mixedmedia

It's very strange that I do a search of the forums to see if the photography of Joel Peter Witkin has ever been discussed before and I see that bobby had started one in Off The Wayside just this very month! But I wanted to start another one here that would be more of an opportunity to discuss the implications of and reactions to his art.

I have been slowly savoring a biography of the photographer Diane Arbus and today I was reading about the variety of reactions she received in the early '60s from editors, art directors and her fellow photographers during the formative years of her career as an independent artist and it spurred me to thinking this evening about Joel Peter Witkin and the one conversation I have ever had with anyone concerning the subject matter of his art. In particular of the use of human and animal cadavers in his fantastical tableaux.

There are links here to his photographs:

http://www.edelmangallery.com/witkin.htm

http://www.zonezero.com/EXPOSICIONES...rafos/witkin2/

http://www.artphotogallery.org/02/ar...witkin_01.html

And here is some interesting additional material - differing viewpoints - about the man and his work:

http://supervert.com/essays/art/joelpeter_witkin

http://archive.salon.com/people/bc/2...kin/index.html

http://d-sites.net/english/witkin.htm

And a little Wikipedia blurb:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel-Peter_Witkin

But getting back to my own thoughts, the one conversation I have had about Witkin's work was with a co-worker about 10 years ago. It has stayed with me all these years because the nature of his objections to what Witkin does was so vehement, it was nearly hysterical. He believed that the photographer's use of the human body (both the living and the dead) approached the level of a unique kind of blasphemy (yes, he was a Catholic) which thereby completely leveled the work from ever acheiving any sort of artistic merit.

Tonight, looking at his work again (especially his more recent photographs), I am wondering what other people see when they look at them. There is no doubt that I see beauty in most of his photographs. Just as there is no doubt that the subject matter of most of his work fascinates me in a morbid, prurient way. But at what point does prurience or exploitation of the bizarre serve to negate artistic merit? In your opinion. Or does it? Can it ever?

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

Reese

Is it Morbid? Yeah, some of it. Does it have Merit? Yeah, I don't see why not. Morbid art isn't new. I can't seem to find any good examples on Google, but I remember seeing art created centuries ago that showed battle fields full of severed heads on spikes. Then there's death masks.. Sure they aren't photographs of posed corpses, but they didn't exactly have cameras then.

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“It is better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick” - Dave Barry

Cynthetiq

I guess.

I went to some photographer gallery here in Manhattan that what 9/11 photos that had never been seen.

I saw the bound hands, piles of liquified people who jumped from the building, entrails, bloated and bruised bodies, all among the grey dusty Lower Manhattan background. It was surreal because the most of the photo was "black and white" but the human parts were generally bright and colorful.

art? I don't know. Some people at the MoMa call some things there art. There are things that I think were just picked out of the garbage.

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mixedmedia

Thank you, cybermike and cyn for responding.

Yes, I am not trying to say that depictions of extremity and death are something new in the world of art. But I'm pretty sure that no one has gone to the extremes that Witkin has to procure dead bodies for the purpose of posing them within a fictional narrative style. Not to mention using body parts in bizarre still lifes (I have never found out whether he has the bodies dismembered and decapitated, or if he 'gets' them that way.)

Just as a bit of supporting trivia, Witkin obtains the bodies from morgues (I think in Mexico) at which there is always a large supply of unclaimed bodies.

Personally, I both appreciate the beauty of the photographs and his visionary exuberance, as well as his technical ability as a photographer. But I have serious qualms about his use of the inanimate human body as a mannequin.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

Cynthetiq

so then would the Bodies exhibitions that are being toured be considered art as well? the whole process is an amazing thing. art is subjective based on someone's stating it being art.

right now near my place in LES is a Mark Nelson British Artist installation

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

roachboy

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

mixedmedia

Well, I probably must admit, that I suspect I was looking for an answer that would provide me with the mental key to unlock the door to loving his work uninhibitedly.

Thanks for your post, rb, I enjoyed your take on the subject very much.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

mixedmedia

*bump*

Just moving this thread...

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

fnaqzna

Can't say I know anything about art, but isn't the best art supposed to provoke a response?

Certainly, artists can pick and choose the emotions that they want to play with... and I suppose that a truly gifted artist can select different emotional notes in the same way that a musician chooses a chord.