Barthes/Caravaggio

 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi: The Incredulity of Thomas, ca. 1603. 'Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither they hand, and thrust it into my side: be not faithless, but believing' (John 20).

"I think again of the portrait of William Casby, 'born a slave,' photographed by Avedon. The noeme  here is intense; for the man I see here has been a slave: he certifies that slavery has existed, not so far from us; and he certifies this not by historical testimony but by a new, some-how experiential order of proof, although though it is the past which is in question--a proof no longer merely induced: the-proof-according-to-St.-Thomas-seeking-to-touch-the-resurrected-Christ." Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: 33

"The mask is meaning, insofar as it is absolutely pure..." R. Avedon: William Casby, Born a Slave. 

1963 

       The two images above seem quite disparate, although a close study of the marks of age on the faces of working men is a common feature to both. One is unique, hand-made from the earth (the colors are literally dug from the ground and mixed by hand), a passionate example of religious devotion. The other is infinitely reproducible, born from factory-milled metal and chemistry, the flat representation of an empirical fact. In his classic work Camera Lucida, Barthes has brought them together in metaphor to explain what he believes to be the nature of Photography (eidos), what makes a photograph powerful, even dangerous (punctum), and what makes Photography unique (noeme). This essay will use Barthes' Camera Lucida to analyze Caravaggio's The Incredulity of St. Thomas as a "photograph" in light of evidence presented in the Hockney-Falco Thesis and David Hockney's book Secret Knowledge that Caravaggio used optics to create his works. The purpose of this analysis is to test the hypothesis that Lucida can be used to prove that Thomas was created optically, as claimed by Hockney and Falco; and to initiate a personal study of iconophilic painting, photography, and computer simulation as a non-linear or rhizomatic continuum.
       Barthes, an author the scholar Margaret Iversen characterizes as a scholar "throwing off his academic robes" (Beyond Pleasure, 113), perhaps scuttles our endeavor at the docks by stating that it is "often said that it was the painters who invented Photography (by bequeathing it their framing, their Albertian perspective, and the optic of the camera obscura). I say: no, it was the chemists." (Lucida: 34) Possibly, we can evade this disaster by ascribing it to the highly subjective and speculative nature of Lucida, which Bruno Latour might describe as "very Gallic!" (We Have Never Been Modern, ix) The chemists in question were mostly French, maybe we can blame this fit of pique on national pride.
        If we are to press on from this initial pratfall, we must show that Thomas contains those endemic and essential elements of Photography which Barthes identifies by a closely related set of terms: eidos, punctum, noeme, and "that-has-been." Barthes links this set to "what Lacan calls the Tuché, the Occasion, The Encounter, the Real, in its indefatigable expression." (Lucida: 2) He also connects the set to death. "Death is the eidos of that Photograph." (Lucida: 5).
       Barthes uses these terms almost interchangeably, although there are subtle distinctions between them. The initial term eidos refers to the nature or essence of something, in this case Photography. Photography or the Photograph capitalized can be taken to mean the experience of photography in general, and includes all photographs everywhere. The eidos is "the universal without which there would be no Photography." (Lucida: 3)
        The second term, punctum,  must be understood as binary with the term studium. The studium can be defined as a voluntary, conscious, and culture-mediated appreciation of an image. "It is by the studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy the as good historical scenes: for it is culturally (this connotation is present in studium) that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions." (Lucida: 10)
       The punctum, "this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow," is involuntary, unconscious, and grounded in the subjective experiences of the individual viewer. It is specific to a particular photograph when viewed by a particular individual. "This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call the punctum; for the punctum is also: sting, speck, cut little hole--and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)." (Lucida: 10) The punctum is (initially at least, as we shall see) a highly subjective reaction to a small detail in a particular photograph.

"I dismiss all knowledge, all culture... I see only the boy's huge Danton collar, the girl's finger bandage..." Lewis H. Hine: Idiot Children in an Institution. New Jersey, 1924

     In the photograph above, Barthes identifies the punctum as the boy's collar and the girl's finger bandage, rather than their physical deformities. This not to say that the collar and the bandage are also the punctum for us (if there is one), but for Barthes only. Describing the central talisman of the text, the image of his mother which he calls the "Winter Garden Photograph," Barthes says that for us, "it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the 'ordinary'; it cannot in any way constitute the visibility object of a science; it cannot establish any objectivity, in the positive sense of the term; at most it would interest your studium: period, clothes, photogeny; but in it, for you, no wound." (Lucida: 30)
     The noeme should be understood as an expansion of the unique experience of the punctum to cover the universal experience of Photography in general. A particular photograph may not contain a punctum for us, but Photography does. This is what makes Photography distinct from other interpretations of reality such as Painting or Discourse. "Contrary to these imitations, in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past. And since this constraint exists only for Photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noeme of Photography." (Lucida: 32)
      "That-has-been" is the term Barthes uses to describe the noeme: the indexical connection of a photograph to its referent, or subject. The burns made on film (and maybe the code produced by the light sensor of a digital camera, too) made by light bouncing off a person's skin is, for Barthes, irrefutable proof that the person once existed. Again spiting us from beyond the grave, hey says "for the noeme "That-has-been" was possible only on the day when a scientific circumstance (the discovery that silver halogens were sensitive to light) made it possible to recover and print directly the luminous rays emitted by a variously lighted object. The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star." (Lucida: 34) It is up to us to prove that ground earth and linseed oil are as suitable conduits for this transmission as silver gelatin.
        In this essay we will generally refer to the set of terms described above collectively as the punctum. We can see why Barthes was drawn to the metaphor of Christ's stigmata to describe "this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument." (Lucida: 10) The theme of Thomas can be understood as metaphor for Photography with the viewer as St. Thomas and the punctum as the wound in Christ's side. It is the wound that provides "a proof that is no longer merely induced," that compels us to "be not faithless, but believing." Mirroring Barthes' formula, it is the image, Christ, which bears the wound rather than the viewer, Thomas. The wound is what exerts on Thomas (and us) the strange power of the photographic image: "that-has-been."
          Therefore, in order to prove our hypothesis that Lucida can be used to confirm that Thomas was created optically, we must demonstrate that Thomas contains within it a punctum, or "that-has-been." Barthes, again invoking the theme of Thomas, says that "there exists another punctum (another "stigmatum") than the "detail." This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme ("that-has-been"), its pure representation." (Lucida: 39) It is this specific form of punctum that we will prove is present in Thomas.

