Melancholia and the Dialectics of Seeing War: Celmins, Richter and the Hyper-unreal

“During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence.” Walter Benjamin

I am wondering, here, about what happens when we increasingly receive so much of our information about the world second hand, through images or text, and on flat, lit, screens? What happens when so much of our emotional world is in relation to representations of actual experience, and in particular when what so many of us actually know about war and violence is in response to images on screens? Walter Benjamin, speaking to the impact of photography and film claimed that “To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.” Benjamin could not have imagined the reproductive technologies we now have at our disposal, nor their real time capabilities. Does this make our feelings any less authentic? Or, as many have claimed, do we simply become numb to the reality of human suffering? From Baudrillard’s assertion “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” to Sontag’s “Looking at War” (from which I will borrow), we have increasingly understood war as a simulacrum that tends to affect most as information rather than physical endangerment. In addition to the previous questions, I wonder why many painters, even after the advent of photography, continue to use the medium to deal with images, period, and specifically images of violence, when it seems to be such a poor medium compared to our ability to capture and represent violence today with photography and moving pictures. How can painting, this historic craft, unmoving, created by hand out of liquid colors, continue to be a site where artists work out their relationship to pictures, to representation, and to the violence and pain that accompanies the human condition?

I would contend that part of what painting does, by revealing its method of construction, is to make us acutely aware that we are looking at the still image as a built (constructed?) thing; painting can take the language of all picture making, all forms of representation, and bring those qualities to the forefront- the dimensional object with sides and scale makes us aware that pictures have edges, that there might be something left out of the picture; the built strokes of color reveal, in even the most photo-real painting, that these pictures have to be made, decisions determined on how to get to an image, color mixed, a cognizance that choices have been made; as opposed to the way that the neutrality of the lens and the machine might cover up, or work to make us unaware of the production of the image. So on some level I would argue that part of what painting might tell us is what we can-not “know” from images and I would like to investigate some artists who I believe are working through paint to speak to the distancing of representation, and the strangeness of having emotional responses to “pictures.” I am going to particularly focus on the works of two highly acclaimed painters, Vija Celmins and Gerhardt Richter, both children of the second world war (Celmins an emigrant to the U.S. from Latvia, and Richter escaping from East to West Germany months before the wall was built), but I could suggest that nearly any contemporary painter making recognizable pictures would also have to cope with the nature of representation after the invention of photography, which rendered the act of painting the world unnecessary as a “record” of a time, and left painting as “art.”

In perhaps the most famous suite of violent pre-photography drawings/prints, “The Disasters of War,” Goya, the great Spanish painter, depicts the atrocities committed by Napoleon’s army. Goya included text at the bottom of the prints that would say things like “I have seen this;” “this really happened;” etc. In “Looking at War,” Susan Sontag speaks to the difference between these prints and a photo, noting that “artists “make” drawings and paintings while photographers “take” photographs....a painting is judged a fake when it turns out not to be by the artist to whom it had been attributed to; a photograph is judged fake when it turns out to be deceiving the viewer about the scene it purports to depict.” So while Goya has worked to make a record of the violence of war, we understand that he has also taken liberties– removed the background, centered the subjects, and exacerbated our focus; as all forms of representation do by simply cutting, flattening, and framing our world. Again, Sontag, speaking to Goya’s images, claims, “things did not happen exactly like this. Things like this happened....a photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show...that is why photographs can count as evidence.”

After the invention of photography, and by the civil war and earlier, you do not have Goya’s “I have seen this,” but “it has seen this.” There is a cold neutrality to the images of battlefields strewn with bodies, but there is also an immediacy and truth, “evidence,” that we would not give to something drawn or painted. The dead bodies captured are of real people with individual identities. We understand them as bodies like our own and can mourn for the real lives lost and the waste of war. These images are no longer allegories, they are documentation. The scene has not been composed within the frame of the painting, but has been framed by the photographer. Or, again, in Sontag’s words “It is always the picture that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.”

