What could ‘embodied’ photography look like?
The aim of this research is to explicate the question "What
could embodied photography look like?"
Whether we consider ourselves to be a disembodied mind, which
is entirely distinct from our physical selves and the external
world, or, whether we consider ourselves to be embodied;
inextricably linked with our physical selves and the external
world, dramatically affects our understanding of the artistic
process. Is a photograph doomed to represent the external world
or could the process and the finished article be considered
embodied, as part of the world; and if so, what would this look
like?
Firstly I will examine how dualism permeates our everyday
language and experience of the world and contrast it with what
it is like to be embodied. I go on to discuss what it means to
make or perceive art in these different ways of being in the
world, particularly in terms of what ‘representation’ is
perceived to be.
Referring to the artwork of Cézanne, as discussed by Merleau-
Ponty, will be key to understanding the conditions under which
the artistic process maybe considered to be embodied and the
term autofigurative will be introduced to describe it.
Referring to Collingwood’s theory on "art as imagination" and
Cazeaux's article on "sensation as participation”, I will
discuss to what degree intention and interpretation play a
role in embodied art practice. I will explain that intention
is a negotiation when artist and material/technology meets;
and that interpretation is part of this activity, since
meaning is already implicit in the materials and choices as
they are being made. It will be argued then; that the
criterion for a successful piece is one that both shows and
incites embodiment and will necessarily refer to its’ style.
I will analyse what could be meant by style when Merleau Ponty
describes the embodied process and the resulting artwork and
whether embodied art practice has a certain ‘look’. I will use
Cezanne and Giacometti’s work, to compare and contrast what
style may refer to in each, in order to test the weight of the
criterion.
Finally, I will contest Merleau-Ponty’s claim that photography
“destroys” embodiment by showing how it itself might be
embodied in either the camera-work or in the entire
photographic process, giving examples of what this might look
like in other artists work. I will give an example of my
practical research, which takes elements from the different
examples, and explain what I think I achieve in this and how I
plan to take it further.
The World And I or The World With I
Dualism naturally permeates our language when we talk about
our experience in the world. We talk about bodies in relation
to ourselves but not as ourselves, for example; we might say ‘my
brain’, ‘your foot’ etc.; which indicates possession of our
physical self by something other than ourselves; which suggests
our mind is a non-physical thing separate from our bodies.
Rene Descarte promoted a separation between mind and body. In
Meditations on First Philosophy he supposes,
The fact that I can clearly and distinctly understand one
thing apart from another is enough to make me certain
that the two things are distinct […]Accordingly, it is
certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can
exist without it.
(1996:54)
Descartes is describing himself inwardly and talks about
things not ‘belonging’ to himself, even going so far as being
able to ‘exist without [his body]’. For Descartes then, vision
could be described as the ‘something’ (your mind; or soul; or
ego perhaps) inside your head looking out at a movie screen; a
kind of ‘ghost in the machine’ that sends a message to the
body to respond accordingly once visual information is
registered on the retina from light received from the external
world. This process is often described using the character of
the Homunculus, Latin for ‘Little Man’, in place of the mind,
where the Homunculus controls the “Cartesian Theatre” to relay
visual information to our bodies. Whilst there are many
different types of dualism that could be explicated here, the
importance of dualist metaphysics for my research is that the
external world is represented in the mind. Although messages may
pass between the mind and the body, the body is separate and
passive.
In contrast, the term ‘embodiment’ comes from phenomenology
and offers a theory of existence in which the human being is
located in and as part of the world through the body. Maurice
Merleau-Ponty differentiates sharply from the dualist
perspective in his phenomenology, in that for him, knowledge
[of the world] is arrived at through our bodies, rather than
our consciousness or mind. It then follows; that which we
perceive through our bodies cannot ultimately be disentangled
from them.
To describe the entanglement of body and perception, Merleau-
Ponty uses the example of your left hand touching your right
hand. The right hand is both felt and feeling in an ungraspable
continuum. The more you speculate on the moment of touch and
of feeling, the more the subject and object division becomes
arbitrary and unattainable. He cites, “The body catches
itself from the outside engaged in a cognitive process; it
tries to touch itself whilst being touched, and initiates ‘a
kind of reflection’.” (2002:107). We can have experience of
the world through touch, sight, smell etc precisely because we
ourselves can be touched, seen and smelt, and that there is no
division between this phenomenon of seeing and being seen. Our
bodies are not windows for our minds, to look out upon the
world as a representation as is the case with the Homunculus.
