Body representations in Art and Photography

Ben Baruch Blich — Body representations in Art and Photography Ben Baruch Blich — Introduction The purpose of my paper is to present, discuss and debate the problem of body representations in art and photography. In fact, my interest in the problem of representation, i.e.: of conveying information by visual images, goes back to my paper 'Pictorial realism' (Blich 1991), in which I raised the question as to the nature of pictures. A visual image: a painting, an illustration, a photograph and the moving picture in the cinema are all enigmatic vehicles of information. They are considered the most common and most readily perceived means of communication, much easier to create and apprehend than words and sentences, but as soon as we try to explain the reality for which they stand for, it becomes clear that unusual perceptual processes are involved. On the one hand their relation with reality is denotative, and as such they truly reflect and frequently also preserve reality, serving as an easy channel for acquiring knowledge. Yet on the other hand, pictorial rendering raises the complex issue of understanding the act of visual perception: what do we see in pictures? Real lively objects, real scenes, or do we interpret what is actually seen, i.e.: the conventions of colours, lines, dots etc., to be seen as if real objects. This equivocal understanding of pictures stems mainly from our dilemma on how we are to treat the 'aboutness' of pictures. 102 The Weight of Photography While pictures are made of paper, canvas, covered with paint, dots, lines, all to be perceived on their own merit, they are also, after all, vehicles of representation, in which we are presumed to identify real objects. Indeed, visual images raise epistemological questions as to how we perceive them, and through them, the world we live in. By confronting painting to the photographic act of representation, I intend to examine remarks colloquially referred to their extent of similarity that lies between them and reality in general, and to the human body in particular. I will show that photography in this respect, alludes to, and sometimes even takes painting to be its source of inspiration. Yet on the other hand, I will show that photography has an advantage on painting even when it strives to convey metaphors, in this case the body as a metaphor. The discussion starts with a note on the epistemology of photography in comparison to painting. Then I go on to discuss the many facets of the human body as represented by painting and photography. Visual information by Painting and Photography Among the possible means of communication, pictorial representation has accumulated a momentum that none of its counterparts, including language, can credit itself with. Today, more than ever in the history of mankind, pictures have become the main means of transferring information: in education, in moulding public opinion, in advertising, not to mention their traditional role in the visual arts. With the penetration of photography into the arena of representation in the middle of the 19th century, the rules of rendering were changed, and with that the scope of images, which, for ages had been exclusively in the hands of artists. Though it seems odd at the beginning of the third millennium to be still justifying the act of photography, it is nevertheless true to say that the history of modern times is ipso facto the history of the camera. Modern life has flirted with the camera, has worshiped it, and, to a certain extent, modern times would not have been possible without it. 103 Ben Baruch Blich It is true that in contrast to the hand-made, one-off, traditional craft of representation by painting, photography is an easy, straight forward, technological, mass medium, that each and everyone can handle. Photography does not need much learning or skill to produce, especially today in the digital era, in which the camera is part and parcel of our cellular telephones. Photography is no longer a myth, it has freed itself from the obscure darkroom, from Plato’s cave, to become a medium that not only represents, preserves and artistically exhibits reality, but also dramatically has violated, traditional epistemology by constituting new and unfamiliar attitudes towards the act of representation. Though a photograph is easy to manage and produce, still to this day we are amazed and fascinated by being able to hold in our hands images representing ourselves. On the one hand a photograph is a pictorial representation, and it enhances visual information as paintings do, and yet, on the other hand, a photograph is a real depiction, and as such, deliberately brings to our attention, scenes which traditional vehicles could not