PHOTOGRAPHY & FETISHISM

FETISHISM involves a person having a strong liking or need or a particular object or activity which gives them sexual pleasure and excitement.

It was Benjamin writing in 1930’s who developed Marx notion of commodity fetishism and applied it to cultural practice under capitalism, particular to his analysis of nineteenth century.

Commodity fetishism described the ritualistic value that is ascribed to such goods because of their exchange of monetary value.

Plate 221 Jacques-Andre Boiffard, photograph, in G. Bataille, ‘Le gros orteil’ (Big

Toe)

Plate 212 Jacques-Andre Boiffard, photograph, in G. Bataille, ‘Le gros orteil’ (Big

Toe)

The preoccupation with the angled look in photography was not, of course, confined to surrealism. A concern with camera angle, as one of the specific properties of photographic process was shared by the photographers.

There was a primarily a commitment to the particular language of photography, which had to find new ways to represent new political and social realities.

The crucial difference in surrealism was that sexuality and desire were central in the process of deflection from reality.

Plate 213 Brassai, untitled, photograph. Collection RosaBianca Skira

Palte 214 Andre Masson, Gradiva,1939, oil on canvas

Masson portrays a female figure as half-flesh, half-statue. The divided female is half the classical draped female figure reminiscent of Picasso’s monumental nudes of twenties.

Plate 217 Rauol Ubac, Mnnequin, 1937 (photograph of Masson’s manequin.

Through eroticism, which must, according to Breton, be considered the ‘keystone’ of his work, Masson achieved a general sense of dizziness. And technically he achieved this by plastic metaphor in its pure state, by which by mean a literary uninterpretable metaphor.

Plate 218 Sigmund Freud’s plaster cast of ‘Gradiva’, bought by Freud at Vatican Museum in 1902

Delusions and dreams in Jensen’s “Gradiva”

It is the story of a young archeologist, Hanold who fell inlove with a classical relief that he first saw in a museum of antiques. He oobtained a plaster-cast of the relief, which he named GRADIVA or ‘THE GIRL WHO STEPS ALONG’ and hung it on study.

Labouring under this delusion, he beieved that he found gradiva in pompeii. The woman whom he meets turns out to be his childhood sweetheart, Zoe, who by appearing to accept his delusion fully, actually works to bring about his cure. The task is to turn the love for a muse into the love for a woman, who is an active participant in life. significantly, for Freud, the woman happens to be a physician and effects the young man’s cure by using.

The two-folded character of GRADIVA/ZOE and the precarious state of ambiguity between the muse and the real woman.

Plate 219 , The Surrealist Gallery, ‘Gradiva’, in A. Breton, La Cle Des champs, Paris

When, in 1937, the Surrealist opened a their own gallery, of which Breton was the director. Breton seems to have opened the gallery largely because he was short of funds.

Plate 220 Dora Maar, Le Simulateur (The Simulator), 1936, photograph.

Plate 222 Leonora Carrington, self-portrait, ‘A I Auberge du Cheval d’ Aube’ 1936-37

Leonora carrington, an english writer and artist who went to Paris in the 1930’s. it is an example of the kind of fantastic Surrealism, with a preference child-like imagery, that is markedly different from the work of Oppenheim.

Carrington has painted herself in an interior, with a rocking horse suspended in space casting a shadow on the farwall, and with a fantastic creature at her feet; a magical horse can be seen in an almost ethereal landscape in the distance.

Plate 223 Meret Oppenheim, Ma Gouvernaute (My Nurse), 1936, white heels with paper ruffles, presented on a oval plater.

oppenheim’s object on the other hand, used childhood memory differently; she claimed the work was made to revenge a nurse who had tied her feet together as a child, but she resists the child-like connotations. The shoes, trussed like a chicken, are served up on a silver platter

Plate 224 Frida Kahlo, Self-portrait dedicated to Leon Trotsky, 1927

She painted herself in a robe of wings gilded with butterflies, and its exactly in this guise that she draws aside the mental curtain.

This is the point in Breton’s account where Kahlo as a muse figure and Kahlo as artist are most clearly conflated, where a woman endowed with all the gifts of seduction is also an artist delicately situated at the point of intersection between the political line and artistic line.

Plate 225 Frida Khalo, Lo que el agua me ha dado (what the water yields me), 1938

Plate 227 Frida Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital, 1932