Between the subject and the world is inserted the entire set of discourses which make up visuality, that cultural construct, and make visuality different from vision, the notion of unmediated visual experience. Between retina and world is inserted a screen of signs, a screen consisting of all the multiple discourses on vision built into the social arena.

Norman Bryson 1

we can’t understand photographic meaning as an abstract system, as a langue, but only as a social practice involving specific institutional currencies, determining the way photographs circulate as social discourse.

John Tagg 2

But within the overarching category of immanent critique, it is important to distinguish between those practices that elucidate, engage with, or even contest their institutional frame and those that suspend or defer the institutional critique in the belief that such critique is already implied within the terms of their focus on the politics of representation. Representation is, after all, itself contextually determined, and the meanings thereby produced and disseminated are inseparable from the discursive structures that contain and enfold them.

Abigail Solomon-Godeau 3

These works of Robin Dru Germany and of Marilyn Waligore entail a critical practice of photography, in which the medium is the site of a critique of the construction of gender within the social formation, conducted concomitantly with a critique of the medium as a system of representation. This dual critique entails a twining of iconographical threads: an iconography of ostensible content and an iconography of the medium. The effect of meaning is generated in viewer response to the interrelationship of signifiers, both visual and textual. Both at the level of the circulation of images within the social formation, and at the level of each of these images, a critical practice of photography abrogates a notion of the photograph as ‘transparent’ 4 to substitute a notion of the photograph as text, an adequate reading of which must entail a problematization of the system of representation in which it is constituted, and the practices of the social formation in which that system of representation is embedded.

The iconography of content subsumes primary subject matter from which motifs are constituted, secondary subject matter from images and allegories are constituted, and content or “intrinsic meaning,” from which a “world of symbolical values” is constituted. 5

The iconography of the medium entails all the aspects of the articulation of the morphemes of the medium in the material cause of the work which are discernible as such. It is perhaps most evident in the trace of the syntax of output device in the facture of the artwork. The apparent graininess of Germany’s plotter prints are less a function of output resolution than of the supposed graininess of the source images (‘supposed’ insofar as apparent grain is readily added by digital intervention). In contrast, the apparent grainlessness of Waligore’s gelatin silver and Fujichrome prints produced respectively from large format negatives and transparencies seemingly obviates her digital intervention by resulting in works that might have been printed from large format camera original negatives and transparencies. Both graininess and grainlessness are inherent attributes of the photographic medium, and as such both are signifiers of the photographic. 6 The presence or apparent absence of this characteristic of the medium functions as a morpheme for rhetorical use within the medium and the discursive field in which the medium is embedded.

As both Germany’s and Waligore’s works entail digital intervention, the facility which digital intervention provides for the processes of collage, montage, and bricolage 7 cannot be disregarded with respect to the iconography of the medium in the facture of these works. While these processes, and layering, juxtaposition and superimposition are not unique to digital intervention, digital means greatly facilitates these operations and strategies. One might consider digital intervention as constituting a ‘digital flatbed’ in extension of Leo Steinberg’s notion of “the flatbed” as an imaging surface on which “any content that does not evoke a prior optical event” might be interposed. 8

The works by Robin Dru Germany are configured on a ground with a superimposed grid in light gray, and with the left edge perforated to suggest a spiral bound sketchbook or notebook page, the subsuming format of presentation is a site of analysis. Rosalind Krauss has urged that the grid is the fundamental trope of modernism; so it may be, if modernism is understood as nascent in the Renaissance employment of the grid as an emblematic instrumentality of the mensurable. 9 Germany’s works extend the tropic inscription of mensurability by employing an approximate bilateral symmetry, with appropriated advertising images flanking a center panel to form a diptych or triptych on which textual elements are superimposed. The resultant visual balance functions as a trope of weighing, a figure of comparison and contrast, of similarity and difference.