portray. Being the most realistic vehicle of representation, photography moulds new and sometimes unexpected points of view onto the scenes depicted, and as such it brings to the open questions concerning perception as well as ethical dilemmas. It was Walter Benjamin who taught us ‘that everybody who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an expert’ (Benjamin, 1968, pp. 231), that is: the aura of being a one-off rendering customarily attributed to the traditional means of representation, does not play a role in photography. According to this view, advocated later by Slavoj Zizek and others, the camera is indeed an intricate agent; it serves as a vehicle of documentation, of memory, of preservation (Sontag 1977), and by the same token, it is a voyeuristic vehicle which invades the private and transfers the scenes depicted into the spectator’s possession. The gaze, the seeing, the information retrieved from the photograph, is the essence of the camera’s attributes and the bottom line of the photographic epistemology. One does not simply look and register a photographic scene; one sees and perceives a photographic scene in the same way a child, according to Jacques Lacan, (Lacan 1949) recognises for the first time its own image in the mirror – a stage which marks the child’s ability to reflect on his own body and construct his own self. 104 The Weight of Photography The reflection of the self in a photograph, a mirror, or in the water, as in case of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image, is indeed one of the major problems Western civilization is preoccupied with. Painting, sculpting, engraving, carving, were for centuries in the service of mimesis, the only pictorial vehicles denoting the real and the imaginary alike. With the penetration of photography the rules of mimesis were changed, and with it, the status of the observer: from a passive stance to an active, involved, critical observer. The same is true of the object represented by a photograph. From an aesthetic experience, as in the case of a painting, we are faced with a reification of the object depicted by the camera, or, to use Laura Mulvey’s (Mulvey 1989) terminology, the photograph is an agent of fetishistic scopophilia, since what is seen by the photograph is not only an aesthetic experience, something pleasing to look at; a photograph is also an object through which we experience a frame, a window onto reality, and that very photograph, the frame, may become an object in itself, a fetish, replacing the so called ‘real scene’. To look at a photograph is in many ways to become a voyeur, to unveil the forbidden, the private, and be exposed to real scenes as if they had happened to ones self. To substantiate that statement we can compare a painting made by a skilful painter with a photographer: let us take as an example Goya’s The Third of May, 1808, and place it next to a photograph of a similar scene: Eddie Adams’s A street execution of a Vietcong prisoner (1968). This comparison will point out that being exposed to a painting is in many respects a different experience from being exposed to a photograph. It is true that both pictures depict horrible and horrifying scenes. And yet, if you disregard for a moment aesthetic values and artistic excellence, and concentrate on the information retrieved from the two depictions, and reflect on the epistemological point of view each one of them demands, you may agree with me that a photograph is a spectacle, a hyper-reality representation because it complies not only with truth and objectivity, but also with what is so eloquently defined by Guy Debord (Debord 1992) as the transparency of vision, and to what is labelled by Jean Baudrillard (Baudrillard 1992) as the precession of simulacra. 105 Ben Baruch Blich Being a transparent vehicle, a photograph is an icon, a simulacrum, which precedes and in many ways also facilitates the scenes it exemplifies. Not that we would not have knowledge about horrible executions without a photograph, but a photograph has the power of articulation, and it turns vague knowledge into a concrete testimony, giving it an ontological credibility. Practically speaking, a photograph is in the position of replacing reality, and as such it represents a state of affairs we would not have been exposed to unless by the act of photography. Moreover, in contrast to a painting which may successfully (or occasionally may fail) to symbolize a certain idea or value (as in the Renaissance art), a photograph has always a reference, and is expected to be relevant even when it depicts aesthetic scenes (landscapes, sunsets, impeccable bodies, etc.), or when it alludes in a roundabout way at political atrocities (as in the case Adams's photograph). This in turn has