In looking at an image like Robert Capa’s famous photograph from the Spanish War it seems that the moment could only be captured by a lens. It is an instant. It is what a mechanical device does. And we presume that this is a true (real?) and not a posed photograph as it is not a pose that could be held. I would argue that, pre- photography, we did not have these poses. While it would be too digressive to go into it here, my guess, if one were to really look at paintings before photography, you could see dynamic poses (anything could be held for a period), but not truly anti-gravitational poses–they were simply not a part of the visual register. Benjamin noticed the affects of film, suggesting that it essentially changed human understanding, claiming “The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was already visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones, which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the affect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions.” Here the psyche has new information, changing the way we perceive, as Laurie Anderson would note about “walking” in her video monologue “Walking and Falling;” “with each step you fall forward slightly, and then catch yourself from falling, over and over you are falling, and then catching yourself from falling.” This deconstruction of motion is probably only able to be imagined after the advent of film, where motion is mechanical, and where we are able to slow-down, speed-up, and manipulate motion (will return to that later). I am reminded of the “Men in the Cities” series of drawings by Robert Longo from the 1980’s (simultaneous to Celmin’s investigation of photography and painting and both working out of LA) where he threw objects at his models and photographed them as they dodged. Removing the background, and precisely drawing the figures–one is unsure of whether they are dancing, dying, being abducted, etc. Richter and Celmins will both examine the novel images that photographs brings to the visual register and attempt to think through the medium of photography.

Looking at painting, and paintings of violence, near the moment of the invention of photography, we find something like Manet’s deconstruction of the medium of paint in “The Execution of Emperor Maximilian”. These are models subject to the law of gravity and the parts of the painting that have to be invented (like smoke, which is never still) are quite intentionally badly painted (they are, in fact, distinctly “paint”). Manet is accused by Bataill–“On the face of it death, coldly, methodically, dealt out by a firing squad, precludes an indifferent treatment; such a subject is nothing, if not charged with meaning for each one of us. But Manet approaches it with an almost callous indifference that the spectator, surprisingly enough, shares to the full. Maximilian reminds us of a tooth deadened with novocain...Manet posed some of his models in the attitude of dying, some in the attitude of killing, but all more or less casually, as if they were about to buy a bunch of radishes...” But I believe that what Bataille is missing is that this is part of Manet’s investigation; paintings are constructions; they are fictions. Interestingly, contemporary critic Dave Hickey will describe Vija Celmins work in similar terms, claiming “the manner in which Celmin’s drawings first evoke sublime romantic melancholy and then negate it constitutes part of their meaning.” Paintings take time to put together so cannot, and perhaps should not, “capture” reality in the way a photograph can. The soldiers are posed; the picture is fabricated; the guns are essentially half-way through the body of the people they are shooting; the background breaks down completely into blobs of paint (“impression/ism”); the casual spectators seeming to reference cherubs from renaissance painting. The Execution of Maximilian is a deconstruction of history painting, and an early questioning of whether we should derive emotions, patriotic or other, from pictures.

It would be nearly impossible to stage Tyler Hicks’ photo of a Taliban fighter killed by his enemies, it is a tragic and inhumane destruction of a body, BUT, and this is a big BUT, the difficulty that Susan Sontag, in “Looking at War,” finds with pictures of violence in a 21st century saturated by images, and even as they intend to evoke empathy, is that photographs are inevitably beautiful, even when they are of horrific things. This is difficult to explain except to say that, on some formal level, all representations are beautiful- they are pulled from our world; framed– journalist are trained photographers as well- and perhaps now we all are because we have been exposed to so many pictures. Bataille, in his examination of the base, theorized that, “It seems that the desire to see is stronger than horror or disgust.” And Sontag claims, specifically about war photographs, that “to photograph was to compose (with living subjects, to pose); the desire to arrange elements in the picture did not vanish because the subject was immobilized, or immobile;” going on to say “but the landscape of devastation is still a landscape,” and, finally, as another German post- war painter like Amselm Kieffer might evoke, “There is beauty in ruins.”

To go back momentarily to Manet and his painting “The Dead Toreador”, and after considering contemporary war photographs, Manet’s figure might be the least dead, dead bullfighter–the only signifier of death, the small drip of blood running out from under the shoulder. The pose, coupled with the strange lighting on the “floor” (which has no horizon line–we will return to this with Celmins and Richter) makes him look like he is levitating. The painting is a construct filled with symbolism that becomes the primary reading of this piece, but I would reason that its meaning might actually be in the act of painting it, and that the feelings that the painting may evoke have more to do with formal issues and the way it was painted than what was painted.

