n the Photographic Conditions of the Avant-garde, Rosalind Krauss states, "Surrealist photography exploits the special condition to reality with which all photography is endowed. For photography is an imprint or transfer off the real; it is a photochemically processed trace causally connected to that thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to that of finger prints or footprints.....Surreality is nature [the real/the index] convulsed into writing." Through a close reading of the text and the passages cited above, please translate the concept above into your own language. What does Krauss mean? Why is Surrealist photography so radical? What does "Nature convulsed into writing" mean? How can only indexical representation do this?
What is the 'special condition' present in photography? This condition as Krauss calls it is a paradox, what do I mean by paradox 'a statement that is self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth.' With this in mind I will deconstruct what this 'paradox' is in relation to the photograph. The paradox of a photograph is that of 'reality constituted as sign' what I think this means is, reality what we can/would consider the 'real' becomes something of a double of itself in a photograph becoming itself and the representation of itself simultaneously, therefore becoming paradoxical, meaning, it seems absurd to think of oneself as a self an (I), but also as a representation of (I) that will more than likely outlast the original 'real' (I) and create a representation of (I) that lives and lasts only in the photograph as a sign (or a peel off) of what (I) is/was/becomes. How does this paradoxical reading of a photograph relate to Breton's notion of Convulsive Beauty? In his manifesto 'Beauty Will Be Convulsive' Brenton gives us three examples of what convulsive beauty is stating: his first example is mimicry, which to Brenton refers to instances in nature where nature seems to mimic itself. In other words nature practicing the art of mimicking itself the example he uses of this mimicry is the markings on the wings of butterflies that mimic eyes. Nature without any help from man, mimicking itself with 'signs' that seem paradoxical, why would butterflies have eyes on their wings? (We know they do not, but we also know that the 'sign' we 'read' as eyes are there… meaning there are no 'real' eyes on the wings, but there are natural production of 'sings' of eyes available for 'reading'. The second example is 'expiration of movement' what he means by this is an experience with something that in nature or in the 'real' would be in motion but has in the experience of viewing/reading the image has been stopped, this reminds me of the images of Minor White, who's almost exclusive subject was nature. The third example given is the found object/verbal fragment, citing an instant of chance where the outside influenced 'real world' reflects some desire, becoming a (readable) sign of this desire. The graffiti image above is an example of this, this is a image that the photographer came across by accident, and that could be 'read' many ways, but this mark at this place in this time, meant something to the photographer it represented something about/to him in such a meaningful way that he 'saved' it from oblivion and created a paradoxical 'home' for the mark within the photograph.
ReplyDeleteThe first image from the top is truly surrealistic by being the overall epitome of what Surrealism set out to be. Surrealism’s crux was that the experience of reality as representation would be found by the concepts of the Marvelous and the Convulsive Beauty. The Convulsive Beauty could be found in work that dealt with mimicry, “the expiration of movement”, and the found-object (or found verbal fragment). Through these three examples the work at hand could be reduced to its natural symbol or sign. This reduction to a sign is at the core of what the Convulsive Beauty is, which is the experience of the real in representational form.
ReplyDeleteThe first image reveals the Convulsive Beauty by playing on all three aspects of what it could be. The woman is mimicked in the reflection of the water, the movement is embraced in the singular moment of cessation, and the found moment is the light embracing the singular chance of the exact action of the woman in the water. Through these three aspects the woman is reduced to her ultimate sign or representation; she is an object of desire; she is beauty. With the reduction of nature to its natural signs Krauss goes onto explain of how nature itself is convulsed into writing. Writing, or language, for all purposes is in itself a form of representation and symbol. It is a deliberate positioning of signs in a manner in which spacing and alignment are infused to create an overall experience of communication or language. It is the reduction of nature into its natural signs that the Surrealist can begin to then translate, through writing, the actuality of reality as a sign or representation.
This want to discover or capture the Convulsive Beauty leads us to the camera as an apparatus that is capable in capturing and exploring this concept of Surrealism. The actual use of the camera as an apparatus is what makes Surrealist Photography radical and also the only indexical process unto which can capture such reality (realties). The Surrealist speak of “the crop” as a means of isolating the world, or nature, from its ceaseless automatism. Through this crop the isolation of nature can be captured and then reduced to its natural sign. This isolation or cessation is at the heart of what the apparatus, the camera, is and can do; stop-motion. With this stop of motion the camera is able to capture a moment from reality that plucked from the grasps of the “reality-at-large”. This impression upon the glass, to then upon the paper, is the indexical realization of the cessation of movement to reveal the Convulsive Beauty. This cut, this frame, not only isolates nature to its natural sign but can also be read as a sign itself. As Krauss explains, “the frame announces that between the part of reality that was cut away and this part there is a difference; and that this segment which the frame frames is an example of nature-as –representation, nature-as-sign. As it signals that experience of reality the camera frame also controls it, configures it.” Through this framing the index reveals the natural sign and yet has the ability to deliberately double upon itself, which in turn reveals the intention of the photographer at hand. As Krauss explains, “doubling is in this sense the ‘signifier of signification’.” Never before has the artist had this ability to crop or frame such an indexical process and to explore nature at such a reduced existence (as sign or representation).
“Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all,” declared by André Breton in 1928.
ReplyDelete“Nature convulsed into writing” appears to mean Beauty convulsed into writing. It is nature as representation, as language. To punctuate a moment by photographing it means to cut out a moment in the continuum of nature. To punctuate means 1. to put punctuation marks in written work 2. to interrupt a situation or activity frequently 3. to do or say something in order to add emphasis. It is important to consider photography as a disruption or punctuation of the real. Convulsive Beauty is to be mimetic as well as an expiration of movement so that the object, that which is “the stream of absolute continuity.” This stopped object then becomes “a sign of the reality it no longer possesses.” The final and third qualification of Convulsive Beauty is the found object that signifies the desire of the subject.
“Put into play, an aesthetic of Convulsive Beauty not only transgressed the boundaries of an academic “Beauty” but the boundaries of rationality and formal logic, as well. In fact, Convulsive Beauty disrupted the very question of boundaries or classifications. As if mimicking the female hysterics…the surrealists used a strategy of Convulsive Beauty to ‘hystericize’ aesthetic, social, and ideological norms by calling all assumptions into question. Hysteria is precisely that “which escapes definition.”
This is why Surrealism photography is so radical. In making imprints from the real it allowed the signs in nature to imitate, stop, and be recoded. This recoding of signs from the real allowed surrealism to “hystericize aesthetic, social, and ideological norms by calling all such assumptions into question.” If hysteria came from the Greek “hustera” meaning uterus and nature often gendered not only as female but as mother, and Carol Armstrong’s engendering of photography as again not only female but as Mother, and the unconscious is all about the return to the Heimlich, the mother, then it seems that to remove the contradictions in life and to return to that which was repressed (again the Heimlich) it absolutely requires that which photography can provide and that is the imprint of the real. Nature is beauty and it is the punctuation of that beauty, that sign of desire, that is surrealism.
“The point of mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions”- André Breton
Part of the process, the experience, and the pleasure of being a good, close reader is learning to translate, paraphrase, and explain the lines you quote.
ReplyDeleteKim, what does it mean that nature mimics itself?
Angela, you mention several times that in Surrealist photography notes that the real is a sign? What does this mean and why is it significant. It is a basic idea (that we all take for granted) that nature and culture exist across an inseparable divide? So reality as sign? What might that mean? How does RK get there.
Why is spacing so important?
Louise ORourke
ReplyDeleteSurrealist photography is so radical because it takes what's real but then pushes it a step further. Such as the solarization process with a negative or a print. Using solarization to manipulate say an image shot from nature changes the image of what was taken from the real. The real in this case becomes surreal, a world that doesn't exist a world created.
The image provided in the writing, Bill Brandt Perspective of nudes shows the cut from reality in two different moments at the same time. Giving the viewer a cut from the real at two separate moments.
This can also be seen as the photographic prints spacing.
Surrealism takes what's real and turns it into a language. Using signs to represent things instead of putting in font of your face. Instead of giving it to you. Taking from the real and seeing something more than just what the eye can see. The Spoon that Breton found in the flea market represents a repetition, a reduplication which i then began to see after reading this text. The surreality of the object is that its infinity is not there for everyone to grasp. Its not there when you first look at it. The word imagined is used in describing this idea of infinity and through that imagination can we then see this idea that breton is talking about. This for me is where the surrealist are surrealists. Taking an object and creating more meaning than maybe was meant. The index provides us with this because the heel of the spoon is a sign. Through indexical representation the heel can then be seen as a sign. The surrealist were visionaries that could see more than what was given and then attach that vision or sign to the object or the real. they manipulated reality or replaced it through a form of writing.
Krauss' attempt, it seems, is to reveal the radical paradox of the surrealist photograph as both an index and a sign. OR rather, that due to the various manipulations of surrealist practice, and due to the practice of framing itself (spacing), surrealist photography infused in reality a new idea, a new vision: that perhaps the photographic experience of an element/index wrested from external-reality-at-large is a presentation of one bit/clause/phrase in the larger semiotic meaning of it all--the larger picture of visual "reality" as an infinite and ceaseless automatism ("automatic writing of the world", as she puts it)--manifesting itself as both sign and presence: perhaps one and the same? Working off of Breton's notions ["Beauty Will BE Convulsive"] she pin-points the heart of the radical transformation or reconciliation of seeing and writing: seeing as writing/writing as seeing: On page 28 she says, "For it is precisely this experience of 'reality as representation' that that constitutes the notion of the Marvelous or of Convulsive Beauty--the key concepts of surrealism." And so, she goes on to explicate Breton's 3 basic types of example: 1. Mimicry: the tendency of nature to represent (to take on the visual qualities of) other things in nature; 2. the delay/(w)resting of the thing from its continuum in reality-at-large;
ReplyDelete3. the found-object (thing) as a kind of messenger or agent of the "desire" (Dasein?) of the beholder.