an impact on the viewer's position towards the scenes he sees in a painting and in a photograph. Since a painting is an opaque medium, that is, it denotes a certain scene, let us say - two human bodies at a certain posture, but represents an idea, for example the idea of Creation, as in the case of The Creation of Adam by Michaelangelo, a photograph, on the other hand, always denotes the scenes it represents, and will hardly refer at an idea without depicting the real scene. That is why a photograph goes beyond the represented and functions as a simulacrum, whereas a painting is a visual story recruiting narrative devices, such as metaphor, oxymoron, etc. in order to be able to convey its ideas. Goya's painting is an illustration of a real execution which took place during the French occupation of Spain; it is a painting which denotes an execution, but its intension is to convey the idea of rebellion, liberty, etc. But since the scene is aesthetically depicted, that is, the painter used narrative devices to convey his message (combination of colours, contrasts, etc.), the painting may aesthetically please the viewer and fail to convey its horrible message, as in the case of Adams's photograph. Would it be incorrect to say that a photograph, due to the nature of its characteristics, is a vehicle which has the power to put the viewer in an awkward position, embarrassing him by the gaze the photograph implicitly imposes on him? Whereas a painting, though horrible and repelling, as in the case of Nicolas Poussin's The rape of the Sabine Women, or Theodore 106 The Weight of Photography Gericault's Medusa and many other paintings, as well as scenes in the theatre, for example Othello's strangulation scene, not to mention scenes in the cinema – are all directed towards the aesthetic, and hardly call for the viewer's involvement or put him, by the very act of looking at the painting, in the same epistemological position, a photograph (of the same scene) would do. It is, therefore, inconceivable to think nowadays on a painting as a vehicle of information, or take it as a means in moulding our points of view. Again, look at Adams's execution photograph, would it not elicit questions as to the position taken by Adams? Why did he photograph the scene? Why did he not intervene to stop the execution? And perhaps the most annoying assumption is that probably the execution took place only because of Adams's presence, and that his camera urged it. Poussin, Goya and Gericault are all excused of raising these question, not only because a painting is a narrative interpretation of the scenes depicted; the same goes also with photography, which is an interpreting vehicle as well, but unlike painting photography has changed the rules of denotation and with it the conventions of perception. A painting would never impose on the viewer the burden of justifying the act of perception: am I looking at a picture as in the case of a painting, or, by looking at the picture, I witness scenes beyond it, as in the case of photography? Am I examining the picture from its aesthetic and narrative points of view (painting), or by being exposed to the picture, I am ipso facto involved, an accomplice, invading the subject's private as in the case of photography. These are not simple minded questions, and the fact that I raise them vis-a-vis photography, means that in my view the camera, although a mechanical, automatic vehicle, is a medium that puts us, the viewers, in a reflective state of mind, compelling us to adjust the scenes exemplified by the picture, with our dissonant interpretations of the real and the quasireal alike. This is indeed the crux of the difference between a painting and a photograph; the one is a narrative aesthetic display, whereas the other brings to the open ontological questions, and with it the unresolved ‘distinction between what we really see and what we infer through the intellect’ (Gombrich 1972, pp. 15). To conclude: we all live in reality, and we all have a certain amount of knowledge as to how reality manifests itself, and yet, when we talk 107 Ben Baruch Blich about scenes we witness, paint them and photograph them, and try meaningfully to interpret their various manifestations, we consciously or unconsciously turn to use different levels of language games – the language we commonly use (if there is such a thing), and languages of representation, used by painting and photography. Reality, so it seems, is a theory laden concept, exemplified by various sign systems, and my purpose was to point at two options: the one advocated by painting, and the other by photography. The body The human figure, the body and its parts, were for centuries and are still to these days in the focus of the arts. Bodies were