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Maquette cardboard and silver reflective paper. Painted in acrylic. 

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Maquette cardboard and silver reflective paper. Painted in acrylic. 

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Enquiry and knowledge - one to one woodwork tutorials

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Enquiry and knowledge - one to one woodwork tutorials

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Tate Modern's Turbine Hall takes visitors to the dark side

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12 October 2009: The installation of a giant shipping container, resembling a cavernous black hole, marks Tate Modern's 10th annual commission for the building's Turbine Hall. The work, by Polish artist Miroslaw Balka, measures up to 30 metres long and 13 metres high. The Guardian's art critic, Adrian Searle, described the artwork as occupying 'a space that asks for silence'.

How It Is will be open to the public at Tate Modern from tomorrow until 5 April 2010

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Tate Modern's Turbine Hall takes visitors to the dark side

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12 October 2009: The installation of a giant shipping container, resembling a cavernous black hole, marks Tate Modern's 10th annual commission for the building's Turbine Hall. The work, by Polish artist Miroslaw Balka, measures up to 30 metres long and 13 metres high.

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Mike Nelson by Chris Chang - BOMB Magazine

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Mike Nelson by Chris Chang - BOMB Magazine

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Matter, mythology, and metaphysical pelts.

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Communication -+Crit with Serene and Andrew

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Communication -+Crit with Serene and Andrew

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Michelangelo Pistoletto - Galleria Continua

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Michelangelo Pistoletto - Galleria Continua

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Mixing it Up - Painting Today - Hayward Gallery

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Mixing it Up - Painting Today - Hayward Gallery

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I use family Super 8’s which I have had transferred onto hard drive. I cut, splice and layer them to transform and re engage with my own and social history. I am exploring ideas around performance and contrivance in photographs and films and ideas of family and gender during the 60 and 70’s.

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Recording 20two 20ladies 20on 20bus 20other 20languages

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Different languages spoken and overheard on London bus journey

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Tapping sound in station

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Woodwork Induction completed -November 21

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Woodwork Induction completed -November 21

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Initially my intention was to create a Camera Obscura in the second chamber. I created one outside of the cabinet, but later this would prove too difficult given the light within which was constricted.

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Copper installed and Paper Zoetrope attempted

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Copper installed and Paper Zoetrope attempted

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Start of Building 'Chiffoinier'.  At home and in the kitchen before Christmas 2021.  Wind up record player working

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Start of Building 'Chiffoinier'.  At home and in the kitchen before Christmas 2021.  Wind up record player working

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Transferred to studio in Chelsea.  About to attach painted cupboard doors to bottom

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Transferred to studio in Chelsea.  About to attach painted cupboard doors to bottom

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The single speaker was set up behind the doors. The mini projector sound quality wasn't good enough and with the help of the technicians I was able to split the sound.

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First position in the gallery - wind up record player stopped working in transit and so reversed the player to reveal the mechanism instead.  Wire curtain attached and copper piping added to top

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First position in the gallery - wind up record player stopped working in transit and so reversed the player to reveal the mechanism instead.  Wire curtain attached and copper piping added to top

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Film playing reflected in mirrors and mirror on the stairs

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Film playing reflected in mirrors and mirror on the stairs

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Binoculars attached and mirrors placed inside to capture moving image from different angles

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Binoculars attached and mirrors placed inside to capture moving image from different angles

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The Contract- at the private view.  Film playing alongside painting

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The Contract- at the private view.  Film playing alongside painting

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The feminist uncanny in theory and art practice - Middlesex University Research Repository

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The feminist uncanny in theory and art practice

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Information on Middlesex University's Research Repository: a online collection of Middlesex University's research outputs

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Cabinet of Curiosities: Victorian Death Dolls | The Order of the Good Death

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Cabinet of Curiosities: Victorian Death Dolls | The Order of the Good Death

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If you were a girl-child during the Victorian era, you probably had a doll.

With a sweet, cherubic face that doll was seen not only as the reinforcement of innocence, but also a model in which to practice social interactions and gender norms. While childhood in the late 19th century was seen as a time for play, that play also came with instruction.

Through tending to their dolls, girls were taught tho sew, knit, and fashion clothing. They play-acted tea parties and courtships, and learned the expectations and rules of femininity. Of course they were encouraged to dote on babydolls like they were their own; preparing girls for life as a good wife and mother.

But there was another role that dolls prepared girls for: funerals.

Young girls were given "death kits", everything a future-woman might need to practice executing a wake and funeral.

A kit would include a doll with black mourning clothes and a doll-sized coffin. The girl would then practice dressing the doll, laying it out for visitation, placing it in the coffin, and facilitating a funeral. She might also be expected to practice attending to the grief of the doll's mourners.

Now a-days this might seem like a lot to ask of a young girl, but in the Victorian era up until the mid-20th century there was a high likelihood that a woman would be called upon to care for the dead. That's what women did.

So that's what girls did. They did tea-parties and death rituals.

So not much has changed.

But dolls were more than Little Suzy's Funeral Friends™, for many they were a part of the grieving process.

When a child or infant died, if a family could afford it they might have a realistic wax doll created in the likeness of their child. Dressed in the child's clothing and often adorned with locks of the dead child's hair, the effigy would depict the child as peacefully sleeping.

The doll would be prepared for the wake and funeral, being displayed for mourners near the body of the child. Sometimes the effigy would be a full bodied doll, its body weighted with sand so as to feel more realistic, and with a flat back so as to lie down nicely in something like a tiny coffin. Dolls of older children might just be a head and shoulders, with the back of the head and torso flattened so it could be framed.

After the funeral the doll would either be left at the child's grave or kept in the home, perhaps displayed in a glass coffin. Often cared for much like a real child, the mourning doll might be placed in a bed or crib and have its clothes regularly changed.

"Wax Dolls, Montanari and Pierotti Dolls - Gotta Love The Beauty of Wax""The Lovely and Disturbing: The History of Wax Dolls""The History of Creepy Dolls""Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society"

Louise Hung is an American writer living in Japan. You may remember her from xoJane's Creepy Corner, Global Comment, or from one of her many articles on death, folklore, or cats floating around the Internet. Follow her on Twitter.
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider supporting our work. Your contribution goes directly toward running The Order, including resources, research, paying our writers and staff, and funding more frequent content. We'd love to keep pushing the funerary envelope in 2018. Visit our Support Us page, for a variety of easy ways to contribute.

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Cabinet of Curiosities: Victorian Death Dolls | The Order of the Good Death

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If you were a girl-child during the Victorian era, you probably had a doll. With a sweet, cherubic face that doll was seen not only as the reinforcement of innocence, but also a model in which to practice social interactions and gender norms. While childhood in the late 19th century was seen as a time for play, that play also came with instruction.

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Suffering and Desire: A Conversation with Berlinde De Bruyckere - Sculpture

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Suffering and Desire: A Conversation with Berlinde De Bruyckere - Sculpture

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Suffering and Desire: A Conversation with Berlinde De Bruyckere - Sculpture

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'At Once Funny and Melancholic': Remembering Christian Boltanski (1944-2021)

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Christian Boltanski has died at the age of seventy-six. Together with his partner Annette Messager and their friend Sophie Calle, they long shared a studio in Malakoff, a suburb south of Paris, producing work that led the trio, each in their individual careers, to become the leading lights of the French art scene. While they developed their own, very different, styles, they all shared a certain chutzpah, humour and freedom.

A recipient of Japan's Praemium Imperiale in 2006 (Messager followed in 2016), Boltanski was a rotund man with a sharp mind. Born during the Second World War and entirely self-taught, Boltanski was subject to little formal education. His Catholic mother had divorced her Jewish husband in order to protect him (Boltanski's 'absent' father remained hidden under the floorboard of their apartment for one-and-a-half years), and they remarried promptly when the war ended. Christian Boltanski spoke about the Shoah with an almost extra-lucid awareness, capable of bringing up the guilt of survivors as well as the frantic over-protection with which his parents surrounded him after the war (the artist used to state that his childhood only really ended when he was aged twenty-four).

