SPIR: Conceptual Photography

Jill Casid & María DeGuzmán

 Wish you were here.
Copyright © 2002 by Jill Casid & María DeGuzmán, SPIR: Conceptual Photography. All Rights Reserved.

 

Yes, it is true, as some of you know already. SPIR, the alchemical egg,

has been split asunder. Another sign of the times?

SPIR (1991-2003) is what Jill & María were (1990-2003);

that is, SPIR is neither Jill nor María, but the two together.

Visit María's new website as Camera Query at: http://www.cameraquery.com.

 

   As the queer feminist partnership SPIR: Conceptual Photography, we collaborated with each other and friends and colleagues from 1991 to 2003 to produce various kinds of photo-text. These ranged from photo sequences that look like story boards or film stills with text running underneath them on gallery walls to photo-essays that appeared in several journals (Art Journal, Iris) to postcards and digitally and hand-manipulated polaroids. From 1994 onward we also presented our work in the form of slide-projector talks that involved simultaneous reading or "lecturing" along with an ongoing rotating slide-carrousel exhibit of images to create experimental combinations of words and images. We explored many related issues in our photo-text work: identity in terms of the impersonation of social roles and cultural icons and the transformation of those roles; the relationship between words and visual images and their effect on us as viewers and "projectors" of images; the uses of photography to explore the linkage between fantasy and politics; how people employ photographs and story-telling to apprehend time and make the disappearing present personally and historically meaningful; and the material and philosophical implications of different kinds of photographic media and practices. Our photo-text work was and is an extension of our work as scholars in the fields of visual culture & art history (Jill) as well as literature & photography (María).

   Why "conceptual photography"? This may sound abstract and disorienting. Disorientation may be confusing, but it is also the beginning of questioning. And questioning is the stuff of thought as thinking. If concepts are the images of thought, as Gilles Deleuze spent his life elaborating, images, whether verbal or visual or both, lie at the very center, the inner sanctum, of the bone of thought, its life-giving marrow.

The Vanishing Emergent: this is not mere analogy, alchemy of excrement into gold-less guilt, nor is it one more version of Darwin's "natural" evolution of forms, life-forms included, in a C[lonely] world of manufactured substitutions and replacements seemingly ad infinitum. Technomancy of necromancy, empire of the marvelous, but not necessarily of the liberationist sort. Simulation is our recompense, our workers' compensation for a proliferating case of Phantom Limb, the missing body part, the mourned hand or leg buried in the Sandman's sand box. But more likely it's an internal organ (Oh, I'm missing you!) snipped out by adroit android hands while we, you, me, s/he slept dreamless under technoanaesthesia. When you finally awaken, you'll stumble groggy-eyed to the mirror in anamorphic disbelief, shellshock, passionless wonder, muttering, "What happened? What happened? What happened to me?" Then you'll open the medicine cabinet behind the mirror, the cabinet of curiosities designed and prescribed to keep you (el curioso impertinente) from asking too many questions or doing anything about them. Directions: stay exterminatingly absorbed with your mass-produced projections of self-preservation at the expense of others and mind your "own business" in this upside-down world of incorporated megalopoly (while Peeping Techno-Tom pries into your affairs uploading Info on deliciously downloaded applets). Meanwhile, your vision is not only doubled, but compounded into a million collared feelings of futility by the multiplying spectacles perched at the end of your nose, substitute corneas compliments of ArtfulScience, Inc. Some gadget composed of cut crystals grown in space. Some gadget acquired from a mail order catalogue advertised on the cathode-ray commander of abducted minds.

Text of "Vanishing Emergent" copyrighted © 1999 by Jill Casid & María DeGuzmán, SPIR: Conceptual Photography. All Rights Reserved.
Image "Scoundrel Lines" copyrighted © 2001 by Jill Casid & María DeGuzmán, SPIR: Conceptual Photography. All Rights Reserved.
 

Virtual Presence from Prism Pictures. March 23, 2003.
Copyright © 2003 by Jill Casid & María DeGuzmán,
SPIR: Conceptual Photography. All Rights Reserved.

Or write to us at María DeGuzmán, P.O. Box 989, Chapel Hill, NC 27514, U.S.A. or at Jill Casid, Dept. of Art History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Elvehjem Building 240, 800 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53703.
 

Image on the left: Real Wild Dolly: "Oh, Darling!,"apocryphal image from Tango of the Dolls in the Deep.Copyright © 1993
by Jill Casid & María DeGuzmán, SPIR: Conceptual Photography. All Rights Reserved.

Image in the middle: Valentino: homo americanus #3, frame 2. With the collaboration of Jeff Richter. Copyright © 1992 by
Jill Casid & María DeGuzmán, SPIR: Conceptual Photography. All Rights Reserved.

Image on the right: The Death of Marat #2. With the collaboration of Joseph O'Donnell. Copyright © 1992 by
Jill Casid & María DeGuzmán, SPIR: Conceptual Photography. All Rights Reserved.

