Hmmnn, Chris, I just dont know enough about all that. Kant & all.
But, even in reproduction on a computer screen, that photo the author
spends so much time on simply sings its craft & stark beauty, as such.
I agree with him about the eye waiting & catching exactly a moment
that goes abstract in the midst of muddle so perfectly. My eye then
looking at what his aye saw & caught is caught itself by the formal
qualities that work so well.
But then, that's the way I look at all art, which is my bias....
Doug
On 7-Feb-09, at 9:06 PM, Christopher C Jones wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-02-05 at 09:36 -0700, Douglas Barbour wrote:
>
>>
>> I at least feel no need to read his personal life into such a
>> beautiful, & as stated, abstract, image....
>
> Doug, I would have to agree. It is not possible to give a photograph a
> semiotic reading which the writer attempts because of the lack of
> index
> and the same goes for poetry, which is another thing art photography
> and
> poetry share. What happens instead in this article is an indexing of
> homosociality as an exchange of women to follow Sedgwick here. Similar
> problems arise with attempts to give a semiotic reading of a poem,
> since
> attempts at indexing will find themselves outside the poem.
>
> Since the writer is an artist writing about another artist he
> admires I
> can be a little more generous and can see how he is trying to find a
> way
> of understanding White's metaphysical aesthetics which sees the body
> of
> the photographer as part of an interface between subject and
> photograph
> where the 8 zones of grey between black and white IS contact with the
> subject as it is with the photographer's body. White also sees this
> body
> as a metaphysical anti-ego produced in contact with zones of grey
> which
> also create affects and emotions. I like this idea of White's since it
> can be applied to poetry as variation without a categorical difference
> and clearly breaks with poetics and aesthetics inherited from
> Aristotle
> and Kant's line.
>
Douglas Barbour
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http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest books:
Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
Wednesdays'
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.
Charles Ives
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