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The Human Form: How Much for that Image in the Window?

Photography’s subjects include the other visual arts along with their institutions such as museums, theaters, galleries, shows, festivals, and auctions, and their modes of spectatorship such as gallery tours or 3-D movie audiences.  So it is that occasionally the daily slide shows include images such as this one.

A woman is walking past an artwork at the 2011 Armory show in New York.  It is significant that she is shown in silhouette, that the photograph’s caption didn’t include the name of the artwork or artist, and that both spectator and artwork are framed in black.  Art and spectator are unified by a shared darkness, which also places them in a figure-ground relationship.  She is tied to the artwork even though not looking at it (she is walking by as if it weren’t even there to be seen), and it becomes the vehicle for revealing her presence (as if it had been designed for that purpose).  Neither inference is true, yet that is irrelevant to the photograph’s artistic effect as it is viewed by another, unseen spectator: you.

Way back in the twentieth century, it was easy to speak of the human person ensnared in structures of alienation, and to believe that the art could expose that alienation.  One could read this image in that way, but, well, the colored panels are just too bright, and the human form is not so much trapped as simply passing by.  By featuring both the jawline and the tightly bound ponytail, the silhouette has a decidedly anthropological cast.  She seems to be almost primitively human, as if part of one of those 19th (and 20th) century “ascent of man” pictures that were a centerpiece of evolutionary anthropology during its racist and sexist heyday.  But isn’t she going in the wrong direction?  Yes, and that is one reason we can assume that the old hierarchies no longer apply.  But what is going on?

The answer lies in the artwork behind her.  She is carrying her culture with her while passing through the historical corridor of modern art, while the art seems both more vibrant and the more enduring structure.  Its form imitates the bar code or other modes of systematic information display as they are designed for machine processing.  She is not so much alienated by that information as simply different from it; not so much alienated from the rectilinear code as the life form that is symbiotically related to it.  She is a human being while it is a human design, yet she is relatively primitive as it no longer needs her input while being more directly transferable across the  domain of information systems.  (Consider which one is easier to reproduce.)   As one of its tertiary functions, however, it provides the lighted background so that she can remain visible.

And remaining visible may be a gift worth having.  This image from the Shenyang stock market was taken far away from the Armory show, yet it uses a similar artistic repertoire.  The human figure is caught, albeit only in silhouette, as it is passing across a lighted data array.  The gauzy screen that is partially visible provides a nice artistic touch, suggesting a medium in both the technological and spiritual senses of the term.  Again, however, the mood can’t be fraught with angst: true, this time the colored columns are somewhat intimidating, as if in a dream that is going bad  (the blurry numbers tower above him while an alarming red band cuts across the screen at waist level), nonetheless, he is a happy fellow, smiling brightly as it hurries along.  As he is going in the same direction as the woman above, we might wonder what is there, off in the back lot of the march of progress?

More to the point, however, we might ask what value there is in highlighting the human form in a very modern world.  Both the stock exchange and the Armory show are marketplaces, and the human figure thus acquires not only aesthetic but also economic significance.  Photojournalism, which seems resolutely dedicated to realistic documentation of people and places, also can provide a different artistic platform for thinking about larger questions of how humans can inhabit the markets and other impersonal information systems that constitute modern life.

Artworks in their own right, photographs such as these can raise good questions about the human image, and, with that, about our place in a strange world of our own making.

Photographs by Timothy A. Clary/AFP-Getty Images and Tian Weitao/Xinhua-ZUMAPRESS.com.

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Fire, Darkness, and Endless War

Just outside the bright lights illuminating the democratic movements in the news this month lie the shadows of history.  Triumphant demonstrators smiled radiantly in Egypt, while the army quietly consolidated control.  As the tottering Muammar el-Qaddafi took self-caricature to new heights (breaking his previous record), other despots doled out cash and intimidation to make sure they weren’t next in line.  Western governments boldly announced their commitment to peaceful transitions, while sending envoys to curry business–much of it with autocrats–at an international arms show.   American pundits celebrated liberation and condescended to advise the fledgling democracies, while acting as if the US government and American corporations had never been the mainstays of the regimes being deposed for corruption and brutality.

So it is that I find this photograph a fitting image for the current historical moment.