Primarily a painter, photographer, and author of occasional short films such as L'Homme qui tousse (1969), it was when Boltanski made L'Album de la famille D in 1971 that he became interested in the banal, archetypal qualities of personal archives, and the fact that the ephemeral nature of our lives can only belong to us, making any attempts to trace it inadequate or vain - and all photo albums the same. The art of Boltanski lent itself perfectly to installation, since he wasn't so much interested in leaving a trace as he was in creating an art poor enough to be endlessly reinstalled (or not). His direct reckoning with the Shoah began at Documenta 8 in 1987, and continued in various ways, often manifesting itself through faces from black-and-white photo archives presented in series or blown up to the point of abstraction.

His intimate understanding of horror coupled with his magnificent inability to 'fit in' provided him with a very singular perspective on the world. He was at once funny and melancholic. To give the title Réserve des Suisses Morts (The Reserve of Dead Swiss, 1990) to a work about mass death indeed required a certain particular humour. As he used to say, "the Swiss have no historical reason to die" but their portraits, drawn from the obituary section of a small regional newspaper, can become an altar for the whole of humanity. In 2010, for his monumental installation Personnes, he placed 50 tons of clothes under the dome of the Grand Palais, which were repeatedly being plucked at by a large crane that lifted them up in bundles before dropping them back into the pile. The garment as a vessel of memory is a recurrent motif of his oeuvre - in Volver (2015) he revisited this enormous pile but replaced the clothes with survival blankets, unmistakably conjuring the plight of migrants. Boltanski was less concerned with what Georges Perec called 'l'Histoire avec sa grande hache' (a pun on the double meaning of 'hache': 'History with a capital H' and 'History with its large axe' ) than with history on a one-to-one scale: one person, another person, each person and their mortality; what he called "petite mémoire" (memory with a small m).

At the Maison Rouge in Paris in 2008, he recorded and played the sound of his heart beating - the most staccato inner reminder of time passing - while offering visitors the opportunity to record their own hearts. Another recording studio was also made available to the public simultaneously in Stockholm, at Magasin 3. The experiment continued in various locations (including his 2010 show at the Grand Palais) and these Archives du Coeur (Heart Archives) will eventually become a permanent installation on the island of Teshima in Japan. And yet Boltanski was a tad despairing (though with him, it was always hard really to know) about ever finding a human being capable of answering his existential questions. Instead he installed giant whistles along the windy coast of Patagonia in order to, he explained, ask the whales about the origins of time ( Misterios, 2017).

Since 2010, his life in the studio was constantly being filmed and broadcast live at the Museum of New and Old Art (MONA) in Tasmania - "there won't be much of an audience," he used to joke. The museum's founder, David Walsh, a patron and professional gambler whom Boltanski liked to describe as "the devil", bought the remainder of the artist's life in exchange for a monthly stipend. Boltanski used to laugh at the idea of the DVDs piling up to the point of being unwatchable - archives rendered vain by their very proliferation - and his mischievous laugh would only intensify on explaining that he had "the tensest of relationships" with Walsh (compared to other collectors), since the gambler was essentially betting on the imminence of the artist's death. For Walsh to win, for the transaction to be profitable for him, Boltanski needed to have died in 2018. It's been three years then of cheating the devil.
Translated from the French by Louise Darblay

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'At Once Funny and Melancholic': Remembering Christian Boltanski (1944-2021)

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Christian Boltanski has died at the age of seventy-six. Together with his partner Annette Messager and their friend Sophie Calle, they long shared a studio in Malakoff, a suburb south of Paris, producing work that led the trio, each in their individual careers, to become the leading lights of the French art scene.

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'Unland: audible in the mouth', Doris Salcedo, 1998 | Tate

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Unland: audible in the mouthis one of a group of three sculptures collectively titled Unland that Salcedo created in 1995-8. The works are a response to the testimonies of children who witnessed their parents' murder during Colombia's civil war. As part of the process of creating the Unland works, the artist travelled to a northern region of the country to research the experiences of these orphans and the ways their lives developed as a result of their trauma. Unland: the orphan's tunic, 1997 (Funcació 'la Caixa' Barcelona), Unland: irreversible witness, 1995-8 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and Unland: audible in the mouth (the last and most minimal of the series) were all made by fusing two old wooden tables into one. Salcedo bought the pine and oak tables she used to make Unland: audible in the mouth in Bogotá, where she lives and works. The two tables have been joined by sawing off the legs at one end of each table and fitting the legless ends together. The artist and her assistants drilled thousands of tiny holes into the tables' surfaces before a team of volunteers laboriously threaded a combination of human hair and split silk fibres through the holes to cover much of the wood. The 'stitching' crosses the hybrid table against the length of the grain, and varies in density and colour. Salcedo used black and dark brown Colombian women's hair she sourced from a local hairdresser and raw white silk. The silk threads are most dense at the end of the pine table, where they also encircle the legs and cover the sides; the ratio of silk to hair gradually decreases towards the central join where hair then supersedes silk on the wider oak table. Deep cuts scored lengthways into the table tops as part of the stitching process evoke controlled wounding, very different from the shallow grooves and notches scratched into the wood during its life as a table in a home. The surface of fine thread and hairs that cover much of the wooden surface recalls the veil of cobwebs that appears in abandoned places and on objects not touched for a long time.

Salcedo studied art and art history at Bogotá University (BFA 1980) where she majored in painting and theatre and was particularly inspired by her teacher, the painter Beatriz Gonzalez (born 1938). She began making sculpture in New York in the early 1980s, while attending New York University (MA 1984). Here she encountered the work of Joseph Beuys (1921-86), whose notion of 'social sculpture' - integrating political awareness with making - and his focus on materials to convey specific meanings were a significant influence on her. She began to think of sculpture as 'a crossroad, a meeting point' (quoted in Basualdo, p.11), of ideology, theory, materials and objects. In New York, Saldedo also experienced being a displaced outsider - a sense she retained on her return to Bogotá in 1985, where she deliberately maintained her peripheral position in order to have a critical distance on Colombian society.

Since the mid 1980s, Salcedo has based her work on the experiences of Colombian people whose lives have been damaged by the country's civil war. During the 1990s, the artist interviewed the relatives of dead and missing people and did extensive research into the records of humanitarian workers. From these stories she created sculptures that poetically resonate with the affects of loss and horror resulting from the trauma of extreme violence. Salcedo invented the title Unland to express the conditions of dispossession and displacement created by war. In Colombia most of those suffering these conditions are in the most distant rural areas of the country and have no voice and no presence to make their suffering known. The word 'un-land' suggests a reversal of some kind - a place that is no longer a place, a country that no longer exists. 'Un-land' evokes the impossibility to imagine or to express the trauma suffered by children who see their parents die violently and whose lives are irrevocably damaged by this experience. The phrase 'audible in the mouth' is derived from a poem by the German-speaking Jewish Romanian poet Paul Celan (1920-70), whose writing was driven by the Holocaust in which his parents perished. To express horrors for which there were no words, Celan invented hybrid and fragmented words or forms of language, ultimately inspiring Salcedo to do the same. The phrase 'audible in the mouth', taken from Celan's poem An Eye, Open, first published in a collection entitled Sprachgitter or Language Mesh (1959), evokes words that cannot be taken into the body in the normal way - through the ears - but rather through the rather more visceral channel of the mouth. The 'audible' words, like the victims and their stories, are displaced to a place where a different kind of hearing occurs - a non-verbal gut-impacting expression of permanent emotional damage to which Salcedo's Unland sculptures attempt to give visible form. They transform the neutral association of tables - around which a family might sit to share a meal - to the disturbing notion of a prop on which a body might be fixed to be tortured or a dead body might be cut open. The intense and pointless labour of stitching wood with hair and silk suggests an attempt to repair the irreparable affective damage of war.

