Blocker’s article discusses the “whereabouts” of Ana Mendieta in art history and how it isn’t necessarily easy to locate her, nor possible, nor needed. This approach seems appropriate in dealing with performance art, although Mendieta cannot escape categorization just like nothing can, and speaks to ideas we have discussed in class about what constitutes performance and how it places itself in opposition to the commodity of art. Performance relies on the fact that it is fleeting and can exist in time and space at just one moment, only to live on in memory or documentation. In the way that Blocker discusses Mendieta, I get the sense that her Siluetas series was more about the performance seen in the exact place at the right time, meaning it was meant more for a present audience. When I look at the photographs though, they seem almost staged for the camera and not to be in environments that are easily accessed. I would like to know what Mendieta’s feelings were towards the presentation of these works since they rely so much on the presence or absence of a body, whether hers or an audience. On p. 332 Blocker addresses audience in relation to her work, specifically the Siluetas series, when she writes, “As earthworks that existed in remote sites for limited periods of time, whose creation may have been witnessed only by Mendieta or a small group of guests, their audience is limited…Few have seen her work ‘live,’ in the moment of its disappearance in time and space…yet that sense of loss is central to its meaning.” This hearkens back to our discussion of audience with William Pope L. yet it is a much different consideration. With Pope L., care was taken in order to have sufficient documentation of his performance for those who were not present, especially in his choice to utilize video. But his performance is similar to Mendieta’s in that they both rely so much on the space in which they are performed. Mendieta chose her Siluetas to have a limited present audience, only to continue life through a single photograph. Is it possible to reach the limits of a discussion of loss and absence when artifacts, and high quality ones at that, remain? I suggest that Mendieta is not attempting to address loss but to actually make it tangible within the space where her body and the earth connect. Her work seems not to be about absence, but is comprised of absence in a form that goes beyond her body but recalls it in shape. The depressions in the earth that she leaves with some of her photographs are not showing us where her body once was, but instead point us to a personified absence, and therefore the connection between earth and body. This is all stated for the most part in the two articles given, yet in reading the second article I don’t understand why the depressions in the earth that appear later in the series serve as a “trace” which is “preserved” through documentation. These ideas seem to contradict how I’ve come to view the work through reading the first article. Her body seems more present within the images in which it doesn’t “exist” and I think Mendieta is attempting to go beyond the physical limits of bodies in order to connect with the earth. Therefore, she is never just a trace of herself but a body that is made up of human and earth, and this is more apparent to me in the later images. I especially like the following photo not just because it’s beautiful as a photo but more because it encompasses or comes closer to some sort of goal Mendieta had in returning to nature. Her body is not a depression but as if something pushed out from the ground, already existing there. There is no separation between land and sky, human and earth. 

According to Berger, there is something different about Nikki Lee’s Yuppie Project that makes it stand out apart from her others, and he attributes this to whiteness. He says that this whiteness causes her to never “quite fit into the yuppie milieu” and that her face registers “the unmistakable signs of sorrow and even despair.” I don’t know about or have seen all of her photos before, but I know that I can recall an equal look of sorrow in some of her other images. The thing that confuses me is whether or not Berger is discussing whiteness because she seems uncomfortable and doesn’t blend in with her project as well as her others, or simply because of the fact that she is surrounded by mostly white people. I attempted to find a photo of her during the schoolgirls project wherein she may have a look of sorrow on her face, but failed. I also attempted to find one with the hip hop project, to try and counteract the idea that it was necessarily whiteness that caused her discomfort, but of the photos that are online, she seems comfortable and upbeat. Thinking back to then the images I remember of her looking sorrowful or dejected, they do involve projects that consist dominantly of white people. So maybe Berger made a good observation in saying that she is unable to hide her own sense of discomfort with whiteness, and therefore it seems to make her Yuppie Project more personal in a sense. It comes off a little bit though as an attempt to find the “real” Nikki Lee within her artwork, which is one of the topics we’ve discussed recently in the class. Is it really her own discomfort with being an Asian woman that is shining through remarkably enough to make it distinguishable? or is her body language carefully crafted so as to make a more obvious statement about whiteness? Both are most likely true, but it seems to me that a large force behind her work is the playfulness with the fact that no image of her reveals anything true or “real.” I am then more inclined to pursue my latter question, which is a better basis for the article, and probably the main one after all. I still find it curious though as to the inclusion of the idea of a “visceral discomfort” that is uncontrollable or planned. I also don’t feel that the photos of her schoolgirl project wherein she’s smiling and energized represent a visceral comfort. She picks projects for the reason that it’s a challenge for her to become a part of them, and I think she’s playing more into a cultural stereotype of different social groups than representing her own feelings towards them. The stereotype for a yuppie for me does involve a sense of sorrow and emptiness, regardless of race, so it makes sense to me that she would have a look of dejection, or even despair. As with this photo of the schoolgirl project, my stereotype includes smiling and bubbliness. I wish that I could understand what it’s like to be of a race other than white, and awareness of one’s own race might exist within every single person who is not white, so it is possible that it’s impossible for Nikki Lee to erase it from her face. 