In Jeff Wall’s historical “Dead Troops Talk” we see a contemporary photographer’s deconstruction of the facticity of photography. The photographer must, in some way, narrate the belief in the photographic picture as he does not have material and touch to use toward rethinking the image. The construction of a photograph like “Dead Troops Talk” requires that all has to happen before the photo is taken. A painting, in difference, is the very result of a series of material constructions and applications; that is essentially what a painting is. With the time that it takes to “make” a painting, the question, clearly visible in Manet, and moving forward to post-photography painting, is–what can it possibly tell us about our current image world that other mediums cannot do faster, more accurately, and with the reproducibility that a painting is lacking–painting’s “medium”, as Benjamin claims in “The work of art” being in the aura of the original, of its singularity, and of its one- on-one interaction with its audience.

The argument that I would like to make with painters like Vija Celmins and Gerhardt Richter, who both evolve out of war-time, is that maybe they do not tell us so much about the content of images, but about the realities of photography and what we can know and not know from them–or as Hickey will describe in Celmin’s paintings “it is the photograph (and not the object or the image or its referents) that constitutes the critical content of Celmin’s work–and, further, that it is the memory of the photograph that facilitates Celmin’s seamless conflation of romantic iconography and modernist studio practice into a distinctly post-modern celebration of the exteriority if the image.” Painting’s material nature stills the photograph even further, making it out of a liquid substance that has solidified, as though it has been captured in wax/amber–or, again, as the art critic Dave Hickey will frame it regarding Vija Celmin’s paintings “Celmin’s almost suboptical adjustment of the photographic image to the smooth plane of her work has the effect of freezing it.” Other changes to the initial image might include shifts in scale and the material ground of the image. Even Warhol, deconstructing painting through the use of screen-printing, and who does not fit with the intense hand-built and material quality of the painters I am focused on here, in “Race Riot,” still understood the power of pulling a transient newspaper photograph, enlarging it and printing on canvas–creating a new object that asks that we change our valuation of the image.

As Vija Celmins’ developed her painting, she speaks about looking at old war photographs, even though some are violent, as a way to feel connected to her homeland, which she had been forced to leave. Celmins begins mastering her craft by painting pictures of the things around her; small moments in the studio. But occasionally those moments allude to additional information, like a hotplate that is on, or an object like a television that has an image.

She will move from these closely observed still-lives to working directly from the photograph; but it is still an observing of the physical photograph–( including the site where ...including the wall.) finish

Celmins slowly removes the color from her paintings, (as though the color might give too much information) and makes distinct note of the way she has received her images. (expand)

Sontag concludes, “looking at war” by questioning her own previous assumptions about how images become deadened; or how we become callous to horrific images. Theoretical presumptions about photography

-the first is that public attention is steered by the attentions of the media- which means images. When there are photographs, a war becomes real.

-the second idea is that in a world saturated, even hypersaturated with images, those which should matter to us have a diminishing affect: we become callous

Ultimately she concludes that “an image is drained of its force by the WAY it is used, where and how often it is seen.” And this is revelatory- where and how often- understanding that images are contextual and subject to time.

So Celmin’s, in her tromp loi painting, seems to double distance by including the reference for its contemplation

She also deals with paints imperfections and its inability to describe detail- or plays with cropping (what we are shown etc.)

Or in this very quiet painting where a toy from ww2 shows a struck plane as the base of the game; which also reference a globe...

She eventually realizes that she does not need the photograph’s reference because these images could only come from photographs. They are things captured, conditions captured in action- essentially invisible to the naked eye. And certainly not able to be captured by the slow act of painting. Imagine a plein-air painter trying to capture Celmin’s image of a fighter jet, or the waves of the ocean, as she will paint later.

