Compare Richard Avedon's "Marian Anderson" (1955) on the left to Ana Mendieta "Silueta" (1970s, above right) and Ed Ruscha's "Royal Road Test" (1967, above left). ENGAGE Mansoor's essay on Ruscha and Kwon's text on Mendieta. Define and discuss the importance of the concepts of "horizontality" and "contingency." Consider the relationship between these concepts and the index.
the blog "reset" the position of the photos. Avedon's image appears at the bottom, Ruscha's at the top and Mendieta's in the center.
ReplyDeleteLouise ORourke
ReplyDeletethe index in these images is quite wonderful. In Ruscha's work there is a cut from the real right out of the horizontal plain. the gas station while framed by the car window and the dashboard, places the viewer right inside the car. In the Royal Road Test he has taken the "Celebrated Kerouac Typewriter" and destroyed it. The index representing the typewriter and placing the viewer right there with the demolition of this object. Avedon uses his light and backdrop to gut out the strong features of Marian Anderson, making her features the index. Ana Mendietta uses the ground with other materials to cut indexes into the earth while documenting this through photography.
With Avedons image I want to think of this image as the photographer creating a photograph and with every work a part of them is placed upon every image, whether minimal or monumental. I want to believe that Avedon through himself and through his style was glorifying Anderson's African roots. Defining them in the times they were in. Not photographing her in a way thats unidentifiable but making it prominent that she was a black women in that time achieving what she achieved. Making her features stark and prominent wasn't to be racist but to put it in your face what and who she was. Photographing HER, not making her look as though she could be white or not sure. He photographed Monroe so the world could see another side. He photographed Anderson so the world knew. I don't look at this image as racist.
Each artist was doing something great in their work at the time they did it. An african american opera singer a women finding connection to nature and a man traveling route 66. All three were dealing with a movement of some sort. Avedon needed to photograph Anderson because she was the first African American opera singer to sing at the Metropolitan. Mendietta's work could be closely related to her death and the feminist movement but she worked more with " erasure or negation: her body constantly disappeared." Ruscha's work deals with " protesting postwar consumerist values " due to his predecessors.
Mendietta and Ruscha do not just document. Mediettta is constantly putting her self into the earth while Ruscha has done this with the typewriter. Taking the real and placing into another real. Avedon takes away from the real, he doesn't put anything in he only cuts out. Taking important people and cutting from what their real is. Horizontality in each of these is cutting from the real and placing it on a plain for the viewer. Avedon cuts Anderson out by doing this he si saying here she is, this is happening. Mendietta puts her self equal to the earth by connecting to it. Ruscha literally cuts things from the horizon line showing us the change of American terrain.
Horizontality is important to all three of the images mentioned above. In that each use it to delineate space (literally & conceptually), in relation to a future. This is most obvious in Ruscha's image "Royal Road Test" this group of images grants to viewer a peek into an action a moment in the photographers life. This 'action' 'the real' and the documentation 'a peel off the real' the photographs produced to document the aftermath of destruction. What was discarded and then documented was the typewriter that Kerouac wrote his novel On the Road. If this typewriter is a symbol then what is it a symbol for, and why would its destruction be cause for documentation? If this object can be recontextualized as a symbol of Kerouac's belief in "the function of narrative to relay him to a self-determined destination, from a beginning to an end, and beyond that, an ends." (p.129) then the destruction of the symbol becomes a new way to 'see' this event/destruction as a contingent event; a chance, accident, that gives the viewer a new kind of destination one that attempts to reconcile road, camera, and self. Ana Mendieta "Silueta" uses horizontality in a different way, Ruscha shows us a 'space' where our destination can occur, while Mendieta uses her body to create connections between the horizontal earth surface, and the horizontal surface of her body. Therefore her interest is not in a journey the viewer takes, but in one that she herself takes into her own symbolic mother 'mother earth', in effect returning to herself. Avedon's 'Marina Anderson' uses horizontality in yet another way, he is in fact cutting away external space within his image. He places Marina rather close to the camera and uses a limited depth-of-field to force the viewer to engage with this larger than life face. We have no 'room' to move away from the face, we have no background information to meditate on, nor do we have a gaze to return our own. We are faced in this image with a subject who refuses to acknowledge the viewer even though 'we' are invading what would normally be considered 'personal space' of that subject.
ReplyDelete“The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing, for it is not an object arising out of the need or use value; it is an object arising out the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia.”