From what I’ve come to know of Althea Thauberger’s work through reading Vey Duke’s article and searching her on the internet, I can see similarities between her work and mine, maybe more with the specific ways Vey Duke defines and describes her work. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the photography project I discussed with you wherein I photographed memories that people wrote out for me. There is one statement made by Vey Duke that reminded me of my motivations in this project. She writes, “Thauberger’s work, likewise, is constructed specifically so that those who use it (both her subjects and her audience) can take from it what they want, according to their needs.” When I first read this, it seemed as if this were a statement that encompassed how people perceive all artwork. I know that I always interpret art in the way that I wish to see it, based on my current position in life, what is going on around me, and my mood at the time. This is why I connect differently with different art, and why I can think differently about the same art at different times in my life (so far). Vey Duke must be trying to iterate though that Thauberger’s art is presented foremost in the structure of being what it is perceived to be by the audience. Maybe it is cloudy as to the reason for her artistic choices, or the structure of her work is very fluid, but without seeing the three video pieces Vey Duke discusses it is hard for me to know. With my memory project, I presented it in a way that forced the viewer’s construction of it, as well as relied upon it. In choosing not to place the written memory with the photograph it correlates to, and the photograph I took of the memory. The audience was forced to make connections between the separate pieces themselves, as well as come to an understanding, of their own creation, as to what the “big picture” was, or the reasoning behind my work. I really enjoyed watching my photography class question the connections, and make connections between memories and photographs that weren’t the original connections. When you looked at it, you could make a connection between almost anything if you really wanted to. I wish that I had documentation of its presentation, as I only presented it the once, and couldn’t say what I did with it. I do have the digital photographs that I took, which were my interpretations of the written memories. Here is my favorite one, which is of my roommate Dan: 

You are now the first person to see this photo out of context, and I’m curious as to what you think the memory was. Maybe if I presented those photos I took as being from memories, without actually presenting the memories, it would push even further the idea of the audience taking from it what they want, according to their own needs.

            There was another statement by Vey Duke that reminded me of another one of my video works, which I think you must have seen as part of my application portfolio. She writes, in discussion of Thauberger’s characters that, “She doesn’t author them per se – she facilitates their self-authorship.” I felt that I was acting in the same sort of position when I was creating my documentary on a dance studio, Bobbidy Boo. I acted very non-invasive during my shooting process, occasionally pretending as though the camera wasn’t taping when it was, and when I was looking through the lens, I attempted to make it seem as though I were filming simply the room and not the dancers in it. I did this so as to try to make the children more comfortable with my presence there, as well as with the camera, so that there could be some moments where they didn’t become aware of it, or maybe forgot it was there. When going through my footage and editing, I noticed how much the camera became a separate eye from mine due to this process. There was one girl in particular whom I didn’t pay much attention to while I was there, or who didn’t stand out from the others to me, but when I looked at the footage through the camera’s eyes, she had become the main character within my film. It was as if her knowledge of the presence of the camera, whether or not she knew it was on at all times, transformed her into a performance of herself, though very subtly. In this way, I felt that I had indeed facilitated her own self-authorship. The process of creating that documentary was an amazing experience for me in that I was able to see firsthand the autonomy that those being filmed can have. I felt like I myself as Laura had become one with the camera, and that I was simply the medium through which this young girl, as well as the other dancers, portrayed themselves. They really were the makers of the work for me. All I did was present it. It still is so unreal to me how much the camera saw that I didn’t while I was there in the moment.

