Between Desire & Disgust:

Some Avant-Garde Photography in Europe

In this session To recap some ideas on beauty To think some issues of desire and disgust To discuss what is avant-garde european photography

Beauty as a historical concept! *proportion! *that which is loved! *moderation / harmony / symmetry"

Once one talks of beauty, one always finds the ugly That thing without: proportion (it has the wrong scale) form (it is formless, a stain or out of place) conformity with an ideal / purpose (it fails) clarity or distinction (it is indistinct or hybrid) The ugly object is an object which is in the wrong place Mark Cousins, The Ugly, AA Files, 1994

Twentieth Century responses to beauty:! A split ! beauty found (and rened) in media images! *the body! *the commodity! *the cultivation of taste (design, style, marketing)! a critique or distrust of beauty is found in ne art practices! *The primitive (against the classical)! *The machine (against the organic or the expressive)! *Excess (convulsive beauty)"

Mert & Marcus! Versace Men campaign! 2012"

Mert & Marcus, Kate Moss for Playboy, 2012

The Ludovisi Cnidian Aphrodite, Roman marble copy after the 4th century BC sculptor Praxiteles with restored head, arms, legs and drapery support"

Paul McCarthy, Butt Plug, 2007

El Lissitzky! The Constructor" 1924"

Lewis Hine! Power house mechanic! 1920"

Marcel Duchamp" Fountain ! 1917"

Andr Breton: Beauty will be convulsive (in his Nadja) Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magical circumstantial or will not be (in his LAmour Fou)

Man Ray, !Fixed-Explosive", 1934#

Miles Aldridge"

Helmut Newton, Nova, 1973, Paris "

Guy Bourdin" Untitled " 1978"

Desire? Disgust? Some definitions?

Desire: Judith Butler: desire is an interrogative mode of being, a corporeal questioning of identity and place desire is that which suggests the displacement of the subject coming to suggest the impossibility of the coherent subject itself Jean Hyppolite: desire is the power of the negative in human life Benedict de Spinoza: Desire is the essence of man see Judith Butler Introduction, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France, Coulumbia University Press, 1987

Disgust: Georges Bataille, Eroticism Beauty has a cardinal importance, for ugliness cannot be spoiled, and to despoil is the essence of eroticism The greater the beauty, the more it is befouled Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation Everything seems at risk in the experience of disgust. It is a state of alarm and emergency, an acute crisis of self-preservation A dynamic of distinctions between digestible/unpalatable, acceptance/rejection Disgust arises from a nearness that is not wanted

A proposal to think of aesthetics not as contemplation but as of the senses The twentieth century has witnessed many art practices that re-affirm the sensorial as the key site for practice.. These works addresses the senses in ways that can evoke both desire and disgust >pleasure and displeasure >novelty and shock

Shock as the modern condition Perceptions that once occasioned conscious reflection are now the source of shock-impulses that consciousness must parry. In industrial production no less than modern warfare, in street crowds and erotic encounters, in amusement parks and gambling casinos, shock is the very essence of modern experience. The technologically altered environment exposes the human sensorium to physical shocks that have their correspondence in psychic shocks, as Baudelaires poetry bears witness. To record the breakdown of experience was the mission of Baudelaires poetry: he placed the shock experience at the very centre of his artistic work.
Susan Buck-Morss, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamins Artwork Essay Reconsidered, October, vol.62, Autumn 1992, pp.16-17

Shock as the modern condition Perceptions that once occasioned conscious reflection are now the source of shock-impulses that consciousness must parry. In industrial production no less than modern warfare, in street crowds and erotic encounters, in amusement parks and gambling casinos, shock is the very essence of modern experience. The technologically altered environment exposes the human sensorium to physical shocks that have their correspondence in psychic shocks, as Baudelaires poetry bears witness. To record the breakdown of experience was the mission of Baudelaires poetry: he placed the shock experience at the very centre of his artistic work.
Susan Buck-Morss, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamins Artwork Essay Reconsidered, October, vol.62, Autumn 1992, pp.16-17

Buck-Morss point? For Walter Benjamin aesthetics is not disinterested contemplation but rather that which is perceptive by feeling of sensation Aesthetics is not the culturing of taste, but rather the redemption of the senses: In this situation of crisis in perception, it is no longer a question of educating a crude ear to hear music, but of giving it back hearing. It is no longer a question of training the eye to see beauty, but of restoring perceptibility. A vital relation to sensation and shock through new technology is essential to this strategy (not to regress into old ways Bertolt Brecht: better bad new things than good old ones)
Susan Buck-Morss, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamins Artwork Essay Reconsidered, October, vol.62, Autumn 1992, p.18

Buck-Morss point? For Walter Benjamin aesthetics is not disinterested contemplation but rather that which is perceptive by feeling of sensation Aesthetics is not the culturing of taste, but rather the redemption of the senses: In this situation of crisis in perception, it is no longer a question of educating a crude ear to hear music, but of giving it back hearing. It is no longer a question of training the eye to see beauty, but of restoring perceptibility. A vital relation to sensation and shock through new technology is essential to this strategy (not to regress into old ways Bertolt Brecht: better bad new things than good old ones)
Susan Buck-Morss, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamins Artwork Essay Reconsidered, October, vol.62, Autumn 1992, p.18