The appropriation of the advertising image is a Détournement, 10 repositioning the discourse of the image from its circulation within the social formation to a metadiscourse of critique within the artwork. This displacement from an uncritical to a critical domain of discourse doubles the displacement of desire entailed in the Gestalt of the advertisement, as Kathy Myers urges:

Through the creation of meaning, the advertisement works to simultaneously create identities for both the product and the reader, who will be addressed as a potential customer. In order to engage the reader’s attention, both text and image must be capable of offering certain forms of interest and pleasure. Crucially, for the image to fulfill its advertising function, it must not offer satisfaction in its own right. The advertisement works to displace satisfaction, promising fulfillment upon purchase of the commodity, at which point the reader becomes a consumer. It then articulates meaning and pleasure through a complex relationship which it establishes between reader, advertising image and commodity. 11

In The Arms, two advertising images are juxtaposed. To the left, an image from the 1950’s is printed in monochromatic blue; to the right, a four-color contemporary image is printed. Each image is a partial figure seen from behind Bifurcated approximately at the vertical axis of symmetry; conjoined at the plane of bifurcation, the two together approximate a single figure. The gesture of each figure mirrors the other: biceps flexed, arm bent at the elbow, wrist flexed to display the development of the muscles. In combination, the gesture of the semblance of a single figure formed by juxtaposition of the two figures alludes to a figure with both arms raised with arms and hands bent reflexively toward the head; compare the upper portion of terracotta pre-dynastic Egyptian female figurines. 13Superimposed over both sections of the work is the legend:

Sleek Lines. SCULPTED
aerodynamics. A powerful ENGINE
and nimble AGILITY.

The Lips is configured as a diptych, with a contemporary advertising image to the left, an earlier advertising image to the right, and a narrower center panel with text overlaying green foliage in the center. The image at the left panel has a male figure with well-developed musculature in briefs, telephone tucked under his chin, two wine glasses upside down in his right hand, with the left hand above his navel. This contemporary kouros has a toothless smile, and directs his gaze toward the camera as surrogate of the viewer. The image at the right panel shows a seated male figure, dressed in a suit and tie, wearing glasses; a telephone is held to his head with his left hand, while his gaze is directed forward and down, avoid the lens. He smiles, with lips parted to reveal his teeth. The text of the center panel, printed in lavender over the scaly green foliage on a white background, is aligned on its vertical center axis and line length varied to form the shape of the flayed skin of a snake, making a simple viewer response to the two side panel images problematic:

The Prop is a triptych with an appropriated 1950’s advertising image on both wings, with the right wing right-reading and the left wing reversed left to right, and a contemporary image in the more narrow center panel. The 1950’s image is printed in sepia, while the contemporary image is printed in four-color. The 1950’s image has a male figure dressed in a suit and wearing a hat; his right hand is raised to touch the brim of his hat in salutation, while his left hand holds a copy of the Wall Street Journal, folded to make the masthead prominently legible. A text box is placed at the lower portion of the right and left wings (like the image on the left wing, the left text panel is reversed left to right):

Junior executive Dick Colbert moved bac[k]
to Lexington, to a lower-paying utilities job, t[o]
keep his widower father from getting lonesom[e.]

Performance
Measuring
Equipment

The Kiss is a diptych, with each wing having a woman and man. On the left, a 1950’s image has a woman with white-gloved hand held to her chin, her slightly rumpled sweater unbuttoned to suggest décolletage, her gaze down and almost inward, meeting neither the man in the photograph (an internal spectator), or the camera. The man smiles. He is wearing a suit, perhaps a tuxedo, and bow tie. On the right, a couple kiss passionately in a tightly framed image of their two heads. The 1950’s image is less grainy than the contemporary image, though the halftone dot pattern of the images as reproduced are prominent in both. The graininess of the contemporary image suggests a rawness, an unstaged character of the image. The 1950’s image, which seems (and almost certainly was) no less directed than the contemporary image has a sense of innocence: the kiss is not in the re-presented moment of the photograph, but prior to or subsequent to the moment of exposure. At the lover center of the diptych, overlapping both of the wings, an oval text box has an orange text printed over a transparent dark green field:

It’s the passion
you always
felt for driving.