Further reading:
Tanya Barson, '"Unland" The Place of Testimony, Doris Salcedo's Unland: audible in the mouth 1998', Contemporary Art in Focus, Patrons' Paper 3, January 2004, London, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/04spring/unland_paper.htm.
Carlos Basualdo, Nancy Princenthal and Andreas Huyssen, Doris Salcedo, London 2000, pp.21, 25, reproduced pp.135, 136 and 138-9 in colour.
Unland: Doris Salcedo: New Work, exhibition brochure, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1999, reproduced [p.4].

Elizabeth Manchester
December 2007

Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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'Unland: audible in the mouth', Doris Salcedo, 1998 | Tate

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Artwork page for 'Unland: audible in the mouth', Doris Salcedo, 1998 Over a period of three years, Salcedo traveled to the northern heartland of Colombia's civil war and spoke to children who had witnessed the murder of their parents. These testimonies inspired a series of three sculptures given the collective title Unland.

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Performance Philosophy is an emerging interdisciplinary field of thought, creative practice and scholarship. The international, peer-reviewed, open access journal publishes articles that interrogate what this field might be and what might be possible within it.

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Both prison and refuge: Louise Bourgeois' Cells at the Guggenheim, Bilbao

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Both prison and refuge: Louise Bourgeois' Cells at the Guggenheim, Bilbao

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28 of Louise Bourgeois 'Cell' installations are currently on display at Bilbao's Guggenheim museum - small spaces of grotesque, intriguing beauty.

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"The Wound Which Speaks of Unremembered Time: Nan Goldin's Cookie Portfolio and the Autobiographics of Mourning"

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Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, 1983

"I used to think I couldn't lose anyone if I photographed them enough."

(Nan Goldin)

By Mihaela Precup

Long before ACT UP started rewriting the sick bodies of AIDS patients as vital, strong, and fighting back, photographer Nan Goldin thought she saw an ill omen in the underground New York community she had chosen to inhabit. There was something about the lives surrounding her, including her own, which was profoundly frightening, as well as endearing, and she found her camera to be the only tender weapon against their vanishing. Goldin's avowed intention was to use photography as a confirmation of presence in the middle of a high-risk population who lived and died too fast for the camera. It is perhaps inevitable that Goldin's work from that period should be populated by ghostly people wandering about in carnivalesque outfits, glittering in the darkness of the New York underground, apparently glamorized by the on-site photographer from whom no form of intimacy was hidden. Goldin's adopted family did not include her flesh-and-blood relatives, who became subjects of her work late in her career, most notably so her sister. This essay examines Nan Goldin's Cookie Portfolio, the well-known series of photographs of her good friend Cookie Mueller from the beginning of their relationship (1976) until Mueller's death (1989), in order to answer several questions about visuality, autobiography, marginality and death. I shall start by addressing the larger issue of how the representation of the AIDS crisis was transformed by the documentary endeavor of a photographer who was both subject and object of the gaze in an archival project constructed as a gesture of anticipated mourning. I shall also focus on the connections between photography, death and haunting which the Portfolio seems to invite, as well as on the larger dialogic potential contained within a visual narrative set in a small NYC underground community in the 80s, and which is undoubtedly both an autobiographical account (in the sense that by documenting Mueller, Goldin inevitably documents herself) and a memorial to a memorialist (Cookie herself wrote mostly autobiographical fictions, most of which are out of print now).
AIDS and the Pitfalls of Representation
During the 80s, everyone had apparently cooked up a method of stopping the AIDS crisis, ranging from the mind-numbingly brutal concentration camp methods of various degrees of conservatism (e.g. brand all the AIDS patients on their buttocks, quarantine everyone, kill all the gay men, encourage people never to have sex out of wedlock/with multiple partners again etc.) to the obviously much more productive activist group solutions, heavily relying on visuals and aware of the importance of rhetoric and relentless attacks on the Reagan and Bush Sr. administration policies (ACT UP, Gran Fury, Group Material etc.). Of all these visual discourses, it was ACT UP's which is most remembered today, when staying alive has become a possibility in the Western world.

Perhaps a brief recapitulation of the main issues surrounding the visual representation of people with AIDS might be useful at this point. The most controversial discussion around AIDS representation has famously revolved around the portrayal of AIDS patients as victims, touched by an all-consuming malady which canceled not only life, but any willingness to live within the subject. Images of PWAs (as ACT UP has insisted AIDS patients be called, instead of "AIDS victims") wasting away, and incorporated by some in the "AIDS = war" strategy, tended to backfire. In Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering, Marita Sturken usefully traces the representation of contagious diseases as sinful and reprehensible to nineteenth-century representation of syphilis, related to the Christian sexualization of evil. At the same time, her review of the framing of contagious maladies inscribes the treatment of AIDS patients within the parameters of a long tradition; viewed as lab rats, PWAs keep the world safe if confined behind photographic paper bars: "In 19th century Europe, hospitals routinely set up photographic laboratories to create visual records of disease, physical deformity, and mental illness" (1997, 152). These photos "tended to dehumanize the patient. (...) even "well-intended" images of people marked by disease can serve to reinforce fear of contamination" (ibid., 153). There is, thus, a well-known tradition relating photography and allegedly objective documentation of the non-normative or contagious (the last two terms have often been read as synonymous).

While in Nicholas Nixon's photographs of Tom Moran (discussed at length by Douglas Crimp in Melancholia and Moralism), the sick body's staging as essentially and primarily sick signified a symbolic premature burial through utter de-sexualization and general de-personalization, other anti-AIDS activists responded by sexualizing the sick body as a strategy to fend off death, more precisely, to provide the sick body with the dignity of a sexualized body. One reason the public required such images, especially in the early stages, when fears of contamination through presence were still prevalent, was that the visibility of the sick assuages the fear of contamination through distanciation and elation, when one is presented with the proof that one is safe, and out of reach of evil, as pointed out again by Sturken: "Documentary photographs of the disfigured, drained bodies of those in the final stages of disease thus offer reassurance that the person with AIDS is detectable, not invisible or among "us" (ibid., 153). This initial public reaction was evidently in tune with the opinion that images cannot infect or kill.

Artists who used photography during the first stage of the AIDS crisis were also aware of another matter, which Wojnarowicz typically summarized as the "Susan Whatshername" issue, and which had come out in 1973: "Susan Whatshername said something about photographs being like small deaths which is maybe true. Maybe not" (Wojnarowicz 1992, 143-4). Aware that Sontag had pointed out the acquisitiveness and excessive inquisitiveness of the eye/I holding the camera, as well as the violence implicit in the photographic act, Wojnarowicz, Goldin, Hujar, and others, thought less about such matters and more about how to write a history which would not be a re-iteration of what was being issued by official power structures:

"To me, photographs are like words and I generally will place many photographs together or print them one inside the other in order to construct a free-floating sentence that speaks about the world I witness. History is made and preserved by and for particular classes of people. A camera in some hands can preserve an alternate history." (ibid., 143-4)

Flawed and naïve as their "alternate history" might have been, these artists felt that it was at least written by those most affected by the plague, and for some of them (Wojnarowicz included) it had testamentary value.

Goldin was thus by no means the only documentarist of the life of drag queens and/or underground New York artists. For instance, in the legendary Tin Pan Alley bar from Times Square, Keri Pickett photographed patrons and musicians from 1983 to 1987, a time period which overlaps with Goldin's own presence around the premises. However, Pickett missed the countless deaths at the end of the 80s because she herself had to move out of New York City in order to get treatment for cancer (cf. Pickett). The downtown Club Kid scene was covered by Nelson Sullivan, who documented various social occasions where sometimes the Tin Pan Alley crowd was also in attendance. By the time Goldin curated Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, everybody involved in the AIDS crisis was producing an autobiographical account of the widespread death and desolation, for personal reasons, which were obviously implicitly political as well. "These are not people who go quietly and obediently," wrote John Russell in his New York Times review of Witnesses, a comment whose redundancy is surprising.