Sensation:Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection curated by Norman Rosenthal and Charles Saatchi 1997

The work of art is a being of sensation! Sensory becoming is the action by which something or someone is ceaselessly becoming-other! Art is always a compound of sensations the vibration, the embrace, the withdrawal! Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp.164-172"

Man Ray, Cadeau (Gift), 1921

Desire and Disgust as found in: Futurism Dada Surrealism

A futurist proposal: art should afrm the sensation of speed! Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: ! We afrm that the worlds magnicence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace"

*The importance of embodied sensation in the work of art replacing distanced cerebral observation. ! *The punch, the slap, spasms of violence as the ultimate Futurist gestures.! *The avant-garde as typied by shock and / or provocation art as rupture with tradition and/or common sense! *art as slap in the face rather a comfortable armchair"

*An emphasis on experiences that move away from the purely optical into more multi-linear channels or pathways (sound, smell, touch, duration). ! *An emphasis on stimuli and sensation An emphasis on shock!

Luigi Russolo: We Futurists have deeply loved and enjoyed the harmonies of the great masters. For many years Beethoven and Wagner shook our nerves and hearts. Now we are satiated and we nd far more enjoyment in the combination of the noises of trams, backring motors, carriages and bawling crowds than in rehearsing, for example, the Eroica or the Pastoral'. "

Luigi Russolo, Dynamism of an Automobile, 1911

Umberto Boccioni" Unique Forms of Continuity in Space" 1913

Umberto Boccioni:$ all forms of imitation must be despised $ in the manner of rendering Nature the rst essential is sincerity and purity $ movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies

Umberto Boccioni" Unique Forms of Continuity in Space" 1913

Fortunato Depero # !Self-portrait with clenched st"# 1915$

F. T. Marinetti:$ We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer"s stride, the mortal"s leap, the punch and the slap$ Except in struggle, there is no more beauty Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces

Filippo Masoero !Dynamised view of the Roman Forum" 1934#

Ottavio Berard, !Futurist photograph: punch in the eye" 1932#

Anton Giulio Bragaglia and Arturo Bragaglia, !Typist" 1913#

Anton Giulio Bragaglia:! We are involved only in the area of movement which produces sensation, the memory of which still palpitates in our awareness.! We despise the precise, mechanical, glacial reproduction of reality! We will endeavour to extract not only the aesthetic expression of the motives, but also the inner, sensorial, cerebral and psychic emotions that we feel when an action leaves its superb, unbroken trace.!

Arturo Bragaglia !Photodynamic portrait of a woman" c.1924#

Logic imprisoned by the senses is an organic disease I detest greasy objectivity, and harmony, the science that finds everything in order I am against systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none. I proclaim bitter struggle with all the weapons of Dadaist disgust: Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action: Dada abolition of logic abolition of memory abolition of the future Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colours, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE
Tristan Tzara, #Dada Manifesto 1918$" (see Art in Theory: 1900-1990)"

Hugo Ball in costume at Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, text for poem Caravan overprinted

Raoul Hausmann, ABCD, 1923-4 Hannah Hch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919-20

Hannah Hch, Self-portrait (double exposure) 1924 Hannah Hch, Das Schne Mdchen (Pretty Woman), 1920, collage on paper

Hannah Hch# !Merry Woman"# 1923#

John Hearteld # !The true meaning of the Hitler salute: millions stand behind me" # 1932#

Martha Rosler! Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful! 2004"

Martha Rosler! Bringing the War Home: $ House Beautiful! 1967-72

"

Thomas Hirschhorn! 1 Man = 1 Man$ 2002

"

SURREALISM! &! PHOTOGRAPHY!

The surreal as a dialogue with the other that is encountered through: " dreams" coincidences" correspondences (strange equivalences)" the marvellous" the uncanny" a reciprocal exchange: connecting conscious and unconscious thought

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express verbally, by means of the written work, or in any other manner the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. ENCYCLOPAEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. Andr Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924

Surrealist journals

Man Ray, Waking Dream Sequence (detail), 1924 Robert Desnos communicating a message in a trance like state. Published in La revolution surrealiste Cover of La Revolution surrealiste, 1, 1 December 1924

Andr Breton: Beauty will be convulsive (in his Nadja) Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magical circumstantial or will not be (in his LAmour Fou)

Man Ray, !Fixed-Explosive", 1934#

Salvador Dali, The Phenomenon of Ecstasy, 1933 Published in Minotaure, December 1933

Surrealist techniques and themes: Doubling - Superimposing Convulsing the ordinary into the extra-ordinary Mannequins and other objects that look alive: an uncanny confusion of the animate and inanimate, the alive and the dead The found object - the lost object - the chance encounter The pseudo scientific - the discovery of paranoid knowledge!