Marilyn Waligore utilizes images of objects as a means of critique of the social construction of gender. Photographing still life material in the directorial mode 14 with a large format view camera, intervening in and compositing the scanned images digitally in very large files, output using a film recorder to 4 x 5 black and white film or 8 x 10 color film, Waligore’s gelatin silver and Fujichrome prints retain the very high resolution and seemingly seamless transition of value and hue typical of large format camera facture, while obviating the discernible artifacts of digital intervention. Texts are incorporated in several of her works, positioning the still life objects and extending the framing of viewer response entailed by the image and its title.

In Watching the Clock, a gold-colored figurine of a young girl, covering her ears with her hands as if determined to avoid hearing the superimposed text:

You’re running out of time,
my pretty!

to integrate the Concept (the signifier in the wide sense) with time, the discourse, the con- sciousness-of-self, and consciousness-of-death, and equating the wisdom of the Hegelian Sage with the authentic Dasein of Being-towards-death. 16

Diamond in the Rough utilizes two small figurines in a still life. To the left a figurine in a slinky blue-green gown, perhaps of the 1920’s or 1930’s with a fan in the right hand and a hair bow, lips intense red and exaggerated in size, rests on a blue-green and blue-violet background drapery. The text Beast is superimposed in red. To the right a female figure is inscribed Cinderella on the base; the text Beauty is superimposed in blue-green. Beauty is thus assimilated to an innocently female model, while the somewhat androgynous seductress is denoted Beast, which is to say the Other of the human. The denotation of the position of the two figures, and their connotations, inscribes the contrast: Beauty on the right, [a]droit, dexter[ous], Beast at the left, gauche, sinister, to cite respectively English, French, and Latin. Inscribed, with an acid irony matching the intensity of the color of the work.

Clean Sweep includes representations of a broom, positioned diagonal and foreshortened with straw end proximal as if about to zoom out of the image field to the right, with a heeled, bowed shoe to the left and a witch’s hat to the right. The text:

There’s no place
like NOT being at
HOME

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi dicerent: Sibulla ti theleis, respondebat illa: apothanein thelo. 19

The witch motif recurs in Three Weird Sisters, where the broom attribute is a synecdoche for witch. Apart from its historical manifestations, the tripartition of the motif is traceable at least to the early Magdalenian epoch (17,000 to 10,000 years before present), ramifying in the triads of the Greek Moirae, the Roman Matronae, Germanic Nornen, Celtic triple Bridgit, the sisters Morrígna and Machas, the Baltic Laima, and the Slavic Sudicky or Roûenicy. 24 The superimposed text foul is fair and [f]air is foul (the ‘f’ of fair is cut by the left edge of the image) references Macbeth: “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” 25 One might ignore or not supply the absent implied f of fair and read air is foul from which one may derive a syllogism:

[f]air is foul
foul is fair
[f]air is fair

O Fortuna,
velut luna,
statu variabilis,
semper crecis
aut descrecis; 27

Mad Tea Party places four cups and a female figurine partly buried in earth is superimposed on a text consisting of the repetition of dirty girls dirty dishes, layered to produce its shadow. The litany dirty girls dirty dishes has a constant element, ‘dirty’, and two variable elements, ‘girls’ and ‘dishes’. Throughout the constant reiteration of the text, the font shifts from majuscule to minuscule, a typographical ringing of changes. One might, if so inclined and were there world enough and time, observe the periodicity of these shifts of case and arrive at an algorithm. An algorithm is a recursive computational procedure. One might by analogy regard the narratives to which a social formation appeals for legitimation as algorithms, recursively applied formulae for bringing about an end. The successive critiques of the Enlightenment Weltanschauung and the Modernist project have de-centered and rendered problematic many of the master narratives integral to those moments. Jean-François Lyotard posits this as definitive of the postmodern: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” 28

