Still Lifes?
The images of fragmented still lifes are neither still nor do they represent life, at least as we know it. The fragmentation of the traditional still lifes in the image, offers a multiplicity of “windows” that gather to form a collage-like image. Each window is a new aspect of the still life: hyper-textualized orange skin, an errant barcode sticker, a tear in a ripe mango, a contoured navel and the soft yellow blur of-- something. Here the still life is violated by the cut-up; comparing apples to oranges is a futile endeavor, as identity lays deflated amidst a plenum of attributes and trivialities. No longer possible to place a ‘self’ within the orange, the viewer finds life in the play of the particular, which unfolds as a moving hodgepodge on the screen. The image becomes a marketplace predicated on the exchange between and within objects, as oranges graft to apples and cloth fuses to ceramic. It is an image economy where bodies lend themselves to one another as a catalyst for change, or at least the possibility of change. The still lifes are forced to abandon their inertness and “itness” amidst the tumult of this image economy, a process that is complicated (or not) by the presence of self portraits.
Self Portraits?
The self portraits are as fragmented and reshaped as the still lifes, leaving disfigured amalgamations of blemished flesh, glossy pupils, magnified eyelashes and tilted teeth. These self portraits abandon any attempts to recover a representation of the individual; instead they bask in the play of images. It is the transformation of a Rubik’s cube from an instrument of logical solution to an instrument of constant re-creation. The image economy disregards the logic of circuits for the logic of the circus, placing focus on the improvised over the calculated, the grotesque over the refined and the inhuman over the human. Emphasis is taken off of the life of the individual and focused upon the lives of the images and their interactions, as some move to lend their unfocused eye to complete another’s face, others prefer to lie below the epidermal images in solitude. The image’s title extends the image’s logic to include the viewer, as careful capitalization in the title forms the question: “STILL…SELF?” This both linguistically highlights the presence of distinctions between identical forms and questions the nature of the “selfness” of the viewer himself.
Still Self?
The video-image is only accessed by the viewer through his visual sense perception, as there are no direct experiences of taste, sound or texture. The viewer is enveloped in the logic of the image, as the image is blind to all but the viewer’s eyes, fragmenting the image of the viewer himself. The image of the viewer and the image on the screen operate under the same logic, at least for a while. As the video lasts only six seconds, the viewer’s experience is transitory, however it produces a new conception of what the individual could be under the particular logic of the image. If the conception of images is expanded to include all things, material and ethereal and human and inhuman, then the self becomes an index possibilities of ‘being,’ which arise from experiences with new images. The viewer’s index becomes similar to the Google search as it results in an infinite index of variations and conceptions based upon a fixed entity, which has endless potential for growth. As each image proffers a logic of existence, a stable life is defined by the presence of familiar images and logics, however despite attempts at insulation images can neither be contained nor always recognized, leaving the individual perpetually at the point of possibility.