My reference to the “hyper-un-real” in the title of this essay alludes to the group of painters in the 1970’s referred to as the “Photorealist” or “Hyper-realist.” This group of painters, coming out of a Pop-Art sensibility, worked from photographs to create highly detailed paintings that came from the ability to translate the photograph, at length, at without the reference ever shifting. (put in example) While Richter and Celmins certainly, on paper (or on canvas, as it were...), seem to belong to this idea of painting, their work has never fit comfortably because, as the allusion to “un-real” might pertain, they are, in many ways, often referencing an event that never happened; meaning that they seem to be looking for a cutting from a motion; something that could only, specifically, be captured by a machine. What I am trying to get at is that there is a different sensibility at work here, something about a violence and distancing of the “cut” that the artists try to heighten through the act of painting–Celmins through the search for the impossible, overall image of nature, captured precisely, and Richter through the manipulation of the photo-real image through the blurring, bringing out the formal elements of the image through its destruction. Both artists question the space between object and image, and both challenge the division of representational versus abstract painting. Celmins, I would guess, does not see her paintings of the galaxy so much as image of a galaxy, but as a galaxy, where light from the months of building a painting may actually just be coming through the surface to reach our eye, much as the we know that light of distant stars, that we see in the moment, was released long ago. And Richter, always frusterating interviewers by refusing to acknowledge that his two side-by-side investigations were different. (get quote) Both artists, in some ways, could be seen as iconoclasts, or at very least, as developed by Latour, in “Iconoclash,” where the conditions surrounding the image/object become at least as important as the chosen image that starts the process....Of the many types of iconoclasts that Latour lists, Celmins and Richter might belong to the “against freezing” type as they question and propose to us where we locate meaning in an image, presenting their questions to us in the form of objects.... Which might lead us back to the other term in the title of the essay- “Melancholia” (perhaps figure out how to bring in the mourning of the passing of time, how could this relate to the cut, could the cut itself be the violence, could it be the stillness that makes us aacutely aware of the passing of time? Could the mourning be what the image can’t tell us about the violence, except for our inability to stop it (Sontag) mediation on how much we do not know translates to a mediation on how little civilization “knows” or how far we have not come....

These specific images of transient events become the core of Celmin’s investigation, alluding to the cutting or capturing of a moment, the unmoving nature of the photograph, and our fragile relationship to the passing of time, be it in the natural form of a spider’s web or the ocean, or in the mechanical world of warfare.

Gerhardt Richter will evolve alongside Celmins; both developing in the shadow of Pop, and both dealing with specific pasts that will, with their mutual interest in the photographic image, lead them to cover much of the same subject matter early on– in particular the ability of photography to show moving objects, anti-gravitational, and stopped in mid-air.

Trained in traditional painting in East Germany, Richter escapes to West Germany before the wall divides the nation. He is introduced to the pop art of Western Europe and the States and becomes synonymous with the blurring of the painted field, as well as carrying on two separate bodies of work that would seem to be at odds–figuration and abstraction. He finds a way to take his traditional technical understanding and through various gestures through wet oil paint, to imbue images with a secondary condition, while at the same time, obfuscating the image itself. He, like Celmins, will treat everyday images in a neutral, cold, observed manner, not really giving away an ideological position.

Perhaps like Manet, Richter will treat the image world with a certain indifference. Whether flowers, porn, or violence, all images are painted the same and then washed out until they get at a “mood” that the artist intends. There is little to let us know why the image was selected or how we are supposed to be with it.

When Richter depicts cities from above, hinting at the language of abstract expressionism, we see an image that just barely holds together as a recognizable, nameable thing. The angle only coming from the modern technology of the airplane, and looking down.

Here Richter takes what seems to be a neutral image, and by inserting the language of abstraction and the blur, suddenly asks that we slow down and consider the form of the painting. Perhaps where we begin to see things as distanced, abstracted, as “image,” and not as a place filled with people. To see things in this way is to see the world as picture and might allow for something like the devastating bombing of German cities at the the end of WW2, where they were leveled to ground in an attempt to force Hitler back to Germany and “to destroy the morale of the enemy civilian population” (footnote 14 in Sebald). As W.G. Sebald (who haunts this discussion of images) evokes in A Natural History of Destruction, his analyzation of the absence, in German writing, of reference to the ruthless bombing of German cities and civilian populations, acts of destruction require seeing things as flattened, two-dimensional “image” rather than things. It is the very definition of “objectification”–the nature of representation and the basis of prejudice – the very definition being “the action of degrading someone to the status of a mere object.”

