Geo-derma


‘He doesn’t know the sentence that has been passed on him?’
‘No -’ said the officer again, pausing a moment as if to let the explorer elaborate his question and then said: ‘ There would be no point in telling him. He’ll learn it corporally, on his person.’
- Franz Kafka ‘In the Penal Settlement’ 1919

‘The deepest thing in man is the skin.’
- Paul Valery ‘L’Idee Fixe, ou deux hommes a la mer’ 1933

In the preface to his book ‘THE BODY’, William Ewing asks the question - ‘Why is it today that the human body is at the centre of so much attention ?’ He then provides the reader with a formidable list of contemporary scenarios which indicate that familiar concepts and definitions of the human form are being challenged on an unprecidented scale.
Scientists and engineers are restructuring and reconstituting the body while artists and writers are rethinking and reconsidering its condition - all are contributing to a project of corporal reinvention; a project motivated by urgency rather than fashion.
For 200 years, from the late 1500’s to the end of the 1700’s, the body was conceived of as an enclosed space from which the surrounding world could be observed with confident objectivity.
During this time the dominant model for human vision was the camera obscura - a dark box with a single hole through which light from the outside world entered, projecting an image of itself onto a flat plane inside.
This image appeared somehow void of the uncertainties of human perception - the camera body, a tenebrous chamber illuminated only by the light of ‘truth’, for what else but the purity and radiance of truth could pass through such a small hole?
Monocularity was the prevailing code which established the status of the observer and his/her relationship with the observed world.
Jonathan Crary points out that, “ until the 19th. century, binocular disparity, the fact that we see a slightly different image with each eye, was never seriously addressed as a central issue. It was ignored or minimised as a problem, for it implied the inadmissable physiological and anatomical operation of human vision.” 1
The human factor was seen as an impediment to objectivity and the proliferation of mechanical devices during the 18th. century that were intended to remove this factor from the equation, reached it’s zenith in the early 1800’s with the invention of photography.
The photograph sought to confirm that the world ‘out there’ behaves as it does independent of a human observer. The photograph doesn’t interpret events but is simply a result of them. It is this causal feature that has been the cornerstone of photography’s claims to possess some epistemological value - it’s warranty to truth.
Jean Philippe Antoine explains - “This was the surprise, horror or delight of the first practitioners and viewers of photography: it was a physical trace of objects (even at a distance), an index, and this index was also, given, it is true, a certain loss of information (colour, nuances in tone), a better imitation than the painted image.” 2
The photograph imitated the real, and by extending the analogy, the camera imitated the body. It was this relationship which provided the observer with the stable and secure location from which to view the world.
However, with the invention this century of the silicon chip and the subsequent developments in computer technology and digital imaging the analogous relationships of camera and photograph, body and reality have been radically destablised.
“For an image to be accorded the status of a photographic sign, it does not suffice, strictly speaking, for it to have the look of a photograph; one must be able to consider its genesis to have been produced by the photographic apparatus.” 3
This is not the genesis of the digital image, its causality originating not in the Cartesian space of the camera obscura but in what Scott Bukatman describes as a “paraspace, constituted at the computer, and as an absolute space, a space to end space as we humanly know and inhabit it.” 4
He describes computer space as a kind of end to looking, a ‘terminal vision’ where spatial exploration is conducted without an anchor.
Geo-derma provides the setting for just such an exploration.
Art as science or science as art - the boundaries become blurred or irrelevent as bodies of knowledge are fused into fresh fields of inquiry. Corporal referrants are flayed and the hides hung out to dry in the cultural cordon sanitaire of the gallery.
Square canvasses stretched tight over wooden frames support thin emulsive membranes of PVA. Within these membranes are suspended veins of red and black oxide - anatomy and geology dissolve into a display of reciprocal similarity, the artist hovers between prospector and geomancer.
Large laminated prints offer a medical melange of memento mori, dissociated from the observer by the picture plane; but, when viewed with binocular disparity the picture plane evaporates - observer and observed simultaneously occupy a mutually mortal space.
The perceptions are further sharpened by the digital video and audio work as the explorer snatches tokens of sychronous sound and image, tokens not placed there by design but identified by the viewers predisposition to do so.
Within the dynamic juxtapositions of Geo-derma, geography collapses into spaceless space, history into timeless time, and the body at the centre of so much attention finds itself curiously centreless.

Paul Hinchliffe

 



1. Jonathan Crary, “Modernising Vision” in Vision and Visuality. ed. Hal Foster. Dia Art Foundation. 1988 p.32.
2. Jean Philippe Antoine, “Photography, painting and the Real”, in Gerhardt Richter. Editions Dis Voir. 1995 p.61.
3. Ibid. p.62.
4. Scott Bukatman, in “A Theory of Everything; Meditations on Total Chaos”.
Vivian Sobchack. Artforum. October 1990. p.151.