Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - Joel Peter Witkin

roachboy · 09-26-2007, 07:05 AM

i hadnt seen this cat's work before and so thanks for the intro first off.

the photos are lovely..

but i think i must be a horribly jaded person who looks at far too much in the way of strange imagery, because nothing about the photographs shocked or disturbed me---i found myself interested in the distortions, interested in all the trompe l'oeil, interested by the use of black and white and wondering what the prints might be like.

i didnt see these images as referring to a "reality" before the lens--more referring to folk like max ernst, as much ernst and surrealist collage as photography. for photographs, these are extraordinarily mediated: surrealist collage, victorian porn, diane arbus, nadar...they seem mostly about the history of photography and because they're so caught up in the history of photography, they end up being about the opacity of photography, the artificiality of it. so i tended to see in the "perversions" visual devices that were on the one hand beautifully composed and on the other a kind of trick to pull you into the game that the images seem designed to play.

so what is perverse in his work seemed to me interesting.
in kierkegaard-terms, that makes me a hopeless aesthete and consequently a bad bad person. but not in a way that has anything to do with witkin. just a bad person.

anyway, i find less interesting the marketing of his work.
the articles seem to share a desire to reduce the photography to expressions of a damaged psyche on the one hand and to the construction of a mythology witkin on the other.
and the material witkin is a willing player in that game.
so you get yet another version of the artist-hero---exemplary deviant--- bravely going where most fear to tread----an old cliche--but useful if marketing can be advanced by it. all this is designed to provide a potential audience with an illusion of control over the work by giving it the idea that it knows the backstory and so can, without effort, see what the work is "really about"....so the images can shuttle from disturbing to a little box labelled The Disturbing with the result of Reduced Interpretive Effort and Increased Sales. and why not, really?
if you're going to get over out there in photoland, this is a version of the game--you have to produce objects that generate strong responses and also provide a mythos that confines those strong responses to acceptable durations and which reduces their implications to voyeurism (oooo--look at how witkin's personal pathologies are staged in THIS one, hiram...) because, in the end, you can fuck with how people see things to a point, but if you want also to sell, you have to give away at least an illusory Key. otherwise, the bourgeois art patron would not feel as though a comprehensible object was hanging over his or her fireplace--and ownership of an object entails control over both the object and its meaning--and given that this is a structural feature of art markets (that the transactional nexus is ultimately about control in these senses relative to the Object, which them maps into other areas by analogy), what choice is there but to do this sort of mythos construction? so it's neither a good thing nor a bad thing really--it's just much less interesting than the work itself---the most i can say about how witkin chooses to play the mythos construction game is that he seems to have found ways to have alot of fun with it. more power to him.

so i dont know whether there is a choice in the question art or carney barker---if you connect the work and the blurbs about the work, it is pretty clear that witkin is playing both sides of this (imaginary) distinction between two modes of cultural production. at the same time, the mythos of the Artist really is no different from being your own barker and it turns your work into a sideshow and if that's inevitable then why not embrace it and run with it?
have some fun being your own carney barker.
why not?

09-26-2007, 07:05 AM	#6 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i hadnt seen this cat's work before and so thanks for the intro first off. the photos are lovely.. but i think i must be a horribly jaded person who looks at far too much in the way of strange imagery, because nothing about the photographs shocked or disturbed me---i found myself interested in the distortions, interested in all the trompe l'oeil, interested by the use of black and white and wondering what the prints might be like. i didnt see these images as referring to a "reality" before the lens--more referring to folk like max ernst, as much ernst and surrealist collage as photography. for photographs, these are extraordinarily mediated: surrealist collage, victorian porn, diane arbus, nadar...they seem mostly about the history of photography and because they're so caught up in the history of photography, they end up being about the opacity of photography, the artificiality of it. so i tended to see in the "perversions" visual devices that were on the one hand beautifully composed and on the other a kind of trick to pull you into the game that the images seem designed to play. so what is perverse in his work seemed to me interesting. in kierkegaard-terms, that makes me a hopeless aesthete and consequently a bad bad person. but not in a way that has anything to do with witkin. just a bad person. anyway, i find less interesting the marketing of his work. the articles seem to share a desire to reduce the photography to expressions of a damaged psyche on the one hand and to the construction of a mythology witkin on the other. and the material witkin is a willing player in that game. so you get yet another version of the artist-hero---exemplary deviant--- bravely going where most fear to tread----an old cliche--but useful if marketing can be advanced by it. all this is designed to provide a potential audience with an illusion of control over the work by giving it the idea that it knows the backstory and so can, without effort, see what the work is "really about"....so the images can shuttle from disturbing to a little box labelled The Disturbing with the result of Reduced Interpretive Effort and Increased Sales. and why not, really? if you're going to get over out there in photoland, this is a version of the game--you have to produce objects that generate strong responses and also provide a mythos that confines those strong responses to acceptable durations and which reduces their implications to voyeurism (oooo--look at how witkin's personal pathologies are staged in THIS one, hiram...) because, in the end, you can fuck with how people see things to a point, but if you want also to sell, you have to give away at least an illusory Key. otherwise, the bourgeois art patron would not feel as though a comprehensible object was hanging over his or her fireplace--and ownership of an object entails control over both the object and its meaning--and given that this is a structural feature of art markets (that the transactional nexus is ultimately about control in these senses relative to the Object, which them maps into other areas by analogy), what choice is there but to do this sort of mythos construction? so it's neither a good thing nor a bad thing really--it's just much less interesting than the work itself---the most i can say about how witkin chooses to play the mythos construction game is that he seems to have found ways to have alot of fun with it. more power to him. so i dont know whether there is a choice in the question art or carney barker---if you connect the work and the blurbs about the work, it is pretty clear that witkin is playing both sides of this (imaginary) distinction between two modes of cultural production. at the same time, the mythos of the Artist really is no different from being your own barker and it turns your work into a sideshow and if that's inevitable then why not embrace it and run with it? have some fun being your own carney barker. why not? __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite Last edited by roachboy; 09-26-2007 at 07:08 AM..