Cookie and Vittorio's wedding, 1986

The genealogy of the illness and its visual production were intricate and broken in many places. The Cookie Mueller narrative stretched far and wide, and everybody seemed related through either illness or loss. For instance, Cookie Mueller published All about Putti's Pudding in the short 2-month interval between her husband Vittorio Scarpati's death and her own, and included some of the same drawings by her husband, drawings which would after her death be included in Witnesses. David Wojnarowicz took postmortem pictures of photographer and former partner Peter Hujar, who, had, incidentally, photographed Sontag who had also discussed AIDS in her essay "AIDS and Its Metaphors" (1989). A geography of recuperation and mourning was being created even before some of the subjects met their deaths.

But probably the most visible and politically efficient were the activist collectives, whose strategies of visual representation sometimes coincided with Goldin's: the staging/rehearsal of death included in ACT UP demonstrations where everyone would be lying down, holding a headstone above her heads, various attempts to build mobile monuments such as the Names Project, bitterly humorous approaches to the crisis, as well as innumerable protest and informative billboards. All these contained warnings against the perils of instituted sainthood, the morbid fascination with the spectacle of death, as well as the commercialization of the AIDS crisis through special stores and magazines targeted at PWA consumers (cf. Sturken). It was in the middle of this deep preoccupation with death and representation that Goldin's own photographic urgency made its own comments on sudden disappearance and visibility.
Cookie Mueller and the Long Arm of the Camera
In 1988 Nan Goldin came so close to death herself that she had to go into detox, and take the first break in her life from the community of friends and acquaintances she had been photographing for about a decade. While in detox, she took only self-portraits, most of them on the hospital bed, in a strikingly septic and predominantly white space, dominated by a crucifix, and showing an increasingly composed and rested Nan, still inside, but in an inside space which was strangely not convivial, not garishly lit, and uncluttered. When she got back, one year later, many of her friends had died of AIDS or had become infected. Goldin kept on taking pictures. Of the same people she had been photographing since the early seventies, and some of the new friends who would never quite manage to become old friends. Sometimes her view of her lifetime endeavor to fend off death and "make a REAL record... of what I had actually seen and done" (1996, 451) can seem naïve and most definitely essentialist, but there is still something moving, which resists brutal dismissal, in the intentions of one who was never an outsider, and never too far from sudden death or destruction herself:

"Actually, I take blurred pictures, because I take pictures no matter what the light is. If I want to take a picture, I do not care if there is light or no light. If I want to take a picture, I take it no matter what. Sometimes I use very low shutter speed and they come out blurred, but it was never an intention like David Armstrong started to do what we call, he and I, "Fuzzy-wuzzy landscapes." (...) I use a very low shutter speed. It used to be because I was drunk, but now I am not. The drugs influenced all my life. Both good and bad. I heard about an artist in Poland, Witkacy, who wrote down on his paintings all the drugs he was on. Depending how many drugs he took, that is how much he charged for the portrait. I saw his portrait at the National Museum, a kind of German expressionism, and I loved it." ( http://fototapeta.art.pl/2003/ngie.php)

Her audience was, for the first significant part of her career, made up of the very subjects who were photographed, and her slide-shows benefited from what very few artists get, i.e. immediate reactions to their work, from exactly the target-audience one has always had in mind, as Marvin Heiferman points out:

"Because they were respected rather than demeaned, the people in the pictures became the first serious audience for Goldin's work. In the mid-1970s, Provincetown friends reviewed their summers by watching end-of-the-season slide shows Nan put together. In the 1980s, downtown New Yorkers came to watch the slide shows Goldin projected on the walls of bars like Tin Pan Alley, and at late-night haunts like the Mudd Club, Club 57, and The Saint. The slide shows grew in scope, scale, and reputation; they were now layered with soundtracks that not only gave the pictures a beat but helped shape their themes and narratives. The show defined a new hybrid form - as much performance as photo-novella - each one filled with outrageous characters, self-aware Lower East Side celebrities, and complicated plots driven by emotional and sexual entanglements. People stood in line for each new version, to see if they'd been included, to see how they looked, to clap for themselves and their friends as the images flashed on the screen." (qtd. in Goldin 1996, 279)

As far as audience response is concerned, this was a nearly ideal situation, one where, despite the intimacy and sometimes unflattering nature of some of the images of people exhausted, lonely, laughing, making love, hating etc., Goldin was allowed access. She is apparently magnetic, extremely sociable, and, quite importantly, will not shy away from portraying herself exposed, crying, battered, having sex, naked, out of control. She insists that she has always shared with her subjects "a sense of recognition...of my own complicated sense of gender. Or... of something I loved" (1996, 448). By emphasizing the role of recognition in her own photographic record, Goldin points out one important component of the construction and recuperation of connections which, as Barthes would so memorably put it, can only be remade when the subject's gaze is itself broken.

Starting from the first black-and-white photographs of her trans roommate and her friends, at various parties and beauty pageants, then moving on to color and new relationships, and gaining access to bedrooms and bathrooms where she sometimes posed for herself as well, Goldin and her audience shared the same aesthetic of poorly furnished, shabby interiors full of knick-knacks and junkyard sale articles, as one friend, Luc Sante, recalls,

"Life was bleak on the Lower East Side in the late 1970s, but it was a purposeful bleakness. We liked it that way. We were living a movie of youth in black-and-white that in order to be grand needed to be stark. We were scavengers, and the castoffs with which we dressed ourselves, our apartments, and our minds fortuitously matched our aesthetic. The inner movie might vary from person to person, but the styles overlapped: I was walking around in Paris Belongs to Us while you were in Ashes and Diamonds and she was in They Live by Night and he was in Flaming Creatures. The makeshift, the beleaguered, the militant, the paranoid, the outcast, the consumptive romantic, the dead-eyed post-everything - all the shifting and coinciding modes and poses played very well against a backdrop of ruins." (qtd. in Goldin 1996, 97)

But out of all these lively characters stands out Cookie Mueller, who is obviously introduced as a flamboyant queen of the New York underground. Nan Goldin shows us the summarized story of a young glamorous woman who was probably loud, drank a lot, was the soul of many parties, had a son, a female lover, a husband, and many friends. Vittorio, the husband, died of AIDS, and then Cookie too died of AIDS. What we can find out from other sources is that she was an actress in several of John Waters' films, and wrote some short stories and columns in Details and High Times. It is not at all clear from this photographic record how she supported herself, whether she was ever awake during the daytime, whether she ever went shopping or made breakfast for her child, what her hobbies were, if she had pets, where she holidayed and what her favorite foods were. Goldin wants us to remember her indoors, back in a time when Goldin herself was not accustomed to living or photographing in daylight, and when she had persuaded Cookie, whom she admired, to become her friend by taking photos of her. Photography, in the Cookie portfolio, began as a form of courtship. It went on for years, since Goldin loved her friend's underworld glamour and was in awe of her zest for life.
Cookie at Vittorio's casket, NYC, September 16, 1989 Cookie in her casket, NYC, November 15, 1989
Cookie's face is always heavily made-up, smiling or laughing and lighting up an otherwise dark atmosphere with magnetic energy. The first picture in the Portfolio shows her in an armchair, in a more conventional pose, smiling politely, with her son in her arms. The rest of the photos, up to Vittorio's death, are almost always of her partying. Either she is dancing with her lover Sharon, or laughing and posing irresistibly while Vittorio is chatting with someone else in the background (Cookie and Vittorio in the Forest), or she is smiling at Millie, who is sitting on a toilet next to hers, more prudishly keeping her knees together, unlike herself, with wide-open legs revealing matching red underwear. Nan only shows her serious or sad when in pre/post party mood, either when she is sitting on Nan's bed, trying to open a beer bottle, her ashtray close by, or in the early Tin Pan Alley photograph, where she seems to be the last customer in the bar, right before closing time, with a fallen golden goddess aura given partly by the gilt movie star busts on the walls, and partly by the air of sad reverie in tune with the crooked smile of the golden bust right above her. Her marriage photos show us the figure of a happy easy-going Vittorio and a stern-looking, probably nervous Cookie, signs of exhaustion in her face, looking downwards, presumably at her hands, a mien which strikes one as incongruous and uncharacteristic, placed as it is after images of mad parties and obvious non-commital to monogamy. The photograph of her and Vittorio almost kissing, after the wedding, both wearing their wedding clothes, Cookie holding her bouquet, would be conventional if detached from the overall Cookie Portfolio narrative.

