Concept of the Body : Merleau-Ponty
Fundamental assumption that the body was not an object, the body is the condition and context through which I am able to have relations with objects.
The mind in its insertion in (creating/becoming) corporeality creates the ambiguous relation with our body, and correlatively with perceived things/superimpositions/entanglements.
Understanding the material/body image in discursive terms
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The body generates and presumes interpretations, perspectives which serve its needs in the world, its will to power and its drive towards self expansion/self overcoming, the movement of becoming, vigorous, free, joyful activity. (Nietzsche)
Francesca Woodman explores the spatial relationship of the body in space and time.
These performative images and her relationship to the pictorial space, her body traces, are witnessed and further manipulated/annotated by drawn lines enclosing and creating other spaces.
Barad: Thinking with intra-action
There is an important sense in which practices of knowing cannot hilly be claimed as human practices, not simply because we use nonhuman elements in our practices but because knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part. Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming. The separation of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and nonhuman, subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse. Onto-epistem-ology—the study of practices of knowing in being— is probably a better way to think about the kind of understanding that we need to come to terms with how specific interactions matter.
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 141.
Antony Gormley, states, that one of his central concerns has been to recover a sense of being in the conditions of today's increasingly materialist and mediated social environment. He uses sculpture, via the intimate process of the body cast, to construct surrogate forms, derived from an almost sacrificial process. A rehearsal of death of an absent body, recorded as an enclosed volume of air, entombed in a lead sarcophagus of fragmented body sections, soldered to reconstruct a new wholeness. He creates, within this sculptural volume, an “infinity of space within the body.” His works are embodiments of the body. They are literally body cases. The use of lead with its own alchemical and historical contexts and its particular non aesthetic further adds to the tomb like qualities of the work.
Each sculpture invites occupation; it is complete when the imagination or the mind inhabits them.
Gormley’s body cases are almost orphans, cast adrift from their symbolic maternal mother. They have become shells; empty humanoid spaces, awaiting an identity in the mind of the post-modern witness. In return their identification identifies the witness. The experience of metaphysical inhabiting this surrogate human space might allow us to lose all sense of the present and our identity with ourselves. Gormley’s sculptures, with this lack of identity or questioning of identity with the space they are placed in, prompt a different mode of questioning the purpose of their presence. The viewer becomes more interrogatory, more concerned, almost asking the sculpture to confirm its placement, not its actual identity. We see in them something of ourselves, externalised for scrutiny, a dialogue of intervention caused by a bodily proximity to something unknown, which can compound meaning, or conversely it can fragment it.
An investigation into a disembodied physicality, inducing elements of fetishism and narcissism, with the search for an identification of the feminine, within the confines of spaces, loaded with tactility, dust, dilapidation and decay?
Some of Francesca Woodman’s work involves herself and female characters in staged film, feminised melodrama. Stills with an unknown and possibly convoluted narrative, together with ambiguous relationships amongst the characters. The images are shot as straight documentary stills and seem to be searching for the identity of the partially hidden women, as seen through the response and body language of the other characters facing us. These works are full of conceptual ambiguities.
Photographs are indexical; they point to something else; a mirror with a memory; a stage for an inquiry.
Francesca Woodman’s use of the camera’s ability to witness and document, is subverted into a personal language of aggressive tactility and the notion of the body’s identification being partially hidden or even lost; just its trace remains recorded in the latency of the camera’s recorded time.
Her work seems to have an inherent almost codified, femininity, probably due the semiotics and symbolism of early surrealist influences. She performs, re-enacts and exposes her body for the witnessing of the camera. She seems to, fleetingly, seduce and then disappear, just leaving a trace of her being, her sexuality and its actions, entrusted to the fragility of the light sensitive gelatin. (extracts from The Body, Francesca Woodman and Antony Gormley, WSA Russell Moreton 2006)
Reading The Landscape
This Enchanted Isle : Peter Woodcock 2000
Radio On by Chris Petit.
The film has a hallucinogenic noir-like quality, a weird hybrid of Fifties Americana and a displaced Britain. It is a seismographic disruption of British culture in a limbo land of displaced dreams, elements of an almost mythical Britain fleetingly appear.