Harold E. Edgerton: Milk Drop Coronet, ca. 1936

           Barthes' initial example of an image with this type of punctum is a portrait by Alexander Gardner from 1865 of the young Lincoln assassination conspirator Lewis Payne. He identifies the punctum of the image: "he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future." (Lucida: 39) Barthes says the pose is "what founds the nature of Photography. The physical duration of this pose is of little consequence; even in the interval of a millionth of a second (Edgerton's drop of milk)" there still has been a pose, for the pose is not, here, the attitude of the target or even a technique of the Operator [This term refers to the Photographer, not an individual but the concept of all photographers everywhere.], but the term of an "intention" of reading: looking at a photograph, I inevitably include in my scrutiny the thought of that instant, however brief, in which a real thing happened to be motionless in front of the eye." (Lucida: 33) It is this pose, "death in the future" which is the punctum in Thomas.

Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi: The Incredulity of Thomas (detail), ca. 1601-1602.

          In my personal, subjective experience of Thomas, the punctum (Here, I mean our first definition of punctum: the detail in a particular photograph that wounds us. I'll get to the second one, the "death in the future"-punctum, later.) is not the the wound in Christ's side, but the face of the unknown disciple in the rear of the group. This careworn face is what tells me, "this-has-been." I seem to have seen him before, where? Also, his expression arrests me. He is witnessing a miracle, the return of the dead; yet he seems somehow...bored? Above all, he seems real, perhaps even Real in the Lacanian sense.

1601

        According to Andrew Graham-Dixon's Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, the painter often used the same individuals as models for different paintings. Fillide Melandroni modeled for Caravaggio in Martha and Mary Magdalen of 1598, Judith and Holofernes of 1598 or 1599, and St. Catherine of Alexandria from 1599. He painted her so faithfully that Graham-Dixon notes "the same slight deformity of the same finger: Fillide must have had a damaged hand." (177) His assistant, Francesco Boneri or "Cecco" modeled in various works, including St. John the Baptist from 1602, Omnia Vincet Amor from the same year, and The Sacrifice of Isaac from 1603.
        The bored disciple in Thomas bears reminds me of the

1602

1603

1603

disciple on the right-hand side of The Supper at Emmaus, which Caravaggio was paid for by his patron Ciriaco Mattei in January 1602. We can see the same fold of the upper ear, the same forehead, the same nose, and the same impassive expression in both images. The fall of the hair seems very similar. Graham-Dixon states that the model for Abraham in The Sacrifice of Issac, completed some time before September of 1603, "strongly resembles the uppermost disciple in his Doubting Thomas." (274) Going back to The Crucifixion of St. Peter finished for Tiberio Cerasi sometime in 1601, we can perhaps see the same man as the central figure. The shape and color of where beard meets cheek is the same in all four images, the same placid squint. Is this recurrence evidence of "an emanation of the referent...From a real body, which was there." Is it evidence of the noeme: "that-has-been"?
        Graham-Dixon describes the old man at the rear of Thomas and the other apostles as "earnest, ordinary, with heavily lined brows and sunburned faces. Thomas's sleeve needs restitching at the shoulder." (240) These are not idealized figures. We can tell from the twisting muscular torso of St. Peter that this grey haired man is still employed in strenuous work. This frank depiction of weathered and wiry peasants was uncommon at the time. A comparison with Annibale Carracci's Assumption of the Virgin, the central panel in the Cerasi Chapel, flanked by Caravaggio's The Crucifixion of St. Peter and The Conversion of St. Paul, demonstrates the stark contrast between Caravaggio's work and that of his contemporaries.
        When I look at Assumption, there is no punctum. The brightly colored drapery creates an interesting abstract composition, and the head of the putto emerging from under the Virgin's foot is disturbingly surreal, but I am not assailed by a dart of "that-has-been". The older male figures in the foreground are conventionally similar to Caravaggio's apostles, but they are not Real in the same way. Their clothes are idealized forms of pure color, not the weather stained mantles of Italian peasants. They are more properly demonstrative of amazement, but their faces lack the authentic marks of care, the map of suffering that is present on the figures in Thomas (and the face of William Casby).
          When I look to the right of Assumption at The Conversion of St. Paul, I find a punctum. It is double-barreled: the nails showing though the hoof from the horse's metal shoes echoed by the broad toenail of the man holding the bridle. Then, the strong vein running up the man's other calf. The droop of the moustache, the creased forehead. Is this the same man (maybe the son of the older man?) who modeled for the doubting apostle in Thomas?

Caravaggio: The Conversion of St. Paul (detail), circa 1601.

