Primal Screen 5 (fatigue)
August 15th, 2009 at 15:31Can you feel the aggression?
I don’t feel aggression. I feel envy.
When I shoot a photograph, I interrupt the continuity of visual experience. When I shoot at a photograph (or a mirror), I interrupt the illusion of depth. If you don’t believe me, take a look at André Kertész’s Broken Plate.
“In this picture of Montmartre, I was just testing a new lens for a special effect. When I went to America, I left most of my material in Paris, and when I returned, I found sixty percent of the glass-plate negatives were broken. This one I saved, but it had a hole in it. I printed it anyway. An accident helped me produce a beautiful effect.” (André Kertész)
Were I to describe the meaning of this beautiful effect, I’d say it contains a truth about the nature of photography. Contrary to a widespread wishful fantasy, shared by both image makers & spectators, a visual image cannot be deflowered. Piercing a picture’s surface does not allow me to enter into virgin territory; detecting a wound — a punctum — in an image (as Roland Barthes did) may destroy its coherence, but it doesn’t mean there will be blood. In a visual image penetration produces a blind spot. Nothing more and nothing less. Such is the curse of the primal screen. And such is the art of André Kertész’s Broken Plate.
Defloration envy: The wish to possess, to have at my disposal, a safe & secret interior protected by a fragile, renewable membrane. The desire for never-ending defloration. If woman can be deflowered, why doesn’t the visual image allow defloration?
There’s envy and there’s veiling. And then there’s fatiguing, the passion of John Sparagana.
From magazines known for the superb quality of paper and fashion photography (such as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Cosmopolitan) Sparagana tears out fashion advertisements. He then carefully rubs the pages between his fingers — Sparagana calls this activity “fatiguing” — until the pages lose their sheen and most of their substance. What remains resembles a translucent and elastic spider web behind which the image seems to have receded. Fatiguing separates what is normally thought to be inseparable in a visual image: the re-presentation of an appearance and the material support on which it is re-presented — panel, canvas, glass, paper.
The effect this surface treatment produces is uncanny: the photographic paper supposed to receive the image seems to veil it, hide it from my view. The Fatigues evoke a space set apart, secluded. Inside/outside. A sanctuary in which what is private and secret finds refuge. Looking at the Fatigues the gaze, this great colonizer, reassures itself: there will always be secrets; the world is not (yet) flat. By rubbing away the sheen Sparagana not only adds a sense of mystery to the superficiality of fashion photography and its obsession with appearance, he also creates marvelous ruins that evoke the beginnings of photography, an era when the perfection of the primal screen left much to be desired.
The Velum was yesterday, fatigue is now!
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André Kertesz, BROKEN PLATE, 1929, Paris, from a portfolio “Photographs Andre Kertesz vol. I, 1929, gelatin silver photograph, printed image 19.3 x 24.4 cm.
John Sparagana, SLEEPING BEAUTY, paper, sampled and fatigued, 2004.
go back to primal screen 4 + proceed to primal screen 6
Posted: August 15th, 2009
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