Beyond the continuing necessity of the critique of cultural constructs within systems of representation, at once entailing a critique of the cultural formation and of the systems of representation within the scopic regime of the social formation, the criticality of these works of Marilyn Waligore and Robin Dru Germany adumbrate a move beyond the present situation. Craig Owens, in noting the centrality of feminist aesthetics to postmodern practice and theory in the visual arts suggests:

the gradual dissolution of once fundamental distinctions—original/copy, authentic/inauthentic, function/ornament. Each term now seems to contain its opposite, and this indeterminacy brings with it an impossibility of choice or, rather, the absolute equivalence and hence interchangeability of choices. Or so it is said. The existence of feminism, with its insistence on difference, forces us to reconsider. 29

The endgame of postmodernism turns on the eternal ritual killing and resurrection of a limited type of father. Other models might provide a path to a new art history and a different system of validation and legitimation. 30

1. Norman Bryson, “The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” in ed. Hal Foster, Vision and Visuality. Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Number 2 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), pp. 87-114. Return
2. John Tagg, quoted in Joanne Lukitsh, “Practicing Theories: An Interview With John Tagg,” in ed. Carol Squiers, The Critical Image: Essays On Contemporary Photography (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), pp. 220-237. Return
3. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Living With Contradictions: Critical Practices in the Age of Supply-Side Aesthetics,” Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 124-148. Return
4. The notion of the photograph as transparent is perduring from the early history, and indeed the prehistory, of the medium. Denoting an assimilation of the mediated representation of the photograph to the myth of the ‘innocent eye’, the notion of transparency conflates the thing photographed with the photographic representation of the thing photographed. See Kendall L. Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism,” Critical Inquiry 11 (December 1984), pp. 246-277. For a contrary position, see Joel Snyder, “Picturing Vision,” Critical Inquiry 6 (Spring 1980), pp. 499-526, reprinted in ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, The Language of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 219-246; see also W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) and his Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). See Dennis P. Grady, “Philosophy and Photography in the Nineteenth Century: A Note on the Matter of Influence,” exposure (February 1997); reprinted in eds. Thomas F. Bar- row, Shelley Armitage, William E. Tydeman, Reading Into Photography: Selected Essays 1959 - 1980 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), pp. 145-160; and Martin Jay’s magisterial Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) for additional context. For the notion of the ‘innocent eye’, see E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960, 1961), p. 298. Return
6. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper & Row, 1939, 1962, 1967), pp. 14-15. Cf. Christine Hassenmuller, “Panofsky, Iconography, and Semiotics, " J. Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 36:3 (Spring 1978), pp. 289-302. Return
7. But graininess and grainlessness are not necessarily signifiers of “the photographic” in Andy Grundberg’s sense: see “The Crisis of the Real,” in Grundberg, The Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography, 1974-1989 (New York: Aperture, 1990), pp. 1-17. Return
8. ‘Collage’ entails transfer of materials from one context to another. ‘Montage’ entails dissemination of the materials borrowed through collage through their new setting. ‘Bricolage’ entails the spontaneous activity of tinkering about with whatever is available (bricoleur in French is ‘putterer’, ‘handyman’, jack-of-all-trades’). See Gregory L. Ulmer, “The Object of Post-Criticism,” in ed. Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 83-110. Return
9. Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” Other Criteria: Confrontations With Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 55-91. Return
10. As the grid as instrument of mensuration predates the twentieth century, and is prominent in Renaissance and later projects of mensuration from perspective to cartography, I cannot concur with Rosalind Krauss’ assertion that the grid is eo ipse emblematic of modernity, if by ‘modernity’ is meant “the art of our century.” [Krauss’ em- phasis.] Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1985), pp. 8-22. Return