Rather, we are implicit in the world: our vision entangled
with it. In, Spell of the Sensuous, David Abrams says, “We
might as well say that we are organs of this world, flesh of
its flesh, and that the world is perceiving itself through us”
(1997:68)
Unlike, the Cartesian Theatre, where the body reacts to visual
stimuli: to be embodied would seem to suggest that vision and
movement are inextricably tied. In Eye and Mind, Merleau Ponty
asserts that,
My moving body makes a difference in the visible world,
being part of it; that is why I can steer it through the
visible. […] We can only see what we look at. What would
vision be without eye movement? And how could the
movement of the eyes not blur things if movement were
blind? […] If vision weren’t prefigured in it?
(1993:455)
For artists then, there must be a difference in how to
approach an artwork when vision of the world is
representational, and separate from the body or if it is
imbued with the body and entangled with the world.
Where is the art?
If we are to take the dualist view, that vision is represented
in the mind, then in the Homunculus example, we can imagine
the artist perceiving the movie screen and that ‘little man’,
inside the head, instructing the arms of the artist to pick up
the paint brush and paint the ‘movie’ as it unfolds on the
screen. The little man is making a ‘copy’ of the movie, a
representation of the representation. The notion of the ‘copy’
can be found in Plato’s The Republic. He suggests, “the artists
representation stands at third remove from reality” (Plato,
339). For Plato, art, with few exceptions, is relegated to
being copies of reality when reality itself is a copy of the
essence (or truth) of things that he terms Forms. This
sentiment could account for most representational art we know
of, where the skill of the artist is noted in their ability to
produce a perfect rendering of what is seen.
For Robin Collingwood, “representation is a matter of skill, a
craft of any kind” (1938:42) however, art proper exists solely
in the mind as “imagined” and that which is produced in the
real world; the art object and the process of making itself:
is secondary to this. Collingwood wanted to dismiss technical
formulaic art in order to foster art that was purely
“expressed” by the mind. He says, “to create something means
to make it non-technically, yet consciously and voluntarily”
(128). It is clear that Collingwood has dualist tendencies
when he reduces the bodily actions and the skill of making to
just craft and separates the ‘art’ from the ‘art object’,
thereby elevating the status of art to the imagination. Later,
I will explain how Collingwood sympathises with embodiment,
however firstly we can see how his separation of the artwork
from the maker may be problematic.
If we say we are located in and as part of the world, or,
‘being-in the-world’, this has implications for how artwork is
enacted. When we take pen to paper to draw, it could be argued
that it is not our mind that does the drawing; rather the
drawing is brought into being by our bodies. Merleau-Ponty
suggests,
[…] we cannot imagine how a mind could paint. It is by
lending the body to the world that the artist changes the
world into paintings.
(1993:123)
Indeed, when we try to speculate how the mind could possibly
draw without the body it is very difficult to describe without
referring to sensations of movement only achievable with
knowledge of being-in-the-world, located by our bodies.
For instance, when drawing, we may alter the pressure of the
pen to denote lighter or darker areas, the motions of which
are synchronous with lighter or heavier tensions in the body.
Taking this into consideration when drawing a tree we see in
front of us, these sensations of darkness and heaviness are
also, perhaps, synchronous with how we perceive the tree to
be, ‘the feeler in the felt’ as Merleau-Ponty puts it
(1992:123). The way the drawing comes into being is a
repercussion of us being there, sensing the weight of
branches, or the lightness of leaves as strokes on the paper.
Quality, light, colour, depth, which are there before us,
are there only because they awaken an echo in our bodies
[…] Rather than seeing it, I see according to, or with
it. (1993:126)
Here, Merleau-Ponty discusses how it might be to paint in this
way, and as an example, he holds up the work of Cézanne, who
rejected traditional methods of painting in order to paint his
experience of being-in-the-world, “in that instant when vision
becomes gesture […] when, in Cézanne’s words, he “thinks in
painting””.