What distinguishes Neo-Romanticism from traditional romanticism is the feeling of danger, the juxtaposition of the urban with the countryside, the element of darkness, dissolution, an almost pagan reverie breaking through the ruins of post-industrialism (Woodcock,2000:55)
England Dreaming : Primordial Memory/Dreaming
The darkness is a silent solid, the light etches its surface, it is simultaneously sign and cypher. The light etching itself on the dark surface is akin to a revelation, an epiphany before the building is transformed by its users and movement. (Daniel Libeskind)
The Drought : J G Ballard
The Tempest : Alchemy, Prospero.
The Neo-Romantic Vision from William Blake to the New Visionaries.
‘A new alchemy is being formed which encompasses traditional methods of art, the new technology, and the revolutionary new scientific discoveries.’
Re-Enchanting the Land. (Woodcock,2000:140)
‘When one lacks outer space one creates inner space. Invention becomes more complex, cup and circle markings on stones, intricate Celtic spirals and knots, illuminated manuscripts, gothic architecture with its inherent story telling.’ (Woodcock,2000:131)
Throughout John Piper’s long and prolific life he remained fascinated not only with churches, country houses and landscapes but also ancient sites. He comments on the landscape of Snowdonia, each rock lying in the grass had a positive personality, for the first time I saw the bones and the structure and the lie of mountains, living with them and climbing them as I was, lying on them in the sun and getting soaked with rain in their cloud cover and enclosed in their improbable, private rock-world in fog. Piper never dismissed the archaic spirit of place.
(Woodcock,2000:31)
To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are in the status quo remaining unchanged. It is to be in complicity with what makes a subject interesting.
Cameras consist of small voids, the ‘camera’, a lens and photographic film. They are camerae obscurae that collect light and allow it to meet the surface of the film. But in fact the light comes from the larger void outside the camera. The moment the light has registered on the light-sensitive surface of the film, memories are constructed. The memory is literally conceived in this meeting and is added to life as an additional layer of being. The process through which void meets surface is therefore also about love—the love of ancestors and relatives, but also of life and its conception.
The camera records subjects considered disreputable, taboo and marginal. Sontag notes Times relentless passage and photographs as a pause of evidence, Together with the camera’s ability to turn people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. She recognizes the inherent pathos in .objects being photographed, and the compulsion to take photographs. Sontag realizes the photographic recycling of reality, acceptable as a daily activity in our consumer society. Photographs do not explain themselves, they just acknowledge.
Bibliography
Bachelard, Gaston, Psychoanalysis of fire, New York, Beacon press 1964
Benjamin, George, Antony Gormley: critical mass, London, Royal Academy of the Arts 1998
Curtis, Penelope, Sculpture in 20th Century Britain, Leeds, Henry Moore Institute 2003
Deneuve, Catherine, Bettina Rheims, Munchen, Schirmer-mosel, 1989
Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger, London, Ark Paperbacks, 1984
Gormley, Antony, European Field, Museum of Modem Art, 1994
Greenaway, Peter, The Physical self, Rotterdam, Museum-Boymans, 1992
Israel, Deborah Turbeville: Wallflower, London, Quartet, 1978
Karabelnik, Marianne, Stripped Bare, London, Merrell, 2004
Krauss, Rosalind, L ’Amour fou, New York, Abbeyville, 1985
Moszynska, Anna, Antony Gormley Drawing, London, British Museum, 2002
Sollers, Philippe, Francesca Woodman, Paris, Foundation Cartier, 1998
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, Francesca Woodman, Photographic work, New York, Hunter College, 1996
Thewelt, Kllaus, Antony Gormley, Germany, Kerber Verlag, 1999
Articles
Riches, Harriet, A disappearing Act; Francesca Woodman’s portrait of a reputation, Oxford Art Journal, 27.1 2004 95-113, Oxford university press
Rus, Eva, Surrealism and self-representation in the photography of Francesca Woodman, www.palazzoesposizioni.it/schede/woodman, 2004
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