            I don’t have a screenshot that I have already made of the girl I am talking about, but I have a screenshot from one of the times when I had turned my camera on and pretended as if it weren’t recording. I think it’s a good example though of what I mean by the girls self-authoring themselves through their relationship with and knowledge of the camera: 

     While I was in high school, I had an online journal that I wrote in and I also used the AOL Instant Messenger almost everyday. My journal was a public one for the most part; I would occasionally make my entries “Friends Only” so that my friends who also had online journals and who were connected to mine were the only people who could read my entries. The link to my journal was in my profile for the instant messenger so that anyone who I conversed with online through the messenger had the opportunity to click and read what I wrote. Most of my friends had the same online activities, and most used them more than I did; I really only did it for the most part so that I could be included and feel closer to them. We would all write entries about our daily angst or either exaggerate something good that happened to us, or chronicle our super awesome fun activities. But we all knew that anyone could read what we wrote if we made it public, and I personally had a sense of excitement from it sometimes. I also liked the idea of being able to be more “talkative” through my journal in order to maybe account for a lack in my personality at school. I wanted whoever was reading my journal to know that I was a thoughtful, intelligent, and fun person who would be someone to hang out with. So I adjusted the structuring of my sentences and chose words accordingly. It wasn’t strange to those friends who knew me and who read my journal because it was accepted (and unacknowledged); everyone presented themselves as more fascinating than they actually were. That really was the only reason why I had an online journal when I think about it in retrospect. Merchant recognizes this fact when he states, “In writing online, how we conceive of and respond to audience, and how we imagine our readership, is clearly of central importance” (240). I wanted those readers who happened to stumble upon my online journal to be intrigued and want to get to know me, or want to keep reading my journal secretly. I desired that sense of power that is felt when someone is intrigued by you, and the desire for this confidence was why I wrote to that specific audience of those I didn’t know, or those who were friends of friends and may find my journal through theirs. And it worked. I had different people who wanted to know me, or who wanted to know my online self which they assumed was how I was in reality. This is how I came to know my first boyfriend. He went to high school with me and found my journal through a friend’s and knew who I was peripherally. Apparently, he watched me and read my journal for two months before I was even made aware of his existence.

            At first I felt flattered in that I had achieved what I had intended (although I never realized or recognized my true motivation then). Then, as I got to know him better, I felt like I had to fulfill an expectation that didn’t exist because I wasn’t in actuality the fun, outgoing, witty person I presented as myself online. Aside from this example, I also had strange people contacting me online or finding me through friends’ journals, and after I ended up dating another guy my freshman year in college who I met through MySpace, the whole idea of a totally public online self weirded me out so much that I deleted everything.

            The thing that bothered me the most though about my experience was that everyone did the same thing as me and I knew they were doing it. I couldn’t understand how people could be so “fake,” but I realize now that those identities were a part of them and equally separated from them as much as was the case for me. I too found others’ journals through friends, stalking those occasionally who I was duped by and wanted to be friends with. I can remember one girl in particular who used to post short animations of pictures of herself on her journal, and talk about hanging out at the canal (I live right on the Erie Canal and the “cool” thing to do in high school was hang out on the trails by it and drink). She was friends with people I knew and went to my high school so I decided one day to leave a comment on her journal and say hi. We ended up becoming friends through instant messaging online but had never actually met in person, even though I bet we passed each other in the halls at least once a day. The situation is so strange to me now but that was normal to me then. I remember vividly meeting her in person for the first time after school once when she was hanging out with people we both knew. She wasn’t at all like how she presented herself online. She never smiled in her pictures and when she did in front of me, she had braces with a bad overbite, and she also had a really bad lazy eye, so that it distracted me when I looked at her.  Her hair looked different and her size wasn’t what I expected it to be. She wasn’t ugly by any means but she must’ve only posted pictures of herself that made her look more conventionally pretty than she actually was. I never posted pictures of myself publicly on my journal, but I did rely on how the overall look of my journal made me out to be. I wanted to be thought of as sophisticated and my journal was simplistic in design with a white background and gray type. I also had this picture on my main page, which was a Polaroid I took and manipulated the emulsion on: 

     The thought of having a public online self like that is so strange to me now, but I still do. I have a Facebook self but the only thing anyone who doesn’t know me can see is a small thumbnail of a picture of me. Even with that, I chose my picture considering how people would think of me when they saw it, and what conclusions they would draw in order to construct me.