Cookie's last smile is given to the camera the day of Vittorio's burial, when she is posing for Goldin with her son, again. This time, it is the son that supports the dying mother, while they both smile "for the camera." Cookie's is a tired smile of complaisance, of polite obeisance in front of her (by now quite famous) friend's camera. Just minutes before maybe, Goldin had taken one of the few photos of Cookie where all the glamour seems to have vanished: the one in front of Vittorio's casket, where the emaciated unrecognizable figure of the husband is placed in an open coffin, thus creating a white cloudy space against a theatrical background of dark red drapes, structured by the crucifix hung on the wall above, which forms a continuous line with the edge of the open coffin. Still, the figure in focus is Cookie, who, dressed as she is in black, cutting into the white background, punctures the surface with a harrow haunted look which is not the bitterness in the Tin Pan Alley photograph, but one of blind arrested flight. We know from Goldin's accounts of that period that by that time she had already lost her voice, and that Vittorio's was not the first AIDS-related death she had ever witnessed. Poorly supported by a cane which testifies to her extreme weakness, her eyes bleakly and bitterly stare into a direction which is difficult to identify. The lines on her face and around her mouth carry an expression of tearful sadness and powerless indignation. Her husband's coffin picture would be joined by her own, something which she must have found not very hard to divine, since Goldin was everywhere, taking photos. Her own open casket photograph reveals a once again glamorous Cookie, again heavily made up, adorned with pieces of jewelry and flowers, in a candlelit room. This, together with her wedding photograph, again strikes one as incongruous. The main points of the Cookie narrative thus seem to be unconventional motherhood, partying, marriage, sickness, and death. The question is, what part of this narrative do we really recognize today, when we have become twenty-first century subjects who have learned to live with AIDS as a global phenomenon, still a political crisis, the challenges of visibility and non-normativity quite different from those of almost three decades ago?

I would like to propose two strategies of interpretation in order to provide an answer to the questions posed within this paper so far. The first strategy relies on the fact that the viewer actively (and possibly with sympathy or love) seeks the actual possibility of recognition in order to productively use an important visual archive. The second strategy positions the viewer outside this circle of empathy, an exclusion (voluntary or not) which brings to mind Roland Barthes' refusal to give access to the famous "Winter Garden photograph" where he finally recognizes his mother.
Speaking (through) the Wound: Cookie Mueller's Laughter and Heteronormative Time
In keeping with the first viewing strategy, I would like to propose that a punctum may be locatable within Cookie Mueller's laughter as the wound that speaks to us most memorably of her and others' life and death. It is those images of Cookie laughing ruthlessly, mouth wide open, hands pressed on chest as in silent prayer or supplication, or trying to keep her balance against a staircase wall, that pierce the narrative of her life and early death. They do so by exuding the blunt unapologetic force that Goldin was afraid she would forget. They do so by contradicting the sense of inevitable doom that hangs over most of the Goldin photographs from the eighties, most of them of reclining figures in dark rooms, loving, leaving, ignoring each other, lonely, and captured with a sense of urgency and fear that hovers over them all. I am proposing that Cookie's laughter arrests time and emits a non-verbal discourse that punctures the narrative of heteronormative temporality.

In order to attempt the second proposed reading of the Portfolio, one where a punctum does not exist for the audience, one where presumably the viewer is positioned outside or against non(hetero)normativity, I first need to say that in this scenario I am reading Mueller as a ghost, and evidently not as a ghost that invites compassion or sympathy. In this reading, I am using Avery Gordon's Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, where the author associates ghost stories with exclusions and invisibilities. At the same time, she claims that the implication behind writing a ghost story is that "ghosts are real," i.e. "they produce material effects," and have "a certain objectivity" (2008, 8). I am thus reading haunting as a permanent part of social life: "The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure" (ibid.). In this case, haunting is the process through which visibility is given to that which is hiding in the shadows. To put it briefly, if the viewing subject allows her/himself to be haunted, something happens to presence. Just as photography is believed to be a confirmation of presence (cf. Sontag, Barthes), the ghostly haunt is a confirmation, Gordon says, "that something is missing," and so, in other words, that something exists, but not within our visual range. At this point in the reading, I would also like to associate haunting with Caruth's reading of trauma as the speaking wound of an other.

I am consequently contending that by taking these photographs, Goldin was rehearsing mourning and Mueller was rehearsing death (see Phelan 2002), and that, in the process of looking, even unsympathetic viewers are lending legitimacy to the intrusive image of a ghost, and their gaze inevitably writes the ghost into visibility. Although the viewer may not care much about the subject or author of these photographs, they are neither bland nor soothing, perhaps because they are also images of people in constant motion or who appear to have paused for the space of only a few seconds, people who were, in other words, difficult to capture. The only real stillness in these photographs is brought by the images of Cookie and Vittorio in their respective coffins, as well as the empty couch where Cookie had sat.
Cookie Laughing, NYC, 1985
I do not - again - mean to say that these photographs of the dead must inspire compassion or understanding even. I mean to say that, by being pictures of the invisible, they create a potential for haunting which allows the viewers to see and attain some form of recognition of that which they have never witnessed, as Gordon herself suggests when she associates recognition with the practice of simply looking at ghosts: "Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge but as transformative recognition" (2008, 8). The audience has access to unremembered time and unexperienced trauma, but, most of all, and even if some may be reassured by yet another narrative of non(hetero)normativity ending badly, they have already and even reluctantly been involved in a transforming dialogue.
Apprehending Ghosts
Gordon's definition of haunting places it at the meeting-point of "force and meaning" (2008, xvi) because the strong impact of repressive systems can and will insist on making itself felt at the level of everyday existence, thus influencing knowledge and meaning-production and rendering the undesirable invisible. Haunting is often if not always associated with trauma, and possesses the capacity of "making itself known" (ibid.) through defamiliarization, loss of bearings, the return of the long-buried or repressed, and also, most interestingly for my own work, the return of visibility:

"I use the term haunting to describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over and done with comes alive, when what's been in your blind spot comes into view. Haunting raises specters, it alters the experience of being in time, and the way we separate the past, the present, and the future." (ibid.)

For my own purposes here, I shall extend Gordon's application of the term to the larger field of post-traumatic experience, especially those instances which involve constant or sudden violence. Gordon's vision is profoundly social, and it places ghosts in the category of the dispossessed, the present but not visible, those lost among the cracks of official narratives.

In Frames of War, Judith Butler identifies the ghost as someone "who is living but has not been generally 'recognized' as a life," (2009, 11); she also asks an important question which locates presence not within but without general frames of recognizability: "In what sense does life (...) always exceed the normative conditions of its recognizability?" (ibid., 4). She answers by reminding the reader that "each and every construction of life requires time to do its job" (ibid.) and that "no job it does can overcome time itself" (ibid.). In other words, life itself is constantly in the making, its parameters shifting and breaking constantly.

Also, Butler's usefully separates between "apprehension" and "recognition," and if we apply this categorization, then it follows that Roland Barthes does not - as he claims, "recognize" his mother in the Winter Garden Photograph, when she was a child, but rather "apprehends" her. For my purposes here, this is an important distinction, and can also be applied to Gordon's text. Butler contends that apprehension takes place despite the various norms of recognition we have internalized, and provides an implicit critique of these norms. In this context, I can start thinking about the intervention The Cookie Portfolio is making in terms of the framing of not only the AIDS crisis in the US, but also of norms of looking at non-normative behaviour from a place of non-empathy.