When we view the painting Mont Sainte-Victoire [Fig 1] we do not see
the perfect rendering of an external representation that
depicts a mountain scene in every detailed stroke. Rather, we
are drawn to the same moments encountered by Cézanne at the
time of painting, which are revealed to us in the hazy brush-
strokes. The brush-strokes are incomplete actions. Rather than
developing a single-point perspective each stroke draws us
elsewhere on the painting, like a glance or occurrence akin to
the experience of seeing; the canvas becomes the incidental
anchor for this experience and its own “coming-into-being”.
In his essay Sensation as Participation, Clive Cazeaux asserts
that the depiction of the mountain is not a ‘thing’ that is on
the painting, but is in relation to us as painter and
therefore of viewer of the painting,
The “work” in the latticework of senses, bodily joints,
negotiations between space and flat canvas, and colour
distribution that defines the appearance of the mountain
is already present in the painting not as a thing but as
an original and continuously active relationship that
extends to include Cézanne and ourselves. It is in this
respect that the painting is autofigurative and
relational, with these concepts being two sides of the
same coin. The painting is a technology: the origin of
relations – a nexus of paint, surface and environment –
that coordinates the embodied behaviour of painter and
viewer.
(2012:11)
Autofiguration, is a term coined by Merleau-Ponty to describe
how a work of art may come into being. A compound of auto
(self, same, spontaneous) and figurative (representing forms
that are recognizably derived from life) by its own definition
seems to suggest a way of working that might be like
Cézanne’s, which Cazeaux says is a ““middle ground between
representation and abstraction” (2012:14).
However, it would be prudent to clarify here, that in
accepting Merleau-Ponty’s metaphysics we acknowledge that all
art making is embodied. Realist and hyperrealist painting must
also necessarily be embodied and so must work that leans
towards the abstract. The comparisons of this work with work
that shows itself to be embodied might be the subject of
another enquiry. For the sake of this investigation I will be
focusing on art making that follows the premise that to be
autofigurative; the artistic intention (where intention is not an
end but a means to act), the technology and the context need
to be in constant negotiation.
Embodiment, as Merleau-Ponty explains it, calls upon the
senses as something that exists in correlation to the artist;
providing the context for the artist to work autofiguratively.
According to dualism, things might appear as pure phenomenon
or ‘”sense datum”, where a green apple would appear only as a
mental image of ‘green’ and ‘roundness’. For Merleau Ponty,
the senses imply each other; they overlap, coagulate and we
come to know them experientially and habitually through all
manners of their being. The apple can also be ‘sweet’,
‘healthy’ and ‘crunchy’ and attend to hunger, in the same
instance of it being green and round. It has the signifying
power to evoke, as Cazeaux (2002) puts it, “something or
other, where “the other” is important because it confirms that
the meaning is suggestive, dynamic, “moving on,”.
Intention, Interpretation and Style
Far from being a passive colour palette; as Cézanne paints, he
is painting the colours as they come to him in his experience
of them, his own vision returned to him. As the viewer sees
it, they too see that activity, since they ‘share’ the same
sensing capabilities. In this way the application of meaning,
and therefore interpretation in the work, begins with the
artist since, as Cazeaux (2002) puts it, “the senses
themselves are already conceptualized” in the way that the
artist perceives the world.
It follows then, that intention and interpretation are not
mutually exclusive as may be popularly believed, and nor do
they exist on different planes firstly for artist and then for
viewer. It is here that we can call upon Collingwoods ‘art as
imagination’ to suggest that a “sharing” takes place between
the artist and the viewer with the artwork acting as a kind of
gateway. It is the deficit inherent in the ‘unfinished’ or
‘hazy’ brushstrokes that offers itself as something to be
inhabited or shared by the viewer. Collingwood says,
The imaginary experience which we get from the picture is
not merely the kind of experience the picture is capable
of arousing, it is the kind of experience we are capable
of having. […] Apart from the activity of our senses we
should see no colours at all.
(1938:150)
This research does not aim to place value judgments on the
perfect rendering of artworks, rather it aims to discuss the
possible criterion of ‘embodied artwork’ and judge a piece by
its success in this capacity, in both its process and its
interpretation. Therefore, when referring to the ‘hazy,
unfinished’ brushstrokes of Cezanne, rather than being a
critique of his painting skill it is actually a marker for its
success as a piece of embodied art.
Using Cezanne as an exemplar for autofigurative artwork, with
his characteristic ‘hazy’ ‘unfinished’ brush strokes that he
repeated in much of his work; it would be tempting to say that
‘hazy’ and ‘unfinished’ were aesthetic properties of
autofiguration and that this is a style of work. However this is
erroneous, as using the word ‘style’ or ‘property’ in this way
is at cross-purpose with what is an ontological rather than
cultural enquiry.
