Biology is Destiny
This gallery is still under construction. I'll be adding more exhibits and explanations as I am able. Please, bear with me during this construction. I've been doing my annual spring cleaning and augmentation of my web pages, and writing, editing, and publishing some of these larger additions take a lot of time. Thanks.
Welcome to my art gallery. In the past, I never really thought of myself as artistic, but I began to reconsider my talents after I took a photography class in the UCLA extension. I used to go on vacation, take pictures, and come home to discover that the pictures were all, without exception, awful, so I signed up for a photography class to learn some of the technical aspects of photography. The class turned out to have an artistic as well as technical component; since I never really mastered any artistic discourse in high school or college—discourse wasn't even in my vocabulary—I dreaded the artistic part of the course. Nevertheless, I diligently did the assignments, which were very well designed around some basic motifs like motion and the decisive moment, and as I worked on the assignments, I brought to bear all of my philosophical training and personal attitudes and anxieties and discovered that I had something to say. I don't bring incredible technique to my work—I was never very accomplished in the area of photography with the greatest room for personal expression, printing—but I have some decent ideas. At the conclusion of my presentation on my final project photograph, the instructor for the course remarked that my presentation could have earned me a spot in an M.F.A. program, and because of her encouragement and the encouragement of a few friends, I started to feel like I might be able to make some compelling statements and actually reach people and began to find my attempts at self-expression gratifying. I wish that I knew how to draw, paint, or sculpt. Maybe someday I'll get the chance to train in another medium, but for now I'll have to settle for working in the media that I know, photography and web programming.
The web is an interesting medium. It exists somewhere between photographs, which are essentially static, and motion pictures, which are uncontrollably dynamic. Web programming languages like JavaScript offer the ability to present an image dynamically without losing control of the presentation as is prone to happen in a motion picture. In keeping with my understanding of the web, I designed the rotating image gallery of my home page to be a variation on the concept of the self-portrait. My hope with this project was that as in a photo album or collection, I would be able to deliver more than a single image and define for the viewer a relationship among the images, but where a photo album or collection fails by being unable to control the actions of the viewer—the viewer can peruse the photographs in any order that he chooses—I would succeed by retaining complete control of the sequence of images that the viewer sees. I think that if you let your mind work on the gallery as shown, in the sequence of pictures in each cell and the contrasting pictures at each moment, by similarities in posture, expressions, and dress, a picture of the subject emerges that isn't contained in any one of the photographs individually and that a viewer may overlook by a casual perusal of the collection. In short the format makes a unique statement about the subject. To see the collection, please, follow the link below. Be patient, and wait for the images to begin rotating.
Before you say to yourself that this guy must really love himself, I want to say that I am the only subject to which I have easy access, so much of my work necessarily involves me as a subject.
This exhibit pays homage to the Italian Futurists and Andy Warhol. More explanation is on the way.
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Biology is Destiny |
As part of my basic photography class, the students delivered reports on some of the most important figures in photography as an artistic medium, and I noticed that the critical and philosophical notions of truth and beauty held dominant positions informing the work of early photographers. I cut my teeth philosophically on modernism, so I felt like I understood the inclinations of these early photographers. I made my break with modernism after college, however, when I had a girlfriend who was an intellectual feminist, and in my arguing with her, I began to read some modern feminist theory. I had already read a great deal of modernist work, and I was well versed in the modernist psychology of Freud. Freud irks most feminists for obvious reasons. In the development of Freud's depth psychology, Freud explains that a child is born with undifferentiated senses of pleasure, and a male child normally takes his mother as primary caregiver as an object of personal gratification. At some point the male child becomes aware of his father as rival leading to the Oedipal complex. The complex is resolved by means of the castration complex wherein the male child out of fear of emasculation renounces his mother as an object of gratification, tries to find pleasure in other objects, and internalizes a judging father as an ego. Freud believed that since boys and girls are different, there is no reason for them to have a symmetric development. Freud needed to explain how girls take men as objects of gratification, and he explained the process by the mechanism of penis envy. Girls recognize that they are somehow incomplete, and when they realize that their mothers cannot help them, they turn to their fathers. Of course, their fathers cannot give them penises, so there is no resolution to penis envy. Because penis envy is unresolvable, adult women are emotionally stunted, so according to Freud, the normal, adult psychology is male. Of course, this construction demands an answer by feminists. In some of my reading, I ran across a competing idea, the Shaherezad complex, which leads to the conclusion that a normal, adult psychology is female and that men are emotionally stunted. What shocked me was that I found both Freud and the modern feminists' approaches to psychology compelling. Both struck chords in me, and I could clearly see myself in both expositions. The problem is that the two ideas are mutually exclusive. They cannot both be true.
