Subjectivity and the Mirror: Framing the Self
Ruth Novaczek
Reading Journal
1. What piqued my interest from syllabus; pathways of thought:
What exactly is a mirror?
...the frame is it interior or external device?
...the parameters of self?
...how do we contain, present, and sense ourselves?
What is autofiction?
How musch of our sense of self is based on...memory, ego, an accumulated masquerade?
What does all this mean in artistic practice?
The self: the subject who cannot be neutral; realist or fabrication; alter ego or ego.
Fragments
The frame as a border which must acknowledge what is outside the self.
Memory is a part of the present.
Where do you stand?
Looking out and/or looking in...both are possible; [simultaneously?]
2. An image and idea that suggests [an aspect of] selfhood to me.
A ‘selfie’ taken winter 2015 with my iPhone 5s. Looking in my closet mirror in the early hours of the morning. Single light source of CPF bulb at upper left. The photo is me, my reflection, a doubling or twinning in the mirror. Only a fragment, three eyes, three brows, some hair, two bridges of a nose...or noses? Are there two faces? Are they the same face? Which face is ‘real’ and which is ‘reflected’?
Summer 2015 I revisited this image. This is a fragment of the photo shown above; a single print which I manually enlarged, pixelated, and fragmented into approximately 180 4 inch x 6 inch [10 cm x 15 cm] commercially printed matte photos. Here are a few stacked together.
I had two sets of the photos printed which I brought to Berlin and hung together to re-form a single, yet fragmented image that was an inverted mirror of itself. Shown at SOMOS Gallery.
Back in the studio the prints became sketchbook fodder.
And the digital files were further enlarged, manipulated, prints ordered…
...leading to a number of explorations in paint; growing evermore non representational.
[not shown]
3. The Anthropology of the Setup: A Conversation with Chris Kraus, interviewed by Anna Poletti in the Oxford Journals
...does not have to contain truthfulness of subject to contain truthfulness of spectator…
The gender divide as it exists between fiction [male] and memoir [female]...if the protagonist is female and bears the slightest resemblance to the [female] author TPTB
call it ‘memoir’...even if the author says it is fiction.
“I mean, memoir implies the neoliberal illusion of the autonomous individual – as if one person’s crises and traumas were his or hers alone. But I favor a more
anthropological, sociographic outlook. A person is always navigating structures; they are what forms the person.”
4. In The Guardian, Dan Glaister interviews artist Jordan Baseman
“I would describe what I do as experimental portraiture,” Baseman says. “They’re all portraits, but they’re really selfportraits – it’s just that I’m not there.”
5. Hilton Als: Photos, writing and portraits: www.hiltonals.com
I’ve read Als writing all my adult life, which coincides with his first publications inThe New Yorker in 1989. This most likely makes him one of the writers/critics/artist whose writing I’ve read most consistently the past [almost] 30 years; and my own writing [and thinking] has probably been formed [somewhat] by his.
This is the first time I’ve visited his website.
I wanted to see the show at The Artist Institute this spring/summer, but missed it.
Watching video of talk at USC/Annenberg conference https://youtu.be/eKq_pk7n-QA; the role of the objective critic/journalist. How to meet the subject halfway; how
to use writer’s voice to express encounter with the subject.
Stanisslavsky School of Writing!
The performative nature of what he does….the only way he knows how to make it real.
Richard Prior Novel. A fiction, begun as a piece for The New Yorker [A Prior Love]. Narrated by his non-existent sister, an actress in LA doing voice overs for porn.
How Richard becomes the narrators double; and the double for black American males. Fiction as a means of exploring and encountering non-fiction, the truth...
The reporter’s desired form of writing fact that has the penumbrum of fiction…
How to create both fact and fiction in an extended form, challenging both genres...like Richard Prior.
Building narrative on the facts that are available…[the actor’s script?]
Not settle to be defined by facts alone; expose the truth by portraying lies.
‘The reporter’ says what the author cannot say about the relationship to the father.