Autofiguration by its own definition resists being contained
as something that might suggest it is a thing-in-the-world
that can be fashioned or appropriated. If instead,
autofiguration is the coming-into-being of our experience in
the world, then, ontologically speaking, it is the experience
itself that has a certain style that as participators, we can
inhabit or share by the ‘filling in’ of our own subjective
experience.
Cazeaux states that, “an object and a technology can be said
to have a style in as much as they lend themselves to certain
ways of being” (2012:16). Similarly the artists also lend
themselves to certain ways of being; otherwise all instances
of Mont-Sainte-Victoire by other artists would look like ‘a
Cezanne’. Whilst we may share similar sensory and motor
capabilities, Singer suggests,“an artist may be said to
discover his [own] style in the world” (Singer, 1993:238) and
it is the “struggle” of the painter to find the expressive
gestures that authenticate their qualitative experience of it.
It could be argued here, then, that a criterion of embodied
practice is something of an “Intentional spontaneity” and that
if intention and interpretation overlap to inform style, then
style has within it the optionality of intention and
interpretation. The task for the artist will be in the
negotiation with material, which will become a meeting place
of how the artist comes to express. Clay will only appear in a
clay-like way. Indeed, Singer suggests,“The artist is most
aware of his style when it appears as a limitation. (1993:238)
It is well documented that when sculpting his figures, Alberto
Giacometti is known to have become exasperated with his
medium, and at the time of making, his sculptures became
smaller and smaller, with the surface of the clay appearing
feverishly attacked. When we study the marks on his sculptures
[Fig 2] this feverishness is located simultaneously in
ourselves as it is in the impressions in the clay. It is a
time machine back to where Giacometti stood. About his
struggle with perception, Giacometti is noted to have said,
I looked at the people around me and all of a sudden I
saw them as I had never
seen them …Everything was different: depth, objects,
colours, silence … and completely new … a sort
of continual marvelling at everything.
(Morris. 1993:105)
Like with Cezanne’s painting, in Giacometti’s sculptures (and
indeed his drawings of his brother Diego which depict the same
feverish strokes in charcoal) we come to know his visual
process through the feverish style in which they were enacted.
Indeed John Berger said of Giacometti’s process, “It was
the act of looking which kept him aware of being constantly
suspended between being and truth‟ (1970:174).
Giacometti’s style does more than just return visual data to
us, as in hyper-realist painting/sculpture/ or indeed
documentary photography, in these cases, “It is seen ... but
not reflectively known” Crowther, 1993:41), as the style of
the artist is diluted and perception “hypostasized”. Crowther
goes further to say that not only can sensory reflections be
ignited in the viewer, but furthermore the;
[…] strife of world and earth can be embodied in a work
at a level of universal significance. `Irrespective of
the creator or audience’s empirical historical
circumstances, they are joined at a more basic level of
truth.
(1993:97)
If the artist has a certain way of being in the world, their
perception stylising in a particular way; then it could be
claimed that style is located relationally to its own
historical context, at the time of making.
For example, Cezanne’s work comes at a point in history
somewhere between or overlapping both Impressionism and
Cubism. Giacometti’s dramatic way of sculpting comes into
being during post-war existentialism. In this sense, Crowther
suggests what Merleau Ponty fails to fully articulate, that
autofiguration, in the context of the artist, “creates the
world anew” (1993:117), and as such, their style being
“original, innovatory, or exemplary” (1993:117) becomes a
criterion for the success of its embodiment.
We have seen how an artist might come to paint or indeed
sculpt autofiguratively, but the photographer may be doomed to
represent.
Is the photographer doomed to represent?
In its,’ “mechanical genesis” (Sontag,1997:158) the camera is
in some sense a creator of images, and can be held as
independent from the image-maker, for the sheer fact that the
‘making’ takes place in the camera itself. The image-maker can
do a lot to influence that process but nonetheless, that
process, despite all manual adjustments, happens on its own.
This fact has given the camera the status of being an
objective instrument and of showing the ‘truth’.
“Common sense suggests there is a kinship between
photographic images and truth” Scott Walden (2010:91). Here,
Walden reflects on situations that have arisen where people
have been upset that a photograph has been manipulated to show
a different version of what happened; thereby revealing a
deeply embedded relationship between photography and truth.
