Incoherent ramblings continued...

by Man Ray

So, continuing with the line of thought I started here, there's a sense in which all art has a connection to the imaginary 'other world' of mysticism. The reality depicted in stories, films, paintings, photographs etc is not the one in which we actually live. Instead, it's a kind of parallel universe; one in which everything is heightened, intense, super-real.

Why does a photograph of an event often feel so different to the event itself? Maybe in part because within the image, that moment seems saturated with meaning rather than contingency. The banal has been transformed - or transported - into the transcendent, the mystical.

Just as in arousal, the body floods with adrenalin, when transformed into art, the entire world floods with intensity. It's as though we've slipped out of the everyday, the mundane, and into that other reality: the dream world, the spirit realm, the mystical. Perhaps this is what Joyce was on about when he insisted on art as epiphany?

I reckon this is intrinsic to art; all art (maybe to all signification?) - from simple, crass, disposable advertisements to the most ambitious artwork. The act of making an image or a narrative necessarily means depicting a different reality to this one: a reality created by humans, and hence full of human meaning (unlike actual, objective reality, which is completely neutral and meaningless in itself). I guess this is one of the reasons we do it in the first place; because the way we make sense of the world is by constructing simplified models of it - artificial images reality that come with in-built structures of meaning. As if, by sympathetic magic, those manufactured structures of meaning will thereby pass into and take possession of objective reality.

These imaginary worlds we build can seem much richer and more potent than the ordinary one we inhabit, although we try to alleviate this by viewing reality through such imposed fictional narratives as ideology, nationalism, religion, personal growth, or our own biographies, in an attempt to make everyday life feel like a story.

Anyway, where I'm trying (kind of ineptly) to go with this is that all images and art can be seen as pornographic - in the sense that they provoke arousal, seducing us into an intensified eroticised reality.*

*Is this what Baudrillard was on about when he talked about seduction and hyperreality? Guess I'd better go back and read him properly! Quotes like this:

To seduce is to die as reality and reconstitute oneself as illusion. It is to be taken in by one’s own illusion and move in an enchanted world.

and this:

Anatomy is not destiny, nor is politics: seduction is destiny. It is what remains of a magical, fateful world, a risky, vertiginous and predestined world.

(both from Jean Baudrillard, Seduction) sure seem worth pursuing. Better dust off my old copy and give it another go...