From Becoming-Woman to Becoming- Imperceptible: Self-Styled Death and Virtual Female Corpse in Digital Portraits of Cancer (original) (raw)
Related papers
This mini-dissertation serves as a framework for my own creative practice. In this research paper my intention is to explore, within a feminist reading, representations of the female corpse in fashion photography and art. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s theories on the concept of representation are utilised to critically analyse and interogate selected images from fashion magazines, which depicts the female corpse in an idealised way. Such idealisation manifests in Western culture, in fashion magazines, as expressed in depictions of the attractive/ seductive/fine-looking female corpse. Fashion photographs that fit this description are critically contrasted and challenged to selected artworks by Penny Siopis and Marlene Dumas, alongside my own work, to explore how the female corpse can be represented, as strategy to undermine the aesthetic and cultural objectification of the female body. Here the study also explores the selected artists’ utilisation of the abject and the grotesque in relation to their use of artistic mediums and modes of production as an attempt to create ambiguous and conflicting combinations of attraction and repulsion (the sublime aesthetic of delightful horror), thereby confronting the viewer with the notion of the objectification of the decease[d] feminine body as object to-be-looked-at. This necessitated the inclusion of seminal theories developed by the French theorist, Julia Kristeva (1982) on the abject and the Russian theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin (1968) on the grotesque.
Death and the image (November 2018)
Art Blart, 2018
This text investigates how the act of photography visually writes trauma. Through an analysis of the context of images of death by artists such as Alphonse Bertillon, Robert Capa, Alexander Gardner, Walker Evans the paper ponders how the camera captures human beings ante-mortem, at the death point, post-mortem and vita ad mortem. It seeks to understand that line between presence and absence where life was there… and now death is in its place. Death was one step removed, now it is present. How does the act and performance of photography depict the trauma of death, this double death (for the photograph is a memento mori and/or the person in the photograph may already know that they are going to die). "The text of eternity that the photograph proposes, imparts and imposes a paradoxical state of loss. The secret of telling truth in a photograph is that the more truthful, "the more orgasmic, the more pleasurable, the more suicidal" the pronouncement of the perfect paradox (you are dead but also alive) … then the more we are strangled while uttering it. The language of deferral in the writing of trauma in death and the image becomes the dissolve that seizes the subject in the midst of an eternal bliss. In death and the image we may actually die (be)coming." Word count: 8,137
Critical Arts, 2015
The past few decades have witnessed a proliferation of photographic images (often in photobooks or online) focusing on the aged and the terminally ill. These works cut across different photographic practices, bringing together the documentary, the vernacular and the art photograph. Rather than individual ‘decisive moment’ shots, such works almost always occur in sequences or series, tracking a process whose telos is inevitably death. Following Roland Barthes (2000[1980]), I examine works from this growing photographic genre in light of the ways that loss and imminent death are ensnared in the theorisation of photography itself. Such memento mori might appear to be linked to the indexical nature of photography, in its most literal sense a photochemical process capturing the trace of something inevitably past, and therefore ineluctably lost. However, I argue that even with technological changes in the modes of production and systems of dissemination of images, where the digital paradigm no longer presupposes a necessary link between the photographic and the real, artists working in this genre have adhered to the notion of photography’s truth effect, its affinity with the role of witness. After a brief glance at three texts linking photography and death, I probe numerous bodies of work from this genre, sounding their need to rehearse loss of life and its symbolic retrieval, and the complex ways in which memory and oblivion continue to be written into diverse photographic practices.
Capturing the Last Moments Recording the Dying Body at the Turn of the 21st century
Image and Narrative, 2013
In the present article I examine Sophie Calle’s video installation Pas pu saisir la mort (2007) from various perspectives. This work functions independently, but it also circulates within different networks in Calle’s work, most importantly the large exhibition Rachel, Monique (2010) and the trilogy on suffering, along with Douleur exquise (2003-2004) and Prenez soin de vous (2007). Within Calle’s oeuvre as a whole, it belatedly highlights and redenes themes and concerns present from the very beginning of the work. By suspending the moment of Monique Sindler’s death and keeping it present in the video installation, the mother’s body becomes an object that can be used at will. At the same time, Calle uses this ambivalent, zombie-like object as the basis to reconstruct and animate her mother as a character. Pas pu saisir la mort can be regarded as a commentary on theories of photography that link photography with death and on recent explorations of the relationship between stillness and the movingimage (lm). The work also ts within a long tradition of artworks dealing with death and dying. Finally, Calle’s artistic project also reveals wider cultural changes in the way in which societies deal with dying and the role of technology in that process.