           Graham-Dixon ascribes the rawness of the figures in Caravaggio's work to him "firmly allying himself with the pauperist wing of the Catholic Church." (233) The details of Caravaggio's personal life and his records in the criminal courts of Rome perhaps belie any interest on his part in the ascetic aspects of Counter-Reformation thought, however. Could the veracity of Caravaggio's images, their puncta, derive from his particular use of the optic techniques described in Hockney's Secret Knowledge?
           All of the images that show the older man were made in Rome, after Caravaggio had moved out of the household of his first great patron, the Medici-linked Cardinal Del Monte. This stay in the Cardinal's Palazzo Madama was pivotal for Caravaggio's career in many ways. The connection to the Cardinal del Monte is crucial to Hockney's theories about Caravaggios's use of optics as well. Caravaggio's work generally lacks the intricate oriental rugs (Although there is one in The Cardsharps, perhaps another picture for Falco to mine. Also, note that another example of such a rug in Caravaggio's work, from Supper at Emmaus, is covered by a white cloth; perhaps to avoid the problems of distortion it presented. [Secret Knowledge, 120]) that provide much of the hard mathematical data Falco uses to scientifically show the anamorphic effects of lenses and concave mirrors in the various papers of the Hockey-Falco thesis. Therefore, much of Hockney's proof of Caravaggio's work is based on purely visual analysis of the works and circumstantial evidence.
          Much of the circumstantial evidence surrounds Caravaggio's connection to the Cardinal del Monte, and is quite compelling. Del Monte purchased The Cardsharps, which is one the main Caravaggio paintings Hockney analyzes to support his theory. Graham-Dixon, who takes a moment in his book to dismiss the Hockney-Falco thesis indirectly, tells us that del Monte was "forever buying and selling works, of art, antiquities, precious stones, sculptures and curiosities," that he "knew alchemists, astronomers and others working on the ill-defined border between medieval belief and modern enquiry."

Caravaggio: Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto, 1597

         "Inspired by the researchers of his own brother, Guidobaldo, del Monte took a lively interest in scientific discovery. He was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Galileo, and played a crucial role in the astronomer's career by helping him to secure the patronage of the Medici. Without the powerful support and protection of Florence's ruling dynasty, some Galileo's most important work might never have been done. The Palazzo Madama contained a tangible symbol of the scientist's gratitude: the gift of a telescope." (Caravaggio, 119)
        So, we have placed Caravaggio in the same building with one of Galileo's telescopes, and probably a higher quality of lens than he had ever encountered before (his work before being employed by del Monte shows some signs of optics, according to Hockney). There is also the painting he did for the ceiling of del Monte's alchemcial laboratory in the Roman suburbs, Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, which seems to depict a lens. It may also depict the wheel of the zodiac, the iris of a highly dilated human eye, a model of a heliocentric universe, an atom; any, all, or none of those things.
           Barthes, of course, doesn't need to be convinced about the use of the camera obscura. He needs be convinced that a painting can deliver the same punctum that a photograph does mechanisticly, impersonally. Perhaps another of Hockney's pieces of evidence can shed some light on why Caravaggio was attracted to optics, and how that might help us understand how ground pigments can deliver the punctum as well as silver gelatin.
            According to Hockney, del Monte bought antiquities from the natural philosopher and target of the Inquisition Giambattista della Porta and his brothers, "and could not have been ignorant of Giambattista's celebrated optical demonstrations. There is, therefore, the distinct possibility that the young artist had the opportunity to learn from an expert."(SK, 236)
            Helpfully cited from the first English translation in 1658 by Hockney, Battista's Magiae Naturalis states, "If you can but onely make the colours. This an Art worth learning. Let the Sun beat upon the window, and there abut the hole, let there be Pictures of men, that it may light upon them, but not upon the hole. Put a white paper against the hole, and you shall so long sit the men by the light, bringing them neer, or setting them further, until the Sun cast a perfect representation upon the Table against it: one that is skill'd in painting, must lay on colours where they are in the Table, and shall describe the manner of the countenance; so the Image being removed, the Picture will remain on the Table, and in the superficies it will be seen an Image in Glass. If you will" (248)
              One who can "but onely make the colours" seems to describe Caravaggio well. From Graham-Dixon: " The Venetian tradition valued colore above disegno, emphasizing the primacy of color rather than design - whereas for the great painters of central Italy, the Tuscan-Roman axis of art for which Giorgio Vasari's work was such a vocal and persuasive spokesman, drawing was the foundation stone of all excellence. Caravaggio seems to have had almost no interest at all in theories of art. But he shared the Venetian preference for working on canvas, rather than in the medium of fresco. In the ages-old debate about the relative merits of disegno and colore he might have sided with the Venetians. Not a single independent drawing survives by Caravaggio's hand. Even the X-rays of his finished work have failed to yield anything resembling a conventional underdrawing." (Caravaggio, 118)
             Furthermore, Graham-Dixon states that Caravaggio was "probably a very bad" student of drawing. Graham-Dixon describes the outcome of the young and tempestuous artist's apprenticeship to the master Simone Peterzano: "It might be supposed - it is the conventional view - that he received a traditional grounding in the techniques of Renaissance painting. In other words, he learned to draw; and he learned how to paint in buon fresco, the 'true fresco' technique, like Peterzano himself. But Caravaggio never painted a fresco and no single drawing exists by his hand. X-rays of his oil paintings show that he did not even use preparatory drawings on the canvas, as a guide for the brush. In other words, there is almost no resemblance between his daringly improvisatory techniques and those that would have been taught in the studio of an artist such as the safe, dull and cautious Simone Peterzano."
             "It seems that something must have gone awry during Caravaggio's apprenticeship. He was a painter of extraordinary innate talent, a unique virtuoso when it came to conjuring the illusion of three-dimensional reality within the two dimensions of the painting. Yet his earliest known works, while forceful, are relatively gauche and crude. Those pictures were done after 1592 and they were done in Rome. If someone with his gifts really had applied himself to the study of art in Milan for four whole years from 1584 to 1588 - working 'day and night', as the contract says - he should have been far better than he actually was by then. The breakneck pace of Caravaggio's subsequent acceleration, from uncertain beginnings to full-blown mastery, begs further questions. Was it perhaps only in the early 1590s that he first took painting seriously? Is it possible that he began his career with the merest smattering of an education, and taught himself most of what he knew about painting on the job? Could it be presumed that he spent much of his presumed apprenticeship playing truant?"
              He continues: "His contemporaries described him as a difficult young man who liked to settle disagreements with violence and who was prone to disappear for days on end. There is no reason to believe that he was anything but an unruly teenager. Even if he did absorb some of the rudiments of art, he is unlikely to have been a model student." (Caravaggio, 55-56) Caravaggio never learned how to draw because he was a hot-blooded carouser.
              Caravaggio might have been able to deliver the impersonal chemical "turning" of the film required to deliver the punctum, the mechanized indexical connection to the referent, the irrefutable "that-has-been" of photography, because he was bad at drawing. A "bad" student, outfoxing his instructors. He did not learn the Albertian idealized space of his master, but could only trace the anamorphic forms projected by the lens or mirror and "lay on colours where they are in the Table, and shall describe the manner of the countenance; so the Image being removed, the Picture will remain on the Table, and in the superficies it will be seen an Image in Glass. If you will."
              The Italian scholar Roberta Lapucci has put forth a hypothesis based on Hockney-Falco that claims Caravaggio "treated the canvas with light-sensitive substances, including a luminescent powder made from crushed fireflies [perhaps supplied to him by someone he met through del Monte], in order to "fix" the image as 19th century photographers later would. He then used white lead mixed with chemicals such as mercury, to outline the image in greater clarity..." (The Telegraph). Although this seems somewhat fantastic, it would explain why Caravaggio's paintings do deliver the punctum (The use of mercury might explain his later acts of violence, as well.) that Barthes claims only Photography can: they can be considered early photographs.
            So, I have identified the detail-punctum in Thomas as the careworn and blasé face of the old man; now I will identify the "death-in-the-future"-punctum, which Barthes might consider an example of the noeme of Photography. This example of the noeme "that-has-been" is the awkward pose of central figure, the eponymous Thomas. Hockney tells us that the very shallow depth of focus inherent in Caravaggio's technique lead to a collage method for scenes with multiple figures: "As the 'camera' is room sized and cannot be turned towards each item in turn, the only option is to place each element in into the position in front of the lens where it will be in focus, and to move the canvas on the easel to put the projected image into the right place for the composition. That is the essence of the method: each figure, every prop, even an outstretched hand, is presented to the camera in turn." (SK, 226)
            That is to say that the models did not pose in a group, but one at a time in front of the immobile lens of the camera. This is why the man in the rear of The Cardsharps does not appear to be looking at the cards of the "mark", or "gull" to use Hockney's term. He had to assume the pose without the other model to refer to, so in the final composition he appears to be looking at the back of the mark's hat. This is also perhaps why Thomas does not seem to be looking at Christ's wound, but somewhere beyond it. He is not an actor, he is a peasant migrant to Rome earning some money on the side. He is looking at nothing, just the dime outlines of quotidian disorder in a rented house on a back street, holding an awkward pose while a ragged painter who has been in trouble with the law, who may or may not come through with payment, creaks around behind the partition of the camera. He is aware of being seen.

