The Pastiche of moments.

Vincent Van Gogh, A pair of shoes, 1886. "I will briefly suggest, in this first interpretative option, that the willed and violent transformation of a drab peasant object world into the most glorious materialization of pure colour in oil paint is to be seen as a Utopian gesture: as an act of compensation which ends up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the senses, or at least of that supreme sense—sight, the visual, the eye—which it now reconstitutes for us as a semi-autonomous space in its own right—part of some new division of labour in the body of capital, some new fragmentation of the emergent sensorium which replicates the specializations and divisions of capitalist life at the same time that it seeks in precisely such fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation for them." (Jameson, p.58)

Andy Warhol, diamond Dust Shoes, 1980. Here, on the contrary, it is as though the external and coloured surface of things—debased and contaminated in advance by their assimilation to glossy advertising images—has been stripped away to reveal the deathly black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative which subtends them. Although this kind of death of the world of appearance becomes thematized in certain of Warhol’s pieces—most notably, the traffic accidents or the electric chair series—this is not, I think, a matter of content any longer but of some more fundamental mutation both in the object world itself—now become a set of texts or simulacra—and in the disposition of the subject. (Jameson,p.64)

The waning of affect, however, might also have been characterized, in the narrower context of literary criticism, as the waning of the great high-modernist thematics of time and temporality, the elegiac mysyeries of duree and of memory (something to be understood fully as a category of literary criticism associated as much with high modernism as with the works themselves). We have often been told, however, that we now inhabit the synchronic rather than the diachronic, and I think it is at least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the preceding period of high modernism proper. (Jameson, p.64) Jameson,Frederick, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press Books, 1990.

The Daguerreotype

Fig. 1 Two girls looking at a picture book 1850-55

Fig. 2 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, 1844

Last semester Ryan Johnston gave a lecture about the history of photography for the subject Modern Art - the politics of the new. It was really interesting to hear about the development of photography over the 19th and 20th centuries.

Ryan indicated that photography is essentially a modern art form. From the Renaissance artists have used the camera obscura and photography was invented simultaneously in many countries in the 1800 – 1820s. (Johnston 2009)

In 1839 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) (Fig. 2) presented his invention of an early type of photography which he named the daguerreotype to the French Academy of Sciences. It was a method that used a large box camera, to expose an image to a silver plated sheet of copper that had been treated with iodine. It was then developed with mercury and fixed with salt. Only one copy was produced and this was a very fragile method. (Met Museum of Art, Online)

The Metropolitan Museum of Arts website has a section devoted to their exhibition titled ‘The Dawn of Photography: French Daguerreotypes, 1839–1855’. You can view images from the exhibition as well as a computer animation of the daguerreotype process. Viewing the images evoked the sense of travelling back in time to see people and places that no longer exist. This is part of the magic of photography.

I chose to decorate my blog page with an image from this exhibition (Two girls looking at a picture book 1850-55) (Fig. 1) because I like the look of this method of photography. I like the image of children reading a picture book. Its astounding how far media has advanced since this period.

References:

Fig.1. Unknown artist
Two Girls Looking at a Picture Book, ca. 1850-55
Daguerreotype; 19.1 x 15.2 cm (7 1/2 x 6 in.)
Département des Estampes et de la Photographie, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Fig. 2. Jean-Baptiste Sabatier-Blot (French, 1801-1881)
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, 1844
Daguerreotype; 14.3 x 11.7 cm (5 5/8 x 4 5/8 in.)
George Eastman House, Rochester

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Website. Available from:

http://www.metmuseum.org/special/French_Daguerreotypes/8.r.htm

Johnston, Ryan, “Photography and Modernism” Lecture, University of Melbourne. Parkville. 26 March 2009.