However, we cannot entirely separate the image-maker from the
camera, even in documentary-style photography which
presupposes an ‘objective’ point of view.
For example, as part of the Farm Security Administration in
1930, photographers were asked to portray the plight of the
poverty-stricken cotton farmers. The resulting images are now
said to be the main record of the Depression era in America.
Photography has an ability to tell a story with a given
message or agenda, just like any other medium such as painting
or writing,
[they] … would take dozens of frontal pictures of their
sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had
gotten just the right look on film – the precise
expression on the subjects face that supported their own
notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture,
exploitation and geometry. … in preferring one exposure
to another, photographers are always imposing standards
on their subjects.
(Sontag,1997:7)
The fact that the image can be manipulated and the camera
settings altered, adjusted and framed in a specific way,
places the photographer in an ‘aggressive’ position, according
to Sontag. She asserts that, “To photograph is to appropriate
the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a
certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge and,
therefore, like power” (Sontag,1997:4) By appropriating
something you are necessarily making an object out of it, to
use as a means to an end; to further an idea which necessarily
perpetuates a subject-object dualism. Furthermore, the
photographer has an agenda to represent, which locates them in
an aggressive, almost god-like position.
In contemporary society, photography assumes representation,
which is why we approach things like air-brushed models in
magazines or pornography with caution. It could be argued that
it promotes an unattainable and potentially damaging view of
both men and women that could be interpreted as reality.
Indeed, the view that representation can be deceiving and
perhaps detrimental for society can be found in Plato’s The
Republic. He suggests representation “has a bad effect in its
audiences, who learn to admire and imitate the faults it
represents.” (Plato, 2003: 349). For Plato, Photography would
be the most extreme example of representation as it is
arguably the most accurate depiction of the external world
possible and therefore would be deemed as mimesis: an imitation
of reality.
Photography as embodied
Merleau-Ponty would reject photography as having the capacity
for being an embodied art form, in Eye and Mind he discusses
with the artist Rodin how, “it destroys the overtaking, the
overlapping, the “metamorphosis” [Rodin] of time” (1993:316),
though here he is talking about photography as he knew it, in
the documentary sense, you might wonder what he would make of
it being used in a completely different way: one that
encapsulates the very overtaking and overlapping he refers to.
John Stezaker, doesn’t take photographs at all, instead he
juxtaposes found-photographs of cultural significance, such as
film icons and splices them with something other to initiate a
third potential for meaning – to be filled by the viewer. In
Siren Song (Fig 3), an upturned colour-postcard of a wave
takes the place of what would be the face of (what we assume
to be) a style-icon or similar, who fills the rest of the
picture-plane. The result is somewhat disturbing; the ‘break’
of the wave has an outline that more-or-less fits with where
the head should be, so that the dynamics of the wave itself;
its power and movement, our gaze both accredits and contrasts
with the vicarious composure of the woman. Like in Cezanne’s
work, our gaze is returned to us, not in ‘hazy unfinished’
brushstrokes, but in the “overlapping” of the sensory with the
documentary; it is a comment on pictures themselves and their
ability to be interpreted differently, perhaps for one, the
wave may make the woman ‘serene’; or another, as ‘angry’: the
piece shows room for interpretation itself.
If I were to elicit a criticism of Stezaker’s work as being
categorised ‘embodied’, it would be to compare the immediacy
of the painters brushstroke in the act of perception, such as
in the work or Cezanne; with the way in which Stezaker
compiles his montages which certainly incur a more drawn-out
artistic process involving various stages. However to dismiss
Stezaker’s work on this basis would be to reduce style to a very
limited time-sensitive perception of the world, where if this
were the case, experience would leave us as soon as the brush
makes contact with the canvas.
In David Hockney’s photo-montages, we encounter the similar
lack of immediacy seen in Stezaker’s work, as the imaginative
moment is extended from the photographs being taken and them
being arranged in the montage until it is ‘finished’.
Additionally, Hockney work does more to dispute Merleau-Pontys
view that the camera “destroys” embodiment by exemplifying the
overlapping Merleau-Ponty suggests it lacks.