ReplyDelete-Susan Stewart
These images all work with the index in relation to recording a specific moment in time and cutting it from the real so that it may be preserved and studied later on. These photographs are souvenirs of contingent moments that the camera was able to capture. These irreplaceable moments that when looked upon again conjure up a longing for that time, that space, and that written moment. Through Avedon’s capturing of Marian Anderson in her action of freeing herself from the physical world through her action of singing, or Mendieta’s “Silueta” where as the marking of her body against sand is slowly washed away by the ebbing of the waves, or where Ruscha captures the residues and imprints of the typewriters which where cast aside, these all capture, and take, and imprint upon a surface (the film) these contingent realizations of the optical unconscious at play.
They are all imprints of these written moments, and I say written moments because of the horizontality of all the images. “A horizontality suggestive of the process-as the process-oriented act of reading insists upon- within image-driven modernity.” This process of reading is automatic because of our modern language systems but the plan of the artist to use this relation as in relation to their own work and processes forces the viewer to observe the work in a temporal capacity. IN recognizing the fleeting existence of the moments signifies the souvenir aspect of the work. In Avedon’s portrait it reads and her face is embracing the action of singing as her hair is flying out to the right, and as the reader moves from her face to the hair to the white background it is the passing of the eyes over (or upon) the image that moves, as with the actual action being captured, through this temporary moment (or time). It is with Mendieta as the shape of her figure at first solidly in the sand is slowly changed and transformed by the waves as they ebb into the sea to the right. In reading the image from left to the right the viewer is revisiting that contingent moment of that performance, which is longed for yet never obtained, as it begins and ends and then is immortalized in a photo so that the longing may b revisited again. All these photographs engage in the play of horizontality and contingency. This action of using the apparatus as a means to play with our fields of recognition and perception and then to also play with the capturing of the optical unconscious (or chance/contingency). So through these plays of temporality the souvenir of the moment is produced and the longing for, the nostalgia, that we can all relate to is made viable by the artist.
Royal Road Test reflects a kind of "topographical consciousness" concerned with the aftermath, the scene of the crime, so to speak. The looming shadows have shown up to see what happened, albeit too late, as always. The action/index/event has already occurred, and the photograph becomes a souvenir, a longing for. The photo does give the viewer a static glimpse of a possible casual connection, however out of context the Royal seems to be. The timeline (horizontality) is constructed in fragments, bits and pieces of a broken consciousness, within the stasis of modernity.
ReplyDeleteMendieta's image is replete with a convulsive sense of time, the welling up of presence and absence and the in-between: the moment just before, the snap-shot moment itself, and the moment after-the-fact.
As for Anderson's portrait, what are we to make of horizontality and contingency? Perhaps the "fiery" nature of her face-in-motion, not to be stopped by the shutter, not unlike the fierce nature of Mendieta's work.
Horizontality indicates a sense of motion and passage of time as Benjamin suggests, this is apparent in the works of Ed Ruscha. "Royal Road Test" depicts the aftermath of a typewriter being thrown from a moving car and photographed after the event has already occurred. The horizontality of the photographs creates an as if scenario that pulls the viewer through one image to the next like you are there yourself watching the act occur. The act of watching is of course absurd because even the photographs have come after the action. The horizontality of the images also creates a smaller space for the viewer's eye to wander forces focusing on the subject the photographer wants to be seen thus reducing the potentiality of puncta. Richard Avedon's "Marian Anderson" has been closely photographed to remove this potential; the closeness also draws the viewer into the action being exhibited, in this case singing. Rusch's collection of photographs are intended to be viewed as a collection that has been bound in a book, this method of observing creates again for the viewer a sense of motion the turning of the pages parallels the movement as the car. The viewer becomes an active participant in the destruction of the typewriter through the horizontally framed photographs and the turning of the pages. In Ruscha's work "Every Building on the Sunset Strip" the horizontal plane of the photograph is mimicked by the frame of the window through which the viewer sees. What the viewer sees is not reducible to a single point in time as the vehicle is moving while the photographs are being taken which creates a continuing sense of movement. This movement makes the viewer continuously look to the future or further down the line of photographs. With every photograph being a continuation of the prior the viewer begins to expect to see a logical progression. Every new photograph is expected by the viewer to be contingent on what was just viewed. Similarly with the "Royal Road Test" as the viewer progresses through the photographs they begin to construct a potential outcome of what the final slide may be. Ana Mendieta "Silueta" requires the indexical properties that only photography can provide. Her works primarily occur by her manipulation of her surrounding environment. The response by nature to her manipulations as with everything is to restore it back to a state of equilibrium. It is only through photography that a record can be maintained of what occurred. Within the image presented the mark was cut into the sand in what appears to be a tidal zone. When looking at the image the viewer begins to think about the water acting on the depression and how eventually the area will be returned to a state of rest. Without the index the manipulation of the sand would be just a memory to those who had viewed it but with the photograph the image can perpetually live on.