            I was thinking of my history with online selves when Volkart was discussing the artists who participated in the double life exhibition. The idea of conversing with people who I’ve never met in person online is such a big part of how life was for me in high school, maybe because it was a time when it was just becoming popular, so the artists’ interactive online works are something that I can relate to. She writes, “Identification, and consequently a feeling of being moved and a sense of emotional intensity happen on the net primarily because of the fact that it is not possible to simply separate parts of bodily existence and transform them into a new identity, even if it seems that you can be someone entirely different there” (277 in reader). I presenting myself online as how I wanted to be, I then understood more about myself and was able to decided if whether or not I wanted to be the way I was presenting myself because people were reacting to the self firsthand. Those experiences I had were definitely emotional for me, and served as an outlet for the rollercoaster of emotions I was going through. The artists in the exhibition seem to really be speaking to the emotional intensity Volkart describes by locking into it and really making someone feel for someone who doesn’t actually exist physically in front of them. In particular the weblives that seem to fit this the best are the ones in which a single self is presented to the viewer: Milica Tomic, Linda Dement, Prema Murthy. I’m curious to know how someone who has never had a specific online identity (besides email) would react to these pieces. The artists must have had an audience in mind who had participated in online identification themselves.  

One of the things that I haven’t really understood about feminist art is exactly how female artists’ presentation of themselves as women does anything to go beyond the fact that they are women, which is what they seem to be attempting in the first place, but I may be being too general and I don’t mean to define feminist art in anyway. I can only think of it in terms of how I would go about making art that drew attention to myself as a woman, rather than as simply an artist. (I think another reason as to why I dislike photos of myself is because I look at them from a culturally conditioned perspective and therefore recognize myself first as a woman. If I had a better knowledge of life and feminist art I can see how female artists present themselves in photographs for this very reason though.) I consider myself to have feminist ideas I suppose in that I don’t feel any different intellectually from any man I’ve ever met, and in that I don’t generally see myself in opposition to men or necessarily as being defined as a woman. I feel as if I go about my life interacting with men and women in a similar way, I haven’t noticed that I treat either differently. This may be a result from the fact that I grew up sort of tomboy-ish in that I never felt interested in what I wore or how I acted, and I played equally with boys and girls. It wasn’t until middle school where I felt I was forced into considering myself as a woman and what that definition implied. I definitely still dress myself and act in a certain way based on how I molded myself to fit in to the ideal of a woman that my friends instilled in me in middle school, but I still feel like I have an underlying sense of approaching people, whether man or woman, in the same manner that I did as a child. So, in a way, that idea of not explicitly defining myself as a woman, and therefore separate, seems to me like what the idea of feminism should be. It feels more to me like man and woman are just two different kinds of human beings and not polar opposites. I’ve even felt that I’ve connected humanly more with some men than with women, maybe because I haven’t been thinking of myself first and foremost as a woman. (I’ve realized recently too that I identify more with male main characters in film and that this is reflected in my recent work where I’ve centered narratives around a male character as opposed to female. But this may be because I’m representing what I’ve been given in the media and learned of film so it’s too much to get into right now.)

            Judith Butler seems to get at an idea somewhat similar to how I feel with feminism. I agree with her when she says, “There is, in my view, nothing about femaleness that is waiting to be expressed; there is, on the other hand, a good deal about the diverse experiences of women that is being expressed and still needs to be expressed” (164). When I see self-portrait photographs by women that draw attention to themselves within the frame foremost as women, I see an expression of their femaleness. I honestly don’t know though if I just haven’t reached a level of intelligence and understanding in order to interpret this sort of feminist art in the way it is intended by the artists.

            In Wark’s article, as she is discussing Martha Wilson’s photo Painted Lady , she writes, “Wilson’s stylized exaggerations can also be seen as key strategies for gaining visibility as an artist without becoming objectified as a woman” (149). I couldn’t find a picture of this photo online unfortunately, but through the description by Wark I am assuming that Wilson is wearing a substantial and exaggerated amount of makeup. At the same time that she is calling attention to the performativity of femaleness, she is separating it from herself as a woman; with its exaggeration, she is providing a distance between the role she plays as woman, and her simply being a woman. The idea that the makeup further blurs her actual sex doesn’t objectify her as a woman before that of her as an artist.  Wark’s take on this particular photograph of Wilson’s seems to be along the lines of what Butler felt feminist art should be. If women continue to present themselves only as society’s idea of women and as separate from men, they in turn help to create the very identity they wish to dispel. Wilson gets beyond this in her photograph by not presenting herself as a woman but as someone performing her gender.

