The death mask and the post-indexical
[19 November]
Emperor Napoelon Bonaparte
Scientist Sir Isaac Newton
Poet Friedrich Schiller
Composer Alban Berg - I like this one; it really looks as if the figure is breaking out of some matter - the face as corner...
Quick note to self about post-indexicality: in Lisa Saltzman's Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006), there's a chapter on the post-indexical. This together with the Peter Eisenman essay (The Post-Indexical: A Critical Option, Hunch, 2007) should be enough to position the project within this particular theoretical fold. Maybe add Rosalind Krauss's Notes on the Index: Part I and Notes on the Index: Part II for historical reference.
Now, perhaps the most interesting part of Saltzman's chapter is this:
Although the classic example of the indexical sign is the footprint, more relevant here is another common example, namely, the death mask. For the death mask is a sculptural object, a memorial object, formed from a mold set upon the very face of the dead. Its anemnetic [sic - this appears to be a misspelling of anamnetic] power derives not just from likeness, but from contact, from touch. Icon and index, the death mask derives its peculiar symbolic power from its founding relation to irredeemable loss. Yet even as the antiquated practice of casting death masks most emphatically literalizes the indexical logic and memorial function of such representational strategies, of physical imprint, so too do the visual technologies of modernity. For photography and cinema are no less beholden to an indexical logic of relation to the evanescent world before the camera. In sum, silhouettes and casts, photography and even film, all of these methods of representation, whose distant origins we encounter in Pliny's mythic tale, are predicated on their contiguous relation to their subjects, their physical relation to the material world.
If i deliberately misread the above and turn it into a passage on post-indexical architecture in a Deleuze-on-Bacon context, I could reach the conclusion that the architectural figure is the mnemonic trace of something that has been taken away to create a negative space. We see the imprint of whatever created the architecture. This needs some more thinking, but I think it could be an important part of the theory of a space of suspension, implying some kind of timelessness.
Emperor Napoelon Bonaparte
Scientist Sir Isaac Newton
Poet Friedrich Schiller
Composer Alban Berg - I like this one; it really looks as if the figure is breaking out of some matter - the face as corner...
Quick note to self about post-indexicality: in Lisa Saltzman's Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006), there's a chapter on the post-indexical. This together with the Peter Eisenman essay (The Post-Indexical: A Critical Option, Hunch, 2007) should be enough to position the project within this particular theoretical fold. Maybe add Rosalind Krauss's Notes on the Index: Part I and Notes on the Index: Part II for historical reference.
Now, perhaps the most interesting part of Saltzman's chapter is this:
Although the classic example of the indexical sign is the footprint, more relevant here is another common example, namely, the death mask. For the death mask is a sculptural object, a memorial object, formed from a mold set upon the very face of the dead. Its anemnetic [sic - this appears to be a misspelling of anamnetic] power derives not just from likeness, but from contact, from touch. Icon and index, the death mask derives its peculiar symbolic power from its founding relation to irredeemable loss. Yet even as the antiquated practice of casting death masks most emphatically literalizes the indexical logic and memorial function of such representational strategies, of physical imprint, so too do the visual technologies of modernity. For photography and cinema are no less beholden to an indexical logic of relation to the evanescent world before the camera. In sum, silhouettes and casts, photography and even film, all of these methods of representation, whose distant origins we encounter in Pliny's mythic tale, are predicated on their contiguous relation to their subjects, their physical relation to the material world.
If i deliberately misread the above and turn it into a passage on post-indexical architecture in a Deleuze-on-Bacon context, I could reach the conclusion that the architectural figure is the mnemonic trace of something that has been taken away to create a negative space. We see the imprint of whatever created the architecture. This needs some more thinking, but I think it could be an important part of the theory of a space of suspension, implying some kind of timelessness.
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