Maybe best exemplified in a passage that Sebald records from a BBC transmission from one of the British Bomber Planes–“That’s the city itself! ... It’s going to be quite soundless, the roar of our aircraft is drowning everything else. We are running straight into the most gigantic display of soundless fireworks in the world, and here we go to drop our bombs on Berlin.” After the aircraft has left the target area the crew members “release their tension in sudden loquacity. “Not too much nattering,” the skipper tells them. “By God, that looks like a bloody good show,” says one. “Best I’ve ever seen,” adds another. And then, after some time, a third voice, rather quieter, speaking with something like awe: “Look at that fire! Oh boy!” (footnote 21 from Sebald) Here the language sounds filmic, at a remove, visual (with even the sound removed), and with no mention of the people who live in the architecture of the city.

With the hoffstedler, a group of terrorist who were jailed and mysteriously died/committed suicide...
He uses the blur to distance us from the image- dealing somewhat with the “blur” of journalistic handheld photography he does not allow us to see detail, and makes us hyper aware of the paint (wet oil that can be completed perfectly and maneuvered with a dry brush

Richter and Celmins often remove color from their work, both deal with the inadequacy of the lens, both work from the photograph as source. Why the cold neutrality, the lack of “expression” that had come to signify creativity and emotion? I think maybe that they, as artists, understand that there is no image that can speak to the real conditions of violence.(painting as a kind of refusal? Quote from Hickey) I think that it is interesting that both Richter and Celmins would go on to work in all- over, nearly pure, abstraction- Richter’s looking like a photograph squeegeed beyond recognition, and celmin’s choosing all-over scattered images without horizon or a grounding in the landscape.

The impossibility of reaching an understanding through pictures at the same time that so much of our experience is being received through representation and that we are accessing much of our emotional experience through media, whether the phone, Facebook, online chatting- that these things happen through screens, are mediated through screens.

What I am ultimately trying to articulate is the different ways that photography and painting try to get at the violence in our contemporary world, and to suggest that painting still has something to tell us about the nature of images- it just may not be where we expected to find it. One might wonder about working from what seems to be such a negative dialectic. Why make things that tell us what we cannot know? Or challenging the thinking that art should be uplifting. But I think that (the two?) are not mutually exclusive, and this is why the materiality/objectness of painting continues to feel relevant to me, and where painting continues to have a complicated dialectical quality–that movement between image and objectness; the doubt of the image constructed. The process of painting seems particularly well positioned to cope with the dialectic between feelings and representations. To potentially speak to the image through touch–the feeling of a painting is ultimately not in the content/image itself but in the hand touching and the time of building to the perceived image. As Dave Hickey so acutely notes in his assessment of Celmins’ work, “we might theorize that the photograph itself, cherished and scrutinized by the artist, objectifies her loss and subsequent desire, and that the painting made out of it objectifies the subjectivity of the photograph, investing it with an undeniable exteriority; and, in that attenuation of desire, the paintings transmutes the empty loss of the refugee into the full absence of the nomad–diverting the angst of history into the intensity of real time.”

Made explicit by painting, think of Magritte’s “this is not a pipe,” or Jasper Johns’ “flag.” One might say that doubt is the doubt of all painting after the advent of photography...an implicit doubt that re-enlivens and makes wondrous and tragic, our current image world. (tie together)

“the problem is not that people remember through photographs but that they remember only through photographs. This remembering through photographs eclipses other forms of understanding–and remembering.” Sontag

Richter-page 158 “The Daily Practice of Painting”

The question is, how far can this schizophrenia be stretched, how far can it really be kept alive, or when does it become an empty pose: to assert this contradiction over and over again, and to act within the contradiction again and again, but without trying to get over the contradiction?

I don’t know what contradiction you are talking about.

It’s the contradiction of knowing full well the means you are using wont achieve what you aim for, and at the same time not being prepared to change those means.