It might be useful at this point to further examine Butler's contention that there is no life and death outside a process of framing, and no framing outside a process of reproduction in different contexts which alter the nature of the frame to such an extent that part of the very nature of the frame is a certain "breakage":

"What happens when a frame breaks with itself is that a taken-for-granted reality is called into question, exposing the orchestrating designs of the authority who sought to control the frame. (...) When those frames that govern the relative and differential recognizability of lives come apart - as part of the very mechanism of their circulation - it becomes possible to apprehend something about what or who is living but has not been generally "recognized" as life." (2008, 12)

Butler's purpose in Frames of War is precisely to examine the "breakage" effects produced by the constant remaking of frames which every reproduction of frames entails. She identifies "a specter" which acts from both inside and outside these frames, an invisible presence whose vexing fleetingness she attempts to capture: "What is this specter that gnaws at the norms of recognition, an intensified figure vacillating as its inside and its outside?" (ibid.). It follows that this specter is whatever does not qualify as a life, and which manifests itself by silently (although sometimes violently) and invisibly changing the parameters through which we view the world.

The issue of communication with the dead, absent, or silent insistently insinuates itself, and one good place to start this conversation is the particular direction in which this type of interaction between two interlocutors/viewing subjects may take place. In other words, we need to ask how it is possible to reconcile Butler and Gordon's position - which places the impulse of communication on the side of the ghost - with, for instance, Derrida's equally justifiable lament upon the death of his friend Roland Barthes, the beloved ghost who can no longer be reached: "These thoughts are for him, for Roland Barthes (...). Yet they will no longer reach him, and this must be the starting point of my reflection; they can no longer reach him, reach all the way to him, assuming they ever could have while he was still living" (2001, 35). Derrida's labor of love and recuperation is very similar to the archival and performative work undergone by Goldin, and also by Barthes himself, upon the death of his mother. Derrida decides to read Barthes' first and last books ( Writing Degree Zero and Camera Lucida) in hope that he might be able to identify "the point of singularity" of Roland Barthes which would enable him to have a similarly intense mystical experience of apprehension that Barthes writes about in connection with the Winter Garden photograph,

Yes, it was from a detail that I asked for the ecstasy of revelation, the instantaneous access to Roland Barthes (to him and him alone), a free and easy access requiring no labor. I was expecting this access to be provided by a detail, at once very visible and hidden (too obvious), rather than by the great themes, subjects, theories, or strategies of writing that, for a quarter of a century, I thought I knew and could easily recognize throughout the various "periods" of Roland Barthes (...). (ibid., 38)

Constantly hesitating and never settling on an appropriate (respectful and truthful or at least productive) strategy of communication, Derrida is searching for the punctum which would offer him access to "the image of the I of Barthes that Barthes inscribed in me though neither he nor I is completely in it" (ibid., 36). In the face of Barthes' accidental death so soon after his own mother's, Derrida is left to contend with Barthes' unanswered questions. In a sense, Barthes' Camera Lucida, by mapping a workable access route towards the beloved dead, should also give Derrida the tools for accessing his dead friend. And yet it does not seem to work a second time. Perhaps this is the most infuriating aspect and main source of the tantalizing pull of the imprecise art of communication mapped in Camera Lucida, i.e. that it appears to work for Barthes and for him alone, leaving the audience craving the experience but unable to replicate it. It is a unique performative gesture whose beautiful sad story we are told as if it were a fairy-tale that we are asked to believe at face value, because attempting to verify it would rob it of its magic. It is a fairy-tale Derrida takes most seriously, and which places his quest in the realm of that half-defeated promise to return we can find at the end of his text on Roland Barthes.

If we follow Butler and assume that it is invisible frailty that lies within the very structure of the frame, then it becomes easier to accept that the map one was hoping for on one's route towards the unremembered or absent may just be constantly shifting within some unlocatable dimension. The hunch that the wound - or punctum - may lead the way is important but not sufficient. When Derrida notices that the "uncoded" punctum haunts the studium with its "homogenous objectivity" (cf. CL 55), he must also admit that this flexibility or fleetingness of the punctum contaminates the stable space of the studium and obfuscates visibility in favor of ecstasy, although, paradoxically, it is through vision that the punctum may become available to us: "We are prey to the ghostly power of the supplement and it is this unlocatable site that gives rise to the specter (...)" (ibid., 41). Thus, Derrida implicitly proposes the blurring of boundaries between - as Butler would put it - what qualifies as a life and what qualifies as a death, and although he fails to regain access to his friend, he undertakes this important theoretical gesture which places the location of the dead within the I of the living: "Ghosts: the concept of the other in the same, the punctum in the studium, the completely other, dead, living in me. This concept of the photograph photographs every conceptual opposition; it captures a relationship of haunting that is perhaps constitutive of every logic" (ibid., 42). At the same time, interestingly enough, Derrida reminds himself and us that Barthes places love outside any system of representation: "The suspension of images must be the very space of love, its music (CL 72)" (ibid.). What does this imply in terms of reconnecting with the ghost? So far, based on all these readings, the route towards apprehension begins in the wound produced in front of a visual representation such as the photograph but after the initial dismantling of existing norms of recognition that the punctum produces, the rest of the road takes one into the contemplation of invisibility within a space bordered by the constantly shifting visual evidence of presence.
Conclusions
The burden of postmemory (cf. Hirsch 1997) is difficult to orchestrate, since it is a work of imaginative intervention and vacating of self in favour of another. In this context, The Cookie Portfolio shows that it matters less if that is the "real" Cookie we see in her friend's Portfolio. We know that Goldin believed, naively enough, but also with the clear awareness of the necessity of preserving her naiveté, that she could give herself and us a REAL record. Much as a photograph of Holocaust victims can change one irreversibly, as Susan "Whatshername" recalls in On Photography, and give one a different sense of living-before-birth, The Cookie Portfolio can - in both readings provided above - change the chronotopes of twenty-first century audiences, and give us a sense of the queering of our own lesbian/gay/trans/ hetero/bi/etc. lives, where "queer," to adopt Judith Halberstam's definition from In a Queer Time and Place, refers to "nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time" (2005, 6). AIDS did change received notions of time and place, which, in the mainstream American space, and despite the Civil Rights movement, were still mainly those of the "waste not, want not" Ben Franklin rhetoric, and people like Goldin, Wojnarowicz and Hujar made sure that there was a face and a name attached to the changes in the flow of temporality which have in the meantime moved beyond the American national space. In a sense, it is through Cookie Mueller's extra-ordinary face, laughing out loud in a dingy room, unable and probably unwilling to contain her laughter, that queer time erupts, and arrests conventional maturation (Halberstam 2005, 2).

Although Goldin never says what Cookie had for breakfast or lunch or dinner, the implication in Cookie's Portfolio is that perhaps the day was not so strictly divided, and that prescriptive foods and activities were approached differently, that marriage was also a means of expressing non-monogamous solidarity and affection, and thus, incidentally, managing not to be thrown out of a hospital room where the "family only" policy excluded certain friends and partners. One could argue that Goldin merely proposes a differently normative space of the surrogate family, where the roles of mothers and fathers were not radically revised, but taken over by friends and lovers but the fact remains that, despite Goldin having the upper hand of the person holding the camera, the space of The Cookie Portfolio, and most of her work, is one of the democratic solidarity of underground marginality, where people came and went for good with such defeating speed that keeping track of names and faces was a hard task, and long friendships like the one Goldin had with Mueller were not necessarily rare, but they obeyed a logic of absence/presence which defied conventional logic.

