Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida

Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson

Bibliographic Data

ID5789616
AuthorsAnnette Michelson
EditorsRichard Allen (0000-0001-8915-2737), Malcolm Turvey (0000-0001-8616-1670)
Year2003
Pages294
Publication date2003-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueCamera obscura, camera lucida (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherAmsterdam University Press (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.5117/9789053564943
OpenAlexW1620006952
Open LibraryOL22529589M
ISBN9789053564943
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited8

Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida Meanwhile, building on his experience in the temporal media of dance and performance, Morris used and extended Duchampian strategies in order to inscribe time into his sculpture, a medium traditionally thought of as 'convert[ing] process into static object' (RM 49).Hence his brilliant 'process' works, such as the Box with Sound of its Own Making (1963).Michelson's core insights into Minimalism's spatial and temporal innovations are now basic axioms of scholarship on '60s art, and have been extended and complicated by others, most notably Rosalind Krauss.8 But their implications for criticism have been much greater than what they revealed about Minimalism per se.For Michelson was keen to show that artists like Morris had done much more than overturn artistic conventions.Turning to the 'phenomenologically grounded perceptual theory' of philosophers such as Charles Sanders Pierce and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (AS 115), Michelson argued that Morris's works -by drawing the spectator's attention to his own body, to the space in which he and the sculpture stood, and to the time of the making and viewing of the sculpture -were asking the spectator to reflect on the fact that temporality is 'the condition or medium of human cognition and aesthetic experience,' and that 'knowing' (quoting Merleau-Ponty) 'is the body's functioning in a given environment' (RM 23; 45).In other words, Morris, and like-minded artists, had passed from a concern 'with things seen to that of seeing itself.'They were engaging in philosophical investigations into the nature of consciousness and related issues such as perception, by prompting reflection on these topics on the part of the spectator:Attention to the simplicity of [the] structure [of Morris's sculpture], to its qualities, directs the [beholder] back, as it were, upon the quality of his perception.The inner rehearsal of its modes, of the aspects and parameters of that perception, conduces to an experience of a reflective nature ... Morris's questioning of a self-contained system of virtual space is impelled by a recognition of the most profound and general sense in which our seeing is linked to our sense of ourselves as being bodies in space, knowing space through the body.(RM 45)The paradigmatic notion propelling this paradigmatic analysis -that an art work can occasion reflection on philosophical topics such as 'What is seeing?'; that art 'as exploration of the conditions and terms of perception ... converges with philosophy and science upon the problem of reality as known and knowable' (CK 58) -has proved to be a singularly fertile one for criticism of the last thirty years, having been extended well beyond the understanding of Minimalism and the avant-garde to include mass and popular art.Certainly it has for Michelson's work.In the same year as her text on Morris, she applies it in her analysis of 2001, arguing that while watching this film, 'Viewing becomes, as always but as never before, the discovery, through the acknowledge-'Examine the mutations of things,' says St. Augustine, 'and thou wilt everywhere find "has been" and "will be."Think on God and thou wilt find "is" where "has been" and "will be" cannot be.' Absolute presentness being the attribute of Divinity, to experience 'the work in all its depth and fullness' as within 'a single, infinitely brief instance' is to dwell in Presence, in 'conviction' as in Revelation.(RM 19) 20Camera Obscura, Camera LucidaHence, Michelson has tended to focus throughout her career on those filmmakers -Snow, Cornell, Duchamp, Rainer, Eisenstein, Warhol -who originally or primarily work in other media, demonstrating in her essays how a modernist desire for the philosophical possibilities afforded by cinema intensifies in these artists' work in another medium, eventually propelling them into cinema.Whether or not one shares Michelson's conviction that cinema is the preeminent modernist medium, it has, I am suggesting, at least in part driven her resistance to disciplinary specialization, her insistence that avant-garde film must be analyzed within the context of modernism as a whole.In acting on this conviction, she has shown several generations of scholars what an important role cinema has played in modernism, how central it has been to the aspirations of avant-garde artists working in and across other media.To quote Bordwell again, 'her philosophically informed essays [have] helped make the study of avant-garde film part of modern art criticism and history.' 13 In the process, she has provided an exemplary model of authentic inter-disciplinarity for contemporary and future scholars, by which I mean true expertise in more than one medium or discipline.The value of such inter-disciplinarity surely does not need explicating in a contemporary context in which disciplines are (often wrongly or absurdly) thought of as 'disciplinary.'Second, for someone who helped pioneer the turn to contemporary French thought in the late 1960s in order to render the advanced art of that moment intelligible, one finds in Michelson's work a salutary resistance to being too closely identified with a single French thinker, or indeed with the trends in French thought known as 'structuralism' and 'post-structuralism.'Over the 30 Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida *In this introduction, I have tried to convey a sense of Annette Michelson's considerable impact -both actual and potential -on Anglo-American criticism of advanced art.All of the essays in this volume honor this legacy by attempting to build on one or more aspects of it that I have mentioned.The editors and contributors hope she will enjoy them

Honor · Art, Technology, and Culture · Cinema and Media Studies · Annette Michelson · Art and motion pictures · Film, TV & radio · Modernism (art) · Motion pictures

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