seymour's intentions here. Nor can we empathize with them to gain historical understanding despite the emotional appeal of the closeness of the concerned photographer to the subject. What we have is a historical text without the benefit of the magazine spreads in which they appeared; a historical text that appeared in the mass media of the day as a documentary photo that bore witness to the events and experiences of of the day.

Though we have a cultural remains or trace of another period that is infused with meaning, we cannot get inside to see the world as either Chim or the mother did. Some----liberal humanists--- try and get round this problem by saying that we can bring people in the past who are so different to us by making them the same as us. Because they are the same as us--ie., we all have the same human nature--- we can gain historical understanding by empathizing with them in their situation.

This stripping people from their culture and stressing that people are, and always have been the same, becomes a ghostly centre in a postmodern world.

We can ask does this kind of documentary photo function as a form of critique in a society of the spectacle. Can it continue to give voice/expression to human suffering---the pain of others---in a culture of commodity aesthetics?

Sontag seems to think so. She says that our historical memory has:

"...conferred emblematic status on Chim's picture not for what it is described as showing (an outdoor political meeting, which took place four months before the war started) but for what was soon to happen in Spain that would have such enormous resonance: air attacks on cities and villages, for the sole purpose of destroying them completely, being used as a weapon of war for the first time in Europe."

With this Sontag undercuts the appeal of classic documentary photography in terms of its aura of truth which is the result of it being a representation of that's how it was. That old chestnut, that documentary photography offers an unmediated view of the world, is put to one side. With concerned photography we shift away from what the camera saw to the photographer who sees, not the camera; nor do cameras themselves make pictures. We accept that photographs do not offer a factual representation of the world, unbiased by the intervention of the photographer. The photographer interperts.

But Sontag is saying more than this. She is saying that what is important in the documentary picture is not that it represents what is real or true. What is important is the historical meaning of the cultural message---the air attacks on a civilian population. And this meaning resonates today with the US bombing of Baghdad.

However, there is more interpretive flux going on than Sontag makes out with her tacit appeal to the truth of documentary photography. The redescription of the past gives us an anti-war photo. But the texts of the past can continue to be redescribed----eg., the mother's relaxed comportment to breast feeding in a public space in Spain compared to a puritanical Australia in the 1930s. All these different interpretations both lean on each other and differentiate themselves from one another. This flux of interpretation destablizes the past, and in the cracks that are opened up, new histories can appear.

reclaiming public spaces

I am glad to see that the claw back of public access to the Harbour cliff tops is now happening in the built environment of Sydney. Land ,such as this, should never have been allowed to have been privatised in the first place. Too much of Sydney Harbor has been privatised. Public spaces need to be reclaimed and a more civilized relationship between public and private spatial expression established.

Too many spaces along cliff top walks, beaches and river frontages in our major cities have been privatised, and the public locked out from what should have remained urban public spaces. Such areas should have remained crown land and so part of the public commons so that the people as a whole can share and use the space as members of a community.

South Bank in Melbourne is a good example of the reclaiming of the public space along the Yarra River. Another is the transformation of the old Expo site on the Brisbane river into the public space of the South Bank precinct. South Bank in Brisbane is a strong public space that counters the withdrawal from the public sphere into the privatised suburbs to ensure self-preservation.

The fight to create the public space shows that the importance of public space in our cities has not died. The notion of the agora and square has been diminished by the car and the relationship to the public space and public buildings died. Victoria Square in Adelaide is a classic example of cars eating a public space.

In a market culture the above South Banks act as a counter to the authoritarian populism that extends the coercive of the state over public spaces with its anti-crime campaigns. This populism reduces a public urban space to a harmonious leisure spot or place to eat lunch, and so disconnects a public space from democracy. All that is left in Adelaide, for instance, is the steps of Parliament itself.

From the perspective we can view and interpret the spaces of the urban environment in terms of a landscape of power.

Derek Allen interview: Part 2

Rick over at Artrift has posted the second section of his interview with Derek Allan from the ANU. In it Allen addresses Malraux's argument that a fundamental change took place in how we in the West understood aesthetics.