11. Détournement refers to the technique of the Internationale situationniste in repositioning items from the effluvia of the Spectacle of mass culture in order to reverse their ideological function. On the Situationist International, see Elizabeth Sussman, ed., on the Passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time: The Situationist International 1957 - 1972 (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art / Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1989, 1991); Griel Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); October 79 (Winter 1997) is a Special Issue devoted to Guy Debord and the Internationale situationniste. Détournement has, in ordinary usage, the sense of diversion, rerouting, hijacking. An archive of Internationale situationniste texts is online at http://www.nothingness.org/SI/index.html. Return
12. Kathy Myers, “Fashion ‘N’ Passion,” Screen 23:3/4 (1982), pp. 90, 94, 96. Return
13. Silvia Kolbowski, “Playing With Dolls,” in ed. Carol Squiers, The Critical Image: Essays On Contemporary Photography (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), pp. 139-154. Return
14. Examples from the Brooklyn Museum and the British Museum are reproduced as Plate 26, Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955, 1963, 1972). Return
15. See A. D. Coleman, “The Directorial Mode: Notes Toward a Definition,” in Coleman, Light Readings: A Photography Critic’s Writing 1968-1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 246-257. Return
16. See Anthony Wilden, “Lacan and the Discourse of the Other,” in Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), p. 195. As Wilden notes, Lacan’s position may be traced to Hegel via Alexander Kojève’s lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes between 1933 and 1939, subsequently published as Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Return
17. Anthony Wilden, “Lacan and the Discourse of the Other,” in Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), p. 195. Return
18. See Susan Stryker, “Transsexuality: The Postmodern Body and/as Technology,” exposure 30:1/2 (1995), pp. 38-50. Return
19. See the artist’s “Artist-Sorceress: Photography and Digital Metamorphosis,” Leonardo 28:4 (August 1995), pp.249-256. Return
20. Petronius Arbiter, Satyricon, XLVIII: “For with my own eyes I have seen the Cumean Sibyl hanging inside a jar, and whenever boys asked her: ‘What do you desire, O Sibyl,’ she responded: ‘I wish to die.’ ” The passage is used by T. S. Eliot as epigraph for The Wasteland. Return
21. C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953, 1968), p. 228ff. Return
22. C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953, 1968), p. 36. Return
23. Dioscorides, De materia medica, 16th century, Codex Medicus Graecus, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek. Image reproduced as Figure186, C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953, 1968), p. 349. Cf. the tree of paradise in the sea, Paracelsus, Das Buch Azoth. Return
24. Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1989), pp. 279, 282. Return
25. Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1989), p. 97. Return
26. Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act I, Scene I. Return
27. In traditional logic “ ‘A is B’ and ‘A is not-B’ cannot both be true in the same sense.” In the propositional calculus: ~[p~p]. Return
28. Carl Orff, Carmina Burana: Cantiones profanae cantoribus et choris cantandae comitantibus instrumentis atque aimaginibus magicis, from Songs of Benediktbeuern, Seria I, fol. 1. The Songs of Benediktbeuern is a rotullus of about two hundred medieval poems and songs in medieval Latin, middle High German, and Frankish, from the Abbey of Benediktbeuren in Bavaria, edited by Johann Andreas Schmeller in 1847 under the title of Carmina Burana. “O Fortune, changeable as the moon always either improving or deteriorating.” Return
29. Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xxiv, cf. pp. 31-38. Return
30. Craig Owens, “Feminists and Postmodernism,” in ed. Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 57-77. Return
31. Mira Schor, “Patrilineage,” Art Journal, 50:2 (Summer 1991), pp. 58-63. Return
32. Marjorie Perloff, “Postmodernism/Fin de Siecle: The Prospects for Openness in a Decade of Closure,” Criticism 35:2 (March 1993), pp. 161-192. Online at http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff/postmod.html. Return