Thomas (detail).

           Barthes says, "once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of "posing," I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image." (CL, 10)We can see this transformation in the mawkish stoop assumed by Thomas. Iversen connects the pose to death via the audible sound of the shutter closing on the camera. "The shutter clicks and 'I then experience a micro-version of death,' the sound 'breaking through the mortifierous layer of the pose' [CL, 14-15]. Here is perhaps an example of an aural punctum finding a chink in the armor of the imaginary. If assuming the pose involves the negation of myself as unique subject, then this 'micro-version of death' is paradoxically revivifying" (BP, 126).
        For the man posing for Thomas, there would be no instantaneous click of the shutter, only the slower sounds of the painter scraping his image into in the canvas. It is the artifical nature of the pose which makes Thomas more Real to me, more of a proof that the arrangement of pigments delivers the noeme, the irrefutable connection to the referent, the emanation from a real body. This indexical relationship to a real person delivers the "death in the future"-punctum: "he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror the anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe" (CL, 96). The painting is indexical proof of man who has lived and died long ago in other time and place, and is forgotten; this breaks my gaze, decenters my ego and reminds me of my own mortality.
         Where has our analysis gotten us? Many scholars have marshaled evidence counter to the claims of the Hockney-Falco thesis, and Lucida is too subjective and fictional to be the basis of any kind of empirical efforts. Barthes himself would probably disagree with the conclusions we have drawn from his work. However, we can now imagine the Cardinal del Monte's Palazzo Madama in Rome as a birthing-house of modernisms; as a pivot, or site of exchange, between the premodern and the modern. We can, with the help of Iversen, go through Barthes to Jacques Lacan and make a connection between Caravaggio's work and one of Lacan's diagrams about the gaze from The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.