            Adrian Piper’s The Mythic Being work seems more along the lines of her attempting to objectify herself as a man, but in doing so, objectifies herself as a woman. With the fact that she is calling attention to herself as performing a man, she is equally calling attention to herself as being female, which may be what she intended. This work then doesn’t seem to go beyond that cycle of feminism that Butler wants women artists to pull themselves out of. This goes back to another point Butler was making when she discusses the difference between performing theatrically and performing conspicuously. Piper presented this specific work with the framework that is audience knew she was a woman playing the role of a man. It’s therefore more like theatre in that people know it’s just an act, hence distinguishing it from her reality as woman. This draws a distinction between the performance and life, as Butler was saying, but it does in the sense that it draws attention specifically to life; to Piper as female. This is in contrast to the Wilson photograph in that her femaleness was made more ambiguous by her theatrical exaggeration. I think Piper could achieve the same role as representing herself as an artist before a woman if she were to be more like the transvestite on the bus, making her womanhood still existent but leaving room for ambiguation.

            I was trying to think of an example wherein a man performing a woman was able to represent femaleness, and I thought immediately of a photo I saw yesterday of my friend in his Halloween costume. He dressed up in a leopard print dress and long, blond wig, as well as wearing a large amount of makeup. I was surprised at how different he looked in this getup, but still could see him, and his masculinity, underneath it. I clicked through the various photos of him dancing at a party on Facebook and when I came to one in particular, I was shocked by how well he seemed to embody female performativity; particularly with his posture. It made me think back to how Piper’s performance was essentially her performing as a man, and how I might easily see this performance as a woman, by my friend, as a woman performing a woman. Is there a connection then between my friend and Wilson’s Painted Lady photo? I think there is but, I’m really not sure what it entails. 

(Kraus’s article became much too jumbled in literary theory for me by the time I reached its end, so the rest of my post may have been answered or explained to some extent within the article but I didn’t understand it enough to catch it. Basically, I may just be totally confused and have missed the points of the article, but this is me trying to make sense of what I thought it was saying.)

I don’t have a good sense of what is right and what is wrong, and I want to know what fits into these categories yet at the same time they are problematic to me. “Cindy Sherman is an artist and artists imitate reality (Universal Truth No.1), doing so through their own sensibilities, and thus adding something of themselves to it (Universal Truth No. 2)” (185). This statement, although I understand its context within the article, seems right to me. And by right, I mean it makes sense if you take out the references to universal truths and accept it as a statement for what it is, not for an example of something considered ‘not right.’ I have read the literary theorists Kraus refers to in her article and know the gist of their ideas, so I understand them, but maybe her usage of them is unclear to me. I understand the concept of the historical vs. natural that she discusses as this is an underlying facet and catalyst for theory, and I can see this quotations ‘truth’ within the example Kraus gives of the art critic buying into the myth. The confusion I have with it is its wording and what exactly is encompassed with each universal truth so I’ll break it down into its two parts and start from there.

            To me, Universal Truth No.1 refers to a non-existence of anything that can be defined as ‘reality’ so therefore no artist can imitate it. ‘Reality’ is socially constructed and therefore constitutes a history of this construct as opposed to something natural that pre-existed humankind. I agree with this, but at the same time, I would like to give the word ‘reality’ more credit than this, as its existence as a word, no matter what it may actually refer to, is a huge chunk of human consciousness. Even though ‘reality’ may not refer to anything specific because it is so subjective, I still think it can be used to represent an individual’s own set of ideas about the world in which they exist and share with others. Therefore, I find truth in the idea that artists imitate reality, mainly their own notion of reality. To go with this idea of historical vs. natural, if we are a construct of social history than what can we do but imitate it, as it has created us? If Kraus wants to get all linguistic about Cindy Sherman’s work, I find it odd that she didn’t directly clarify her statement, being understanding of the absence and deferment of the signified within language. Anyways, it seems to me as if artists can do nothing but imitate and reinterpret their own notion of reality. This is what I do. I attempt to make my ideas on my reality translatable to my audience in my own artistic work. 

