unknowability.
RICHARD As art writers, we need to respect this “unknowability” while also trying to give it a voice. We need to both analyse visual images and leave them with the power of their opacity.
JON Another thing that’s so great about that Zoe Leonard passage is the way in which it acknowledges that everyone can have these really transformative encounters with images and texts, that this is not just the terrain of people with a certain education or connoisseurship; that it’s happening every day and is worth paying attention to. Which, I think, is more important than ever, considering that how we encounter images and what images can do is in a period of flux and rapid change. Even the most distracted, casual, or degraded swipe of an image could end up being a font of meaning or power, in ways that we could not possibly anticipate.
References
1 Amin, Kadji. 2017. Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
2 Cotter, Holland. 1994. “Art after Stonewall: 12 Artists Interviewed.” Art in America 82(6): 56–65, 115.
3 Crimp, Douglas. 1993. On the Museum’s Ruins. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
4 Crimp, Douglas. 1999. “Getting the Warhol We Deserve.” Social Text 59: 49–66.
5 Crimp, Douglas. 2002. Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
6 Meyer, Richard. 2000. “At Home in Marginal Domains.” Documents 18: 19–32.
7 Meyer, Richard. 2002. Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth‐century American Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
8 Meyer, Richard. 2019. “Fifty and Counting.” Art in America 107(6): 80–5.
9 Meyer, Richard and Catherine Lord. 2013. Art and Queer Culture. London: Phaidon.
10 Spring, Justin. 2010. Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
11 Waugh, Thomas. 1996. Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press.
Chapter 6 Scene Selection: Objects Lost and Found
Sharon Willis
“Scenes from the Institutionalization of the Field,” the title of our Part I, immediately puts me in mind of the scene selection function built into the design of most of the DVDs that deliver to me my object of study: film. Among its many rewards, the DVD offers us the ability to archive or edit this object, to pause it or repeat it, to return again and again to its most pleasurable or confusing or elusive moments. This device both denatures the “original” and restores it to us in the capacities for reflection and analysis it affords us.
In Death 24× a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, Laura Mulvey pays special attention to the temporal reshaping that digital technology brings to the cinematic object. “[W]ith this completely altered sense of time,” she writes, “it seems possible to capture the cinema in the process of its own coming into being. A segment extracted from the flow of narrative bears witness to the pull towards tableaux that has always been there in cinema” (Mulvey 2006, 150). Spectacle resists narrative in this format, she points out appreciatively. “To halt, to return and to repeat these images is to see cinematic meaning coming into being as an ordinary object detached from its surroundings… But delaying the image, extracting it from its narrative surroundings, also allows it to return to its context and to contribute something extra and unexpected, a deferred meaning, to the story’s narration” (150–1). In a passage inflected by the affective tonality of pleasure and gratification, Mulvey registers the ways in which digital technology may restore cinema to us as a “lost object.”
What a contrast to the aggressive force that energized her famous early essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which offers a section heading of the form “Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon” and ends by announcing its ambition to “free the look of the camera into its materiality and the look of the audience into dialectics and passionate detachment” (Mulvey 1989, 126)! In the loss of an object through its willful destruction, this early statement strives to escape the entanglements of visual fetishism, while Mulvey’s more recent work seems to revel in its pleasures, endowing them with an analytical force.
But among all its gratifications, analytical and sensual alike, DVD technology also imposes an interpretive frame extrinsic to film as an object—no matter how we construe it. Dividing films by “scene” selection or into “chapters,” DVDs attach titles to the segments they create, supplying an interpretive gloss on the digital artifact. Into the bargain, the choice itself to name this segmentation by scene or chapter evokes the gravitational pull of other media—theatrical or literary, for example. Film mutates into an intermedial hybrid, a creolized object across which, and through which, media speak to one another and entertain one another’s ghosts. Thus the imprint of a new form of segmentation—quite foreign to the film medium itself in its management of the information it delivers as a “film”—reminds us of the loss of that very object, even as its renewed commodification as digital effect makes it available to us in easily manipulated—and therefore revelatory—form.
Digital forms and incarnations of cinema may both displace and restore our objects, making archivists of us all. It should surely be no surprise that, with the emergence of digital technologies, we in film studies have become increasingly preoccupied with the archive—that is, with archiving and curatorial processes as they intersect with critical and theoretical ones, as Catherine Russell proposes in Archivology. She suggests that, as these technologies dissolve the divide between public and private and reconfigure the status and practices of archiving, we might productively return to Walter Benjamin, whose “historiography is based on a nonlinear conception of correspondences between past and future and on the shock or crystallization of the moment produced through juxtaposition and montage.” “His aesthetics of awakening and recognition,” she argues, “are techniques of interruption of the ‘flow’ of images on which conventional historicism relies” (Russell 2018, 28).
But as we archive and explore the archive, we are reminded that our disciplines in and around visual studies are marked by shiftiness: our objects stubbornly refuse stability and demand constant redefinition, as do our fields of study themselves. In all this movement and mutation, what happens when we take our field of study to be our theoretical object seems especially vexed. In its anxiety about its boundaries and the status of its objects, our work remains tinged with melancholy, particularly when we consider our archives and the shifting history of the present as we seek to read it. Can we read it and see it at the same time? We find ourselves increasingly concerned with endings, as our fugitive objects retreat or disappear or transform, eluding us. Ultimately, I will be concerned with two movements: the disappearance of some objects and the failure of others to disappear—especially those objects we wish would not remain so durable: race, gender, ethnicity. These movements, it seems, traverse the various conflicted, dangerous, and oppressive intersections of the visual and the social fields.
To explore the anxious encounters between object and endings, I enter my own recent archive, where I find writers who are mostly friends and former colleagues taking stock of their own investments in their fields. I find each one in a scene of some sort of ending—though not at an end. No doubt, this ambient “sense of an ending” relates to archival impulses as well as to the narrative drive that shapes our efforts to make accounts of our history. As Carolyn Steedman