painted, sketched, sculptured, engraved, etc. Poets and writers were inspired by the human body and eloquently described it. The new two modern media – photography and the cinema, could not disregard the body, and turn their face from it. It would not be an exaggeration to say that photography is possessed and haunted by the body ever since. My intention in this part of my paper is to discuss several artists, some of them are notoriously known as photographers, whereas others are commonly defined as multimedia artists, and examine their interpretations of the human body. Before doing so, let me say that to understand photographs and be able to apprehend their iconography, one has to bear in mind that they continue developing what was already debated by traditional means of rendering in the visual arts, such as painting. Though photographers do not refer consciously to the history of painting, and some of them deny any influence from other media, it seems to me correct to say that they can not refrain from absorbing into their work ideas painters dealt with. After all human figures were painted in the history of western civilization since antiquity, and I am confident that all of you are familiar with hundreds if not thousands of paintings which portray the body, and therefore to deny any connection between painting and photography, would be a careless conclusion. 108 The Weight of Photography And indeed, painting, especially 19th century painting, has much to do with the photographic point of view made by the camera. The first painter, which impressed me deeply, is Theodore Gericault, who in a series of sketches painted legs, limbs, hands, heads gathered from dead people, and portrayed them as in the genre of still life (see his series of paintings 'severed limbs' painted in 1818). The paintings are actually studies made by Gericault as did many artists before him, and yet he is the first who actually painted them as dead parts, as organs dissected from corpses as if to put an emphasis on the fact that the human body is made of fractions, is an assembly of parts, and has nothing in common with our concept of the divine human being as portrayed by the Renaissance artists. Though artists, philosophers and scientists, seem to reach and construct their notions individually, the truth is, even today, that they unknowingly lean on 'background' knowledge articulating intuition, hypothesis and theory. It should not, therefore, come as a surprise to find out that the new bodily formation concepts in the late 17th and 18th centuries, were attributed mainly to the idea that nature is a mechanized system. Advocated firstly by Thomas Hobbes, who in a roundabout way expanded the exclusion of theological necessitation by recruiting Euclidean geometry as the basis for his analysis of nature, and elaborated later on as a materialistic reductionism by Charles Darwin and Ivan Pavlov. In the course of this model Hobbes defined space and motion as the sole means of reality, coupled with the notion of interaction he concluded that sensible change is due to the fact that there is nothing but bodies in the universe. Substance is synonymous to 'body', which exists independently of our thoughts. This materialistic trend was attenuated for a sort period of time by Hobbes' contemporary Rene Descartes. Though he did not completely reject materialism, at least vis-à-vis the inanimate world, he endowed human beings with immaterial and immortal spirits which were not subdued to causal processes. A turning point in spreading materialism as the sole basis for the understanding of the universe at large and in particular the human being, appeared in Julian de la Mettrie's book published in Leiden 1748, L'Homme Machine. As a medicine doctor who fled from Paris to find refuge in Holland and Prussia, de la Mettrie expressed the view of man 109 Ben Baruch Blich as a self-moving machine. By enumerating bodily needs, such as hunger and sleep, and by pointing at its processes in acquiring knowledge of languages, habits, moral conduct, and aging – de la Mettrie embarrassed the well established belief that the spiritual soul is the sole explanation of human behaviour. Since man is a segment in nature, and nature as such is a collection of laws, human being's actions are constituted on natural causes. Sensation, intellectual abilities, thoughts, passions and even beliefs, were identified as inner bodily motions. Hobbes, de la Mettrie, Holbach, Descartes, if to mention well known names who have transformed European thought during the 17th and 18th centuries towards the idea of nature as a mechanized system, had atomized the human body, stripped it of its appearance and Godly qualities, only to render it on physical qualities such as