Why I Love the Photography of Sally Mann

Sally Mann: WR Pa 53, (2001)

I recently heard the photographer Vee Speers described as a Sally Mann for the digital age. To be honest, I'm not quite sure I know what this means. But what I do know is that whilst the former has produced some very striking and beautiful images, not least of all those of children contained in the series entitled The Birthday Party, her work lacks the outrageously disturbing and provocative character of Sally Mann's. 

I still vividly recall the shock of seeing a retrospective of Mann's work three years ago at the Photographer's Gallery in London, entitled The Family and the Land. This, her first solo show in the UK, included pictures from Immediate Family (naked children), Deep South (naked vegetation), and What Remains (naked corpses). 

The strange, elementary worlds of childhood, landscape and violent decomposition were all brilliantly captured by Mann using antique cameras and techniques so that the images retained their full and often gruesome black and white immediacy. In this sense - and only in this sense - her work might be branded obscene. For there is nothing teasing or titillating in her work; the pictures don't ask to be read erotically any more than they need to be located within some kind of reductive moral context.

Having said that, it's true that the distance of the spectator's gaze is often abolished as in pornography. But Mann is at her very best when the bodies on display are presented in close-up and there is a total collusion and confusion of elements; when faces quite literally become landscapes, as in the untitled but classified picture WR Pa 53, (2001).

It's been said by those who dislike her work, that Mann's photographs ultimately fail to communicate anything and make no positive contribution to society. And it's true that, if anything, they contaminate and corrupt our world of adult human order. I for one didn't come away from the exhibition feeling that I'd learnt anything about the 'innocence of childhood' or the 'beauty of the swamps' - thank God!

Critics who continue to insist on their right to uplift and enlightenment from art, do so because they don't know what else to say and mistakenly believe that banality is better than an open confession of paralysis in the face of something genuinely shocking.

It is, we might conclude, the virulent anti-humanism of Sally Mann's work that accords it greater potency than anything so far produced by Speers. Only Mann has dared to show us the full horror of the human face as lunar surface to be mapped, rather than kissed. And only Mann reminds us not only that little girls have vaginas, but that the vagina itself is nothing other than a freshly dug grave. 

The Big Rock Candy Mountains

 

I have always been strongly attracted to what we might refer to as the hobo ethic, most beautifully set out in the songs of Harry McClintock or, as he was popularly known, Haywire Mac.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1928) is primarily a bum's vision of an earthly paradise, but its appeal is wide and extensive. For what it offers is not simply a glimpse of a far away and imaginary land full of wonders, but what Deleuze terms an immanent utopia. That is to say, one that exists now/here, rather than nowhere; constituted in the bonds of love and laughter that tie us to other people.

The song thus affirms a radically fraternal politics that Whitman also sings of in his Leaves of Grass and which Lawrence calls a 'democracy of touch'. Such a model exists beyond liberalism, tied as it is to capital and the ownership of property, and it involves more than a sugar-topped apple pie humanism - even if it does have something distinctly American about it. 

It is also very much a queer model of democracy: one that is not, as I have indicated, anticipated as some kind of future historical development won through revolutionary struggle or social reform. The democracy of touch is, rather, fucked into existence between comrades and lovers - just as the flower is fucked into being between earth and sky; born, that is to say, of a new economy of bodies and their pleasures.

Anyway, I'll see you all this coming fall in the Big Rock Candy Mountains ...

The Hour of the Star

To think is to confine yourself to a 

single thought that one day stands 

still like a star in the world's sky.

And what is this single thought? 

Arguably, it's the thought of death: death is the single thought of philosophy. And it's the single thought also of Clarice Lispector's great work, A hora da estrela, to which this Heideggerian verse could very fittingly serve as an epigraph. 

The hour of the star is the hour of death. And although Macabéa doesn't choose death (she certainly never contemplates suicide), death nevertheless chooses her and is present throughout the story. When she is killed at the end of the novel, it is something towards which she and we, as readers, are long prepared.

The Hour of the Star also happens to be Lispector's final work; published in 1977, the year of her death. It is thus a profound meditation upon her own mortality and that plunge into the void which is death. It is not easy to think death honestly and courageously; to make of death something uniquely one's own rather than belonging to the world of biological fact and universal extinction. 