The sun is seen through a windscreen in Dresden, Germany.  The screen would be invisible but for the ice crystals that are occluding the thick yellow disk hanging in the night sky.  One strand and part of another could be molten gold, while the dark splotches could be oil, dirt, bacteria–anything capable of smothering human life by slow accumulation.  The deep contrasts of light and darkness allude to German expressionist cinema–an expression of a time in history when the forces of darkness were massing beneath modernity’s cosmopolitan veneer.  The small crescent of light limning the smaller sphere in the upper left quadrant carries a different code, however, suggesting that nature’s regularities will continue, and that may be enough to provide some basis for hope.

Other regularities persist as well.  War, for example.

This photograph is one example of an image that appears periodically now: a convoy of oil tankers on its way to supply US troops in Afghanistan has been ambushed.  Here, as is often the case, the attack occurred in Pakistan, for reasons that are not mysterious.  What strikes me is now much this photograph resembles the one above.  Military action shot and artsy nature image are drawing on the same cultural repertoire, and in fact speaking to each other.  Light and darkness, the sun and ice or a fireball and unharmed spectators, the effect is much the same.  A source of power has become strangely complicated, and energy seems to be draining out of the future.   (The explosion mimes a mushroom cloud, which imitates the power of the sun, which sent the rays that made the plants that became the oil, so the circle of life and death may be tighter than we realize.)  If those in the picture aren’t exactly in a panic, their comfortable distance from the burn isn’t a sign of hope, either.  When war assumes the regularity of nature, you might as well get used to it.

Like the windscreen, the first photograph provides a trick of light: We see the sun, but it somehow can seem to mirror the earth: a bright place, covered with clouds and continents, vital and yet distant, a heavenly body yet strangely vulnerable and capable somehow of becoming lost.  There is another trick as well: the sun that seems to be slipping into darkness, is in fact rising.  The sun precedes the day, which has not yet come.  Light and shadow are forever bound together, but it can make all the difference which way one is moving.  Let’s hope that the light of history is on the rise for those wanting democracy rather than dictatorship and peace rather than war.  One must admit, however, that bright moments of change fly upward like sparks from a fire, while the darkness remains.  Hope, yes, but it will take more than hope.

Photographs by Arno Burgi/EPA and A. Majeed/AFP-Getty Images.

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Collective Bargaining and Catastrophe

The other night Jon Stewart derided facile analogies regarding the demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin.  Madison is NOT Cairo, he protested a tad too much.  Since I don’t work for Fox News, I’m not about to defend facile analogies, but I am going to make an admittedly risky comparison.

No, this is not Madison, either.  It is, or was, the Pyne Gould Corporation building in Christchurch, New Zealand.  The 6.3 magnitude earthquake that struck the city on Tuesday has compressed the four-story building to one mangled pile of steel and concrete.   The seismic wave has passed, but the building now looks like a ship that has been wrecked by military attack, like a half-sunken vessel at Pearl Harbor.  The bridge, though still intact, leans dangerously as the rest of the structure has run aground, slammed into ruin when the earth was moving like the sea.

The scene now is calm, and one could almost see the building as a curiosity.  Rescue workers, officials, and the occasional victim or bystander are evident, but everyone is seems a bit idle, almost perplexed about what to do next.  In fact, a larger version of the shot reveals that people are competently problem solving as they sort out the casualties and consider what to do next.  Public servants and private citizens are quickly and effectively coordinating their efforts to limit harm.

So what does this have to do with Madison?  The clue is provided by the letters still visible amidst the wreckage: CORP OR and we can’t quite make out the rest, but we know what it said: corporation.  Pyne Gould is a business, a for-profit entity that will contract with workers for their labor in exchange for wages.  When you see the corporate building reduced to rubble and completely dependent on the state for rescue, it becomes a tad harder to see taxation as a grave burden.  Most important, however, here you can see the corporation as a collective entity: as a building that contained lots of employees, as an enterprise that provided products or services for lots of customers, and, by extension, as a business that did so on behalf of the many stockholders or other people who invested in or owned the business.