            This goes into the second half of the quotation. I understand Universal Truth No. 2 to be that no artist can add something of themselves to their artwork because their artwork is essentially a product of their socially constructed lives and therefore never something individual but always a product of construct. Although I can agree with this, I still have a sense that I have some sliver of individuality in my artwork that I add to it, and this is also due to my reinterpretation and chosen representation. It’s hard for me to undermine my singular being through these ideas, which is human and constructed in itself. I’ve learned to take literary theory with a grain of salt because after all, the famous theorists must feel that they are individual in their ideas and writing even though they preach their own human construction. Kraus seems to define this truth though as relating to the myth that Sherman created her images in response to “original” film stills so that her images are a copy of their original, but done in her own interpretation. I can see this idea though as plausible and that yeah, maybe there is a ton of other stuff under the hood, but does all that hidden stuff completely disavow that she might actually be making images in a response to similar or “original” ones? I think the function of most artists is to create something out of their own interpretations of their reality that they assume has some aspect that is different or separate from what they’ve known, and consequently is in opposition and response to an original.

            So, I get a sense that Kraus is trying to explain the interpretation of Sherman’s work as separate from her but at the same time refers to her wit and intelligence in her decisions and creative choices. With this, I then want to know if we do or don’t see the “real” her within her photographs. Williamson states in her article, “…I think that this false search for the “real” her is exactly what the work is about…The attempt to find the “real” Cindy Sherman is unfulfillable, just as it is for anyone…” (173). Same as with Kraus, I want to know what Williamson evens mean by “real.” She puts it in quotations as if it isn’t necessarily referring to its socially constructed idea, but still, I want her opinion on what she considers “real” or if not, what she considers exists in place of realness. If I go along with my idea of “real” for Cindy Sherman as what she constitutes it is, then I think her realness definitely does exist within her photographs simply in the fact that she has made them. I do get though that Williamson is arguing against the idea that viewers feel like they can see the “real” her through her masquerade, meaning everything that constitutes her being as if they are her and can clarify and define it. But I mean, there’s gotta be something real within everything right? An attempt to find the real Cindy Sherman in her photographs must yield at least some ideas of her being and why not consider those real? There must exist a part of her in her images as well as examples of imitation of her reality. Right?

            Is there a difference then between her own photographs and this snapshot of her, as her?

     Jones’ article was a little hard for me to understand completely, but there was one point she made that really stuck out for me and made me consider my relationship to images of people. On p. 148 (in the reader) she states, “…we project ourselves into  the screen, becoming the person …whose image we engage or making her over in our own…image.” I’ve noticed over the course of my life (and I have considered this many times before) that after watching films I sometimes leave the theater or the living room with a weird sense that I am the main character I have been watching, or have taken on aspects of his/her personality. I almost feel as if I have participated in a life, that is my own, through them, and that somehow we are the same person. I wonder if other people get this same sort of sense, which I’m guessing they might. This feeling can linger for days, where I may think about actions of mine differently as if I were acting them through the mindset of that character, even though the action may not have changed at all. I don’t recognize this identification often, but when I do, I feel lost within it, as if I’m still stuck in the world created by the film. I think this is the reason why I have such an interest in image and in making films; I am reaching for the desire to eventually transfer myself completely into that world of my multiple selves. This realization is new for me as I think about this now, and it makes perfect sense when I remember the fact that I so desperately wanted to be an actor or a singer as a child, wanting to actually become that part of me that was created by the projection of myself onto images of people. I had only thought of these ideas before in relation to moving images, but it rings true for still images as well. Every time that I look at an image of another person, I relate to it by thinking of how I might feel if I were the person depicted. It opens a big door for me to realize this fact. I honestly feel that I get a strange sense of being a specific person or people in the situation in which they are depicted as if it were a picture of me. I can even feel my facial expression change so slightly to resemble that of the person in the frame; which must be the case with most people. This seems to be related to the mirror, literally. Because we have the ability to constantly see ourselves in mirrors, it is only natural that recognizable images of other human beings exist subconsciously to us as mirrors of ourselves. Going back to my first blog post about the overwhelming amount of digital images, and my uneasy with photographs of my friends, it makes sense to me. The other does not exist in the way that I previously thought; the term “other” refers to the double of ourselves, not something separate. This is why I dislike pictures of myself so much, unless they don’t look like me in the way that I see me. They don’t look like me in the way that I see myself in the mirror, and this bothers me to a great extent. The only pictures I have liked of myself are the ones that look the most like me as I see myself in the mirror or that look nothing like me. I took a drawing class one summer and had to create a self-portrait. This picture I drew I copied directly from what I saw in the mirror. I photographed this self-portrait and it is one of the few images I have of myself that I think actually looks like me, even though it is not a photograph in itself. 