Hockney associates cubist painting with his own approach to
photomontage. Cubist paintings require the viewer to let their
eyes be taken by the salient orders inherent within the mark-
making and in doing so, the viewer comes to ‘know’ the reality
of the image. When the painter adds more paint to the canvas
in a cubist painting, it is more than just adding material it
is,
Fresh thoughts and observations […] Much human
experience, when one comes to think about it, is a matter
of layering. We understand the present by comparing it
with the past.
(Gayford. 2011:115)
For Hockney, the problem with one-shot photographs is that
they do not invite the viewer into the scene to look around.
The ‘split-second’ appearance of these images, their single
point-of-view and those paintings that are made from them, do
little to represent the experience of seeing. Hockney’s layers
of photographs are all instances of ‘being there’; each
photograph, like a different hue in Cezanne’s painting;
becomes another thought or viewpoint as they arise, next to
one another, the moment extended through multiple photographs.
In Hockney’s montage David Graves Looking at Bayswater London (Fig 4)
we seem to ‘feel’ our way through the image in order to
decipher it. Our eyes rest on the subjects face, then perhaps
to the window to see what that person is looking at, we notice
Hockney’s own shoes as one of the lower-most photographs and
situate ourselves in the room looking ‘up’ the image from
Hockney’s perspective.
Like in Cezanne’s paintings where the ‘hazy, unfinished’
brushstrokes are revealing in themselves as markers of the
body in relation to the mountain, echoed in the viewer; the
way in which the photographs are laid out are also important
for embodiment. It shows us selection ‘at work’: how our own
visual process works. If it can be agreed that representation
isn’t as the Cartesian Theatre suggest, then vision itself,
like the camera, is not framed. As a montage, the ‘frame’ of
the generic photograph has been lost and instead an ‘edgy’
frame-work takes its place with gaps that could refer to the
deficit present in our own visual sphere, the deficit with
which the viewer ‘shares’ and ‘infills’ with their own
presence. Quite different from if he had taken a photo that
tried to ‘represent’ ‘David Graves Looking at Bayswater
London’; this would have been static, framed by the camera,
rather than then the visual field and not indicative of
Hockney’s presence; or indeed: the full sense of David Graves.
We are instead presented with fragments of Hockney’s actual
experience of being there with the camera and David Graves,
the variety of views and negotiations of which is returned as
one multiplicity.
It is worth asking how it might be to use the camera
autofiguratively, for as it has been said; there is a
perceived lack of immediacy when there is a gap between the
camera-work and the culmination of images for the finished
piece. This infers that there is a difference between embodied
camera practice; the moment when you are ‘with camera’; and
embodied photography; when the process is fulfilled: since the
camera is only the first step in the photographic process. In
this way we can see that Stezakers photo-montages may indeed
be embodied photography in that as a whole piece it can be
described as being embodied. However, the moment the
photograph of the montage was taken was still just a single-
shot photograph and not perhaps autofigurative.
On the other hand, Hockney’s montages may show the camera-work
itself to be embodied by virtue of the decision-making and
salient orders within vision reproduced with the camera. Each
time the camera is moved according to Hockney’s movements, the
camera is ‘correctly’ focused and exposed for each moment;
just as when we look at something, the thing focused on
appears larger and in focus. Additionally, when Cezanne
painted, rather than mix his paint to achieve a colour, he
made certain colours appear through the juxtaposition of
different colours rather than by mixing. The same could be
said of the way in which the photographs are placed together
afterwards; in the mosaic-like positioning comes a fuller
expression of what is there than had it been attempted in one-
single image.
Suzy Oliveira’s photographic sculptures are reminiscent of
Hockney’s montages; in that the photographs taken are put back
together in joined layers with a relief. In Centre Of Your World
(Fig 5) a C-print of a forest floor printed on archival card
forms a 3D wall-mounted relief with layers that advance and
retreat. We view them in much the same way as a Hockney in how
we register the scene; our eyes routed through the prominence
of the layers. However, the main discernable difference is
that the movement is given to us in terms of depth, rather
than flat space. On the 3D ‘edge’ there appears to be motion
blur where the camera has moved to get a different view-point,
it appears almost as if the ground has been ‘cut’ and suggests
the movement atop terrain. This blur may be the insignia of
the artists presence in the same way as we can see Hockneys
shoes; the handling of the camera that gives a sense of being-
there.