Why do I mention this perhaps obvious point?  Because I am getting very irritated by the continual stream of news reports and editorials that describe (and often decry) the “collective bargaining” done by the unions under siege in Wisconsin and a number of other states having Republican majorities.   Why should there even be collective bargaining, many ask, when other workers don’t have the option?  (This is like saying that no one should get medical treatment since I currently don’t need, want, or have it.)  Most significantly, it seems unfair for a collectivity to gang up on the corporation, which is seen as a single entity.  (In Madison, the corporation is the state government, but the appeal is the same: unfair to join forces against the single employer.)  Of course, the corporation is a single individual before the law–but so is the union, so that legal fiction provides no basis for defining only one side of the negotiation as collective.

Corporations are just what the name says: corporate, collective bodies,.  They, too, engage in collective bargaining,  but on behalf of the owners or shareholders, not the employees.  There is no great harm in that, by the way: bargaining between groups is the key to a successful democratic society.  What is harmful is an ideology that masks one set of economic interests while making a corresponding set of concerns a target for denigration.

Which is why images of catastrophe can provide a civic education.  When disaster strikes, the executive can be crushed just as easily as the janitor.  When the facade of tall buildings is torn away, the rubble can expose the extent to which modern societies are complexly interwoven and comprehensively vulnerable.  Individuals remain valuable–even individual commercial corporations, and even stiff-necked governors bent on using an economic disaster as cover for political warfare–but they thrive only because society is already a vast, interconnected field of much larger things: buildings, transportation systems, state governments, global corporations, and even unions.

When disaster strikes, we can learn how it is that all bargaining is collective bargaining.

Photographs by Reuters and Christchurch Press/Reuters.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Fashion Week and the Creative Destruction of Happiness

OK, I get it: Fashion Week in New York is expected to be exotic and excessive, an uber-chic party for only the few and the very few.   Even so, I was a bit taken aback by this unexpected display of privilege.

I don’t think this kid is going to settle for paging through the American Girl catalog.  Runway seating is more valuable than a sky box at the Super Bowl, and yet this little princess is right there.  Admittedly, some are actually working for a living (yes, it must be said, some people have to, you know), but access will have been dear in any case.  Yet the photograph isn’t really about this anonymous child, but rather the social type she is performing.

While they are taking notes, she does them one better by recording the show.  You can bet that she might want to study the results, as she already is highly styled: note the lipstick, boots, hand on one hip, the other hip thrown forward, the long hair (are those highlights?), and the expert tilt of the head that makes a single line from elbow to apex.  She is a little model, and most of all in the face, which has that characteristic look of blank intensity.  (How they do it, I don’t know, but they all have it, and she’s too young to get it from the coke.)  Like other little girls, she is imitating the adults around her, but this kid is so far ahead of her peers it isn’t funny.  I have no doubt that she will become a very accomplished adult having well-honed social skills.

But will she be happy?  Surely, that is an unfair question to put to any child.  So, beware the unfair comparison that follows:

A wife kisses her husband at a celebration in Zhuji City, China, of couples who have been married for over fifty years. He certainly looks happy, and although the kiss could have been obligatory (and produced for the camera), we are to assume that they have achieved a good measure of happiness.  Everyone else in the picture seems to think that there is something to celebrate, and the couple’s mixture of intimacy and good humor is genuinely endearing, and especially so if you consider (as some of us can do more easily each year) that long association and physical aging are hardly guarantors of romance.  The message, particularly as the photo was part of a Valentine’s Day slide show, is fairly clear: love can continue to bloom like a rose, bright and beautiful, among those who have been able to live well together, even as they grown old together.

Youth is one end of the spectrum of a human life, and old age the other, and we can look to both ends of the lifespan to gain a better understanding of who we are.  One conclusion we should not draw is that fashion kills happiness.  Note, for example, the elderly woman’s beautiful jacket, and how her scarf and cap match while they pick up the jacket’s blue embroidery.  Even the old coot has a pretty impressive hat, while the trim lines, dark color, and good fit of his coat do no harm.  All societies cultivate a sense of style as they decorate their bodies and virtually everything else in the human world.

So what does this have to do with Fashion Week?  Look again at the two photographs, and you tell me.  What is there in the first but missing in the second, and again in reverse?  Some comparisons only help to point out how the comparison remains unfair: for example, the adults in the first case are working, while those in the second are at leisure.  Well, life is unfair, and that doesn’t stop it from being able to teach us a thing or two.