        I have two selves, the self I know through the mirror and the self that everyone else sees, and pictures of myself remind me of this duality, making me uneasy. Because I in a sense perform what the person in the picture is performing, it gives me the uncanny feeling that I think Barthes was discussing when I try to perform what I was performing in a picture of myself. There is a recognition there that I’m reinterpreting my actions instead of reliving them. I think Jones gets at this idea in the paragraph surrounding her quote above.

            Carlson states, “Performance is always performance for someone” even when the audience may be the self. My performance in photographs is for someone (that is not myself because I am not physically taking the picture) but I feel doubled when I look at them because I become part of the audience that is not myself, and therefore am forced to consider myself as not myself. I imagine this must subconsciously affect everyone. This is why I feel better with an image of myself in the mirror that is not actually a photograph. It is an account of myself actually performing for myself alone, with no device mediating, such as a camera. 

 

I agree for the most part with Kurtz’s article but there’s one line of his that seems too decisive and less thought out for me: “It is as if Hershman, by using digital tools rather than inventing her own, has become a mainstream digital image maker” (123). When I read it, I felt the words of one of my undergraduate video teachers echo in my head about the use of digital effects in Final Cut pro; something to the tune of “only use them if you have a very specific purpose for it, that’s aware of itself.” Basically, kids had fun with the sepia tone, or the scratched film filter, or the fancy wipes for cuts, and many video projects were splattered with these effects. The problem was that they were using it just because it was there, not because they had set out in their project intending to do it. The effects were mainly just a way to gloss over the bad material they had put so little effort into in the first place. So seeing these projects, I understood, and consequently began to abhor the silly effects and filters in Final Cut. It wasn’t until I had taken a class on image manipulation that I realized part of the reason why these digital effects existed; because if used right, they can actually look good, and can be something of your own creation. It then became not a cop-out to use digital tools that you hadn’t created yourself, but it was your invention in how you chose to intricately layer them or manipulate their functions within the program. Image manipulation produces art that is aware of the fact that it’s manipulated and it then becomes how the manipulation was used, not whether or not you can hide it. So to agree with Kurtz, it is separate from “straight” photography, but I think it knows this for the most part, and it’s not trying to hide it. It becomes a process of working with a new set of tools, rather than using ones that are not yours. Did Hershman use tools that were created by her for her previous images? I find it interesting that Kurtz first mentions in the beginning of the article that she is not a photographer because of the mixed media she has within her work, and then goes on to say that she is still not a photographer, but in the sense that she has lost something. “…digital tools therefore compel us to imagine images that are not manipulated photography – not photography at all.” If the act of taking a picture with a digital camera is not considered photography, then his statement makes sense to me. 

 

            An example of a crappy digital effect (which I wouldn’t mind the doing away of) attempting to gloss over poor picture quality:

Although I would agree that this is a digital tool that's been slapped on, it's still a photograph to me.

When I was first learning of performance art and beginning to understand what it was about, it was in a class that I was taking that mainly looked at diasporal performance art; more specifically, the performance of artists who were living in the US as “outsiders” culturally, ethnically, and racially. The class also focused on artists who explored the theme of representing “the other” culture, with the other referring to anything outside their own culture or the “norm.” Nikki Lee was one of the artists included in this class, although briefly, because of her assimilation into other groups and her consequent documentation. I still don’t know much about her but I have seen images of hers where she places herself within different groups of the “other” (in relation to her). From what I remember learning in the class, she actually spent more than the time it took to take the photographs with the various groups, spending maybe even weeks with each in order to “authenticate” her identifying with them in the photos, as well as to actually share in their own notion of their identity. To me, it seems as if her work was much more than what she presented within the pictures, and when I see them, I think of her work behind them and the time it took for her to changer her appearance and mannerisms. The pictures then become more than what they show, but they also don’t document the time behind their construction. Even though they are presented as if the documentation was the performance (as I remember them being presented to me), most of the performance of them lies in their preparation, which may not be documented or witnessed by an audience. Philip Auslander writes, in response to work like Nikkie Lee’s as well as her specifically, “These are cases in which performances were staged solely to be photographed or filmed and had no meaningful prior existence as autonomous events presented to audiences” (86). There’s one part of this argument that I grapple with, and I still am not sure what is the case. Does an audience have to exist for a performance to exist? And therefore, does it only have to be proven through photographs or are artists’ own accounts of their performances sufficient enough? If what I know about Nikki Lee is true, then the performance she went through in order to take her photographs was as much of a performance to her as any other example of performance art. And if she were to detail her experience in a way to let the viewers of the photos know the process of their creation, is that not the same kind of proof as the photographs? I feel so, and yet, Hayley Newman abolishes that stance with her account of her “fake” performance documentation. For her, the captions and photos documented the performance as well as outlined their separate processes. By all accounts, her performances actually occurred until she said that they hadn’t. And to me, the fake accounts were performances in themselves; after all, she did do the things in the photographs, even if the events described as leading up to them were false. So in this sense, I’m not actually sure what she was trying to “prove,” if anything.