            Caravaggio's painting Martha and Mary Magdalen from around 1598 can perhaps be understood as metaphor for this diagram. On the right hand side of the painting we can see a convex mirror. In the mirror we can see the reflection of the high window which was the strong light source necessary to create the image using optics. The light from the window represents the gaze. It also represents the ego-centered world of Albertian perspective, the idealized imaginary. The square form of the window is reminiscent of the Cartesian grid. The concave mirror, which bounces back the image of the window, represents the anamorphic encounter with the Real. As Iversen clarifies, "only when the position of illusory mastery is vacated does the gaze come into full view. The positions are mutually exclusive: I gain the world of representation only when I sacrifice the immediacy of the real, and conversely, I glimpse the real only when I renounce the vanity of the world conceived as my representation... I may see objects but I am also enveloped by a light or gaze that unsettles the position I want to occupy as the source of the coordinates of sight." (BP, 123 and 127) The convex mirror is the floating sardine can which "photo-graphs" the student Lacan. (BP, 126)
            Although Caravaggio's works contain strong tones of homoeroticism, and he was rumored to have a sexual relationship with his assistant Cecco, Graham-Dixon asserts that he also had sexual liasons with women, particularly prostitutes. The woman modeling for Magdalen is Fillide Melandroni of the damaged finger, who Caravaggio painted numerous times. Graham-Dixon describes her as a prostitute, based on her appearances in Roman court records.  There is no written evidence of a sexual relationship between them, but Caravaggio would go on to murder Ranuccio Tomassoni, the man Graham-Dixon describes as Melandroni's pimp. A possible relationship between the painter and the model can open another avenue of analysis through feminist interpretations of Lacan's concept of the gaze.

The Conversion of the Magadalen, 1598

           In the painting she portrays Magdalen at the moment of her conversion. "The painter shows the moment when the Magdalen, urged on by her sister Martha, forswears her life of harlotry...Fillide as Mary Magdalen once again holds a flower to the bodice of her scarlet silk dress. This time it is not perfumed jasmine but orange blossom, symbol of purity." The object of the painter's desire rejects him symbolically, breaking the male gaze wherein she is part of an idealized imaginary. This painting and concept can therefore possibly be linked to Gerhard Richter's Betty from 1988.

An picture from Jeff Koon's recent show Gazing Ball at David Zwirner gallery.

Van Eyck: The Arnolfini (detail), 1434

Koons: Rabbit (detail), 1986

          Perhaps we can understand Jeff Koons' recent show Gazing Ball as a sculptural embodiment of this diagram. In some of the sculptures, plaster casts of classical sculpture are paired with reflective gazing balls commonly found in garden stores across the United States. Perhaps the classical statue represents fine art (although as a reproduction it is by definition kitsch), the ordered, ego-centered Albertian space, the idealized imaginary, the visible world as a reflection of the deluded ego. The gazing ball is kitsch (although as a readymade it is by definition fine art) and its reflection is the return of the anamorphic Real, or Death, breaking through the idealized imaginary of the gaze. The artist himself notes in the show's press release that "the realization of one’s mortality is abstract thought and from there, one is able to have a concept of the external world, one’s family, community, and a vaster dialogue with humankind beyond the present. The Gazing Ball series is based on the philosopher’s gaze, starting with transcendence through the senses, but directing one’s vision (the philosopher’s gaze) towards the eternal through pure form and ideas."

         Although we have not come to any concrete conclusions, we can use our analysis of Caravaggio's work through Barthes as a starting point for an investigation of how Lacan's concept of anamorphosis can relate to the works the Hockney-Falco thesis identifies as optics-based, particularly through Lacan's analysis of Holbein in FFC. The contrast between perspective-derived and optics-based paintings and the connection of that contrast to Lacan's conceptions of the Imaginary and the Real will be a rich vein for further study.
          

Zizek Nose Wipe Gif

GIFSoup

Interview with Lexie Mountain, Part 2

Continued from Part 1...

Booze Clooze: Yeah, your lobster is not the red lobster, for sure. Have you ever checked out the monograph on Harnett that Doreen Bolger put together? He is one of my favorites, too. OK, one more question. You've written and spoken about how you want to use the lobster to represent the female body. I can certainly see why you'd want to get beyond the mere representation of luxury. The underlying theme that provides a counterpoint to the luxury in the Kalf and the Harnett is the vanitas. All that good stuff is so fleeting. Do you feel like the vanitas theme is relevant to what you are trying to do?

 

Lexie Mountain:   Sorry this has taken me so long to get to. This is really fun though and I like the conversation! Its kind of funny that you mention Doreen because she came to an open studio and I had a slideshow of references going and she came and talked to me because she noticed that one of the slides was Harnett. She told me about that monograph and I am dying to read it. I feel like a tool because I havent gotten to it and I'm really glad you reminded me. Do you know of any good writings about trompe l'oeil?

 Detail from the Studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio. Francesco di Giorgio Martini, 1478-82. Walnut, beech, rosewood, oak and fruitwoods in walnut base.

      To the extent that still-lifes are a sort of symbols game I definitely think that vanitas plays a significant part. One can't look at a lobster without thinking of it being dead, served up, given over for consumption. The very symbol of the lobster is consumption. I had dinner at Red Lobster the other night and when we left, I noticed that one of the lobsters in their lobby tank was dead. I asked the hostesses if I could have the dead lobster and then it turned into this big thing, two hostesses being really polite, a head chef on the horn to HQ, general bewilderment about why any sane person would want a lobster that you couldn't eat. Suffice to say I did not get the lobster but it did drive home that you don't often see a dead lobster that isn't red, isnt cooked, is just a sort of in its natural state of mottled blackish. Its natural state of deadishness! Consumption in the fullness of time, not artificially imposed. I suppose that calls into question what is artificial about sets of symbols. Vanitas and luxury go hand in hand, in the way they revel in a sumptuousness of image in what is commonly thought of as still life. So often when I see images of sumptuousness and luxury I also immediately see lack and mortality in a really stark way, and probably a lot of those images of luxury are preying on my death-fears. And lurking in the corner is Catholicism and its attendant cans of various wormage, and suddenly still-lifes seems like a really insane party of glossy signifiers hanging out together, sometimes in dazzling profusion. All real grotesqueries and magical elucidations of nature, modified by constructs to fit our specific cosmologies, ready to be rewritten for whatever is happening now, too. So to answer your question, yes?