What strikes me about the first photo is how enthralled everyone is within a competitive gaze.  The optics are highly refined yet brutally selective, and for all the individuation that is evident everyone is caught up in powerful process of social reproduction: witness, for example, the line of blondes, none of them natural.  Decoration may be universal, but Fashion Week is a very specific social form of modern capitalism, and one that drives everyone toward competitive display and continuous consumption on behalf of faux individuation within demanding norms of homogeneity.  The business attracts creative people, and I’m all for it if only for its sociological value, but it also depends on unrelenting destruction: first, of whatever is not stylish this year; second, of the self esteem of all those little girls who aren’t going to be able to stand out by fitting in; and third, perhaps, as one edge of those neoliberal economic and ideological processes that are shredding the social fabric in one society after another.

Which is why the second photograph evokes both hope and fear.  Hope that other couples will be able to live so long and well as Jin Juhua  and Zhong Weiqiao, and, as they do so, have around them a supportive community with its many relationships and rituals.  And also fear that their achievement may be harder to come by or less likely to be celebrated.  Is there anything like that communal ceremony waiting for the little girl in the first picture?  Would she even want to be part of such an ordinary event?  Or will she have to settle for looking at herself one more time in the mirror?

Photographs by Timothy A. Clary/AFP-Getty Images and Guo Bin/EPA.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Summer Seminar on Picturing Reform

Picturing Reform:

How Images Transformed America, 1830-1880

June 19-24, 2011

Worcester, Massachusetts

The Center for Historic American Visual Culture is sponsoring a Summer Seminar that will will focus on the history of print production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; interpreting portrait paintings, prints, and photographs; “reading” illustrations in popular journals; and related topics.  Participants will also have access to the varied collections of visual materials of the American Antiquarian Society to pursue their own interests.

The seminar will be led by Louis P. Masur, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American Institutions and Values at Trinity College, along with other faculty.  The cost of the seminar will be $750 with some financial aid available for graduate students.  Housing will be at a hotel within walking distance; the room rate is about $100 per night plus taxes. Participants can share rooms at a considerable savings.

The deadline for applications to the seminar is March 18, 2011.

Additional information is here.

Detail from Currier & Ives’ The Republican Party Going to the Right House (1860).

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Lighting a Fire in Egypt

There have been so many photographs of the democratic protests in Egypt than one can’t help but look for something unusual.

This image is a remarkable exception to the parade of images: it contains no demonstrators, no police, no political slogans, no action.  We don’t see crowds or tanks or flags or blood or burned out buildings.  So what is being shown?

Perhaps irony.  I thought about making the caption “Things Go Better with Coke.”  Some political commentators are quick to contrast citizenship with consumerism, and so this image of pop bottles being “repurposed” as Molotov cocktails can seem doubly misplaced: the consumer product shouldn’t become the vehicle for political action, and the act of making these bottles into weapons degrades politics by turning it to violence.  It seems that Coke can’t win as a public good: no matter how much it might be the people’s drink throughout the world, it either distracts or destroys.

But that’s too clever.  Whatever irony is there–and some is there–the mood of the image is something else.  Organized trash is still trash, and that’s the best in the scene.  Broken and crumpled plastic are so much flotsam in this sea of stone, and the dingy case holding the grungy bottles is hardly a triumph of civilization.  True, someone carefully prepared each of the weapons, but now they sit there as if forgotten like some old thing left at the beach at the end of the season.  The scene seems forlorn, as if they called for a revolution and nobody came.

But, of course, the people did come.

Now we’re back to a more conventional image, and a beauty at that.  This view of Tahrir Square in the evening, filled with crowds and lights, brings back so much of what was missing before: the city framing the demonstration reminds us of its purpose of political reform on behalf of the general welfare, something that is being articulated by the banners and everything else flowing into the square.  The intensity of the scene is communicated both by the sheer density of the crowd and by the lights burning brightly.  The symbolism is obvious but no less meaningful for that: a democratic Egypt is awakening, blazing forth here and there and here again amidst the darkness produced by decades of authoritarian rule.