ReplyDeleteAna Mandieta made a point to hide the performative aspects of her work. “As viewers we arrive too late on the scene.” She was the horizon; in sight, but distanced and constantly moving. She laid her body in the ground, imprinted her body on the ground, as if to become part of the horizon, part of the layering of the earth. Her documentation even acted as a horizon, visible but out of reach (not physically of course, but psychologically). The critique of her work is contingent upon the documentation, which only shows the aftermath of the process, the remnants.
ReplyDeleteAs Ed Ruscha’s car drove on Route 66 he did not place the camera facing the direction the car was headed rather placed the camera facing where the car was. He moved through space not looking forward but horizontally. “As the car rolls down the length of the street, it produces a series of images of contiguous spaces horizontally aligned.” (p.5 Mansoor) The apparatus captured images moving along the same horizontal plane. The typewriter that was destroyed, becoming an indexical marker, was to me saying that the success of that fictional story was contingent upon the reader not recognizing the car as a commodity. The car was supposed to access “the real” but cleverly Ruscha used the car as the frame and the camera to access “the real” and displayed the images in such a way that any sense of space and time was disrupted. “Outside objects are inaccessible; the car’s movement only ever skims over their surface, never accessing spatial depth to reach them.” The gas stations in the photographs taken by Ruscha were similar to Avedon’s portraits. They both employed abstraction in order to avoid the subjects or objects to be linked to any temporal or spacial construct.
The reception of the image of Marian Anderson taken by Richard Avedon was contingent upon the state of culture during that time period. Though it is indexical as an imprint of her, the photograph looked at now, seems to belong to a different era (mainly the 70’s). It too is devoid of any temporal construct, however given that we know the time when it was taken, just as one would have wanted to see Mandieta perform her imprints, one might also have wished to see Marian sing in that studio; not to hear her sing, but to witness the relationship between her body and the camera and her body and the photographer in the hope of determining whether or not Avedon could be credited with making a statement about race or making a racist statement.
A phrase I particularly like in Kwon, in relation to these three photographs, is the “negative residues of actions” (Kwon, 171). It appears a few times within the text.
ReplyDeleteMansoor accredits Benjamin with two ‘evocations’: one being “horizontality as an experience of passage and movement” and the subsequent other being “text as horizontality” (Mansoor, 139). In Ruscha’s Royal Road Test, formatted into book form with pictorial contents (of which contain the aftermath of the destruction of Kerouac’s typewriter in a deserted location), there is an index of an index documented displaced in time and space. The broken typewriter intermixes with the gravel of which it violently interacted with only to be seen after the violence had been enacted. The literal impressions (indexes) of such violence were displaced into another index (the pictorial surface). The smashing of the typewriter, especially Kerouac’s typewriter of which a great narrative was originated, assimilates the broken framework of the narrative; “The narrative is bound by the faith that this model remains a viable means of engagement with an exterior at that particular historical juncture” (Mansoor, 129). Through photography, with its contingent and indexical nature, horizontality (as a passage and movement through time) is continually “present-past tense” (Mansoor, 136), and a performing sense of future. Much like the other photographs presented on the blog, Ruscha leaves no ground figure relation through the act of violence enacted upon the typewriter. The bits of machine mesh with that of the rock and gravel until it is hard to decipher which is machine and which is nature (which is figure and which is ground). The typewriter is stripped of its history through the violence enacted on it and instead becomes a negative residue of action.
In Mendieta’s work there is also this “double void” (Kwon, 170) and index within an index. Mendieta leaves an indexical trace of her body within something of high contingency (i.e. sand, grass, mud stones, candle flame, or fireworks) in relation to the environment. Mirroring what has already been touched upon above in Ruscha, her figure literally becomes one with the contingent ground. The narrative is left null and void as we will never be sure of what was caused by the body and what was caused by the environment and ground it was contingent upon. This double negative also negates the possibility of a narrative. Because both the body and the event are missing in the images, as most of her work was performative( documented through photograph with few or no viewers at the inception of the performance), the work “has already been transferred from origin to trace, transformed from event to memory to desire” (Kwon, 171). Mendieta’s body is void in the image as a result of the actions of impression, performance, the waves of the water molding the original mold, and the documentation.