Representations of dying in contemporary visual culture and the ethics of spectatorship
This thesis is about the dying individual. The institutionalisation of death in the West has led to increasing public unfamiliarity with the actualities and banalities of dying. Accordingly, this thesis is concerned with the place where the dying individual is most commonly encountered: visual culture. How is the dying individual seen and screened? What structures are at play in their framing? And what is the spectator’s ethical relationship with – and moreover, responsibility towards – the dying individual? The introduction looks at imagery of dying which is used to “shock”. I then examine how, over the past century, “dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living” (Benjamin, 1936/2007), before turning to the use of visual culture in national health projects which seek to return the dying individual to the communal fold. I identify problems, which in turn open up new possibilities for spectatorship as an act of active citizenship and solidarity. The last two chapters consider how to foster public solidarity with the dying individual in visual culture. Through photography, then film, I examine texts which unsettle the status quo and help lay the foundations for an ethics of spectatorship in the encounter with the dying individual.
Material Remains: Photography, Death, and Transformation
2019
This dissertation discusses photographic series by nine contemporary American photographers who picture the materials of death: belongings left behind, physical traces, dead bodies, and cremation ashes. In the series by Andrea Tese, Justin Kimball, and Jonathan Hollingsworth featured in Chapter One, belongings left behind-furniture, clothes, keepsakes, and personal effects-retain physical and psychic traces of the lives of the deceased. The blood-and fluid-stained fabrics and the decaying dead bodies themselves pictured in series by Sarah Sudhoff, Sally Mann, and Robert Shults, discussed in Chapter Two, serve as evidence of the physical and sociopolitical circumstances of death. In Chapter Three, series by Jacqueline Hayden, Jason Lazarus, and David Maisel feature cremation ashes, which suggest, through their resemblance to stars and other sublime vistas, an enduring afterlife. These photographs vacillate between emphasizing the "truth" and persistence of material remains and their literal and metaphorical transformation. Utilizing an array of photographic processes and artistic choices, the photographers lead the viewer through various levels of literal and metaphorical transformation, allowing the photographers to vii explore new ways to visualize that which otherwise may not be accessible, apparent, or knowable: the story of a life lived and lost, the underlying sociopolitical causes of a death, or the existence of an afterlife. These varied approaches to reading death through transformation suggest possibilities but ultimately accept the limitations of attempting to picture the unknowable. Despite their acknowledgement of such limitations, however, each photographer suggests that efforts to memorialize, understand, and envision remain meaningful and worthwhile. This dissertation primarily utilizes visual analysis and incorporates material from in-depth, firsthand interviews between the author and six of the discussed artists. The dissertation also draws on photography theory and interdisciplinary scholarship from the field of Death Studies. Contemplating the photographs discussed herein, singly and in series, and in conversation with each other and with trends in popular media and contemporary funerary options, allows viewers insight into individual experiences of dying and enables them to extrapolate broader patterns in attitudes, sociopolitical circumstances, and institutions that affect how people age, ail, and die, and mourn and remember today.
Between the Lines: The Language and Art of Death
This short paper reflects on the attitudes that modern society has towards death, which affect and form the language that we use to describe death. The key domains of concern to the dying are described, as well as the patterns of social interactions. It explores how the visual arts can offer an alternate and cathartic form of communication of death, as shown by the patient experience with cancer. Ultimately, it encourages us to view medicine as an art, and also art as medicine.
“The Somatechnics of Life and Death: Recent Trends in Gender Studies.”
Australian Feminist Studies 3, 2019
This article introduces the special issue on “The Somatechnics of Life and Death”. This issue is a collection of papers presented at the 10th International Somatechnics Conference, held in December 2016 on beautiful Bundjalung country in Byron Bay. Building on the conference theme, “Technicity, Temporality, Embodiment”, this special issue explores current trends in feminist and gender studies scholarship on the nature of ‘life’ and ‘death’. Key themes emerging from these papers include: current uptakes of Foucault’s concept of ‘biopower’; new materialist focuses on animacy and vitality; the importance of critical perspectives on both ‘life’ and ‘death’; rethinking binaries around inanimacy and animacy and ‘life’ versus ‘death’; and the place of somatechnics in refiguring these binaries.