So it is that we are tempted to allow the second image to displace the second.  How much nicer it is to be lifted up emotionally rather than pushed into sarcasm or discouragement.  The pictures are not merely opposites, however.  Light is an effect of fire, and electric lights are the descendants of fire, and Molotov cocktails are weapons of fire.  More to the point, one reason the demonstrators can fill the square on Day 15 of the protests–one reason they can still be there, well-organized against the night–is that not too long ago some of them were making and throwing Molotov cocktails.  Despite all the froth in press coverage about Facebook and the Internet, this revolution has been a bloody battle.

We all should be grateful that it may be developing into a more peaceful and more recognizably political process.  But amidst the calls for “calm” and “patience,” we should not forget that democracy at times has to resort to violence.   Those who start there should be trusted even less than those who call for civility when it protects the corrupt, but there are other alternatives.  I don’t know whether the bottle bombs shown above were ever used, or even if they were used by those opposing Mubarak or those supporting him.  In Egypt as elsewhere, most of the violence will have been directed against the protesters by reactionary forces who usually are well-armed.  The fact remains, however, that more than one democracy has of necessity been born in violent confrontation.   The lights in the square this week may have been started by those who last week were willing to fight fire with fire.

Photographs by Ed Ou/New York Times and Hannibal Hanschke/DPA/ZUMAPRESS.com.

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Visions of the Future in the Chicago Blizzard

Disasters often provoke “finger pointing,” fault-finding, recriminations, and other accusations of failed responsibility.  As well they should.  Those who complain about “politicizing a disaster” usually have something to hide, and spirited public discussion of possible causes is essential for better preparation and improved response.  Even so, preoccupation with what did or did not happen before and during the event can lead to a missed opportunity.  Disaster photographs can contain hints of how the present contains within it alternate futures: suggestions, that is, of how present tendencies could lead to catastrophic conditions.  Those outcomes are not caused by the disaster, but they can be exposed as the smooth surfaces of a civilization are twisted into wreckage.

This photo from Tuesday’s blizzard is a lovely example of what I have in mind.   The crumpled SUV is positioned in front of Chicago’s magnificent skyline, as if the vehicle were a harbinger of things to come.  The wrecked car is one small example of the civilization symbolized by the tall buildings: all are miracles of metal and glass created by the industrial technologies now exposed to the elements once the car’s skin has been sheared away.  Of course, we are aware of the difference in scale and realize that the car can be towed away without loss to the urban core, and yet: could the city be more vulnerable that it had seemed?  Could the car and the city share not only a common environment but similar fates, different only in the time it takes for the entire society to collide with an increasingly harsh environment?

The more I looked, the more I realized how other photos were making similar suggestions.  This image of a long line of abandoned vehicles on Lake Shore Drive could be right out of a science fiction movie.  Somewhere between Victorian ideas of “heat death” and a dystopian future of abandoned cities, this image once again positions the disabled vehicles on a line toward the still illuminated buildings in the background.  Nature is clearly winning, however, and it is easy to imagine the feeble street lamps winking out and the climactic pall becoming ever more deadly, smothering everything at last.

The movie can’t dwell on panoramic shots, however.  We have to move in closer to get the real feel of decline and death.  This image of snow drifted into a bus does that very well.  We can imagine people once filing in, sitting, standing, and jostling as the driver navigated through traffic, and yet we can see only cold, inert abandonment.  Returning to nature, but not for organic regeneration, this is a scene of icy metal, useless equipment, brittle decay.  The door stands open, but no one wandering through would stay.  The snow is like desert sand, and this place has become a ruin.

Life would continue somehow, of course, but Beware the Prong People.  This image of a rescuer on a snowmobile will have brought relief to those trapped in the blizzard, but it can double as an image of a predatory nomads.  Morlocks on ice, Mad Max in the snow, whatever the allusion, the yellowish miasma of snow, fog, glare, and swirling winds suggests a hideous world where cyborg killers can prey on those already weakened by the unending storm.

Surely, however, it can’t get that bad.

If Blade Runner had been shot in Chicago in the winter, it could have looked like this.  But don’t feel too sorry for her.  She’s got her goggles and her Bud Light, and one person’s blizzard is another’s party. This could be a study in individual improvisation or in gradual cultural adaptation to a steadily deteriorating climate, but it doesn’t have to be so bad.  Her stylish insouciance in the face of the storm is charming, and one is reminded that the young often don’t know enough to cynical, which benefits us all.

