The very pulp of the sensible, what is indefinable in it, is nothing else than the union in it of the "inside" with the "outside," the contact in thickness of self with self
Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1
the flesh we are speaking of is not matter. It is the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body, . . .
Maurice Merleau-Ponty 2
These sixteen photographs by Amy George engage the body-more precisely, the lived experience of the body-as site of a manifold of aspects: biological ground of transcendening consciousness, equiprimordially physical and spiritual. The body is at once subject and object, sentient and sensible, seer and seen, site of visibility and vision. The body as flesh is not a Cartesian dualism, but a move beyond Cartesian dualism: the flesh, in Merleau-Ponty's sense, is the ground subsuming the being of subject and object, antecedent to their dehiscence into subject and object as such. The chiasmus of the biological ground of vision and the body qua visible is inherent simplicitur in the situation of the self-portrait. It obtains as well in more general form in other situations of representation of the body: the work is a sedimentation of the vision of the visible.
The small scale of these works requires close viewing, elicting not the viewer's glance but the viewer's gaze. The glance is brief and furtive; the gaze is prolonged and contemplative. 3 The subtleties of value and richness of detail are only discernible at close range. This requisite closeness of viewing renders the encounter with the works particularly private and intimate, as only one viewer can occupy a position close to a print at a time. The small scale of these prints is a consequence of the Ziatype process, a printing-out process using lithium palladium chloride and ammonium ferric oxalate to form the printed image. The limited light sensitivity of the image-forming material requires exposure to a higher intensity light source than that available by using an enlarger for printing, thus requiring that a negative the size of the final print be printed as a contact print.
The characteristics inherent in the Ziatype process has other consequences for the appearance of the prints: because the chemistry is hand-coated onto the paper support, using either a brush or glass rod, the hand-coating can-and here does-result in an irregular border of exposed but imageless print emulsion beyond the image area of the print and beyond the unexposed edges of the negative masked by the retainers of the four by five film holder, forming a liminal zone mediating the transition between the image and the not-image of the white paper support. A parergon, neither part of the image qua work per se nor separate from the image, this surrounding margin doubles the passe-partout of the mat, which extends the white of the paper support toward the wall. This digression into material cause and presentation of the image is not apart from but a part of the engagement with the image. The particularity of the border marks the image as hand-made, with all the rhetoric of the chierographic, of écriture and touche 4 that hand-madeness entails, though one knows well enough in close observation of these works that these are camera images: more precisely, the distinction of hand-made and camera-made is rendered problematic, if not thereby disclosed as ultimately jejune. 5 Since the Ziatype emulsion is absorbed into the fibers of the paper support rather than being held above a gelatin subcoating as with gelatin silver photographs, the image is in rather than on the surface, a doubling at the level of material cause of the conjunction of interiority and exteriority in the images.
Three of these works--Body Pod, Torso, and Suspended--directly engage the figure as such. The other thirteen works employ images projected onto the body and rephotographed to produce the negatives from which the prints are made. The resulting layered images superimpose interior and exterior, layering anatomical drawings onto the lived anatomy of the body. To project is to impel some thing forward, to transport in one's imagination and, to externalize and attribute to an other one's internal experience. All of these senses of 'projection' intertwine in these works. One's lived experience consists in more than perception within the present moment: it is also a matter of retention and protention, of memory and desire. As Merleau-Ponty urges:
To perceive is not to experience a host of impressions accompanied by memories capable of clinching them; it is to see, standing forth from a cluster of data, an immanent significance without which no appeal to memory is possible. To remember is not to bring into the focus of consciousness a self-subsistent picture of the past; it is to thrust deeply into the horizon of the past and take apart step by step the interlocked perspectives until the experiences which it epitomizes are as if relieved of their temporal setting. To perceive is not to remember. 6
With the exception of Body Pod, the figure fills the frame, pressing against the edges. This proximal placement tends to the displacement of the body from a spatially volumetric and comensurable environment, repositioning the body from an object to an image. Truncation of the image of the body by the edge is a mode of fragmentation, a trope that has come to seem particularly apt. As Helaine Posner urges:
The dismemberment of the body in late-twentieth-century art is no accident. It is the result of living in a world in which violence, oppression, social injustice, and physical and psychological stress predominate. We may long for the secure ideals of beauty and wholeness embraced by past generations, but experience tells us this worldview is obsolete. Synecdoche, when a part is understood to stand in for the whole, is hard-pressed to perform. 7
If the body is treated not as a simple, stable monad always already given, but as a polysemic and mutable construction, this shift is correlative with a shift in the associated notion of the self. It is a shift from the Enlightenment notion of the self as transcendental ego-"the self-timeless, universal, and in each one of us around the globe and throughout history" 8>to a postmodern, or post-postmodern, notion of the self as entailing a rejection of the transcendental pretence, so that "in order to be ourselves we should not want anything more-or less-than that perfectly modest sense of self that precedes philosophy."9
Amy Holmes George received the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, and the Master of Fine Arts from Clemson University. She is Assistant Professor of Photography and Digital Imaging in the Art Department at Stephen F. Austin State University, Nagadoches, Texas.
All works are Ziatype prints, 5 x 4 or 4 x 5 inch images, matted to 20 x 16 inches. Clockwise, from the gallery entrance.
| 1 | Body Pod |
| 2 | X-Rayed |
| 3 | Skinned |
| 4 | Flayed |
| 5 | Tattooed |
| 6 | Scarred |
| 7 | Self Inside |
| 8 | Inside Out |
| 9 | Eye Inside |
| 10 | Innards |
| 11 | Within |
| 12 | Suspended |
| 13 | Torso |
| 14 | Illusion |
| 15 | Eye Figure I |
| 16 | Eye Figure II |