In this place of enforced blandness, mediocrity, and brutality for the sake of the "money-work system,"(1) Madame la Te(s)te descends the staircase knowing that to translate her potentialities into actions means to submit them to the contempt of this world. And (s)he ought to know for (s)he is she, descending the staircase, this time for herself and in time to meet her match, aware of the world and of what "man" and his "wo-man" are made. This time, undeceived, undeceiver.

But even this clarifying disillusionment is a form of enchantment. For at the end of the realization of her entrapment in a world of civilized barbarity lies the gleaming promise of liberation beckoning her on and on down into the night, the night that for all its bitter coldness and graveyard miasmic mists chilling the very marrow in the bones, is tender in relation to what is yet to come ... But, hey, who ever listened to Cassandra (or all those enslaved maidens sacrificed in the wake of her sacrifice)? And you know how history repeats itself, spiraling like the planet itself around a nuclear-reactor sun burning itself up while boys play with bombs and rockets and guns and slogans about genius, culture, and art and girls cheer (out of fear, and if they don't, they're supposed to) and everyday we step closer to Not-being, not much the wiser.

http://www.peace-action.org

 
Pin-up gilding the clumsy pin
bowling down outta B-29
hey, hey, hey
ya gotta beware
those pin & ball games
pinball wizard for pinheads
'cause within them lies
that fire wall aim
blasting a target (that's folks)
into shades, the lucky strikes you bet,
'cause the others get to burn
the living-dead butt existence
of the maimed for life.
I wish I could sing
a new song, like the psalm says--
balm, not naplam.
But we ain't learnt nothin,'
nothin' yet.

--Found poem for anonymous poet. Subway wall (where else?)

Faustus lights the lights and Mephistophelia steals the fire...
Done with the collaboration of Patricia Juliana Smith.
Copyright © 2001 by Jill Casid & María DeGuzmán,
SPIR: Conceptual Photography. All Rights Reserved.

Schubert (Seraph Peter) is Melancholy Today
Copyright © 2001 by Jill Casid & María DeGuzmán
SPIR: Conceptual Photography. All Rights Reserved.

Quoting Walter Benjamin, Eduardo Cadava remarks in his book Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History,"[t]he forgetting of the photograph's ghostly or spectral character, of its relation to a death that survives itself, corresponds to what Benjamin refers to as 'the decline of  photography'" (13). Cadava goes on to point out that this process of attempting to banish the spectral or ghostly quality of the photographic image has been occurring for a long time. In fact, one might say this desire to abolish or should we say "exorcise" the spectral has been a driving force behind the technical refinement of cameras and film, a refinement governed largely by a "mimetic ideology of realism" (14). Digital cameras with their promise of "digital gain-up" on darkness could be seen as the latest advancement in the campaign to abolish the spectral and its ineluctable companion, the dark and the indistinct. But, we are not so sure that such a conquest is desirable or even that the digital must be used to these ends. Perhaps the dark is light enough.

The light shines in the darkness... in the dead of the night...

The Vampire's Fondest Memory

More SPECTRAL PHOTOGRAPHY

SUB ROSA

Click on Lightbulb for Lost Week at the Grand Hotel
 

Lost Week at the Grand Hotel,#7. Copyright © 2000 by Jill Casid & María DeGuzmán, SPIR: Conceptual Photography. All Rights Reserved.

For further information on other Wildean ventures, please visit D. C. Rose's site http://www.oscholars.com or write to
oscholars@gmail.com.
 

For external links to more info about SPIR: Conceptual Photography:

http://www.indyweek.com/durham/2002-09-25/ae2.html

http://www.ucl.ac.uk./slade/schta/

http://www.southbank-university.ac.uk/~stafflag/photography.html

City of black angels, horses, and riders. We, the ridden below. Cast-iron casting down from the heights. The heights from which we have fallen. Or so some would profess though the myths lie underfoot. The angels of our ambitions--these messengers of mixed messages--stand already the black, already the white, of the fumey sky against which they float in reverse relief. No, not LA. Nor Rome, that city of seven hills, seven heads, cloned ones, too. But, as when Almodovar superimposes City of Women and All About Eve, a bit of both. Cities within cities--Mayrit, Magrit, Magerit, mother sources of hidden springs, my mother's Pandora's box, the water of life (as Tank Girl knows), the living waters from whence courses a river of blood sustaining heaven, a tide of creatures from the shining prison of this world. The Great Ark of the Genome Project dumps its twins into the flood of this world--now that we know we can, it's sink or swim.

Ten 'til ten. Ten 'til ten, read all the clocks in this city. When we insist on deadly certainties, you know the ship is sinking. The hour of trial has begun, the hour of mercury climbing toward disintegration. Or is it The Trial? Courtroom dramas and blow-it-up plots that end in prescripted death, clockwork executions as clean and timely as leaking landfills, couch potato blood clots. All that rises must converge in this age of global entropy and profit-motive apathy (numbed appetites) serving us up to the day of wrath when salt shall once again be as gold, water as platinum, breathable air turned commodity more limited than any precious metal. Lyrical as the Gifts of the Three Kings of Capital Technology. Pretty as the choke of a minimum wage asthma attack. And light--ha!, light. You, me, each cell, each molecule in our bodies carrying a phosphorescent digital price tag, a barcode brand, a code of bars flowing from the shining prison of this virtual world shopping mall.