A blizzard in Chicago is not a catastrophe, nor is it a disaster, not on the usual scale of things, anyway.  It is a disruption that can have unfortunate consequence in the individual case, but generally people deal with it and often are better for it.  Even so, the imagery is part of a larger archive of public art, and the artistic insinuations may be worth considering.  It’s not often that we take the time to consider just how the present may already contain the seeds of futures we’d rather not see.

The point, howover, is not to become either morose or dismissive.  The lesson once again lies in the last photo: The future might not be worse or better than the present, but simply different.  That might be the most disturbing thought of all.

First photograph by Henry C. Webster, Chicago.  Additional photographs by  E. Jason Wambsgans (2 & 3) and Brian Cassella (4 &5) for the Chicago Tribune.

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Arms and Empire: US Weapons and Egyptian “Stability”

One of the interesting facets of photographs is how they can contain information that often goes unnoticed.  The same is true of the discourses of empire.  For those living at the center of the system, the operation and effects of the imperial state might as well be invisible, for they have been neutralized by long periods of habituation and denial.  Thus, one thinks nothing when presidents speak of the need for “stability” in a region, not questioning how that is code for “continued support of authoritarian rule.” Or one is genuinely puzzled why demonstrators in a small country far away would burn an American flag–what have we ever done to them?  Even when caught up in the euphoria and instinctive identification with a democratic revolution, it is easy to overlook the evidence that at the end of the day geopolitical relationships may prove to be, well, stable.

This is one of many photographs from Egypt’s civic uprising that features army tanks surrounded by the demonstrators who could conceivably have been or still become victims of a military assault.  As John Lucaites pointed out on Monday, the images draw on a rich iconography of political upheaval while capturing key elements that are obviously important yet still not fully understood in this particular event.  The ongoing, often micro-political negotiation between the people and the army seems to be crucial to whether the demonstrations succeed or are betrayed and crushed.  That alone would seem to be reason enough for the photograph.

Even so, you might wonder why no one bothers to talk about the tanks themselves.  They are symbols, sure, but they also are real tanks having specific designs and manufacturers.  And that’s where some of the “missing” information is actually there to be seen.  The tanks in the long line are versions of the M1 Abrams.  I’m not positive about the tank on the left, but I’m fairly sure it’s an M60 Patton.   Want to guess where they are produced?

Tanks are not cheap, of course, but Egypt has the benefit of $1.3 billion in US military aid every year.  Although President Obama’s recent statements on behalf of regime change are a good thing, don’t think they is going to change the client status of the Egyptian state or the role of the Egyptian army, its officer corp properly schooled by the US, in maintaining that relationship.  As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others have already said, the military aid is not going to change.

And so a photograph of a democratic moment is also a photograph of an imperial relationship.  From there, its a small step to answering the question of “why they hate us.”

Unlike the army, the Egyptian police have not been playing nice.  Gassing, beating, shooting, spying on, and probably torturing the demonstrators, they have revealed in a few days what they have been doing continuously for many years.  The basic reason that many people hate the US is that we maintain dictators who run police states.  We support those autocrats by providing the enormous advantages in money, weapons, information, and just about anything else they need to suppress their own people. And the people notice.

So it is that we have the photograph above: If you look at the figure on the right, you might see the incarnation of a Fox News nightmare: the terrorist, black on brown, his face covered in defiance, his eyes sharply focused in hate.  (Or you can see a young man wearing a scarf to protect himself against tear gas and perhaps the secret police.)  But look at the tear gas canister on the left.  It will have been fired by the police into the crowd; its effects range from painful to terrifying to debilitating.  And look at the bottom of the can: “Made in USA.”

Photographs by Miguel Medina/AFP-Getty Images and Yannis Behrakis/Reuters.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Paper Call: IMAGE=GESTURE

IMAGE=GESTURE



Nomadikon, the Bergen Center of Visual Culture, has extended the paper call for its conference, Image=Gesture, to be held in Bergen, Norway, November 9-12, 2011.