size, shape, colour, motion, weight, etc. Bodies had become matters in motion, randomly interacting, without any specific divine cause. It should not surprise us that less than hundred years later, in 1818 Mary Shelly published her epic novel Frankenstein which was an expression of the romantic aspiration towards creating a human body made by man (and not by God), to overcome sickness and death. And that Gericault's paintings, painted at the same year, were in fact a visual statement of the materialistic point of view, advocated later on by Charles Darwin (Darwin 1881), who treated the body not as a divine Godly impeccable created substance, but as an accumulation of organic parts, each assigned to accomplish a job, like a machine, created in the course of evolution. This is in part the reason for painters like Francois Boucher, Jean-Honore Fragonard, and above all – Gustav Courbet, the 19th century artist, who made an explicit reference to the body, the erotic body and to its organs. Let me in brief mention the Odalisque by Boucher (painted in 1745), who invites us to look at her private quarters in which she offers her body and her flesh, in a tempting look. Or Fragonard’s bathers (painted in 1765), a painting influenced by Rubens, in which fluidly bodies are painted in extreme erotic context. 110 The Weight of Photography Courbet went a step further in his paintings, the sleepers (1866) a woman in the waves, and in his provocative painting The origin of the world (1866). Looking at these paintings, one can not stay indifferent to the allusions to pornography at large, and especially to hard core pornography. Courbet stripped off not only the clothes of the figures he painted, but explicitly pointed at their sexual organs, ignoring their identity as in the case of the origin of the world. His paintings can be interpreted on the borderline between traditional high art, and mass production art, and the reason I find them in the twilight zone between traditional art and modern popular culture, is the fact that none of the subjects he painted refer or disclose information as to their background, or give us a clue why they were depicted in the paintings, except for exhibiting in public their organs. It is in these paintings that Courbet and Gericault have prophesized the agenda of photography, and both paved the road for thousands of photographs depicting the human body. The first photographer who complied with this agenda was Eadweard Muybridge. Eadweard Muybridge is in no doubt a pioneer, and may I say a paradigm photographer, who took his work to the extreme by placing his subjects as if they were specimen of scientific research. His endless series of pictures, of animals and human beings alike, are a testimony to this interpretation: Muybridge is not a documentary photographer; Muybridge is a scientist who has in a roundabout way turned the camera into an involved agent in the process of seeing. Due to his studies the camera has become a medium, an apparatus, of representing movement one could not perceive and experience without. As such it has extended the borders of information and has conditioned our knowledge; it is the utmost modern vehicle to absorb and by the same token - create knowledge, much the same as was the telescope in the days of Gallileo. By stripping off the clothes from the figures photographed, and isolating them against a bare background or a grid for purposes of measure, Muybridge elevates perception into Plato’s world of ideas. These studies have become an historical cornerstone of photography one can not ignore. 111 Ben Baruch Blich And indeed, photographers of all periods could not but relate to Muybridge’s works, especially those who took the body as their subject matter. Man Ray on the one hand together with Cindy Sherman and Gilbert and George, and on the other - Robert Mapplethorp, Helmut Newton and Jeff Koons – in spite of the differences among them, dialectically correspond with Muybridge, and in many ways continue his experiments. Man Ray in his 1947 series labeled Mr. And Mrs. Woodman, had opened to my mind, a new frontier in the understanding of the human body, which was adopted later on by Cindy Sherman, and to some extent also by Helmut Newton. It is a series of well staged scenes, which exibit encounters between two subjects – Mr. And Mrs. Woodman. By using special puppets which customarily are used as model mannequins, Ray empties his pictures from any direct reference to reality; after all what we see are not human beings, but models, and yet by using puppets as models of movements and of postures, Ray sheds light on the body as an object. By extending the semantics of the body to refer also to models, Ray had opened the gate before artists such as Cindy Sherman, who constantly and