Avedon’s Marian Anderson also takes these in to effect. The use of the bright white background both alienates and devours the figure ground relationship between Marian Anderson and the ‘background’. They are put on the plane with no shadow or depth to be seen between the line of black and white. The action of Anderson singing becomes negative of Anderson. She is frozen, wild without history or horizontality. She is stripped of origin and is left a negative residue, floating through history and the future at the same time.
SECOND POSTING REWRITE
ReplyDeleteAna Mandieta made a point to hide the performative aspects of her work. “As viewers we arrive too late on the scene.” She was the horizon; in sight, but distanced and constantly moving. She laid her body in the ground, imprinted her body on the ground, as if to become part of the horizon, part of the layering of the earth. Her documentation even acted as a horizon, visible but out of reach (not physically of course, but psychologically). The critique of her work is contingent upon the documentation, which only shows the aftermath of the process, the remnants, the indexical marker.
As Ed Ruscha’s car drove on Route 66 he did not place the camera facing the direction the car was headed rather placed the camera facing where the car was. He moved through space not looking forward but horizontally. “As the car rolls down the length of the street, it produces a series of images of contiguous spaces horizontally aligned.” (p.5 Mansoor) The apparatus captured images moving along the same horizontal plane. The typewriter that was destroyed, becoming an indexical marker, was to me saying that the success of that fictional story was contingent upon the reader not recognizing the car as a commodity. The car was supposed to access “the real” but cleverly Ruscha used the car as the frame and the camera to access “the real” and displayed the images in the book in such a way that any sense of space and time was disrupted. “Outside objects are inaccessible; the car’s movement only ever skims over their surface, never accessing spatial depth to reach them.”
Both Mandieta and Ruscha were working in direct opposition to that of Avedon. Avedon, “quite brilliantly”, found a way to create images, such as the one of Marian Anderson, that are overwhelmed by studium. The sterile white backdrop and studio lighting/conditions were set up to credit everything within the frame to the operator, Richard Avedon. Ruscha and Mandieta, however, were concerned with the index; the index of her body and the index of the car and typewriter. They were in “resistance against the dictatorial perpendicular of the crease of the body.” Avedon’s work was not working against the index as he was still using a camera, the apparatus that cuts from “the real,” however he did “reverse the radical exploration of the index” by creating images seemingly stripped of accident. He returned the aura back to the image. His style/ signature credited him as the author of his works.
Stephanie's citation of "the double void" is important. What is this double void and how does it operate?
ReplyDeleteThe index in these images is quite wonderful. In Ruscha's work there is a cut from the real right out of the horizontal plain. The gas station while framed by the car window and the dashboard, places the viewer right inside the car. In the Royal Road Test he has taken the "Celebrated Kerouac Typewriter" and destroyed it; the index representing the typewriter and placing the viewer right there with the demolition of this object. Avedon uses his light and backdrop to gut out the strong features of Marian Anderson, making her features the index. Ana Mendietta uses the ground with other materials to cut indexes into the earth while documenting this through photography.
ReplyDeleteWith Avedon's image I want to think of this image as the photographer creating a photograph and with every work a part of them is placed upon every image, whether minimal or monumental. I want to believe that Avedon through himself and through his style was glorifying Anderson's African roots. Defining them in the times they were in. Not photographing her in a way that’s unidentifiable but making it prominent that she was a black women in that time achieving what she achieved. Making her features stark and prominent wasn't to be racist but to put it in your face what and who she was. Photographing HER, not making her look as though she could be white or not sure. He photographed Monroe so the world could see another side. He photographed Anderson so the world knew. I don't look at this image as racist. We spoke in class about violence in the image, making her look as though she is a butterfly pinned to the wall.
Each artist was doing something great in their work at the time they did it, an African American opera singer, a women finding connection to nature and a man traveling route 66. All three were dealing with a movement of some sort. Avedon needed to photograph Anderson because she was the first African American opera singer to sing at the Metropolitan. Mendietta's work could be closely related to her death and the feminist movement but she worked more with " erasure or negation: her body constantly disappeared." The contingency in her work dealt with the materials that she used to create the voids in the landscape. Taking gunpowder and burning it was left to a sort of chance for what the end result actually was going to be. Ruscha's work deals with " protesting postwar consumerist values " due to his predecessors.
