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February 08, 2004
Raoul Ubac.
I'm struggling to find work by this Belgian surrealist photographer to read it against the grain of the decayed (Greenbergian) formalist modernism of traditional art history with its presupposition "significant form," "the autonomy of the work of art," "pure visuality," "transcendence," the quest for "the essential," etc. That understanding of modernism would highlight ths:
Man Ray, Rayogram
I want to see if I can interpret this photography in terms of what is debased, abject, formless: the shift from "from the sky above to the mud below" and the loss of meaning and descent into chaos that this shift entails. Hence we have the return of the repressed" in an economy of excess, overflow and unreason: what Bataille has termed "expenditure without reserve."
Why this path of base materialism? To avoid the common type of "postmodern" discourse on the arts.
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