London-born photographer Miles Aldridge is someone whose work I admire immensely; it's so beautifully dark beneath the fluorescent colours and combines so perfectly his obvious obsessions: the great F-words of fashion, film, and fetishised femininity.
Clearly interested in the philosophical question of style, Aldridge playfully explores and experiments with the semiotics of the catwalk, the fatal seduction of cinema and the cultural construction of woman as a revered object within the pornographic imagination.
It's an artistic and a perverse quest for truth, resting upon the quasi-Nietzschean supposition that truth might be a supermodel or a goddess of the silver screen; sacred monsters whose mask-like faces express neither sensitivity nor sincerity; transsexual creatures who, as Baudrillard says, never dazzle because of their talent or intelligence, but because of their remoteness and what we might even describe as their apparent frigidity.
Of course, some critics find Aldridge's work vacuous and a form of conceit; a glossy fantasy that far from subverting the political and social realities of gender, class and consumerism - as is sometimes claimed - merely reinforces these things. But I beg to differ with this analysis. For me, his work matters. And it matters because it demonstrates how what we consume, what we worship, or what we most desire - be it a Birkin bag, a lifestyle, or the attractive stranger sitting across the bar - is never a new object in itself, but is rather an object previously encountered on screen or in the pages of Vogue; i.e. one that has already been assigned meaning within a discursive framework.
In other words, Aldridge's work disconcertingly suggests that it's impossible to know real objects existing outside a frame of reference; reality itself is constituted via representation and staged performance - just like a photo shoot. Those commentators who, like Glenn O'Brien, insist that Aldridge is in the business of constructing dreams, have radically misunderstood what is going on in his work - or underestimated what's at stake. For what Aldridge is doing is far more fundamental; he's using the logic of fashion and his passion for artificiality to rupture the order of referential reason.
And central to this project, as indicated, is the figure of woman as actress, as model, as perfect object; as one who understands the need for cosmetics and defends the right to lie. Not because she wishes to protect or disguise some concealed essence beneath appearances, but because she has no such essence. Again, many critics will protest that by placing the question of woman into the context of fashion and film, it means she becomes fetishized and commodified as an object or image, rather than liberated as a subject. But, even if this is the case, is that so bad? Mightn't a clever woman - who is always a well-dressed woman - use her own emptiness and reification to her own advantage?
Aldridge insists that his models have a blank expression not because they are mindless, but, on the contrary, because they are lost in thought. And, far from feeling on the verge of extinction because they have been transformed into a hollowed-out figure of male fantasy, they exhibit the pale power of seduction and stillness that is particular to those who are soulless; what Walter Benjamin termed the sex appeal of the inorganic.
For me, as for Aldridge, it's on the runway or the movie screen, where woman best stages her refusal of - and resistance to - male power and masculine depth. For although obliged to pout and to pose and embody consumer capitalism's ideals of femininity, luxury and artifice, woman as seductive object remains fundamentally untouchable and inaccessible. She teases her male spectators with a glimpse or the promise of her nakedness, whilst exposing also the truth that they are as fake and as hollow as she (in their desires, emotions and highest values).
Stare long enough into the void, says Nietzsche, and the void begins to stare into you ...