Mendietta and Ruscha do not just document. Mediettta is constantly putting her self into the earth while Ruscha has done this with the typewriter. Taking the real and placing into another real. His work is more along the lines of banal. Not loud like Avedon, who takes away from the real, he doesn't put anything in he only cuts out. Taking important people and cutting from what their real is. Horizontality in each of these is cutting from the real and placing it on a plain for the viewer. Avedon cuts Anderson out by doing this he is saying here she is, this is happening. Mendietta puts her self equal to the earth by connecting to it. Ruscha literally cuts things from the horizon line showing us the change of American terrain.
“Turning a page propels the text as it displaces it. Passage thus determines the logic of the car’s movement, which in turn generates a horizontal band structure suspended in a tension between pictorial spatiality and temporality. Ruscha’s work thus troubles photography’s static logic, and paradoxically reconstitutes it as ‘going on a little trip’, necessarily dilated through time and space.”
ReplyDeleteWe have discussed how these images do not all adhere to the same concepts of horizontality but these images are alike in the manner of how, as stated above, ‘travel through time and space’. This traveling, may it be through the usage of the vertical, the horizontal, the monumental, or the capturing of the residues of the action all result in showing us a passage through time. This passage poses to us the inaccessibility of the authentic moment and this inaccessibility is the tension that flows through all three images. Avedon’s image monumentalizes the sitter to fill the full frame, to position her in a verticality that ensures a power over the viewer. This powerful image holds over the viewer this inaccessibility to the moment, to the sitter, and even to the experience that the photographer is having while capturing the moment. Where as Ruscha’s typewriter images do not allow access to the viewer because some images are captured with the use of the horizontal that instead of engaging the space is standing apart from and disallowing that access. The other images are also the capturing of the moment in the after effect. The typewriters smashed into the ground, becoming a part of the ground, this flatting of the object into the spaces does not allow the viewer to access the object but to only see the ground and figure as one and as unobtainable residues of the performance that occurred in another time. Mendieta’s image is to the same effect. She is capturing the after effects of the actual performance; she is monumentalizing the fading figure as it blends into the ground and flattens against itself. This inaccessibility lies within all these images and brings forth the “tension between pictorial spatiality and temporality”.
This capturing of these “little trips” also results in the concept of souvenir, which Kwon discuss in her essay about Mendieta’s work. She quotes Susan Stewart: “ The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value, it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia.” This desire to possess the index of the moment now passed is in itself a souvenir. A longing for what will be and what has been. It is this inaccessibility that once again reveals itself to the viewer. For even with this possession of what was the viewer is still denied access to the authentic moment, the authentic performance, the monumental aura of the sitter, and it is this inaccessibility that is shown through out all these images.
The double void--the missing body in the image and the missing event of the image (Kwon 170) this double void is present in both the work of Ruscha and Mendieta. "Royal Road Test" a sort of performance and then documentation of the effects of the performance, the art object that is "Royal Road Test" is a series of photographs, the subject of the photographs is a smashed typewriter. The interesting thing about his piece is that its not its 'formal' qualities that make it interesting, but it’s the narrative that invests the images with meaning. Meaning that Ruscha is relying on the viewer's understanding of the narrative (this is Kerouac's typewriter and I am smashing it on the road) to inject the art object (photographs) with meaning. This Reliance of the narrative creates what Kwon calls double void. In other words this missing body in Ruscha's images is first his own the destructor since we are not permitted to 'see' the destruction only the aftermath, and Kerouac is also missing from the image, we only 'see' him through a symbol the typewriter. Lastly the missing event of the image is again of the machine hitting the road we only are left with evidence that the event occurred. Mendieta's work functions similarly she the artist is the missing body, and the marking of her silhouette on the earth is an event that viewers are not permitted to see. Avedon's work functions differently he removes not the body because we 'see' Marian Anderson but what we don’t see what we as the viewer are not permitted to see, the event. Meaning that we see Marian, but she is striped away from her past/present/future she is out of context, with what information we are given it is hard to place her in any context, it is this lack of context that is the event that is missing from Avedon's image the event of Marian's life. Striped away from her life Marian becomes only her body, her face a flat series of shadows and highlights with no begging/end start/finish.