 

Detail of grapes from Sick Bacchus, by Caravaggio. 1593.

BC:      No problem, maybe that makes it better. Like if it was a recorded vocal conversation, you wouldn't have as much time to ruminate on things or for new experiences to happen. Doreen's book is very good. A lot of the essays have postmodern themes and the reproductions are really excellent. My girlfriend Jess has a copy, she might let you borrow it.
      Did you know that still-lifes and trompe l'oeil were conisdered some of the lowest art forms at the time? Harnett had to hang his work in the hall outside of the annual salon at the National Academy of Design because they wouldn't let it in the formal space of the exhibition.
       Have you read the Baudrillard essay called "The Trompe-L'Oeil"? I think it is really fascinating. I can't find it online anywhere, but I have a photocopy of it. It is in a book called Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France. (Cambridge University Press. 1988, pp.27-52).  For him, trompe l'oeil is distinct from still-life and even painting. It is the beginning of his concept of the simulacrum. He makes a Marxist point about how Renaissance princes would have these little studiolos with trompe l'oeil decorations at the heart of their palaces. That those little rooms were the secret to their power because that's the trick of power, knowing that the outside world isn't real either. Like to be a Pope you have to know that God isn't real or to be a banker you have to know that money isn't real.

       Red Lobster probably thought you were from 60 Minutes or some kind of grifter, or maybe both. Whenever I see dead lobsters like that I figure that they must have died from depression, so I was googling "lobsters depression" but "lobsters immortality" came up in the search bar. You probably already know this, but it turns out that unless something eats them, lobsters maybe don't die. They keep growing and get more fertile because of some weird enzyme they have called telomerase. So that kind of blew my mind, especially in light of what we have been talking about.

LM:    Ha ha I still have to give you your copy of Air Guitar back, don't I? Man I am terrible at giving books back, it is a very bad habit. Borrowing things and not returning them. I'm more careful than I used to be, but not by much! I am always thankful when anyone trusts me with anything. 

Venus Rising From the Sea--A Deception. Raphaelle Peale, circa 1822. Oil on canvas.

I would love to read that Baudrillard essay. I've been asking people for more writings on trompe l'oeil and this sounds like just the thing. There seems to be only one account - Pliny?  Do you know another? of the first "best" painter, like the ancient Greeks were sitting around arguing about who was the most objectively good painter and so they had a duel of trickery to see who could dupe each other. The first painting duped the birds, but the second painting duped the judges, and there's no lasting evidence of the painting itself so it does not remain in our consciousness except as an anecdote. We have to provide the painting for our minds, but since we may assume it was both still-life (fruit to fool the birds) AND trompe l'oeil (curtains to fool the judges) it is easy for our minds to supply the image in some way. (Pliny's Natural History describes this contest between Zeuxis and Parhassios. This contest was touched on in Lacan's lecture Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a--Ed.) Then there are cave paintings, which are perfectly preserved yet we have no anecdotes, we have to reconstruct the lore of the picture from context clues in a thrilling way. Maybe it's a question of how we want to build these pieces of art in our minds, the way it satisfies cravings for mystery AND elucidation, we want to be titillated by mystery and when a painting explains everything to us, just so apparently seems to give up the punch line so readily, or maybe we want the thrill of discovery for ourselves. I like the idea that it is simulacrum because they are not exact realities, they can't possibly be. Technically no image is actually the thing that it is or appears to be. 

The "Venus" of Chauvet Cave, France. 30,000–32,000 BP

The idea? fact? that lobsters do not die is definitely one of the most fascinating things about them. Civilization's relationship with mortality constantly reframes the debate according to its own market, as opposed to a more natural relationship with death as a process. Possibly not in opposition to some idea or concept of nature, but as a response to its own impression of what natural processes are, like a mirror tunnel. Capitalism is kind of a mirror tunnel of self-reassurance, I say as a modern person who may or may not reap its benefits. Lobsters came before us by a stretch of over a millions years, and as far as we can tell they appear to be relatively unchanged. Their design as such was already perfect, and we impose this redness onto it. How better to negotiate endless life than to deify its death mask, the red shell outline symbol. Very few other organisms can claim a perfect design from the start: we really have to work towards perfection, and its constantly negotiated by the consciousness that we impose. Do lobsters have consciousness? They have a grasshopper nervous system and not much of a brain but what if the whole lobster is the brain? We tend to give the brain a lot of authority. Sure, the human brain made skyscrapers, but the human brain also made skyscrapers. 

My favorite part of the Wikipedia entry for lobsters is the part that says they exhibit "negligible senescence". Apparently many organisms exhibit negligible senescence, like tortoises and certain clams, and science cant seem to figure out whether its a dead end or a an advancement. Many species die as soon as their reproductive capacity exhausts itself, and lobsters grow more fertile with age, so theoretically they could live forever under optimal conditions. One of the ironic tragedies of tracking negligible senescence is that often in order to determine the age of an organism it must be killed and dissected, instead of just being perfect and old and somehow ageless.

Soccer, Ceramics, Antisemitism, and Semiotics

Giorgos Katidis

Forgiveness. Charles Krafft, 2012

       On March 17th (the 70th anniversary of the deportation of Greek Jews to Auschwitz), Giorgos Katidis, a midfielder for the Greek soccer team AEK Athens, scored a goal. In celebration, he raised his arm in a Nazi salute. He claimed to be unaware of the significance of the gesture. On February 13th, The Stranger's Jen Graves published an article exposing the artist Charles Krafft as a white nationalist with very disturbing views on the history of World War II. This essay will compare these two events and explore their implications for contemporary art production.