'Everything in the world began with a yes', says the narrator of the work. That is to say, with an affirmation. And that includes death. For the same promiscuity of molecules which gave rise to life also gives birth to death and knowing how to die means also knowing how to live. If you have never lived, then you can never truly die: merely break down like a machine. Thus it isn't nihilism to affirm our own mortality, but, on the contrary, an anti-nihilism; the active negation of the idealism which would deny life and refuse death. 

Macabéa is representative of the millions of young girls to be found like her living in poverty, working a dead-end job, unwashed, uneducated and uncared for. But she is also a singular creature and, in death, she paradoxically comes into her own being at last; she is the star whose hour has arrived.

She might be empty-headed, but she has a strong inner-life and, without knowing it, Macabéa spends most of her time meditating on nothingness whilst listening to Radio Clock count away the minutes. Almost, she might be said to embody the fatal secret of the void; she is a black hole, hardly existing in human terms, as well as a tiny sun.

And so, when lying by the roadside with her eyes turned towards the gutter and the blades of grass that grow near the drain down which her blood trickles away, Macabéa thinks to herself: 'Today is the dawn of my existence: I am born.'

People gather around and whilst they do nothing to help the poor girl, they are finally obliged to acknowledge her presence in the world. It is a scene strangely reminiscent of one in Dickens, much loved by Deleuze, wherein someone held in contempt by society is found on the verge of death; for a brief moment their life takes on singular import.

"As she lay there, she felt the warmth of supreme happiness ... There was even a suggestion of sensuality ... Macabéa's expression betrayed a grimace of desire", writes Lispector, thereby overtly eroticizing the moment of death. For in death, Macabéa surrenders not just her life, but her virginity. Death fucks her into full being as well as non-being and it is an experience she finds "as pleasurable, tender, horrifying, chilling and penetrating as love".

She manages to speak one final sentence. In a clear and distinct voice, Macabéa says: As for the future. It is not understood by any of the onlookers present. But we know, of course, as readers of Heidegger, precisely what this means.

[Note: quotations taken from The Hour of the Star, trans. Giovanni Pontiero, Carcenet Press, 1992.]

How Even Sade Becomes Boring

Marquis de Sade by Delphine Lebourgeois   

Sade asks of his readers precisely what he asked of his countrymen: one more effort in order to achieve an unprecedented level of freedom. His work is thus a call for permanent revolution and self-overcoming. And, arguably, within the mad dialogue that he constructed between love and death, Sade not only made good his own escape from captivity, but opened up a line of flight for us all. 

However, as Foucault points out, in a sense Sade doesn't go far enough and he remains at last a transitional figure shaped by the Age of Reason, even as he points a way beyond it. Thus whilst he succeeded in introducing the frenzy of desire into a world dominated by law and order and made evil attractive to us, he remained trapped within certain conventions of thought.

So it is that Sade's pornographic fantasies of crime and cruelty begin to bore us and we ask of his texts what Lawrence once asked of all those works that forever turn on an ideal of transgression: 'If we can only palpitate to murder, suicide, and rape in their various degrees, however are we going to live?'  

May Day

It's May Day. And I'm feeling a little miserable and irritable (a bit menstrual, as Z would say).

For one thing, I've started to resent the fact that a pagan spring festival has become mixed up with Marxism and transformed into an international day of labour; the maypole being replaced as it were by a giant clocking-in machine.

In an age of universal wage slavery, there's no dignity in paid work and the red flag is just another symbol of tyranny. I would advise those who can avoid or postpone employment that they do so for as long as possible and keep moving from place to place in a headless and homeless manner. 

In the end, there is nothing to do but flee and seek out new lands and strange regions; departing from every gate and refusing to belong to any job, country, creed, political party, or trade union, exercising a decisive will not to be governed or bossed about.

Michel Foucault's Simplest of Pleasures

 

Portrait by Rinaldo Hopf (2004)

Michel Foucault was always deeply attracted to the idea of suicide as one he could darkly caress and think of primarily as an aesthetic question, rather than as a moral problem. He encouraged everyone to carefully choose and prepare their own death: to arrange the details and shape it into a work of art.

Of course, he appreciated the fact that suicide doesn't always result in a beautiful corpse and there are often discouraging traces left behind. It's obviously not very nice to have to hang yourself in the kitchen and leave a blue tongue sticking out of your mouth; or to jump from your eighth floor apartment and leave tiny bits of brain on the pavement for the local dogs to sniff at. Having said that, much of this unpleasantness could be avoided if we revalued suicide and made it easier and acceptable to kill oneself. 