Surrealist techniques and themes: Doubling - Superimposing Convulsing the ordinary into the extra-ordinary Mannequins and other objects that look alive: an uncanny confusion of the animate and inanimate, the alive and the dead The found object - the lost object - the chance encounter The pseudo scientific - the discovery of paranoid knowledge!

see Rosalind Krauss, The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism"

Surrealist techniques and themes: Doubling - Superimposing Convulsing the ordinary into the extra-ordinary Mannequins and other objects that look alive: an uncanny confusion of the animate and inanimate, the alive and the dead The found object - the lost object - the chance encounter The pseudo scientific - the discovery of paranoid knowledge!

Man Ray, The Marquise Casati, 1922

Man Ray, Untitled, 1931

Man Ray, Untitled, 1924 Man Ray, Tomorrow (Demain), 1924

Surrealist techniques and themes: Doubling - Superimposing Convulsing the ordinary into the extra-ordinary Mannequins and other objects that look alive: an uncanny confusion of the animate and inanimate, the alive and the dead The found object - the lost object - the chance encounter The pseudo scientific - the discovery of paranoid knowledge!

Brassa, # !Involuntary Sculptures" # 1933 #

Brassa, Graffiti, 1933-1956

Karl Blossfeldt: looking closely nature convulsed into writing / culture#

Dora Maar, Untitled, 1935

Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936

Andr Kertsz Distortion #34

Georges Bataille, The Big Toe, 1929: " The division of the universe into subterranean hell and perfectly pure heaven is an indelible conception, mud and darkness being the principles of evil as light and celestial spaces are the principle of good: with their feet in mud but their heads more or less in light, men obstinately imagine a tide that will permanently elevate them, never to return, into pure space. Human life entails, in fact, the rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse - a rage that is easily directed against an organ as base as the foot."

Jacques-Andre Boiffard, Untitled (The Big Toe), 1929 Published in Documents 6, 1929.

Surrealist techniques and themes: Doubling - Superimposing Convulsing the ordinary into the extra-ordinary Mannequins and other objects that look alive: an uncanny confusion of the animate and inanimate, the alive and the dead The found object - the lost object - the chance encounter The pseudo scientific - the discovery of paranoid knowledge!

Raoul Ubac, Mannequin, 1937 Jacques-Andre Boiffard, Untitled, c1930

Hans Bellmer The Doll c.1939 / re-colored 1940s

Surrealist techniques and themes: Doubling - Superimposing Convulsing the ordinary into the extra-ordinary Mannequins and other objects that look alive: an uncanny confusion of the animate and inanimate, the alive and the dead The found object - the lost object - the chance encounter The pseudo scientific - the discovery of paranoid knowledge!

Mary Ann Caws: surrealism operates around intense encounters between the everyday and the imaginary! A (proto)Surrealist hero and one of his mottos:! LComte de Lautrmonts (aka Isidore Ducasse) Les Chants de Maldoror, 1869: !

the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table"

Man Ray !The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse" 1920# Published in La Revolution surrealiste, 1, December 1924 #

Surrealist techniques and themes: Doubling - Superimposing Convulsing the ordinary into the extra-ordinary Mannequins and other objects that look alive: an uncanny confusion of the animate and inanimate, the alive and the dead The found object - the lost object - the chance encounter The pseudo scientific - the discovery of paranoid knowledge!

Salvador Dali Communication: visage paranoaque 1931

Three key practices: Man Ray Claude Cahun Hans Bellmer

Man Ray, Lee Miller, 1929

Meret Oppenheim, 1931

Natasha, 1929

Man Ray, Untitled, 1933

Man Ray, Untitled, 1929

Untitled, 1930

Man Ray, Anatomies, 1929

Man Ray, Untitled, 1931

Jacques-Andre Boiffard Untitled 1930

CLAUDE CAHUN:! gender as a !found object" $ unstable identity$ multiple masks

Self-portraits, 1921-32

Sous ce masque un autre masque. Je nen finirai pas de soulever tous ces visages. Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish lifting up all these faces.

Claude Cahun, plates from Aveux non Avenus [Disavowals or Cancelled Conferssions], 1930

HANS BELLMER! anagrams, ambivalence, perverse assemblage "

Hans Bellmer, spread in Minotaure, 1934

La Poupee, 1936

The Doll, 1935-7

Hans Bellmer" Guy Bourdin"

Hans Bellmer: The game belongs to the category of experimental poetry, and bearing in mind such poetrys method of provocation, the toy will take the role of the provocative object

Paul Eluard: Its a girl! Where are her eyes? Its a girl! Where are her breasts? Its a girl! What does she say? Its a girl! What games does she play? Its a girl! Its my desire!

Hans Bellmer, The Doll, 1936/1949

Hans Bellmer

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1992

Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman

Francesca Woodman, New York, 1979-1980

Francesca Woodman, New York, 1979-1980

Hans Bellmer / Francesca Woodman

Hans Bellmer / Francesca Woodman

To conclude: We find a new beauty residing somewhere between desire and disgust (between wandering displacement and dynamics of acceptance/rejection) Through: Form made formless The familiar made unfamiliar Reality as given over to doubling, replication and displacement