ReplyDeleteAs discussed in class Richard Avedon stands in staunch contradiction to what Ana Mendieta and Ed Ruscha are doing. With Avedon's "Marian Anderson" the attempt to control the studium through close proximity to the subject as well as the sterile white backdrop and intentional lighting attempt to remove the indexical nature of photography. Ana Mendieta and Ed Ruscha on the other hand attempt to bring the indexical nature of photography back to the photograph through anti verticality and demonumentalization of the subject. Within Ruscha's "Royal Road Test" the typewriter, itself being a means of index is tossed from a moving car and the resulting destruction photographed. This resultant becomes a new index as the photograph documents what had happened. The documentation via photograph itself is not shot while the event was occurring but after the fact. the passage of time is evidenced by the turning of the pages of the book in which Ruscha's work can be found while the works of Ana Mendieta are preformed in remote locations and recorded (documented) for view later. This documentation especially with in the image "Silueta" depicts a once dimensional shape returning to a state of rest in this case even elevation over time as the water slowly engulfs the mark. The compression of space is also noted within Rusha's typewriter as it is demolished and compressed into the ground. Avedon's image attempts to compress space but as there is not ground in which to assimilate the compression is less obvious, and the compression is outside the constructs of time. In both Ruscha's and Mendieta's works the compression occurs as a result of time passage, if not by the relentless surge of the ocean then by the force of gravity and acceleration. Avedon's photograph is what it is where as Ruscha's and Mendieta's indexicaly represent an event that occurred as the result of the passage of time exhibited through the non vertical photograph.
ReplyDeleteframe 2
ReplyDeleteEd Ruscha and Ana Mendieta return the index back to photography, after Richard Avedon succeeds in retrograde of the index, and critique further the contingent nature of the index by the combination of figure and ground.
Ruscha combines Kerouac's typewriter with the literal and figurative ground through the performance of throwing it out a car window, but only documenting the aftermath. The double negative is held within the the documentation of the action and the impression of the fragmented typewriter/impression of the photograph. This double negative parallels the negation of both figure and ground into a realm of horizontality. By returning to horizontality, you are allowed neither figure nor ground but an aftermath; a hybrid.
Ana Mendieta also works in a documentation of aftermath by leaving an impression (an index) of her figure in the ground. The two are no longer linked, but become each other. Furthermore, the photographs documenting her indxes are all casually related to the undocumented action; action viewed only by those who were there in that moment of performance. Again one can not view figure from ground, instead everything is engulfed into horizontality.
This return to horizontality and indexicality within photography came in response to Avedon. Seen much in his "Marion Anderson", Avedon creates signatures that eliminate indexical chance and contingency. The backdrop is set as a white void that leaves little chance for causality or a change in environment. Horizontality is negated through the monumentality of the model and the white impenetrable wall to her (in this picture) right. She does not grow or impress herself into or out of the picture, but is more so cut and framed and pinned into the vertical register; even that of her out of the frame is not indicated to be anything other than vertical. Anderson, known for singing, is even seen frozen in her action. There is no double negative functioning within this piece.
"As viewers, we always arrive too late on the scene. The immediacy of [the] experience of marking the landscape, guaranteed by the image that registers its distance in time and space, has already been transferred from origin to trace, transformed from event, to memory, to desire," Kwon says, concluding the essay on Mendieta. This notion of "arriving too late on the scene" registers within the context of both Mendieta's "absence" and "traces" as well as Royal Road Test. We might say that both articulate a sense of the traces of presence-- of performativity--but always this: the photo as the Witness of an event in space and time. This, despite the worlds-apart-ness of Rucha's and Mendieta's work.
ReplyDeleteSo, we have absence and longing-for-connective-presence in Medieta's Silueta images, while Avedon gives us in-your-face presence. Both articulate the performativity of a "wild" feminine welling up, though Avedon's strips his "wild" subject of place of origin, of the interconnectivity of particulars, and instead, copy-and-pastes" his performer like the relative transposition of the dictatorial perpendicular--a billboard, a stop sign, a red light, a FOR SALE sign. Anderson (despite hr wildness) becomes a kind of type-cast, an accompanying illustration in a dictionary under "wild." In other words, in effect, he removes and essentializes her as a sign.
Royal Road Test is absence and presence, and the laying down of time and place in the dirt. It manages to effectively and humorously critique the verticality of the onlookers (the (photographers cast in shadow looming). In a sense, Royal Road Test acts as a kind of shift in time, a tracing-the-steps of what happened, albeit from a "vertical" point-of-view.