I have proposed that within the queer time of the Portfolio a space of infectious dialogue also opens up. Although photographs are allegedly voiceless images, owned more by the photographer than by the subject photographed, I must agree with Butler's proposal that some of them are also images which - properly embedded in a larger collection such as The Portfolio, whose associations do produce a more or less explicit narrative - speak more articulately. Contradicting Sontag's idea that images of faraway suffering may reassure us through disidentification, Cookie's ghostly laughter pushes her back into visibility by introducing her not as a victim of her irresponsible lifestyle, but as a person who lived unapologetically, and without making amends to the culture that decided her life to be ungrievable.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Prof. Tirza Latimer for reading the first version of this paper and making invaluable suggestions. The many talks during Prof. Laura Wexler's extraordinary graduate class on Vision and Violence at Yale are also behind this paper. Also, Jim Hicks's and Sonja Šoštarić's valuable suggestions prompted me to think of two possible reading strategies for the Portfolio.
Refrence List
BARTHES, ROLAND. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Young.
BUTLER, JUDITH. 2009. Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso.
CARUTH, CATHY. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
DERRIDA, JACQUES. 2001. The Work of Mourning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
DUBIN, STEPHEN C. 1992. Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc.
GOLDIN, NAN. 1996. I'll Be Your Mirror. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art.
---. Interview with Tom Holert. Artforum, March 2003. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_7_41/ai_9
8918665/?tag=rbxcra.2.a.11
GORDON, AVERY. 2008. Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.
HALBERSTAM, JUDITH. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place. New York: New York University Press.
HIRSCH, MARIANNE. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
MEYER, RICHARD. 2002. Vanishing Points: Art, AIDS, and the Problem of Visibility. In Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, Richard Meyer, 225-275. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
MUELLER, COOKIE. 1996. Ask Dr. Mueller: The Writings of Cookie Mueller. London: Serpent's Tail.
---. 1990. Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black. New York: Semiotext(e).
PHELAN, PEGGY. 2002. Francesca Woodman's Photography: Death and the Image One More Time. Signs 27 (4): 979-1004.
---. 1997. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. New York: Routledge.
RUSSELL, JOHN. 1989. Review/Art: Images of Grief and Rage in Exhibition on Rage. NY Times. http://www.nytimes.com/
1989/11/16/arts/review-art-images-of-grief-and-rage-in-exhibition-on-aids.html
SONTAG, SUSAN. 1973. On Photography. New York: Picador.
---. 1989. AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
---. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
STURKEN, MARITA. 1997. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press.
WOJNAROWICZ, DAVID. 1991. Close to the Knives. A Memoir of Disintegration. New York: Vintage.

(All rights reserved, text @ Mihaela Precup, images @ Nan Goldin)

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"The Wound Which Speaks of Unremembered Time: Nan Goldin's Cookie Portfolio and the Autobiographics of Mourning"

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Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, 1983 "I used to think I couldn't lose anyone if I photographed them enough."

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riticism sometimes achieves the condition of art; certain works of art are also a form of commentary or criticism. Roland Barthes's meditation on photography, Camera Lucida, is a classic example of the former. How to respond creatively to a book that has profoundly shaped the way the medium is regarded? A writer might feel compelled to follow George Steiner's grand advice and "write a book in reply". And if you're not a writer, but a photographer? If you do what Barthes is writing about?

Idris Khan's response was to photograph every page of the book and then digitally combine them in a single, composite image. The result of this homage to - and essay on - Camera Lucida (English edition) is a beautiful palimpsest: a series of blurred stripes of type in which the occasional word can be deciphered and one of the images reproduced by Barthes - a portrait of Mondrian by Kertész - glimpsed. Khan did the same thing with On Photography by Susan Sontag. The whole of the book can be seen in an instant, but the density of information is such that Sontag's elegant formulations add up to, and are reduced to, a humming, unreadable distillation. Already slight, the gap between texts and Khan's images will shrink further if the books are reissued with his "readings" of them - surrogate author photos? - on the covers.

It's not just books about photography; Khan also photographs photographs. Bernd and Hilla Becher compiled a comprehensive inventory of architectural building types, such as gas towers, all photographed in a stark, neutral style. Khan's composite, every . . . Bernd & Hilla Becher Prison Type Gasholder, transforms their rigid geometries into a fuzzy, vibrating mass, more like a smudged charcoal drawing of a shivering iron jelly than a photograph.

These - the Sontag, the Barthes and the Bechers - were the first things by Khan that I came across. It was obvious he was on to something. A better sense of what that something might be can be seen at the Victoria Miro Gallery, in London, from today. Practically everything in this, Khan's first UK solo show, is a composite of some kind, but the range and depth of the idea have been extended with uncanny success.

Freud, in his famous essay, mentions "the constant recurrence of the same thing" as a symptom of "the Uncanny". In Khan's picture of every page of the recent Penguin edition, the black gutter at the centre throbs like a premonition or memory of an Optical Art void. It makes you wonder if, as well as psychoanalysis, Freud invented the Rorschach blot. In the background, two of the paintings discussed by him, Leonardo's Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with St Anne, peer through a shifting sleet of type like emanations of the unconscious or something. It's only a book - only a photo of a book - but it pulses like a living thing.

Khan was born in Birmingham in 1978. His mother, who had trained as a pianist, worked as a nurse. She converted to Islam after meeting his father, a doctor. It was his father's idea that Idris - himself a non-practising Muslim - photograph every page of the Qur'an. Since a significant part of the population believes that the complexities of the world can be resolved by this one book, there is a certain logic in taking things a stage further and reducing the book to a single manifestation of itself. The result is incomprehensible. And lovely. The patterns bordering each page are turned into a solid black frame so that the book becomes - as is often said of photography - a window on to the world. Inside this frame - rigid, unalterable, definitive - all is in flux. Fixed meaning dissolves in a blazing grey drizzle. Words, as one of Don DeLillo's narrators says when confronted by a swirl of Arabic script, are "design, not meant to be read, as though part of some unbearable revelation".

Working in a medium wedded to the visible, photographers, perversely and inevitably, have been preoccupied with photographing the invisible. Given his mother's training, music has an allure for Khan. Struggling to Hear . . . After Ludwig van Beethoven Sonatas is a picture of all of the composer's scores for piano, the impenetrable mass of black serving as a visual corollary of Beethoven's increasing deafness.

Each art form has its own advantages and limitations. Words and music unfold successively, through time. Photography is about an instant. By analogy it can ask the impossible: in this case, what if you could hear every note of Beethoven's sonatas in an instant? What would that look like? And when we think of a piece of music that we know well, don't we sometimes remember it, not phrase by phrase, but in its amorphous entirety?

It is often said that photographers freeze time, but Khan does the opposite. This can be seen most clearly in his remixes of Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies of the 1880s (a well-documented source of inspiration for Francis Bacon). Muybridge used fast-shutter speeds to break action into moment-by-moment increments, rendering movement stationary. Khan takes these sequences of isolated moments and unfreezes time by combining them in a single image. Muybridge's strictly mechanical record of a man getting out of bed becomes a vision of the unconscious lifting clear of the body, a dream of waking. It's like a photographic equivalent of Henri Fuseli's Nightmare, an out-of-body experience made flesh - and vice versa.

To learn more about artists' working methods, some paintings have been X-rayed so that preliminary versions of masterpieces are brought to the surface. Khan's photographs are a kind of reverse X-ray, laying bare by accretion. Marrying up the eyes of all Rembrandt's self-portraits, reducing them to the same size and layering them digitally together, Khan effectively photographs him with an exposure time lasting the length of the artist's life. Rembrandt by Himself offers an experience akin to the painter looking at the mirror in the moment of his death, when the evidence of a lifetime of intense self-scrutiny flashes before his grave-dark eyes in a single instant.

There are precedents for these essays in visual condensation: most recently, Fiona Banner's paintings in which a film is verbally transcribed in her own hand so that an entire movie can be seen - but not read - in an instant, on a single canvas. In the 1970s, Hiroshi Sugimoto began photographing empty movie palaces and drive-ins. Using an exposure time equal to the duration of the film, Sugimoto reduced the contents of whatever was on screen - car chases, murders, betrayals, romance - to a single moment of radiant whiteness. The most explicit precursors, however, are also the earliest. They also enable us to view Khan's situation and methods in a broader historical and contemporary context.

