Materiality And The Image

Modernism and After (Vis Com)

Lecture 5: Materiality and the Image

Today we’ll be touching...

–Waste–Products and Commodities–Material Culture–Photographs–Illustrations

WASTE

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Zizek – Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema

Mary Douglas

“In chasing dirt, in papering, decorating, tidying we are not governed by anxiety to escape disease, but are positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea. There is nothing fearful or unreasoning in our dirt avoidance: it is a creative movement, an attempt to relate form to function, to make unity of experience.”(Douglas 2001 [1966], p.2)

Carolee Schneemann (1964) Meat Joy

Paul McCarthy (1997) Santa’s Chocolate Shop

Norman M. Faye (1945) Photo taken from the Buchenwald concentration camp

PRODUCTS AND COMMODITIES

“The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of material behaviour.”Karl Marx in (Eagleton 1997, p.6)

“Objects are important for Marx because they are the unit representations of fundamental processes of capitalist society: alienation, exploitation and estrangement.”(Woodward 2007, p. 36)

Martha Rosler (1969-72) Cleaning the Drapes

Martha Rosler (2004) Bringing the War Home

“Forty years ago [in 1968, Marxism] was supposed to denounce the machinery of social domination in order to equip those challenging it with new weapons. Today, it has become the opposite: a disenchanted knowledge of the reign of the commodity and the spectacle, of the equivalence between everything and everything else and between everything and its own image.”(Ranciere 2009, p. 32)

Strictly speaking, the humans of the age of affluence are surrounded not so much by other human beings, as they were in all previous ages, but by objects. Their daily dealings are now not so much with their fellow men, but rather – on a rising statistical curve – with the reception and manipulation of goods and messages...

MATERIAL CULTURE

(Revisiting) Products and Commodities

Coca-Cola: A Black Sweet Drink From Trinidad

Daniel Miller (1998 [1997])

Bertien Van Manen (2003) La Courneuve. Chez Monsieur Fofana (Mali). They came to Paris in 1963

Photographs

“Photographs are both images and physical objects that exist in time and space and thus in social and cultural experience. They have ‘volume opacity, tactility and presence in the world’ (Bracten 1997, p.2) and are thus enmeshed with subjective, embodied and sensuous interactions.”

(Edwards and Hart 2004, p. 1)

Illustration

2008, Hong Kong, Victionary

Eleanor Bowley (2008) Experimental Faces

Peter Callesen (2008) Half Way Through

Peter Callesen (2008) The Core of Everything

Sandrine Pelletier (2008) Employee.

References / Readings• Baudrillard, J (1998) The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London, Sage.• Buchli, V (2002) The Material Culture Reader. Oxford, Berg.• Dant, T (2005) Materiality and Society. Berkshire, Open University Press.• Douglas, M (2001 [1966]) Purity and Danger. London, Routledge.• Eagleton, T (1997) Marx. London, Phoenix.• Edwards, E and Janice Hart (eds) (2004) Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of

Images. London, Routledge.• Graves-Brown, P.M. (2000) Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture. London, Routledge.• Miller, D (2008) The Comfort of Things. Cambridge, Polity Press.• Miller, D (ed) (2005) Materiality. London, Duke University Press.• Miller, D (1997) Coca-Cola: A Black Sweet Drink From Trinidad. In Miller, D (ed) (1998) Material

Cultures: Why some things Matter. London, UCL Press. Pp. 169-188.• Ranciere, J (2009) The Emancipated Spectator. London, Verso.• Tilley, C et al. (eds) Handbook of Material Culture. London, Sage.• Tilley, C (ed.) (1990) Reading Material Culture. Oxford, Basil Blackwell Ltd.• Woodward, I (2007) Understanding Material Culture. London, Sage.