Stuck/Black Ice

At Anne-Fay’s, in swine flu quarantine limbo. So no shots of Nando’s performance at EYHO last night, which saddens me. Instead, been catching up on mailing-list reading and thinking about images, in halt compensation for inability to go out and make them. More on that later, but first a note to self, bookmarking a short thread on the Empyre list’s discursions around Relational Aesthetics this month. Reminded me I’ve never read Barthe’s Camera Lucida, so have a 2nd-hand copy on its way from Amazon… of which, I would be very interested to read James Elkin’s “Camera Dolorosa” in History of …

A Painting of Heaven

I’ve been reading The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing, by James Elkins. It’s worth a read — he covers a lot of phenomenological territory, in pursuit of what seems a very personal understanding of what seeing (as contrasted with vision or sight) is about. Seeing, as he sees it, is a complex ‘metamorphosis, not mechanism’. Unexpected insights in familiar places (he is an art historian by trade, and much of the book deals with how we exploit seeing in our representations of its effects). This from a riff on Picasso’s Women of Avignon: When a whole crowd …