An untitled act of withholding

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Content AN UNTITLED ACT OF WITHHOLDING
by
Lisa Ohlweiler
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
August 2010
Copyright 2010 Lisa Ohlweiler
Table of Contents
List of Figures iii
Abstract iv
Prologue v
Introduction 1
Weston’s Forms 4
Unbridgeable Gap 6
To Face, A Face, No Face 9
Foil 13
Torsos 16
Collapse of Genre and Simultaneity 18
The Kafkaesque in Roni Horn 19
Bibliography 22
ii
List of Figures
Figure 1: Roni Horn, Untitled, No. 1. 1998
Figure 2: Edward Weston, Pepper. 1930
Figure 3: Edward Weston, Pepper. 1929 (14P)
Figure 4: Roni Horn, Untitled, No. 4. 1998
Figure 5: Gerhard Richter, Betty. 1988
Figure 6: Roni Horn, Dead Owl. 1997
Figure 7: James Welling, B35 April. 1980
Figure 8: Roni Horn, Gold Field. 1982
Figure 9: James Welling, Torso 3. 2005-2008
iii
Abstract
Taking as its premise Susan Sontag’s statement that, “Photographs which cannot
themselves explain anything are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and
fantasy”, this thesis paper looks at the photographic works of Edward Weston, Roni
Horn, and James Welling for the clues to how photography might negotiate the
complications it faces with regards to communication. Using literature, painting, and
sculpture to comparatively assess the entrenched disconnections that thwart explanation
in photography, this paper looks to gesture, denial, and the suggestiveness of form as
potential divergence from the problem of explanation and the spiral of inexhaustibility.
iv
Prologue
In Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa awakes to discover that he has
inexplicably transformed into a human-sized insect overnight. Still preoccupied with the
concerns of his former human self, he decides that the one object in his bedroom that he
is determined to hold on to is a picture of a lady dressed all in fur that he had cut from a
magazine, framed, and hung on his wall. The image “showed a lady with a fur cap on
and a fur stole sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur muff into which
the whole of her forearm had vanished!”
1
Gregor, still feeling very human, finds that his
position is at odds with his family’s insistent treatment of him as an insect. When his
family decides it best to remove the furniture from his room to allow his new insect form
to move about unobstructed, the photo on his wall becomes the site of resistance, a
gesture towards the retention of his human identity. Quickly scanning the room to choose
which of his possessions to rescue first, “he was struck by the lady muffled in so much
fur”
2
. Bound by his insect form and unable to communicate his desires to his family, he,
“crawled up to [the frame] and pressed himself to the glass which was a good surface to
hold on to and comforted his hot belly”
3
. Gregor’s desire first for the depicted image (the
fur, the lady, her arm hidden in the muff) and later, as an insect, the
photographic object (the magazine image framed behind glass) mirrors his physical state,
first as human and then as an insect, his soft, warm skin opposing the new hard, cold
1
Kafka, Franz. “Metamorphosis”. The Complete Stories. New York: Schocken, 1995. p. 89.
2
Ibid. p. 118.
3
Ibid. p. 118.
v
exoskeleton.
The brief but critical role of the photograph in Metamorphosis focuses on the dual nature
with which we regard it, as both visual representation and physical object. In spite of
himself, Gregor’s changed state from human to insect shifts the attention of his desire
from the image of a lady in fur to the physical properties of the framed picture under
glass. If we look at an image of a lady in fur, we see the lady and we see the flat
photographic object simultaneously.
4
Kafka exploits the potential for a separate
experience with the image as a visual gateway to another object, place, or person and the
actual object we hold in our hand or frame for our wall. Bifurcating the experience of the
photograph in this way gives the impression of its having an interior and an exterior, the
internal space where the lady and fur reside and the space from which we regard her,
even as we are aware that the photograph has neither; it is only a flat surface. The
narrative amplifies the impression of a photographic interior in Gregor’s alienation from
what the image represents. As a traveling salesman, he is precluded from access to the
womanly ideal that the collected magazine picture depicts. His remoteness from her and
her experience of the sensation of touching the fur is expressed in the distance between
his body and the picture, the glass metaphorically providing the thinly invisible division.
It is this seeming contradiction between a complete understanding of an interior space of
4
Walton, Kendall. “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”. Critical Inquiry 11,
December 1984. p. 252. Kendall Walton makes an extensive argument concerning the nature of
transparency in photography and our experience of it as a depiction of the real. In this essay, he explains
that while we have the impression of seeing the thing depicted in the photograph immediately, to see it as
the object and not a representation of the object, we simultaneously see it as a photography. “To be
transparent is to nearly be invisible. We see photographs when we see through them.”
vi
a photograph and its actual collapse into an encounter with a flat surface that betrays the
division between what we see and what we experience.
vii
Introduction

Figure 1: Roni Horn, Untitled, No. 1. 1998
Susan Sontag wrote, "Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are
inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy."
