Question 3: Do you think work like that of photographers Sally Mann, Jock Sturges and/or David Hamilton is positive, innocuous or pernicious in its effect on the viewer? Do you think the photos were intended to be sexual or is this perception something our oversexed culture brings to them? (Please feel free to incorporate your reaction to Noelle Oxenhandler's essay, "Nole Me Tangere," in your answer.) |
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Works of art -- even works of non-art -- do not and cannot dictate the way they are read or viewed. They are subject to interpretive codes 
and practices current in the culture, codes and practices works of art
neither control nor contain. These photographs are, in themselves,
neither pernicious nor positive, innocuous nor poisonous, beautiful nor
repellent. The way we respond to them, what we say they mean and do, says
everything about us and the way we have been taught to look; it says
nothing about the works. This is true always, but it is most obviously
true when we are most anxious to take our response and put it "into"
(i.e. blame it on) the work: if we feel queasy, the work is sick; if we
feel exalted, the work is fine; if we feel aroused, the work is pornographic
(or purchased, depending on our politics); if we can't make heads or tails
of it, the work is muddled.
This is true even of our discourse. Naomi Wolf finds herself feeling -- well, however it is she feels, she takes that feeling and socks it onto what others have said, mounts her stilts, then exits. It's all in how one sees or reads, and one sees or reads largely according to the complex and subtle instructions absorbed from one's culture. But, there are, even within these instructions, a wide range of possibilities; and we are not compelled to read anything mimetically, pornographically, hysterically. Take, for instance, Sally Mann's Popsicle Drips (1985), a photograph of her son Emmett, seen from the neck down only, body in a sinuous arch, penis prominent, speckled with what the title tells us are harmless stains but which some have figured look like blood. There are, following Wallace Stevens, at least thirteen ways of looking at that photo:
And, if I knew anything about photography, I could go on. But you see the point. The furor over these artists points to a condition in our culture: our addiction to working ourselves up, exciting ourselves in every sense, and then saying, "The photos made me do it!" It's we that are the problem, not the pictures. And, back to Naomi Wolf, ditto: she's her own problem, I believe. She first proclaims herself a free-speech feminist and then draws all sorts of limits to the allowable, limits to which she appends self-flattering terms, abusing some of the rest of us (me, I hope, among them) in the process with thin-lipped talk about decency and exploitation. I guess she figures that naming herself a free-speech feminist makes her one. Having done so, she can proceed to the claptrap rhetoric of all censors: "I believe in the First Amendment, but really now . . ." The logic is familiar and odiferous. I can proclaim myself a champion of particle physics and start slinging judgments around, hash-like. But that doesn't mean I understand or can speak for particle physics. If what we are saying is upsetting, or if the photographs are upsetting, one should look for the cause of the disturbance on the inside. Why are you making of it what you are making? Why do you want to see the photographs that way? What's the pay-off? What's driving you? Those are the interesting questions. I am not interested in why Naomi Wolf responds as she does; I am very interested in why our culture shrieks in unison at these photographs and then blames the images not just for eliciting but for somehow containing that shriek. |
Question 1 A. M. Homes James Kincaid Judith Levine Michael Medved Stephen Schiff Celine Texier-Rose Naomi Wolf Question 2 A. M. Homes James Kincaid Judith Levine Michael Medved Stephen Schiff Celine Texier-Rose Naomi Wolf Question 3 A. M. Homes James Kincaid Judith Levine Michael Medved Stephen Schiff Celine Texier-Rose Sally Mann Question 4 A. M. Homes James Kincaid Judith Levine Michael Medved Stephen Schiff Celine Texier-Rose | |||||||||||||
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