In the late 19th century, photography became an important tool in an alliance between some of the "scientific" fads of the day - physiognomy, eugenics, racial taxonomy - and attempts by the police and the state to isolate types likely to commit crimes. Francis Galton believed that there could "hardly be a more appropriate method of discovering the central physiognomic type of any race or group than that of composite portraiture". His composites of convicted criminals duly showed "not the criminal, but the man who is liable to fall into crime". Using similar techniques, Arthur Batut, in France, made "type-portraits" to identify the defining traits of particular races, tribes or families (including his own). In a phrase that might have come from Khan himself, Batut spoke of these composites as "images of the invisible", images that shimmer with the same ghostly air that we see in Khan's.

Khan is himself a composite of artist and photographer. For more than a few current practitioners, the advantages of identifying themselves as artists rather than photographers can be summed up as a six-word hustle: Print bigger, sell less for more. For my money, Khan is as much of an artist as any other photographer currently working. He is a conceptual artist in the straightforward sense that thought is implicit in the act of looking at his work. A lot of contemporary British art flogging itself as conceptual has the intellectual depth of a paddling pool and the gravitas of a helium balloon; Khan's work is dense, multilayered (literally) and profound.

The danger is that this composite thing could just become his shtick. He could do every page of every book, every this of every that. Every . . . Photograph Taken Whilst Travelling Around Europe in the Summer of 2002 seems a rather pointless novelty - there's nothing to see. Its relative failure suggests that Khan's method tends to work better when applied to existing works of art. You can almost hear certain books summoning him to them. It is only a matter of time, surely, before he does every page of Borges's story "The Aleph", in which the narrator discovers a spot where "all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist".

Needless to say, not everything lends itself equally fruitfully to his attention. Garry Winogrand said that he took photographs "to find out what something will look like photographed", and Khan, in his mediated way, is motivated by a similarly random curiosity about what might emerge when he opts to give an image the treatment. I'm guessing that a fair amount of stuff gets processed and then discarded once the preliminary findings are in.

In tandem with the Miro show, inIVA is showcasing Khan's six-minute film of Gabriella Swallow playing bits of six cello suites, with sound and image repeated, overlain and mixed together. It's interesting to see Khan expanding his repetition compulsion into the realm of the moving image but, for me, A Memory After Bach's Cello Suites lacks the eerie concentration of stilled works like the huge Caravaggio: His Last Years. Fifteen late works by the painter who, according to John Berger, depicted a world that "displays itself in hiding", who found a promise "in the darkness itself", are turned into a tangled kaleidoscope of disembodied bodies, a swirling knot of light.

In the course of these negative excavations a form of auto-interrogation is at work, as Khan's "discoveries" question the ways in which accumulation can both reveal and obscure essence. Every . . . William Turner Postcard from Tate Britain transforms these great paintings of light and air into a brooding soup with an amoeba-mushroom curdling in the swampy twilight. And yet something glimmers, faintly, through the murk. What could it be?

Walter Benjamin claimed that mechanical reproduction, the process of which Tate postcards are symptoms and which Khan has pushed to an extreme, stripped artworks of their "aura". Ironically, Khan's obsessive reproduction invests works with an aura buried within them. Consistent with Barthes's notion of what makes a photograph special, this is, simultaneously, something that Khan adds to the originals and which, none the less, is already there.

· Idris Khan's first solo UK show is at the Victoria Miro Gallery, London N1, until September 30. Details: 020-7336 8109.

· A Memory After Bach's Cello Suites is at inIVA, London EC2, from September 13 to October 22. Details: 020-7729 9616.

· Geoff Dyer received this year's Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York for his book The Ongoing Moment (Abacus).

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What if you could see each page of a book at the same time, hear every note of a sonata in an instant, or view an artist's works all together? Idris Khan's obsessive photographs attempt to do just that, writes Geoff Dyer.

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mirror art sculpture brooklyn bridge park waterflame public art social modified laguardia southbank

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Stephanie Syjuco: Artwork Survey: 2010s — Art21

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Stephanie Syjuco: Artwork Survey: 2010s - Art21

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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Rachel Howard:You Have a New Memory - Artlyst

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Rachel Howard:You Have a New Memory - Artlyst

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Simon Lee Gallery presents You Have a New Memory, Rachel Howard's inaugural exhibition with the gallery in London. The show brings together a new body of work that continues Howard's pursuit of the possibilities of painting through experimentation.

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The work of Kader Attia explores ideas of injury, repair and cultural exchange. Moving through the exhibition, there are moments of unease and uncertainty, juxtaposed against moments of clarity and familiarity. Is this the understanding which the artist speaks of, an understanding which can be obtained by reflecting on history and what he calls the "bigger picture"?

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The Universal Addressability of Dumb things | Southbank Centre

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Read, watch and listen more

The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things presented a kind of 'techno-animism', where the inanimate came to life, returning us to 'an archaic state of being, to aboriginal landscapes of fabulous hybrid creatures, where images are endowed with divine powers, and even rocks and trees have names'.

Through a conceptual assemblage of archaeological artefacts, contemporary artworks and visionary machines, Leckey proposed an exemplary network of objects - an Internet of Things, all communicating, talking away to one another, and implicitly, looking back at us.

The exhibition was loosely grouped into 'leaky typologies': Man/Bodies, including angels and monsters; Animals, including mummies, fossils and chimeras; and Machines, with circuitry, scientific and medical devices, and spare gadgets.

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The Universal Addressability of Dumb things | Southbank Centre

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Read, watch and listen more The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things presented a kind of 'techno-animism', where the inanimate came to life, returning us to 'an archaic state of being, to aboriginal landscapes of fabulous hybrid creatures, where images are endowed with divine powers, and even rocks and trees have names'.

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Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 - Exhibition at Tate Modern | Tate

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What are we to make of the world in which we find ourselves today? Contemporary artist Wolfgang Tillmans offers plenty of food for thought.

This is Wolfgang Tillmans's first ever exhibition at Tate Modern and brings together works in an exciting variety of media - photographs, of course, but also video, digital slide projections, publications, curatorial projects and recorded music - all staged by the artist in characteristically innovative style.

The year 2003 is the exhibition's point of departure, representing for Tillmans the moment the world changed, with the invasion of Iraq and anti-war demonstrations. The social and political form a rich vein throughout the artist's work.

Alongside portraiture, landscape and intimate still lifes, Tillmans pushes the boundaries of the photographic form in abstract artworks that range from the sculptural to the immersive.

German-born, international in outlook and exhibited around the world, Tillmans spent many years in the UK and is currently based in Berlin. In 2000, he was the first photographer and first non-British artist to receive the Turner Prize.

Tillmans also takes over the south Tank for ten days with an immersive new installation featuring his work in music and video, interspersed with live events in which Tillmans and his collaborators will explore the capabilities of the sound system and the acoustic qualities of the space.

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What are we to make of the world in which we find ourselves today? Contemporary artist Wolfgang Tillmans offers plenty of food for thought. This is Wolfgang Tillmans's first ever exhibition at Tate Modern and brings together works in an exciting variety of media - photographs, of course, but also video, digital slide projections, publications, curatorial projects and recorded music - all staged by the artist in characteristically innovative style.

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Gallery 31: Create, Capture, Organise, Pluralise

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Gallery 31: Create, Capture, Organise, Pluralise

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Exhibition exploring the notion of the body as an archive; as a record of collective stories, experiences, and memories.

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Félix González-Torres was a Cuban-born American visual artist. González-Torres's openly gay sexual orientation was influential in his work as an artist. Wikipedia

Known for : Sculpture, installation art

Where is Felix Gonzalez Torres from?

Why are some art named Untitled?

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Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds. Félix González-Torres was a Cuban-born American visual artist. González-Torres's openly gay sexual orientation was influential in his work as an artist. Wikipedia Known for : Sculpture, installation art Where is Felix Gonzalez Torres from? Why are some art named Untitled?