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Our exhaustion with the ineluctable perfection of Photoshopped reality is indicative of a deeper infection. Perfection, at least as imagined through our collectively commercialized imagery, is a synonym for efficiency. Visual perfection is the efficiently sublime. The viewer need not reach for transcendence. The sublime approaches on familiar rails and reproduces expected results. Ecstasy becomes automatic, another expression of the technological field that sustains and contains the contemporary self. Within this circuit, film photography and historical printing methods become useful commodities for consumers who unconsciously long for a less routinized world, and for the overlords who impose consent through distraction. But these technologies can also become instruments used to challenge the ruling ontology, and thus the rulers themselves.
Many talented artists rightly devote their energies to engaging directly with current social problems, like racism, gender oppression, climate change, and economic inequality. The political force of my work is more indirect. I focus upon the blindness imposed by the discursive “structures of feeling” (Raymond Williams) that secretly shape our encounters with reality and possibility. My photograms, aperture prints, photo assemblages, contact prints, darkroom enlargements, and glyphic tablets use altered negatives, broken glass, found objects, spatial disruption, and dislocation to merge photography, philosophy, and poetry. These artisanal, process based works act against the principle of technical efficiency, regenerate the post-romantic sublime, and so serve as an index of the invisible.
Graham Cassano
September 2024
As I re-read these pages,--increasingly seeing their unity as sui generis logical assemblage rather than a series of discrete works,--several terms reappeared, revealing, even to me, my otherwise elliptical aesthetic orbit. First, among them, “the sublime.” I’ve been obsessed with this figure, and its relations—“the sacred,” “the abject,”—for decades, returning, always, to the same set of queries, and, like one of Dr. Freud’s desperate patients, unable to fully formulate the questions I know the concepts demand. Now I have no choice but to try.
Is the basis of the sublime inconceivable instinct, or social habit? Is the sublime a basic fact of consciousness, with no outside? Or is it a social construction that has taken on the status of inexplicable indexical force? Even if we except the children of the Enlightenment and their Romantic heirs—from Burke and Kant to Schiller, Blake, and Poe—as prisoners of an inescapably essentialist cosmology, later relativist radicals,--Durkheim, Mauss, Mary Douglas, Julia Kristeva,--argued that the sacred/sublime or the abject/sublime are rooted in the structure of culture (Durkheim, Mauss, Douglas), or language itself (Lacan, Kristeva). But if the sublime is rooted in the acquisition of language/culture, its origin cannot be fully explained through linguistic or cultural mediation. Evidence becomes embodied revelation. Not wrong, necessarily, nor unconvincing, necessarily, but necessarily suspect. More than that, this fundamental fact of the social life of sentient creatures (if the arguments are correct), also gives force to fascism. Fascism is the instinct for the sublime redirected, regimented, regulated, and transformed into a mechanism of political (rather than aesthetic or spiritual) discipline. In a sense, fascism is a fabric covering the wound left by sublime absence. But it is possible that the treatment itself created the wound, that the hunger fascism satisfies is an old habit, an addiction not easily thrown off. Thus, to the extent that a regenerated sublime inhabits these (web) pages, and the images they present, it is as a questioning, a constant interrogation, and my use of spatial disruption, image repetition, and broken glass photograms, are meant, at least in part, to alienate the spectator from too close an identification with whatever the figuration evokes.
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