Derek says that the reason:

"....Malraux focuses so strongly on specific works of art is that he wants to draw our attention to the enormous change that has taken place over the last century in what we – the West – include under the rubric art. We take it for granted now that art includes objects such as (certain) African masks, Indian bodhisattvas, or Mesoamerican figurines. But this was certainly not taken for granted in 1900, Malraux reminds us."

This is is important. What is being described here is the way Australians have changed their attitude to the cultural products of indigenous peoples. Once there were just artifacts from a dying civilization at a time when our art galleries were filled with portraits of dead white people from Europe (England).

After the 1970s the cultural products of indigenous poeple are deemed to some of the most innovative art works being produced in Australia. The acrylic desert paintings have been interpreted as helping to define contemporary Australian art. So when Malrauz tralks about 1900 in a European context we need to redescribe this aesthetic shift as the 1970's in the Australian context.

Could this shift be a change in taste? Allen says no:

"What happened was not comparable to a shift in ‘taste’ from, for example, Baroque to Romantic (assuming that the notion of taste could explain even that). For the first time in human history, Malraux points out, one culture began to admire the works of all other cultures. Malraux calls it an ‘aesthetic revolution’ and argues – with good reason in my view – that it signified a fundamental shift in the very notion of art, and in how we respond to art."

I reckon this is right. Art in itself has gone. We now think of art in its historical context. And this has import for aesthetics as a discipline. As Derek says:

"Personally, I don’t think one can approach the philosophy of art sensibly today without taking that development into account and trying to understand its significance."

Alas, the discipline of aesthetics, in general, suffers from a lack of historical perspective. This does not seem to matter since aesthetics is marginal not only in the sense that it lies at the edge, or border, of the philosophy discipline, but also in the additional, more troubling, sense that it is deemed to be philosophically unimportant. As Adorno put it in Aesthetic Theory:

"Like the idea of a philosophical system or a philosophy of morals, the notion of a philosophical aesthetics seems awfully antiquated. This perception is not confined to artists and public opinion, both of which are indifferent to aesthetic theory. It is a sentiment one runs into even amongst university students." (pp. 456-457).

Aesthetics seems obsolescent and it is mistrusted.

Regarding the Pain of Others: comment 2

The second entry in Rick Visser's project on Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others can be found here. The image is Robert Capa's photo of a male Republican soldier being shot on a hilltop during the Spanish Civil War. It is a defining moment of photojournalism that is going through a crisis of identity.

Sontag says that:

“It is a shocking image, and that is the point. Conscripted as part of journalism, images were expected to arrest attention, startle, surprise."

Then----in the 1930s----but not now. It is a memory image of our culture. We have to work at it to read it. We are reading the past and we need to remember what has been forgotten in a consumer culture enwrapped in the dreams of the present.

We re-read Capa's photo as the past from our present situation in Australia and not in terms of some presuppositionless interpretation. We do not slough off the present when we do this, not we read it within an overlay of historical interpretations about war, photography and culture. Someone in Spain, for instance, is going to read this quite differently to someone in Australia. The Spanish civil war is the past and, as the past, it is an otherness. And in making the past familar we are not engaging with the past in itself----that photo---but what others have written and constructed about the past.

In short, we are engaging with Sontag's interpretations of war photos and the way she understands the role of interpretation and cultural criticism in reponding to visual texts. And what is Sontag's interepretation or cultural criticism trrying to do?

This link via the resourceful wood s lot gives us a clue. Catrinona Mills says that Susan Sontag:

'....saves her passion not to attack the voyeuristic misuse of representations of pain but in order to critique the writing of others. She is quite clearly angry at recent French thinkers on media and those theorists who accept their thinking on the “spectacle.” She sums up the argument: “Each situation has to be turned into a spectacle to be real—that is, interesting—to us. People themselves aspire to become images: celebrities. Reality has abdicated. There are only representations: media (109).'