Enter the post-structuralists. According to post-structuralists like Foucault (my favorite philosopher), the problem with modernist constructions in psychology is at their common core. They all naturalize some quality about us—we are creatures of pleasure or sexual creatures—and these core assumptions may be wrong. They are unverifiable, and must be taken as articles of faith. Worse still, the whole idea that there is a truth about us—we have some essential quality that is observable at all times and all places—might be wrong. The kind of truth that the modernists offer is too strong for the purpose of social science; eternal truth is only appropriate to mathematics and the hard sciences, and the post-structuralists reject the idea that there is a privileged point of view in the social sciences with access to eternal truth. Instead, according to post-structuralism, the objects of study of the social sciences, the delinquent, the madman, the homosexual, the hysteric, are all the products of the operation of an ordering gaze passing over a disorganized space of bodies and behaviors producing the objects and the truth that it investigates.
I realized that post-structuralism was the only frugal, academically defensible position in the social sciences, and while I personally identified with the essentialism of Marx—we are producers, and in the self-reflective act of creation, we shape our environments and learn about ourselves—I had to admit that I couldn't defend the core ideas of philosophical Marxism as outlined in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscript of 1844. I took up the sword of post-structuralism with its watchwords, gaze, surveillance, hegemony, and discourse.
In my critical estimation, truth and beauty are bankrupt ideas, and a modern artistic effort needs a post-structuralist foundation. I designed my project photograph to expose and disarm gaze. I took inspiration from a few sources. The first was the François Truffaut film, The 400 Blows. I love the last five minutes of the movie where the main character, a delinquent child, is interviewed by a reform school psychologist. The camera is positioned above and behind the psychologist as it might be during a clinical recording, and the placement gives the viewer the distinct impression of being party to surveillance. The same effect is present in the Godard film, Masculin, Féminin. Most of the scenes are filmed in the style of a documentary interview, where a disembodied voice interrogates the subject. I realized that the camera normally operates in one of two modes. On the one hand, it can act as a proxy for the viewer as in a portrait. The viewer assumes the position of the camera and forgets that it is present in the scene. On the other hand, the camera can work as a silent observer, an instrument of surveillance, giving the viewer unobtrusive access to a scene. In both modes, the camera would seem to be an instrument of truth, and I wanted to challenge the position of the camera and its license to produce truth. These films are noteworthy for creating the uncomfortable sense of intruding in the scene, and they subvert constructions of delenquincy, gender, and sexuality by exposing them as products of gaze. I wanted to take one more step and undermine gaze itself and truth along with it.
I put the camera in a position classically associated with surveillance, above and behind a cash register. While a surveillance photograph would preserve the position of the camera by showing the members of the scene unaware of the work of the camera, I intended to bring the camera into the scene. By having the members of the scene look at the camera, the camera, and the viewer by proxy, become trapped in the scene and ultimately disarmed. Moreover, I tried to have everyone in the scene look at the camera thereby dividing the gaze of the camera over many subjects diluting its power while multiplying the focus on the camera. I hoped that the effect would be to bring the work of the camera sharply into focus and shatter the illusion of objectivity. The title, Who Watches the Watcher?, is supposed contribute to the reflective disarming of gaze and recall a catchphrase associated with a comic book hero, the Watchman, who like all comic book heroes is ambiguous for his power, anonymity, and vigilantism.
If I had it to do all over again, I would try to have more people in the scene. I think that a large crowd with eyes trained on the surveillance camera would have a much more chilling effect. I'd also try to trap the camera physically in the scene by capturing it in the convex mirror in the upper, right quadrant of the picture. I have a few other ideas in the same vein that I'd like to explore, and hopefully the projects based on these new ideas will appear in the future on the webpages.
In conclusion, I'd just like to say that I'm sure that this presentation makes my picture seem like the soulless product of engineering rather than art, but since I also believe that creativity is an invention of gaze, the presentation reinforces the point of the picture by undermining the conventional wisdom on creativity.
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