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posted by Jack Butler on December 29, 1997 at 12:57:01:
in reply to: second sight posted by rob on December 16, 1997 at 13:19:26:
Responses to web links and to "second sight" Thx for the links: Your "Drift" site and your use of moulage casting, I think, are very appropriate responses to what I am trying to do on this site.Your lateral drifting approach complements our (Leonhardt and myself) hierarchical structure. I breath a sigh of relief when on "Drift". "Hypomnemata" adds a whole library of ancillery texts, especially Foucault's dscription of the hypomnemata personal collection style notebook, and its contrast with the confesasional notebooks of the Romantic philosophers and artists. Why do you find the art of this site to be in the overall piece rather than in the individual images? My fears are exactly the opposite: that the web site is too documentational and book-like in its format; in short, too much like scientific illustration and not enough like visual art. Whereas, the individual images vary both in their roles in the building of the embryological/theory project and in their relation to artmaking. To my mind there is a big difference between the sections "Is Like", "Is Not Like" etc., which I think use art processes (pattern construction/ recognition - visual metaphors) and the modelling sections constructed as scientific illustration, ie., the interplay of images and texts which represent content beyond both mediums. I really appreciate your tackling this issue as it is deeply interesting to me and few will engage the site so intensely and respectfully as you are. I should mention that I have continued to work with the overlay images in large scale woodcut/digital collages. A bit of background about the white "embryo pic" you mention above. This photograph is from a suite of pictures of three plasticene models I built to represent genital differentiation. After 20 years of work on this subject it occured to me that every image I had seen of embryonic genital development, whether in scientific text books or popular magazines, represented the genitals as if the embryo is lying on its back like an adult patient on an examination table (or in stirrups). The unacknowledged associations with adult pornography and subjugation/disempowerment infect (it sems to me) virtually the whole history of imaging human genital development. I set out to build models of genital development which, a) include the relationship between the gnitals and the whole body of the embryo and b) position the genitals in the photographic image more as they would be seen pictured in the womb - embryo floating head down, etc. This technique has, as you note, introduced a whole new set of difficulties. But the tragi-comic look of these images does make it clear how important it is to render explicit the conventions for understanding any model. This is also my answer to your question about the dangers of turning a representation - which medels content beyond itself, into a fetish - a model that we mistakenly identify with the content it represents. Fetishes have there place, of course, especially in art. But not, I think , in the representation of theories of human embryological development. Follow Ups:
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