some may say – obsessively, raises in her works an existential question of identity. Now it is true that Ray has objectified the body, and has emptied it from subjective personal identity, but by doing so he raised the meaning of the photographic act: from a scientific objective means of rendering reality (as in the case of Muybridge), into an involved vehicle which is in the power to make statements concerning the human condition. And indeed, his works at large, as well as this bitterly humorous series of Mr. and Mrs Woodman as marionettes of love and lust, were influenced, no doubt, by Frued’s Interpretation of dreams, in which the unconscious, the dream, and the absurd condition of the human kind, are revealed and debated. The camera in Man Ray’s hands is an anarchistic vehicle as it maneuvers us to apprehend facts concerning our body we tend to repress or deny, and by using a model of two figures, of two puppets, Ray rewinds our fantasy and turns it to be true. 112 The Weight of Photography Using an artifact, such as a puppet or a doll, either as a model or as a means to elicit in the viewer sentiments towards his or her own existential condition, is meticulously done by Cindy Sherman, who steps one pace ahead and endows to the body a new, and a morbid meaning. I refer to her series of works done in the beginning of the nineties, in which anatomical figures and parts of dolls, replace the complete human figure. Some of the critics who referred to her work have defined it as an expression of hysteria, others have given it a feminist meaning and stated that they continue her previous works. These are all legitimate and interesting interpretations, and yet I want to point at another option which puts her work in line with Theodore Gericault, Muybridge and Ray, and state that these special works in which the body is dissected and deconstructed, are the utmost expression of the loss of humanity, of despair, of fear, of nihilism. In an interview Cindy Sherman said that her works are meant not only for the pleasure of the viewer, but as she said her intention was to ‘bite him back’, to put the spectator in the position of gazing at her works, invading the scenes she presented as in pornography. Her provocative series of body parts constructing hybrid dolls which are made of training mannequins, were correctly described by Amanda Cruz as “gruesome, hilarious, which we can not help but relate because they appear so familiar” (Cruz 2001, pp. 12). It is, indeed, a shocking series as the sexual elements stand for death, power, aggression, beauty, sadness, etc., and they compel the viewer to reflect on his or her dreams, uncontrolled thoughts, desires, as if the stimuli presented are not fictional but constitute a realistic context. The added value of Sherman’s photographs, is what I refer to as an epistemological revelation which puts the educated and sensitive spectator who is familiar with the history of body representations in art, in a reflective position, as he or she are required to observe their intimate body, private erotic images, and their subconscious libidinal dreams in a photograph exhibited in a public arena such as a museum, a gallery, a book. 113 Ben Baruch Blich In order to deepen our understanding of Sherman’s approach to the body let me compare her works with Mapplethorpe, Newton and Jeff Koons. One does not need a sensitive eye to see the differences between them. Whereas Mapplethorpe, Newton and Koons treat the body as a signifier, that is – with the help of the body they point at and signify state of affairs beyond the photograph, Cindy Sherman’s works should be taken as presenting an end on their own, that is – they should be treated as relics which serve as a signifier and a signified of the missing abused body, of the deformed amputated parts of the body, of the mutilated body. Cindy Sherman represents the absence, the void, the silent, as did Gericault in his sketches mentioned above; Mapplethorpe, Newton and Koons depict the presented, the attendant body, as in the paintings of Boucher, Fragonard and Courbet. Indeed, when we come to examine their works, especially those made by Mapplethorpe, one can not ignore his insistence on the presented, on the real, on the well balanced, clear, aesthetic body, even when he depicts parts of a body, like a hand, a leg, and sexual organ. It was Arthur Danto (Danto 1996) who nicely defined Mapplethorpe's works as a rare combination of Dionysus and Appolon, the two opposing gods in Greek mythology, one representing lust and ecstasy the other representing order, virtue and steadiness. Later on it was Germano Celant (Celant 1992) who added Narsissus to the list of gods characterizing Mapplethorpe’s works, who play a major role in Mapplethorpe’s understanding