1
If the first half of
Sontag’s statement elicits objection, it is important to consider that photographs, which
rely on the world to become representations, simultaneously divorce an image from its
worldly context. The implication is that photography itself will not be able to give cause
or reason to its image, but will trade upon this lack. Because the photograph looks like
the world it represents it is not easy to accept that it lacks the same capabilities of
explanation. Consequently, our drive to deduce, speculate, and fanaticize comes from the
persistent feeling that the photograph will and can explain. Edward Weston, Roni Horn,
and James Welling exploit the separation that occurs between the photograph and the
world. Using familiar objects, their photographs avoid symbolism or illustration by
virtue of their depicted subject’s banality. For Weston, these recognizable forms are
easily dismissible and simultaneously indeterminate for content. A familiar object, like a
bell pepper, acts as a nonparticipating form through which he can propose sensuality in
1
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 1 ed. New York, NY: Picador, 2001. p. 23.
1
the implications their curves and surface sheen arouse. Enacting a direct denial of
explanation, the photograph’s opacity insists upon the viewer’s imagination. One can
imagine that Sontag is looking at the pepper photographs when she makes the
assessment; the statement itself a decree on Modernist photography that poses a challenge
to all photography after. Trading on the familiar sight of a bird’s head in an unfamiliar
portrait presentation, the untitled photo series of birds by Roni Horn plays on the
hopelessness of our expectations for explanation in a manner reminiscent of Kafka when
he says, “Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope--but not for us.”
2
Where the
form of Weston’s pepper photographs gesture to the body, Horn’s photographs as
diptychs gesture between each other and to us as the viewer, implicating us as a part of
the photograph’s lack for explanation. James Welling’s photographs provide the bridge
between the formal play and photographic concerns of Weston to the active denial of
expectations and conceptual concerns of Horn. Welling’s photographs of tinfoil and
screens abstract the objects from external context creating a collapse in photographic
depth and the potential for endless speculation of analogous forms. They trade on the
inexhaustibility of Sontag’s statement towards more concrete ends by denying
explanation outside of their own photographic material. Weston, Welling, and Horn
straddle a divide between the familiar, banality of everyday objects and something made
strange through the lens, they demonstrates an inherent understanding of Sontag’s
statement in their ardent depiction of recognizable forms. Welling and Horn, coming
from a background familiar with practitioners such as Weston, seem to take as their
starting point photography’s indeterminacy, using it towards an ends with the possibility
2
Benjamins, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schoken Books, 1968. p. 116. For my purposes, I preferred
the translation of Kafka’s quote found in Illuminations opposing some of the other translated versions.
2
of finitude and control in place of an unmitigable spiral of inexhaustibility. By denying
the immediacy or perceived directness of the photograph, they implicate the viewer and
the act of speculation by challenging the expectation of explanation through gesture,
denial, and the suggestiveness of form.
3
Weston’s forms
Figure 2: Edward Weston, Pepper. 1930 Figure 3: Edward Weston, Pepper. 1929 (14P)
Edward Weston’s peppers, from 1929 and 1930 are early examples of natural studies that
exploit the camera’s ability to re-present textures. With the peppers, it is their slick waxy
exteriors and folds and stark presentation that provides titillating immersion in all the
details the photograph can reproduce. The pepper itself is inconsequential, arbitrary
except for its form. Its austere beauty as an image surpasses its banality as a bell pepper.
"The result is a discovery of the erotic suggestiveness of an ostensibly neutral form, a
heightening of its seeming palpability."
3
Two points of interest emerge from Sontag's
account of the peppers, the first is that the palpability is heightened through erotic
association and the second is the importance of arriving at this suggestion from a neutral,
or rather, banal, form. Sontag notes that Weston's peppers are, "voluptuous in a way that
his female nudes rarely are."
4
More importantly, the peppers are sensuous in a way that
3
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 1 ed. New York, NY: Picador, 2001. p. 98.
4
Ibid. p. 98.
4
the female nudes could never be. The presence of the nude female in the photograph, to
quote the cliché, leaves little to the imagination while the peppers stimulate erotic
association through a dialogue with the viewer in the body’s absence, inviting rather than
illustrating the erotic. The photographs of the peppers boast their ability to present both
sensual form and bodily representation while neither is present in the object of the
pepper. In other words, our relationship to looking at the pepper as a pepper is
complicated by the idea that what we experience is not entirely rationalized in the object.