As a critical and heuristic trope, the gestural galvanizes many of the most pertinent areas of inquiry in contemporary debates and scholarship in visual culture and related disciplines:
a) Ethics: Images and their values and affects.
b) Ecology: Iconoclastic gestures and spaces of conflict.
c) Experience: The human as acts of mediation/product of the gaze.
d) Epistemology: Archive, document, memory.
e) Esthetics: From visual essentialism to transesthetics and synesthesia.

Abstracts should not exceed 400 words. Please include a short bio. Deadline for submitting abstracts: March 1, 2011.

A more extensive description of the conference and submission guidelines is here.

Photograph by Ruth Frenson/New York Times.  Because Nomadikon has not offered an image for the conference, we thought we’d supply one–as a gesture, you might say.

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Scale and Magnitude in Public Culture

Skyscrapers are big, and walking through the concrete canyons of a major city can make one feel small.  But you can go to the observation decks high above the rest of the city, and everything looks small even though you know you are seeing miles upon miles of large buildings and great thoroughfares.  You can walk through the busy streets and feel enlarged by the social energy coursing through the city, or you can lean while lost against an anonymous building and feel desolate, not much different from the scraps of paper blowing down the alley.  If things go well, you might take a picture or send someone a postcard of the spectacular cityscape, but that, too, has been miniaturized by the technologies of visual reproduction.  So it is that contemporary artists draw on distortions of scale to make one stop and think about where we are.

Lorenzo Quinn’s sculpture, “Vroom Vroom” is now on display in Park Lane in London.   The Fiat 500 is held by an aluminum hand, as if the car were a child’s toy.   The title of the work is not ironic, as the artist says that he wanted to recapture the innocence and excitement of childhood.  By contrast with the stress of driving, parking, or dodging cars in crowded downtown streets, this artistic license seems a good way to go: Stop, smile, and think about how exciting simple things once were and can be, and about you already may have gotten your wish if you would but take the time to remember it.

That simple advice actually is harder to follow than it seems; one might say its about as easy as seeing a car as a toy car.   As children, it was easy to see toy cars as cars, but now we need an artist (and considerable public investment) to recover such freedom of imagination.  As well we should, and not as merely a break in a busy day, for good civic life requires just such inversions to be able to see  problems, solutions, and possibilities.  Public art, like the city itself, can school us in these shifts in scale so that we can become more likely to make sound judgments of magnitude, that is, of how much or how little needs to be done collectively for the general welfare.

And shifts in scale are not the only available inversions.  When I looked at the photo above, which I saw without the title, I had a sense not of excitement but of something closer to foreboding.  (No, I didn’t have a terrible childhood.)  Sure, the idea of a child playing with a car is there, but the child is not so innocent in such moments, as the ability to play god is also involved.  Perhaps I’ve seen too much science fiction or read too many Puritan sermons, but a hand coming out of the sky isn’t necessarily such a good thing.  The artwork may suggest the role of chance in life, something more easily felt when aware of how small one is relative to the sheer numbers and size of city life.  Cars are not plucked out of the air, but lives are crushed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and cities will not thrive if contingencies, including problems of scale, are not managed with imagination and vision.

And so one might even speak of light in the darkness.

But a table lamp?  OK, a very big table lamp: this giant was placed in Lilla Torg square in Malmö, Sweden over the holidays.  Not so much excitement here.  As the man pulls his bag across the cobblestones of the otherwise deserted square, he seems a lonely figure, hunched a bit into his overcoat against the cold, left to his thoughts–so much so that he seems oblivious to the enormous artwork glowing in front of him.  Yet the lamp highlights his isolation, for it has twice transformed the scene: first, by its inversion of scale, and second, by placing an artifact from the home in the public space.  Instead of moving through a small square, he now appears dwarfed by the city, and instead of heading for home or hotel, he seems fated to be alone in any space, public or private.  Perhaps the lamp was intended to brighten up the square with the light and decor of a gracious home, but it can just as well suggest that the city makes everyone homeless.

Inversions also can teach us that no one condition need be permanent.  These artworks involve inversions of scale and of affect, and together they suggest both that big things can be made small and that small things can loom large.  Questions of magnitude, otherwise known as the quality of life.

Photographs by Stefan Wermuth/Reuters and Yves Herman/Reuters.

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