This refers to Guy Debord's text The Society of the Spectacle A society of the spectacle would be spectacles in the form of the Clinton Sex Scandal, or the 1991 U.S. invasion of Iraq as shown on CNN: the parading of state power as a form of entertainment that masks socio-political actualities. But the society of the spectacle also refers to the autocratic reign of the consumer market economy and what the French would call globalization as the Americanization of the world. It is a world without historical memory, where the circulation of images flow and merge, like reflections on the water.

Regarding the Pain of Others: comment 1

I mentioned in an earlier post that Rick from Artrift has a project on Susan Sontag's new book on photography called Regarding the pain of others. That work involves an interpretation of photographic representation of the suffering of others.

I've decided to comment on Rick's project entry by entry on this weblog.

The first entry is here. In it Rick says that there is an interesting connection between the photographic representation of the pain of others and the program of the avant-garde in its effort to shock. He then gives us a quote from Peter Burger's book Theory of the Avant Garde about Dada, shock and provocation.

Burger argues that the avant-garde challenges the Modernist assumption of the autonomous status of art and celebration of the distinction of art from bourgeois society. The avant-garde does this by challenging the institution of art itself, the conventional means and modes of the contextualization, and the reception of art in society.

War photos do provoke. Many of them are designed to do so, eg., Mathew Brady's matter of act photos of dead bodies lying on the ground to show the horrors of the American civil war. He shocked America by displaying his photographs of battlefield corpses from Antietam and so tore away the romance of war. He was able to do so because it was assumed by his audience that photography, unlike art, mirrored the real.

I have two quibbles with Rick's suggestive montage of the Sontag book and the avant garde.

War photos do take us beyond the avant garde's challenge to modernism. The avant garde aimed to shock, but they also wanted to return art to everyday life. War photos are a part of everyday life; integrated into our social practices. War photos are then selectively picked up by the art musem and turned into art.

My second quibble. War photos touch the core of our humanity in a way that the Dadists never did. We do not respond as if viewing an art object. We respond to the child runninng down the road burning from napalm as human beings. We do not see this as art. It is the horror that shocks us.

These quibbles do not undermine Rick's montage. With these differences in mind we can think about the shock good war photography has on us. This shock is a long way from the images produced by the embedded Fox Television journalists that glamourised and so romanced the Iraqi war.

But do war photographs shock us now? Or has the effect worn off?
(life intervenes)

a virtual life

Too much of a virtual life can end up ruining your real life.

From
Miranda Devine.

She speaks sense for once.

More on Malraux

There is the start of an interview with Derek Allan over at Artrift. Derek Allan who is at the ANU wrote the very fine paper on Malraux's theory of art that I outlined here.

selling the academy

Invisible Adjunct has a great post on the rise of the academic superstar (or celebrity) in the declining humanities. She says:

"..the academic superstar phenonemon might actually point to a decline. That is, as the liberal arts sink lower and lower in public esteem .... the cultural gatekeepers to the liberal arts respond to this degradation by seeking to inflate the value, as it were, of a select group of its professors."

It is a covering up the dirt of the ongoing trashing the humanities and the underpaid and unsupported causla teachers who increasingly teach many of the classes. That is the everyday reality behind the glossy facade of a visiting (overseas) superstar dropping in for a few days or weeks.

The celebrities are expected to perform and they are usually judged on their performance not on their ideas. This is an example of the academy copying the media by embracing the virtues of entertainment as culture and marketing their glossy image in the marketplace.

It is way to earn prestige. Buy it in. The corporate university hopes that some of the superstars prestige will rub off on the university and it will look better (more glamorous and fashionable) than its rivals. Hopefully the latter will then look more provincial and pedestrian.

a tragic sensibility

This article from the Washington Post is interesting. Since things are not turning out as "planned" in Iraq----the flowing of democracy in the Middle East and all that--- it may pay to view events in the Middle East through the prism of tradegy.

How so?

Why not the prism of Vietnam? The quagmire scenario.