In an interview entitled The Simplest of Pleasures, Foucault envisions a time and a people to come who have accorded suicide the highest status. Such people will hold suicide festivals and suicide orgies and establish places where those planning on suicide can seek out potential partners.

Indeed, Foucault says if he were to win a fortune in the lottery, he would personally open a suicide hotel where people who wanted to die could go and spend a weekend, enjoying themselves as far as possible before happily checking-out, liberated of every identity.

To think of suicide in this manner - as a question of style and as something not only admirable, but chic and playful - dissolves the depressing interiority that those who would make of life and death a tedious psychodrama insist upon. Death should not be another opportunity to pass judgement; nor should it be turned into a banal biological fact with which to smother the imagination. 

And suicide should not be left to a minority of unhappy souls who frequently make a mess of it and thereby bring the entire concept into disrepute. Each one of us needs to address the issue of how best to make an exit from this life - not waste time asking why it has to happen, or praying there's an afterlife.

The Voyeur

 Illustration by Joe Shuster

The voyeur takes the imperial gaze to its erotic conclusion. By watching lovers fuck, he exercises his power to probe and master bodies and assign meaning to otherwise insignificant sexual activity. 

The voyeur is always a solitary figure, watching in private and unbeknown to at least one of the parties observed. Crucially, he has no desire to join in. For his pleasure derives exclusively from the fact that, like a god, he has learnt the art of what Nietzsche terms immaculate perception.

For the voyeur, the greatest thing is to look at life without desire and not stare, as a dog does, with its tongue hanging out. 

Ooh Matron!

The figure of the nurse plays an important role within the pornographic imagination, where she is usually conceived either as a kindly angel who administers some form of erotic relief, or as the cruel representative of strict and punishing authority delighting in needles and cold latex gloves.

But, for the British, reared as they have been within a Carry On culture, the figure of the nurse also plays an important role within the comic imagination. 

And so it's virtually impossible - unless you're as humourless as many perverts are - to take the sexual stereotype seriously for long: fetishistic medical fantasies are invariably undermined by fond memories of Hattie Jacques.

Ecstasy

We should be extremely wary of those attempts to conceive of the overman as corresponding to the possibility of an ecstatic break from humanity. Zarathustra explicitly warns against the thought of a transcendent leap into the future.

In fact, it's arguable that what is most needed today is some form of counter-ecstatic return to the flesh; a stepping back into material life and the rejection of all forms of idealism that would abstract us away from the world of physical objects that we might touch.

For the key to constructing an active and ethical life is to remain, says Lawrence, inside your own skin and not pretend that you're any bigger than you actually are. To overcome ourselves we need not become more hu-man or superhuman, but less so; more animal, complete with teeth and guts and genitals and all those things which our idealists hope to see shrivel away.

And so, like Anna Brangwen, I hold on to the little things that save me from being swept up helplessly into the Abstract and the Universal. I don't want to get outside myself, or go around open-mouthed with a strange, ecstatic grin like a true believer. 

A Transpolitical Afterword

To my surprise, I discovered last night at a wine bar in St James's, that there are still intelligent people in the world prepared to discuss politics as traditionally understood and practised, despite the fact that we have entered a transpolitical era. They might not have been entirely sober when doing so - but they were almost certainly serious.

For one reason or another, they seemed unprepared to accept - or, in some cases, incapable of accepting - what the radical confusion of formerly fixed and distinct political categories, ideologies, and identities might signify. It was as if the last forty years had changed nothing at all. Or as if Baudrillard had never written a word!

However, like it or not, we are rapidly approaching what the latter describes as the zero point of politics; a stage in which everything that formerly held truth and value in the political sphere has been emptied of all sense. Not that this marks the end of history, or the end of man; rather, it simply results in the interminable illusion of the end and the simulation of phantom events on the world stage broadcast in real time on 24-hour news channels.

Henceforth, attempts to do politics, or discuss politics, are increasingly doomed to failure. And if many people don't bother to vote, it's not because they are apathetic or cynical, but, for the most part, indifferent to a system in which it has become impossible to believe. Parliament, I'm afraid, is beginning to resemble a huge HMV store: a place that holds no great interest and serves no real purpose.