That’s not a contradiction, it is a perfectly normal state of affairs. The normal mess, if you like. And that couldn’t be changed by choosing different means and methods. Because all means are of equal value?
No, but all are similarly inadequate...

hickey, Vija Cemlin’s: The Path Itself

“even though the cropped and focused, black-and-white photographs that Celmins’ uses as sources do, indeed, endow her work with the ominous grisaille, the dense horror vacui and the aura of romantic solitude that we recognize as symptoms of artistic melancholia, our access to this emotion is deflected as well. Celmins’ deadpan rendition of the photograph denies us any clue, any image or mark that might humanize the “character” of this melancholia and allow our theatrical participation in it.” (this could be said of the Manet)

“So, when we consider Celmin’s source photographs as content, it helps to remember that all the promises that Vija Celmins’ works make, and consequently break, photographs keep. Where else does one go but to photography for subjective iconography? Emotive imagery? Nostalgic atmosphere? Sublime nature? Formal transcendence? Icons of personality? Atmospheric melancholy? Catalogues of loss? Communion with the dead. Certainly the artists went no where else in 1965 when, in a miasma of homesickness, she scoured the junk shops, secondhand stores and yard sales of Las Angeles for evidence of her war-ravaged past–buying up “war books and tearing out little clippings of airplanes, bombed out places–nostalgic images.”

P 94 “harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they don’t help us much to understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us...on Bosnian war “It tells you everything you need to know” But of course it doesn't tell us everything we need to know...

P 96 –presumptions about photography
-the first is that public attention is steered by the attentions of the media- which means images. When there are photographs, a war becomes real.

-the second idea is that in a world saturated, even hypersaturated with images, those which should matter to us have a diminishing affect: we become callous

-An image is drained of its force by the WAY it is used, where and how often it is seen.

P 94 “transforming is what art does, but photorgraphy that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems “aesthetic” that is, too much like art...
“photographs that that depict suffering shouldn’t be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize. In this view a beautiful photograph drains attention from the

sobering subject and turns it towards the medium itself, inviting the viewer to look aesthetically and thereby compromising the picture’s status as document.

From Sandra Raponi, Meaning and Meloncholia in Beckette’s Endgame

“I once knew a madman who thought the end of the world had come. He was a painter— and engraver. I had a great fondness for him. I used to go and see him, in the asylum. I'd take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look! There! All that rising corn! And there! Look! The sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness! (Pause.) He'd snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes. (Pause.) He alone had been spared. (Pause.) Forgotten. (Pause.) It appears the case is ... was not so ... so unusual. (Endgame 44)” (but anyone who loves paint, loves the color gray, it is the most able to move towards other colors...)

Kristeva's analysis of sublimatory art in Black Sun is not limited to art that is cathartic in its thematic development. She also argues that literary works can overcome melancholia at a semiotic level, by means of melody, tone, rhythm, gesture, semantic polyvalency, and prosody. In Kristeva's brief reference to Beckett in the above passage, she suggests that his works are able to curb melancholia through the semiotic—through the narrative's broken and retarded movement. Such an analysis is more appropriate with respect to Beckett's work since for him, form is as important as content; or rather, "form is content and content is form."2 Unfortunately, the effect of the semiotic on the ability of the text to spread or curb melancholia is indeterminate, as will be discussed in the last section of this essay with respect to Beckett's use of pause and laughter.

2. Beckett makes this statement in his analysis of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. The passage continues: "You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read—or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something, it is that something itself." "Dante...Bruno...Vico...Joyce," (1929) in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (London: John Calder Publishers Ltd., 1983), p. 27

“Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city-state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation”

― Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia

The melanchology, that someone like Barthes, would claim for all still images; perhaps tempered when the image is no longer made by a machine, is physically produced by a human touch?

Carried away into the solitude of mutism, depressed persons do not forget how to use signs. They keep them, but the signs seem absurd, delayed, ready to be extinguished, because of the splitting that affects them- Kristeva 47

Think of Richter’s quote “all are equally unable to... why paint when you know that it will not do what you want...

When I talk about the hyper-un-real I am talking about the idea that the images do not even come from the world of “reality” they are distinctly about catching a still, removing it from “reality” ...where as hyper-real is about photography/still- life...