Evening leads with romantic promise--an escape from the day--along the Gran Via back down to the Puerta del Sol, the Gate of the Sun at the very center of this metropolis. Where the sun also rises, why should this city be an exception to the fates of Dresden or Baghdad? Every street in this barrio has been torn up to receive the cables of "wireless" technology. Each morning brings the pre-bellum of drilling and pounding in the name of progress, in the name of light to come. But now se hace de noche. And night arrives dressed as an ephemeral glimmering stepping out in quivering feathers from beneath an archway, a dream-weaving thief with gloves and lashes long as those of that arch-diva towering for a moment in St. Mark's Square, pigeons fluttering around her as she sings, sighingly,"Why, oh why ...?"

It is too late. Or, rather, it has become too late. (Here we sit, two lonely old people ... Hey, wake up, wake up and dream us a different ending!) Diva-night turns like a steel girder against the sky "old as an iron queen" with all that glass and who knows what else beyond the night's luminous haze about to fall--"the fall of a crystal palace"--upon self-absorbed heads wearing their jokes, ostrich eggs, for helmets: "Chicken-little, chicken-little." But the sun also rises, doesn't it? A blinding egg yoke of hope in the sky. More than seventy years ago (that long ago?!) two characters out of a well-read (perhaps over-read) hardboiled novel flagged a taxi, climbed in, told the driver where to drive, settled back nestling close together (what a luxury!), and turned out onto the Gran Via, one saying to the other, "We could have had such a damned good time together" and the other replying, "Yes. Isn't it pretty to think so?," not especially concerned about that mounted policeman raising his baton. (But then, what's a baton next to the replicating kin of little boy bomb, the repeating dwindle, dwindle of little star wars?)

Then again, we are not them, those characters of the mid 1920s. We are us (or who are we?) trying to keep our eyes open (weren't they?) scanning for signs while this life zooms by so quickly or rather we do (captured in Polaroid today, liquidated tomorrow) we barely have time to comprehend what lies before us (or within us) and all is hindsight (isn't it pretty to think so?). And not even that, the doppler effect of an explosion on the other side of the world, on our blind side. What would it mean to be touched by what we see? Bearing witness, a watchword for ethical living--precarious in the face of those powers who would rather we not exist if our living be an inconvenience, a nuisance to them. (Away, away in a patrol van or some other vehicle of seizure-inducing flashing lights.)

Ojo liquidado, liquidated eye. The eye, a liquid-filled organ. Not enough to cry our eyes out. And yet something must flow beyond the mind-forged manacles reinforced at every turn by barbed wire, electric fences, walls of concrete and steel, invisible radiowaves, electronic eyes, the flat gray screens of the idiot box designed to keep us hypnotized in place.

Imagine (if you still can) that we channel the diva's absurd and flaming incongruity within the flow of time. We, the city of black angels, of ruffled feathers and ephemeral glimmerings, Weimar-wakened, divining, divine against liquidation, against the deadly (and dull) reduction to capitalized flows.
 
 

Even at night the clouds blow over the city, flame-like. A strange wind strikes up, sweeping across the plains, now sirocco, now polar gust, the fever-chills of the earth communicating with our pores, the lining of our lungs, our skin-deep illusion of separateness, whether we like it or not, whether we look or look away.
 
 

To fly, as to crawl, we need an atmosphere.
We must breathe.
 
 

              spectacles of the ghost at the bottom of the sea             street of the box brides and bag divas

                Copyright © 2001 by Jill Casid & María DeGuzmán, SPIR: Conceptual Photography. All Rights Reserved.

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Nightbathers
Copyright © 2001 by Jill Casid & María DeGuzmán, SPIR: Conceptual Photography.
All Rights Reserved.
 

Dawning of a Queer Planet
Copyright © 2001 by Jill Casid & María DeGuzmán, SPIR: Conceptual Photography.
All Rights Reserved.

Headlines claim, "cosmic X-rays reveal new forms of matter!" New forms of matter or is it new states? Form and state, what's the connection? Anyway, the excitement, the excitation, appears to be over rare sub-atomic particles briefly in existence (on our earth) only during experiments inside particle accelerators. Particle accelerators. What a concept. What would E. A. Poe and company have to say about that? Poe who was fascinated, no, actually committed, to vibrational life beyond entropy, much to the consternation of his detrators who snicker, "Delirium tremens, short and simple." Well, not so short and simple for those for whom Lady Madeline is coming again, a perpetual Second Coming, up out of the basement. And you know what? Methinks the Lady is mad! Mad at those with new particles, new states of matter, and no new thoughts beyond the usual brutally boring binaries, the us v. them, the bloody fantasies of war among the stars, the continuation of colonization and conquest now to other planets, the rat race (dear Rattus, pardon the misnomer) to a slave's grave. Oh, what a wonderful world it could be ... .
 
 

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Last updated 11/02/07