            I feel that written documentation is as much proof as photographic, and that the process of the creation of performance art that is considered “theatrical” by Auslander is more of the performance than the actual document. I feel that performance can exist without an audience, but maybe the audience is the only way it can be considered art. I want to contradict this, but then again, I don’t necessarily believe that every private action people make in a day is a performance. So to conclude, I really don’t know how I feel, but I’m pretty sure I know what I don’t feel, and here is my favorite photo of Nikki Lee’s that I could find online:

     For as long as I can remember, photos have represented for me something intangible but bigger than what they were picturing. A photo was mysterious because even though the person, place, or object that was pictured might be in front of me, there was a definite disconnect between the two. The photo inexplicably felt as if it were of a duplicate of the actual object, or maybe picturing that object in an identical space; there was an inherent disconnect that made me uncomfortable at the same time intrigued. Photos were derivatives of what they pictured, but they were also something different and removed from their referents. Barthes speaks of a similar sentiment when he writes, “For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity.” (1) Although he is speaking about his own image, his statement encompasses all images for me. I have heard that primitive cultures dislike having their pictures taken because they believe they lose part of their souls, but it seems to me to be the opposite. Something new is created that relates to the object but has no actual existence except in the photograph while at the same time, something is lost in translation to the two-dimensional. I’ve felt uneasy about photos for this reason while in my own photographic practices I have attempted to focus on the “otherness” as well as special relations to ease the translation. One of the main instances of photography that surrounded me as I became interested in it was the disposable camera. On any trip or outing with my group of friends, we all had them and used them to document each other. I loved the pictures I would get back from the grocery store and how they were a memory of adventure but also seemed to show things differently than how I had actually experienced them. The easiest example of this is the smile; all of my friends would pose and smile a specific way that was different than how they smiled at me if I was not taking a picture. I often felt disconnected then in a small way from them because I felt as if they weren’t smiling for me, but for something unknown inside the camera. Another aspect of their identities was created that I had never seen before and I would continually only see in photos. As a result of the inexplicable uneasiness that pictures of my friends gave me, I bought several disposable cameras in high school and took pictures of my friends or people I knew, sometimes telling them to pose, and sometimes snapping the picture quickly without telling them beforehand. For example, my best friend at the time:

  

     I was able to snap a picture at a time when she would be least likely to pose to be photographed, and yet when I compare it to a picture where she is posing, both photos seem to represent different aspects of a person but on top of that, to me, I still feel as if I see someone separate from her that looks like her but not her. This is also why I dislike pictures of myself. I feel as if there’s some other part of me that is removed and exists, as if it is a fleeting double, my original second.

       It reminds me of a quote by the musician Ani Difranco I once saw written in an online journal: “It took me too long to realize that I don’t take good pictures, ‘Cause I have the kinda of beauty that moves.” Barthes echoes this when he speaks of himself becoming a specter in a photo, or “Death in person” (2).

      It seems to me that the increase in the production of images and sharing of them that exists today stems from the uneasiness created by the “other” in photos. Through a larger network of images, we can now choose which ones we want to see and for how long, and when, passing them quickly enough to forego analysis and interpretation if we choose. Rubinstein and Sluis write, “This inexhaustible stream makes it difficult to develop an intimate relationship with a single image.” I no longer have to address my uneasiness with snapshot photography if I don’t want to. I can look at my friend’s snapshots on the internet in privacy, not having to spend a certain amount of time on each one as if I were looking through prints with my friends in the room. I can click through them as fast as I want or skip certain ones. The deluge that now exists is welcomed by the desire to diffuse the “other” created.

1. Roland Barthes, "Camera Lucida" p. 12

2. Barthes, p.14

3. Rubinstein and Sluis, "A Life More Photographic" p.22