The September 1973 cover of the National Lampoon

        I very clearly recall my own first encounter with Nazi iconography. I was about to go into the third grade. On a visit with my grandparents in Greenville, SC, I stayed in my uncle's childhood bedroom. I  rummaged through his old desk, which seemed to have been left untouched since he left home for college. Under some pooka shells (no lie) and a high school yearbook I found the September 1973 issue of the National Lampoon.

        As soon as I touched the tattered but still glossy cover, I was overcome with a frisson of forbidden knowledge. The advertising was geared towards an early 70's student lifestyle that I had been completely unaware of. The comics in the back were frank and jolly in their depiction of sex and drugs, two of the most taboo subjects in my life at the time. The Nazi iconography was included in a parody of LIFE magazine. I didn't really know what Nazis, a parody or LIFE magazine were, but I knew that the symmetrical red-white-and-black designs looked really cool.

My first encounter with the symbols of the Third Reich

          Swastikas and stormtroopers started appearing in my drawings regularly, until I turned in an assignment with a bucket-helmeted Nazi drawn on it to my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Walker. She was not a "nice" teacher, and she made it abundantly clear to me that this was not appropriate. I remember apologizing to her in tears.

He looks pretty clueless here

         Perhaps the AEK midfielder made a similar mistake. However, Greece does have a burgeoning neo-fascist movement, and he did choose a pretty fucked up date for his stunt. He has claimed via Twitter that he was unaware that the salute was connected to fascism. He is twenty years old, so perhaps he is telling the truth. I can tell you from my experience as a community college instructor that many twenty-year-olds refer to the entire course of human history from the discovery of fire to  the break-up of Destiny's Child as "the early 80's", so it is possible.
        An analysis of Katidis' tatoos can perhaps give us a clue to his philosophy. The body art would not look out of place on any young urbanite, although it would perhaps draw snickers from the Bushwick crowd.

           These are not curated boutique tattoos, but the kind of stuff folks come home from Ocean City with. He seems to have some vaguely Christian stuff on his forearms, and some kind of anime or bande dessinee inspired image of people making out on his left bicep. He has two tats written in English that look like the flash was made on Microsoft Word. One says, "Never Give Up" and the other is 50 Cent's motto, "Get Rich or Die Tryin'". There doesn't seem to be any fascist or nationalist symbology. So, probably not a Nazi, just dumb.
            Dumb kid or not, Katidis' pastiche of tattoos and willingness to use a Nazi salute without any political motivation point to a greater truth about the nature of semiotics in contemporary art and society. Katidis appears to have selected his tattoos purely on an aesthetic basis, without any regard to the meanings attached to their symbols. He seems to be unaware of any cognitive dissonance created by a Christian tattoo and one of 50 Cent's acquisitive mantra on the same body, and perhaps there is none. The inclusion of Charles Krafft's work in many prominent public collections seems to be a product of a similar relationship with semiotics.

Anselm Kiefer. Besetzungen (Occupations), 1969.

 

Josef Beuys. Aktion, 1964.

         The photos of Katidis saluting reminded me of Anselm Kiefer's early work Occupations from 1969. In these works, Kiefer (then only 24, not much older than Katidis) used the same stiff-armed salute, posing for photos in European capitals and on rocky seashores. However, he was well aware of the history and meaning of the gesture. The meaning attached to the gesture was in fact the fulcrum of his artistic project. He submitted photographs of his performance for his degree show, and the reaction from faculty and colleagues was similar to the stir caused by Katidis. Kiefer chose the provocative gesture to shock German viewers out of their complacency and denial of the Nazi past, an artistic approach being already being developed by fellow Germans Josef Beuys and Gerhard Richter.

Gerhard Richter. Uncle Rudi, 1965.

Charles Krafft. Hitler-Idaho Teapot, 2003

              One of the best instructors I had in grad school told us that it was important to understand Nazism as an aesthetic movement rather than a political one. Hitler was an artist and voracious collector, so perhaps it makes sense that artists would be required to exorcise him. The work of Charles Krafft seemed to be operating in a similar way, although with the earnestness and risk of Kiefer saluting in drag or Richter's family portraits replaced with an avowedly (before the Stranger article, at least) ironic humorousness which perhaps should have rang alarm bells.
          The point of this essay is not to condemn Katidis, Krafft, or Krafft's collectors on moral grounds, but to examine the separate events for clues to nature of semiotics in contemporary art and society. One of Baudrillard's central theses is that the postmodern condition is defined by the precession of simulacra, that signs have become unmoored from and replaced the reality which they originally represented. The "use-value" has been replaced by the "exchange-value". The iconography of Nazism is no longer tied to the reality of Nazism.
       If this is the case, then both Katidis and Krafft's collectors are merely acquiring signs based on their "exchange-value" instead of making political statements. What is the "exchange-value" of Nazi imagery? According to Baudrillard "it's all capital", but what kind? We could perhaps research the prices of Katidis' tattoos, the value of his professional contract, or the prices Krafft received for his work. This purely material analysis seems incomplete, somehow. Is the real "exchange-value" of a swastika attention and notoriety rather than money? Both Katidis and Krafft have been catapulted from a regional fame to the front pages of the Internet in short order. There is something of Warhol's "fifteen minutes of fame" in these mercurial ascents.
         There has been much talk of the death of irony in the decade since September 11th. However, the death of irony does not necessarily mean a return to earnestness. The ironic use of a sign requires you to fully understand its meaning in order to create the cognitive dissonance required of irony. Is this better or worse than Katidis' blithe ignorance or Krafft's apparently earnest use of Nazi imagery?

Interview with Lexie Mountain, Part 1

 

 A Portrait Takes Two People (Pinchy Goes on Tinychat), 2013

Lexie Mountain is a Baltimore based polymath. She is constantly in motion. This is her twitter and her website.