of the body. It seems to me correct to say that his approach to the body as well as his treatment of parts of the body, such as a hand, a leg, a head., and sexual organs – are all depicted under the veil of Appolon, i.e.: they are well staged, delicately photographed, and yet on the other hand – the subjects chosen and their contexts, unveils Mapplethorpe’s indulgence, sadomasochistic undercurrent, and fetishism. Take for instance his model Lisa Lyon, a body builder, he photographed for almost 3 years, and who served in his photographs as an epitomized body – both male and female, a masculine physical identity with a female embodiment. It is one of the best examples in which the body becomes not only a means but also an end for Mapplethorpe to express his desire 114 The Weight of Photography for a body full of energy, a virile dynamic body, a “kind of deity for whom everything is possible – a very strong and unreal sexual power” concludes Celant (Celant 1992, pp. 48). By glorifying the body and its organs, it might be wrongly thought that Mapplethorpe takes the viewer back to the Renaissance, to the ideal impeccable body, ignoring sickness, death, misery, and mutilation. This is indeed a wrong interpretation; Mapplethorpe’s works are loaded with aggression, with loneliness and fear, he successfully disguised behind his Renaissance approach to the body. In spite of the body’s glamorous appearance, and its healthy athletic built up, it would not be an exaggeration to say that his obsessive drive to exhibit the body and present it as an offer to the gods, Mapplethorpe (and the same goes with Helmut Newton and Jeff Koons), is publicly referring to his actual self, to Robert Mapplethorpe, the private concealed person. In that sense, the body depicted is an expression of the needs he strives for, and one may conclude that his works presented in books and galleries were done for the one and only receiver, i.e.: Robert Mapplethorpe. The same goes with Helmut Newton. Newton took the ordinary fashion model, stripped her off, and stressed her erotic and pornographic aspects. By displacing the fashion model from her ‘natural’ context – the fashion show, and transplanting her in a cold, alienated environment – an office, a cellar, a garage, an hotel room, he undermined the glamorous side of the fashion model and pointed at her carnal, erotic aspect. His insistence on undefined backgrounds, and his use of dolls, window shows mannequins, and especially his insistence on an obscure, film noir, narrative in his photographs, Newton skillfully takes Mapplethorpe’s legacy of legitimately depicting the naked body, to defy any reference to the straight, to the normative, to the virtuous. Newton’s bodies are chaotic, sometimes even mutilated, maltreated, confined, and to some extent they are surrealist, all meant to stir our imagination, our daydreams, our hidden and forbidden sentiments towards what are considered models of beauty. 115 Ben Baruch Blich Putting their insured bodies in unusual environments, twisting them, ordering them to perform harsh gestures and movements, dressing them with strange clothes, and above all – photographing them in quasipornographic scenes, Newton no doubt challenges and provokes the innocent eye of the viewer as if to seduce him to look again and again at the photographs, as do voyeurs who can not but look and gaze without any conscious control. This very trend was brought to the extreme by Jeff Koons who had bluntly exposed himself and his wife, known as “La Cicciolina”, in his series ‘made in heaven’ as part of his artistic project which glorifies mundane and ordinary objects, personas and labels. It is one of the rare occasions in which the artist, in this case the photographer, turns the camera at his private and intimate world, as if to defy voyeurism and fight back the notion attached to the camera as an intruder, an invader, as a means to get hold of the concealed. Koons opens the door for us, and by exposing himself and his wife, he undermines the tasks attributed to the camera as a vehicle of representation which presents scenes one would not be able to see without. Moreover, Koons and let me add also Gilbert & George, are calling upon us the viewers to see their bodies as they themselves do. In the case of Gilbert and George we see pictures in which Gilbert and George are staged in between brown human excrement, and the message of the body, that is to say – the body depicted from its bodily anal perspective, is an existential message, which puts forward their decaying and old bodies to say that “we are human being, dressed up in suits or not, full of complexities, of differences. We are naked, we are full of shit – that is what we are trying to show. It is a kind of existence, the realism of existence. That we are here” (cited from the Stedelijk Museum catalog, 1996). In between the lines we can hear that Gilbert and George attribute to their bodies an existential meaning, that is to say – they take their anatomical built up to symbolize the fact “that we are here”. 