[-empyre-] Relational Photography, Relational Aesthetics?

[virginia solomon]

Robert, thank you for this wonderful thought.

I wonder, since you draw upon Barthes so extensively, but you are also
invested in remaining vigilant to race politics, what you think a theory of
photography and photography's operation that starts with Barthes as its
foundation, which so enacts a kind of gay colonization (the punctum of the
image, you'll have to forgive me because I don't have the text in front of
me, but the punctum of the image of the two black boys standing behind the
seated white man being the hand of the younger boy [trade] on the seated
man's shoulder or whatever...).

Basically, I am interested in thinking through how this poststructuralist
phenomenology of photography provides a different structure through which to
relate to the photograph, and through which to understand how the photograph
structures its relationality. How is it attentive to the problems of race
present within the structure set up by Barthes?  Here I'm thinking, for
example, about Teresa de Lauritis' wonderful essay in the Bad Object Choice
*How Do I Look?* anthology, in which she discusses a lesbian gaze not as
simply women being empowered with the gaze, but rather a means through which
to construct a film theory that moves past feminist film theory's
reification of the problematic underlying structures of psychoanalysis,
including binary logics and comulsory heterosexuality.  For example, if you
are familiar with Malek Alloula's *The Colonial Harem*, which tries to
reclaim French postcards from Algeria, but I think does so unsuccessfully
because his recuperative reading of the images performs Barthes in a manner
that reproduces the colonial gaze, despite the attemps of Alloula's project
to do otherwise.

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 3:12 AM, Robert Summers <robtsum at gmail.com> wrote:

> I do not mean to subtract from the discussion of Solomon's and Lam's
> "Tainted Love," but I want to share this, and I hope I am not being
> too self-indulgent.  I would like a discussion, if only even briefly,
> to be triggered.
>
> The ‘Touch’ of Photography; the Reciprocity of Photography
> Robert Summers, PhD
>
> Within the study of photography, the photograph has been understood,
> among other things, as a *trace* of something, or someone; the
> photograph points to the facticity of the *that has been*—what Roland
> Barthes has called the _noeme_.  With the advent of digital
> technologies we have come to question the _noeme_: so now, *it may
> have been.*  But, even with or without digital technologies there are
> still moments when we hold (behold?) a photograph, and it touches us,
> caresses us, and un-does us—sometimes (always?) violently so.  In the
> words of Jacques Derrida, *a caress may be a blow and vice versa—it
> comes down to the conceptual condition of concepts.  And let us not
> exclude either that certain experience of touching (of ‘who touches
> whom’) do not simply pertain to blows and caresses.  What about a
> kiss?  Is it one caress among many?  What about a kiss on the mouth?
> What about a biting kiss, as well as everything that can then be
> exchanged between lips, tongues, and teeth?  Are blows wanting there?
> … Is a *caress,* more so than a *blow,* enough of a concept to say
> something of this experience of *touching* …* (Derrida, _On Touching_,
> 69)?
> So, I am wondering about a poststructuralist phenomenology of
> photography, and, also, of not viewing photographs, but rather looking
> at them -- even as they look at, and touch, us -- which Nancy, as well
> as others, has theorized.  I am wondering how and why, and here I am
> following Nancy’s and Barthes’s lead, do some photographs capture us?
> un-do us? ravish us?  Indeed, the art of the event, par excellence,
> with regard to photography.  In other words, how and why do some
> photographs touch us even as they bruise us by their punch—or what
> Barthes has call their punctum?  I wonder about the reciprocity of
> photography.  How it is a relationship?  How does it create, if it in
> fact does, a relationality, a reciprocity?
> I want to look at several photographs of a live art piece by Julie
> Tolentino titled *A True Story About Two People* (ATSTP) (2005), which
> was a durational performance piece—and which we only have remnants:
> photographs.  It was constructed in such a way as to let anyone, for
> any length of time, intimately dance with Tolentino, who was
> blindfolded.  Now, I am not interested in the discussion of documents
> of live art *being* art (this discussion would reify too many
> modernist binaries and myths); rather, I am interested in how
> photographs of live art have the potential to touch the viewer—even as
> s/he touches them—even though s/he may never have been there.  And, I
> am interested in what Barthes has stated in _Camera Lucida_, *What the
> Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once [just as live
> art] … the Photograph leads the corpus I need back to the body I see;
> it is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency … what Lacan
> calls the Tuche, the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real, in its
> indefatigable expression.*
> I would like to use the photographs of Tolentino*s live art piece as a
> case study, I want to think about the touch and the being touched by
> photography—as well as its relationality, its reciprocity.  I will
> enact a performative reading that reckons with two things I believe
> are part and parcel to (some) photographs: their ability to touch,
> caress—even as they bruise—and their ability to create a space of
> reciprocity.  Now, pushing the latter further, I will gesture toward
> _another_ form of Bourriaudian *relational aesthetics* -- one that
> gives worth and weight to *objects* as much as it does to
> *subjects*—so, a *relational aesthetics*—otherwise -- perhaps *queer.*
>  Indeed, the touch of photography, the reciprocity of photography, the
> *relational aesthetics* of photography—and the other.
> Tolentino Website:
> http://web.mac.com/thejulietolentino/Tolentino_Projects/Images.html --
> scroll down if you want to see ATSTP
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>



-- 
Virginia Solomon
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