How to de-internalize without loss...being personal without saying “I”.
Sounds familiar…
The posts.
Frozen, images, performed and re-formed. Fragments of something become fragments of something else...
“A writer’s byline follows her even as she becomes a different self and develops into adifferent kind of writer. “
[Talking Back to Maya Angelou. June30, 2014 http://www.hiltonals.com/2014/06/talking-back-to-maya-angelou/ ]
“Wanting—I think that’s a word that applies to Angelou’s work as a memoirist. She wanted so much, and she got so much in the bargain.”
The memoirs for which she is known are full of fictions too.
I need to spend more time later exploring Mr. Als.
6. Joe Brainard I Remember, 2001, Granary Books [PDF]
I always remember that which I cannot forget. But each time I remember I cannot be sure the memory is the same as before; usually it is not. Each time I remember the
memory becomes clearer, but not necessarily more accurate.
I remember hearing the memories of multiple persons, together at the same historic Event. Each remember what happened that day in May 1970 slighlty different. Each
time they recounted their memories of that day to me the story was also slightly different. And each time they retold the memory of that day they relived it, more real
than in the moment it happened.
7. Chris Kraus I Love Dick [excerpt] 1997, Semiotext(e), 2015, Serpents Tail [PDF]
See point three above.
intimacy via deconstruction...interesting idea, particularly when combined with the conceptual versus ‘real’ relationship...which is more truthful?
Writing as exploration of both the conceptual and the actual....the method.
8. Film: Jim McBride, David Holzman’s Diary 1967 https://vimeo.com/117733608
I waited to google this until after watching it so I would not ‘know’ what it was...fact or fiction. Per Wikipedia it is ‘docufiction’. In other words, fiction masquerading as the
‘Truth’, although quite obviously not. Each character is clearly ‘acted’, poorly as the friend before the mural states. There seems to be script, but the friend says there is
none, get one...but in truth there is never a script.
The editing with use of the black frames and bits of end frame becomes a signifier of the medium, the materiality of the film, and towards the end it seems, at times, that
the breaks and fragments are no longer under the control of the director, the machines, the film itself is in control.
Capture, control, rearrange, repeat...relationship to the truth via the chosen medium.
Is it ever possible to understand ‘things’ via the medium?
“Why not?!”
9. Eileen Myles, Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) 2010. http://www.eileenmyles.com/infernoexc.php
Read Inferno and website went down....
Finally it came back up.
How often have I felt like her? Not the same, but different. Then, finally, that moment....
"Cause I could know myself, that’s all."
10. Eileen Myles, My Childhood [PDF]
“There
you’re doing it again.
I was doing it again.”
“Everything felt all ruined from
the inside & I didn’t even know how
It happened or what the real truth was.”
What is childhood? A process of repetition...practice to become who’ll we become?
An adventure, like those of Peter Pan...but disappointment by the realization that Peter is a grown woman and those are wires?
What ends this repetition? Death?
11. Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills 1977 http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1997/sherman/
“This exhibition is sponsored by Madonna.”
Who better?!
Actually I do have a lot to say about the Untitled Film Stills along with Cindy Sherman’s subsequent work as I am curious of how she creates characters and where she, Cindy Sherman, is within the work.
However, back to Madonna... what binds her to the work of Sherman is not only the period and place of their birth as artists, but the very nature of their work. Sherman’s claim not to be a photographer; nurturing the myth of her failure as such as an art student. Photography is simply the medium with which she works, it has no relevance beyond the method by which the image is mediated to the viewer. It is the creation of the image, the pose, the makeup and costumes, the character that emerges which is the art. It is a private performance for the camera which captures it on film and delivers it to the spectator on the gallery wall.
And Madge?
Unlike Cindy Sherman, Madonna claims that music is her medium; but she is no more a musician than Sherman is not a photographer. Like Sherman, Madonna is a performer. Music is her medium, the method by which she delivers the characters she creates to her audience.
12. Students should bring with them one example of relevant material that reflects their own approach to selfportraiture.