116 The Weight of Photography This exhibitionist approach to the body, shared also by Jeff Koons, is in fact a new interpretation of the body and of the role of the camera as well. If the body in previous interpretations was seen as a scientific specimen or a victim, and the camera as a means by which we the viewers invade the private and the concealed, now under Koons and Gilbert & George approach, the body serves as an existential statement and the camera is its reflection. To conclude my paper, let me return to one of my earliest statements. The fact that we are corporeal, that we are all bodies, and the fact that most of us are familiar with the look of our bodies and the ways they function, does not entail that the images we produce by the photographic vehicle, are formed by the same ‘language game’. The photographic image, in spite of its causal link to the object depicted, is nevertheless a subjective product, and as such it contributes to our understandings as to what bodies are, and in a roundabout way it enhances our beliefs in the power of the camera to create as much as possible points of view vis-a-vis our reality. Would it be a fair conclusion to say that without the camera we would not be able to grasp our own intimate image of our body? Would it be a far fetched assumption to say that with the help of the camera we reflectively construct our reality? There are no straightforward answers to these question, yet we can say for certain that without the camera these questions would not have risen at all. Ben Baruch Blich, ph.d. Senior lecturer History and Theory Unit Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem [email protected] 117 Ben Baruch Blich References: Baudrillard, J., 1994 [1981], “The Precession of Simulacra”, in his: Simulation and Simulacra, trans. By: Glaser, S. F., pp. 1-42, Michigan U. press Benjamin, W., 1968, [1936] “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in his Illuminations, trans. H. 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Co. 118 The Weight of Photography List of images Due to copyright reasons, images cited in the paper are referred to their relevant links. - Francisco de Goya: The shooting of May 3rd 1808 http://www.asmilan. org/teachers/rmarjerrison/art_images/Goya's,%20Execution%20 of%20Spanish%20Rebels%20under%20Napoleon.jpg - Eddie Adams: A treet execution of a Vietcong prisoner, 1968 http://www.jimlowney.com/mt-archives/eddie_vietnam.jpg - Michaelangelo: The creation of man, Sistine Chapel 1508-12 http://www.christusrex.org/www1/Sistine/4-Adam.gif - Nicolas Poussin: The rape of the Sabine women 1634-35 http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/p/poussin/index.html - Theodore Gericault: The Raft of the Medusa 1819 http://www.abcgallery.com/D/david/gericault4.JPG - Theodore Gericault: Severed limbs 1818 http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/constabletodelacroix/ images/gericault_limbs.jpg - Francois Boucher: The Odalisque 1753 http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/b/boucher/index.html - Jean Honore Fragonard: The Bathers 1765 http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/fragonard/bathers.jpg - Gustav Courbet: The origin of the World 1866 http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/kuspit/Images/kuspit610-15s.jpg - Eadweard Muybridge man walking 1887 http://www.oceanstar.com/graphics/muybrid3.jpg - Man Ray: Mr. and Mrs. Woodman 1947 http://www.ragoarts.com/onlinecats/10.02MOD/103.jpg - Cindy Sherman: untitled 1992 http://homepage.esoterica.pt/~nx0xsz/Untitled250.jpg - Robert Mapplethorpe: Man in Polyester suit 1980 http://www.artphotogallery.org/02/artphotogallery/database/ mapplethorpe08.jpg - Helmut Newton: Office love 1976 http://www.artnet.com/WebServices/picture.aspx?date=20061114&c atalog=108788&gallery=110884&lot=00006&filetype=2 119 Ben Baruch Blich - Jeff Koons: Jeff in the position of Adam 1990 http://farm1.static.flickr.com/30/88538106_9fd15db12c_m.jpg Gilbert and George: In the Piss 1997 http://images.google.co.il/imgres?imgurl=http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ hatton/images/BehindMask/GilbertnGeorge.jpg&imgrefurl=http:// www.ncl.ac.uk/hatton/programme/2002/portraitimagelinks/gilbert. htm&h=322&w=269&sz=92&hl=iw&start=2&tbnid=AmdybhOoJ2ZHx M:&tbnh=118&tbnw=99&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522gilbert%2B and%2BGeorge%2522%26gbv%3D2%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Diw %26sa%3DG 120