Risky Business, Business as Usual

Meeting our group last night, Fiona Annis welcomed us into her "live/work" space in Griffintown for a memorable introduction to the art and science of wet-plate collodion photography. As suggested by the impromptu portrait session depicted above -- Jeff donning a fur, Fiona lighting her target as the rest of the group looks on, slightly stunned -- the spirit of "making do" or bricolage in the Levi-Straussian vein would seem to be central to Annis's practice. A credit card has been bent to hold her aluminum plates in place inside the gerry-rigged plastic cartridge she attaches to a thrift-store camera. An ice-fishing tent draped with light-blocking cloths becomes her portable darkroom. And the accreted condensations of silver crystals on and around the corners of her plate holder become the noisy artifacts of her photographic images.

But, how much of these menaced, compromised or otherwise accidental mutations can really be explained by the "inevitable" constraints of those improvised situations? That is to say, Annis's own attractions to sublimity, darkness, and a Surrealist-informed aesthetics of monstrosity feel much more compellingly present as the gravitational force propelling these occasions for decay. As we canvassed her collection of dripped candles, books on the art of Joel-Peter Witkin and other items worthy of what Restoration poetaster Ned Ward called a "Ware-house of Egyptian Mummies, old musty Skeletons, and other antiquated Trumpery," we heard tell of her friend's 32-page suicide note as "an extraordinary document." We saw her images of sites of famous, melancholic deaths. We smelled unfurling around us the pungent odors of the highly toxic ether, collodion and silver nitrate requisite to this procedure with which she works and sleeps. 

Annis claimed at one point that her art aims for "a sense of meaning without actually making sense." Wet, wooly and intentionally designed to court visual danger, I think there actually is a very clear way in which it does make sense—as a risk-seeking indulgence of a full-throated death drive. Fluid this work surely is in its material making. Liquid it may be in its squishy, morbid reflections. But, is it intelligent? More broadly, does an account of liquid intelligence need to breed in the dark, marshy backwaters of this plangent lugubriousness? Or might we model its movement—as with Fiona's posing of Jeff—across the face of brighter, lighter surfaces?

"A Resemblance too Perfect"

Lost has Sanford Sanchez been to the world of blogging these past months. Lost, it must be said, beneath a brimming pile of academic nonsense—as much a pile, often it has seemed, as a pyre alight with flames that needed to be extinguished before they got too far out of control. With the final weeks of courses now virtually in hand, I find myself drawn back to you with the discovery of a wondrous gem.

Let me set the scene: last weekend, I was prepping for a PhD defense on eighteenth century French anatomical culture and I wanted to check my facts on anatomical instruction at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. So, I went to the library where I consulted a copy of Paul Duro's The Academy and the Limits of Painting in Seventeenth Century France (New Haven: Yale, 1997). There, I found the notes depicted above leaved into the book—notes not only on academic practice but on the very practices of wax modeling that figured prominently in the very dissertation I had been reading! While the notes are slightly ... well, I'm sure they merit transcription and your consultation as follows:

"Relationship between wax & art theory, part of a greater epistemological shift --> naturalism --> secularism + scientific knowledge, reconstituting art as knowledge. Issues of resemblance. Perhaps it is not surprising that a material that has an uncanny ability to imitate reality would be used for religious purposes in a religious society & scientific (anatomical) purposes in a more secular society. Begins with with Charles Sorel, the satirical portraitists, & the assault on the masked man --> interesting because Sorel is a satirist. The question of what is naturalistic (<<au naturel>>): on the one hand the portrait is denigrated within the hierarchy of genres because it reproduces nature without invention --> a slave to nature. On the other hand, here the average portrait is equated with distortion and deception --> the portrait projects the wishful fantasy of its patron. It is the satiririst -- and Soerl's satirical universe is both wild & absurd -- that provides the true image <<au naturel>>. The paradox of the mask in satire --> with the presentation of explicit masks - exaggerated portraits & invented caricatures -- that the satirist seeks to strip off the 'masks' of unreflective hypocrisy and vanity. Negotiating the relationship between wax sculpture and art theory. A resemblance too perfect: wax sculpture & art theory."

I bet that was one sweet paper!