In Langdale Fell, Motion Frozen/Frozen Motion (Fig 6), John Hilliard
presents us with a double aperture combining two views of a
partially frozen waterfall. On the left, the ‘frozen motion’
was captured by precisely focusing the camera onto the frozen
river which resulting in the water flowing next to it
registering as a blur. In contrast, on the right hand image,
Hilliard attempted to arrest the flow of water by moving the
camera with the speed and flow of the water; attempting to
make the camera river, as if he were feeling through the camera
itself by using slower shutter speeds to “sense”. This results
in the flow of water being still and the ice being out of
focus and ‘flowing’. The fact that he tried to make the camera
‘like river’ by moving it with particular impositions is more
reminiscent of the immediacy of drawing, where the pen carries
the motion of the wind in the leaves, as concurrent with the
tension in the artists’ hand. However the ‘moment’ of
embodiment is still extended to the act of placing the two
versions together which would have happened at a later stage.
Seen together, the double aperture ‘admits’ the photographers
role in the image-making by revealing the process of their
manipulation in the resulting image; but also ‘admits’ the
cameras own intentions in having a certain way of being. This
is a good example of how artist and material negotiate
together to bring the image into being and of both being part-
of-the-scene. Langdale Fell, Motion Frozen/Frozen Motion shows the
limits of the cameras ability to tell the ‘truth’ but also the
limits of our own ‘vision’; the image is self-conscious and in
a completely different way to Cezanne’s painting: shows
embodiment. Seeing the images together we arrive at a sense of
knowing the scene more completely then if he had used one or
the other image.
Eeva Karhu’s work combines different exposures and angles of
the same view together in one image to create an overall
ambience of a place through light and colour, her work is
often described as impressionistic for these reasons. For
example, Path 1 (Fig 7) is made up of 30 photographs of the same
walk she takes throughout a month in winter, a visual diary of
different moments of the same place, placed upon each other
with varying degrees of opacity; but so that the similar
features shared throughout come through. The differing levels
of opacity reveal the temporal nature of how we perceive in
the different layers so that the final image conveys ‘winter’
more so than had it been just a single split-second image from
a single perspective.
Furthermore her Light Paintings (Fig 8) are a series that I find
particularly evocative. For these montages she photographed
the light that fell on a blank canvas everyday for a year,
then arranged the recordings by seasons. The photographs
varied according to season, time of day, and the light in the
room being natural or artificial. Whilst it could be said that
the camera is doing all the work, it is in the arrangement of
the images that the scope of her project is fully realised,
she says,
At that moment I stepped aside from being the painter,
and let the Sun work on the canvas for a period of one
year. My role was director, to record that act with my
camera combining photographs that I obtained. […] By the
end of the process, after one year, my canvas is still
empty but the evidence of the photons playing in the
surface have been recorded.
(Karhu E. 2007)
The resulting montage of squares of varying shades of night
and day tessellate as a whole. Karhu’s work is autofigurative in
the sense that there is an element of chance in what occurs
between camera/canvas/photographer, though she relies upon the
environment for the work to come into being, she gently
directs in the repetitive nature of the entire process.
The resulting montage is not dissimilar to Hilliard’s piece
Camera Recording its Own Condition (7 Apertures, 10 speeds, 2 mirrors) (Fig 9)
a piece in which photography becomes both subject and object
thus blurring those very boundaries. In this piece Hilliard’s
fingers can be seen taking the photograph and holding up a
smaller mirror so that the camera settings can be seen. The
camera’s own possibilities are clearly seen and yet it is not
a direct representation of reality, rather it is multiple
versions of it made possible only by the artists own intention
to show it in this way.
In my own work, CameraTree (Fig 10)I have tried to take
elements from Hilliards work in the way he makes the camera
‘river’. For me, sensing through the camera, by using its functions
how one might use a pen, appeals as a way of working
autofiguratively where I am depicting a tree in a camera-like
way, as opposed to depicting a tree with a camera in a vision-
like way. I find this approach to be more explicitly
autofigurative than Hockney’s, although he uses the camera in
a vision-like way, he steers the camera, rather than the other
way around. However, perhaps it could be argued that Hockney,
like Oliveira, has more success in the way he frees the
photographic image from having a frame as opposed to
Stezakers, Hilliards and Karhu’s work. Oliveira goes further
than Hockney in this way as it brings the photograph into
relief as well which serves to intrude on the viewers space.