Booze Clooze: OK, first question: You're originally from New England. When I think of lobsters, I think of New England. Did you choose the lobster as a subject in part because of a regional affiliation? If so, what is your opinion of the idea of regionalism as one of the central taboos of Modernism? Like in architecture they came up with the International Style to replace the local types of buildings. Or how in Ad Reinhardt's "How To Look at Modern Art," regionalism (a weight on the lower right) is outside of the purview of "true" art?

Lexie Mountain: I do have a regional connection to the lobster because of my time in Massacusetts and Maine where I ate dozens of them in the course of my lifetime and didn't think much about them except to occasionally race them on the kitchen floor with my sister. A passing interest in lobsters began some years ago while on vacation in Truro MA, when my father started buying lobsters from the Souzas, a family that kept saltwater holding tanks in their garage. The husband Bill fished with his sons, and the wife Cheryl managed the stock and sales. Affectionately known as "The Lobster Lady" she was voluble and friendly and never hesitated to pull specimens of unusual size or coloration from her tank to show my sister and I. 

I began to rethink my connection with the lobster more aggressively when I visited the Olson House in Cushing, ME, the location and residents of which were the inspiration and subject matter for Andrew Wyeth (specifically Christina's World). The pine-tree-lined streets lulled me into a Sunday-drive haze; I drove right by the Olson House and barn featured in Christina's World, past some ramshackle livestock pens featuring a hangdog horse wearing a dog collar, and suddenly found myself in the parking lot of the lobster wharf at the end of the road. I wrote about the trip here and here. The nature of my trip was to re-enact Christina's World for video, and I was totally dumbfounded to learn that the wharf was owned by the Olsons, specifically Christina's great grandson Sam. I had been looking at lobsters in my work and came to that area of Maine to film them, but I hadn't been expecting the connection to be so direct. I had already drawn them together in my mind as a place of objecthood upon which values and significations of luxury, mythos and sustenance could be written, and the immediate link, quite literally the road from the Olson house to the wharf, somehow bridged that gap even more intensely. 

I was more interested in artist/subject relationships and was interested to see if I could change my view of the lobster, so perhaps I am attempting to use the lobster as a vehicle by which any regional sentimentality could be divested or replaced with a different or more mature relationship. In a way, I could see this particular Modernist taboo as something of a weakness in the work, an available nostalgia which colors my view of them, which is perhaps why I feel more of a connection to the Realists and often the Romantics. Courbet's "Oak at Flagey" could be a visual correlation: the Oak stands for the triumph of liberty, it is a symbol, as the lobster is in my videos made to be seen (hopefully) as hyper-real, brought to the viewer in pieces that are so high definition they could not be confused as anything but representation. Courbet has leaves made out of brush-strokes, I have the depth of 1080p and grading plug-ins.

Every movement is itself a reaction to and a revisitation of what "true art" is capable of and should aspire to, it seems, and I have no idea what tradition I am parsing from, what hole I'm standing in. I grew up in the eighties, with postmodernism, but now? Post-post modernism? Alter-modernism/ transmodernism? Something that is on the outside cusp of Transmodernism? Maybe I'm looking at all the tropes that Reinhardt sees as crippling weights (still-lifes, regionalism, nudes) because they do weigh so heavily on artistic tradition to the point of caricature, and I want to zoom in as far as I can on the pores of caricature (specifically, the red silhouette of the lobster on the side of the clam shack) to see what might live there, what bacteria are milling around creating a porous surface.

Gustave Courbet, Oak at Flagey, 1864

Gustave Courbet, The Origin of the World, 1866

BC: Wow, great answer. That must be what it's like for Joe Flacco when he hands off to Ray Rice. That direct connection to Wyeth is pretty amazing, too. Personally, I think the regionalist critique is a good example of the kind of outmoded ideas that permeate a lot of art school thinking. There's nothing less regional and more Modern than a McDonald's drive-thru, but it sucks. The clam shack in Rockland is much more appealing. 

   I love Courbet, too. You said you were into him partly because of the texture, but these two Courbets, The Trout and The Origin of the World, seem like they might be thematically relevant. What about this painting by Willem Kalf, Still-Life with Drinking Horn? Do you feel like there any connections between this "portrait" of a lobster and your own?

Willem Kalf, Still-Life with Lobster, 1653

William M. Harnett, Still Life with Lobster, Fruit, Champagne and Newspaper, 1882

LM: Talk about regionalism, talk about the Ravens! Boy I only wish I could be half the man Ray Rice is. Every great movement that carries a dogma is in danger of instantly outmoding itself, and it seems that every new genre that arises may accidentally bury part of its own head in the sand. I think about Courbet's "Origin of the World" quite a bit, and I would say that it is thematically relevant at least aspirationally! The segmenting of the subject, the expansion of the symbol, and the sheer voyeurism of the image are all analogous to the types of issues that I would hope to engage in this lobster work. Ha ha "Lobster Work." I hadnt seen the Kalf painting before, but it is absolutely the type of image that I have been looking it and thinking about in creating my videos. I was also very taken with this painting by William Harnett, for a more prosaic view of a kind of everyday luxury, if that is even possible.

     In both these images we can see that the lobster is a central figure, the red is unavoidable and talkative, and the positioning is a sort of mirror image. I wanted to go beyond the redness of the lobster's representation to a more Courbet-based exploration of the darker tones and the washes of depth that were possible in close viewing. I still have a soft spot for the "red lobster" so to speak (without copyright associations) and I believe it is possible to have a conversation with these still lifes that gives them some context beyond their representation as luxury objects. 

Click for Part 2...