The Paradox, then: the index itself is not necessarily "real" but a snippet of the language of the world itelf unraveling before our eyes. But does this mean that the index as signifier suggests that what is signified is invisible (sign)? Is Krauss suggesting that what was so radical about surrealist photography was its paradoxical implications of "Reality-at-large:" the continuum of signs (perceived by the photographer as presence) playing out as message/sentence-construction in infinite white space? Hence, to "read" a photograph? Closing her essay, she hints at the frame (seeing) of Henri's photography as a violent or "masterly" writing: " of focus and selection from within the 'inchoate sprawl of the real'." And so Wl,a.
Surrealist photography has the ability to reduce an experience of reality and transform it into representation. The snapshot taken is a reproduction of the act that had occurred. Photography’s connection to the real allows it to convert nature into writing. The ability to write as understood through photography indicates that the image can be read or interpreted. Photography alone through cropping and framing makes it a copy or duplicate of the real. The necessity for light to be present to facilitate a photograph makes it an imprint of the real, take for instance the Rayograph which produced a negative of the object placed in front of it. The photochemically processed trace casually connected to that thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to that of finger prints or footprints, which refers to the nature of photography as a kind of deposit of the real; “drawings and paintings are icons, while photographs are indexes”. A painting of a rose can be idealized and made to represent the ideal of the rose where photography cuts out the area and duplicates it to be forever trapped in that instance.
ReplyDeleteSurrealist photography is so radical that it uses a medium that inherently shows the “real”. Photographys ability to duplicate the real is used in surrealism to attempt to show its contradiction. Surrealist photography also aims to show stationary objects that should be in motion which is counter to their natural state. The surrealist’s photograph also captures images of the found object or verbal fragment, this is noted by the image of the object informing the viewer of his/her own desire. Photography being privileged to the realm of the real acts as a presentation of reality, where nature is the sign and can be coded as writing. Only photography can do this because only photography is a cut out of the real, painting and sculpture are representations of the thing while photography is the index of the thing.
This passage when broken down, into terms of my own language and interpretation, reads that Surrealist photography takes the indexical nature of photography into something that is more manifestation than representation of writing. There is no separation between the constructs of the ‘real’ and the constructs of writing. The concepts of Convulsive Beauty, spacing/doubling, and the frame reveal this dual construct.
ReplyDeleteKrauss speaks much to the Bretonian definition of Convulsive Beauty (a.k.a the Marvelous) of which is placed at core of Surrealism. This Convulsive beauty is the understanding of the real as a representation already. Here we find mimicry, i.e. plant life resembling classical architecture or quartz as drapery, is real (said in the sense of natural, not fake) as a representation of signs. The simultaneous idea of stop-motion is also contained, in addition to the found-object/found verbal fragment within the Marvelous. The latter two parts of Convulsive Beauty also speak to photography. The moment of a stop-motion is the exact process of photography and the endless reproduction of the found-object/found verbal fragment speaks to the apriori nature of photography to already be reproduction/reproducible.
The strategy of doubling also creates spacing within a picture just as there are spaces providing difference or deferral between the words I am writing/ you are reading now. In the example of the sound /pa/ and the word /papa/ both the first sound of /pa/ and the second sound of /pa/ are given the status of signifiers of which both are autonomous from the other. Surrealist photography is seen analogous to the paradox of reality as a sign (what Krauss continues as a “presence transformed into absence; into representation, into spacing, into writing” (28) and I see as something cyclical that must be negated in order to result as something retaining presence).
The frame, or cut-crop nature of photography, is a “signifier of signification” (31). What does this mean? The photograph is already cutting/cropping/framing reality in an indexical process and can never enter into existence without this cut/crop/frame. Therefore, photography’s natural existence as a result of cut/crop/frame is already a form of representation. So the natural and unnatural (i.e. representation, cut/crop/frame) are interlinked within the same moment of existence (referencing to Krauss’ note of nature-as-representation, nature-as-sign).
These traits make photography radical because of the dialectic between and existence within the same moment of two antitheses (explained above and seen within the phrase “nature convulsed into writing”).
The indexical only has this ability because it is the only not only link but simultaneous existence of the real and the represented. It has one foot in causality and the other in effect. The index contains both a regression and reaffirmation of the boundaries between the natural and the construct: the real and the written (translation of last statement of (34) “Reality was both extended and replaced or supplanted by that master supplement which is writing: the paradoxical writing of the photograph”).
*re-write---> The indexical has this ability, unto intself, because it is not only the link but simaltaneous existence of the real and the represented.
ReplyDelete