In CameraTree, from many perspectives, on slow-shutter speeds
of varying degrees, I attempted to move the camera with the
speed of the wind moving through the leaves and branches of
the tree. Where lightness and wind was perceived, I attributed
it to slower shutter speeds in the camera and so ‘felt’ it in
this way, through the camera in order to capture it. In
contrast, the trunk of the tree was perceived as heavy and
immobile and this was captured using fast shutter speed,
halting the motion. The result is that the leaves of the tree
appear almost ‘painted’ by the camera, as the light registers
the camera movement creating ‘gestures’, where as the trunk of
the tree is more static and deeper as it is less exposed. Put
back together as a composite, I attempted to reimagine the
tree with the hundreds of exposures taken so that as a whole
image it reappears as a tree. It is was my intention to act in
the moment with the camera in response to the tree as it
appeared to me and so on this basis I would deem it to be
successful. Further practical research might involve an
element of relief like in Oliveria’s work, where the singular
photographs are printed onto clear Perspex, and when arranged
as a composite in relief, the latticework of frame is even
more an ‘illusion’ given to us by the camera.
We can see then, that there are different ways in which
photography can be employed to reveal embodiment, in some it
is seen in the camerawork, but usually it is in the entire
photographic process as a whole. True of all the examples
here, is the way in which they are layered or juxtaposed with
something other, either a layer on top or to the side or; in
which the layering suggest the works coming-into-being and
reveals the negotiation between artist, material and context.
Moving forward, further theoretical research might aim to ask
whether embodied art-making is a more ethical, viewer-friendly
way of making art, whereby the notion of ‘artist as genius’ or
of having power is replaced by one who is part-of-the-world
rather than commenting on it. It might investigate that art
made in this way seeks to include the viewer rather than
alienate at a time when public opinion of the arts is very
critical of its intentions.
Bibliography
Abrams D. (1997) The Spell of the Sensuous, USA: VintageBerger J. (1980). About Looking. London: BloomsburyCazeaux C. (2012) Sensation as Participation. Aesthetic Pathways 2 (2):2-30 Collingwood R.G. (1938) The Principles of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Crowther P. (1993). Art and Embodiment. Oxford: Clarendon PressDescartes R. (1996) Meditations on First Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Gayford M. (2011). A Bigger Message. London: Thames and HudsonJohnson G.A. (ed) (1993) The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Evanston: Northestern University PressKarhu E. (2007) Light Paintings. www.helsinkischool.fi/helsinkischool/artist.php?id=9060 (Last Accessed 3/11/2013)Kostelanetz R. (2003) Conversing with Cage. London: RoutledgeMerleau-Ponty M. (2004) The World of Perception. London and New York: RoutledgeMerleau-Ponty M. (2002) Phenomenology of Perception. London and NewYork: RoutledgeMorris F. (1994) Paris Post-War, Art and Existentialism. London: Tate PublishingRadice B (ed) (2003) Plato: The Republic London: PenguinSontag S. (1977). On Photography. USA: PenguinWalden S. (2010) Photography and Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing
Further Reading
Cazeaux C. (ed) (2000) The Continental Aesthetics Reader. USA: RoutledgeCazeaux C. (ed) (2011) The Continental Aesthetics Reader 2nd Edition. USA:RoutledgeJanaway C. (2006) Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art. Oxford: Blackwell PublishingSobchack V. (1992) The Address of the Eye. USA: Princeton University PressWeschler L. (2008) True to Life USA: University of California Press
List of Illustrations
Figure 1: Cezanne. P. Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from Bellevue, Oil on Canvas, Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania
Figure 2: Giacometti. A. Walking Man II (1960) Bronze, Succession Giacometti / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Figure 3: Stezaker, J. Siren Song V,(2011) Collage
Figure 5: Oliveira S. Centre of your world (2009) C-Prints on ArchivalCard
Figure 6: Hilliard J. Langdale Fell, Motion Frozen/Frozen Motion (1979) Photograph, Tate
Figure 7: Karhu E. Path 1 Artifical Light (2012) C-Print, Purdy HicksGallery
Figure 8: Karhu E. Light Paintings 01 (2012-2013) C-Print Helinski School
Figure 9: Hilliard J. Camera Recording its Own Condition (7 apertures, 10 speeds, 2 Mirrors) (1971) 70 Photographs on Card on Perspex, Tate
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