If we think of the body or of Weston's nudes while looking at his photograph of a pepper,
our erotic thought is connected to the body but if we look at the pepper seeing the
contours that are supposed to resemble the body but still think about the pepper then our
erotic thought turns to the object, as fetish. But our erotic thought is not really connected
to the pepper either for we can imagine that our experience of the actual pepper in the
world would fail to produce the same libidinal response or allusions to the body. It is
only the pepper as photograph that produces this reaction and thus it is essential that its
tactility is imagined and not experienced, that is, through the mediation of the camera.
Which is to say, our penchant for fetishizing Weston’s forms begins with Weston’s
treatment of the object.
5
Unbridgeable Gap
In the examples of Weston’s peppers and of Gregor’s lady in fur, we are looking at two
sides of the photographic fulcrum. The first is from the perspective of the photographer
as collector of objects in the world and the second is from the perspective of the viewer,
the collector of the photograph. The peppers, once captured by Weston’s camera become
Weston’s peppers, an everyday object elevated to the status of art but more importantly
they become images/ objects associated with their “creator”- Weston. Possession
becomes a pacifier in the gap between ourselves and the objects we desire. The
difference between the photographer and the viewer is that the photographer creates the
desire through the need to own and the viewer deals with their desire through ownership.
We can imagine that Gregor comes across the image in the magazine as Weston comes
across the pepper in the world and each, in his own way of framing it, makes it his own.
Photography not only shows us objects that might otherwise not invoke desire but,
through a palpable distance, creates it. As part of the photograph's withholding, our
awareness of this distance's palpability- physically, psychically, and temporally- creates a
longing for the image and consequently creates the desire to possess it. Gregor first
asserts his desire for the image of the lady in fur by taking ownership of it, removing the
page from the magazine and framing it for his wall. With this gesture he removes it from
the realm of public consumption (the magazine) to that of personal consumption (his
wall). The point is not only private meditation but, more importantly, display as anyone
who might view it in his bedroom would be led to associate the image with Gregor, as
6
both 'his' and 'of him', a badge which evinces some part of his personal, aesthetic taste.
Climbing on top of the photograph is a gesture of ownership that brings together the
desire to possess with his desire for the image that is then satisfied (unexpectedly) in the
physical, tactile sensation under his belly. The description of Gregor and the glass
impresses the thin but tangible distance between ourselves and the image, metaphorically,
and between ourselves and the desired object, physically. If we were to imagine what the
attempt at closing the gap between our bodies and the photographed object (and
photograph as an object) might look like, we see the failed attempt when Gregor climbs
onto the frame. The glass frame between Gregor and the photograph illustrates the
unbridgeable gap. One can only really imagine such a merger, however incomplete, in
some fantastically surreal scenario of the most bizarre and horrific fiction. If we look,
instead of at Kafka, at the Surrealist vision of Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye
5
is
saturated with imagery charged with the purpose of imagining the merger of our body
with the desired objects. Story of the Eye centers on object fetish and climaxes in the
moment in which the characters attempt through the most sexually explicit and wildly
violently means to close the gap between the object desired and their own bodies.
Mounting sexual adventures culminate in the moment when Simone, one of the three
main characters, overtaken by her penchant for ovular fetish, inserts the eye into her
vagina after raping, defiling, and murdering the priest to whom the eye belongs. The eye,
which for photographic purposes is the vehicle through which desire is roused, is
reimagined by Bataille for its qualities as the fetishized object of desire. As exemplified
5
Bataille, Georges. Story of the Eye. New Ed ed. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987.
7
in the exaggerated tale of Story of the Eye, the closest we can come to merging with the
desired image (or object, in the case of fetish) is possession or sexual congress.
8
To Face, A Face, No Face
Figure 4: Roni Horn, Untitled, No. 4. 1998
A series of untitled photographic works by Roni Horn from 1998-2007,
6
pictures the
backs of bird heads. The photographs are displayed as diptychs and present a detailed
account of the bird’s bust from behind its head. Foiled against a stark white backdrop,
the photographs provide no other visual information or distractions. Maintaining a
perfectly superficial continuity, we are presented with the maximum amount of detail, all
of their feathers in natural, full color gradations, while exhibiting the minimal amount of
information needed to immediately understand that we are looking at birds. The size and
cropping of the bird heads have a clear connection to portraiture though they deny the
6
It is important to note that the discussion of the 2008 untitled series refers to their installation on a wall
and not as they appear in the book, Bird. Bird, which reproduces the 20 images paired in a book format,
adds to the series a “Hornithology” written by Philip Larratt-Smith. The “Hornithology” is a collection of
bird-related clichés, phrases, and references to books, films, and
Horn herself. Aside from the experience of the book being, for my purposes, very different from
the diptychs on the wall, the addition of the “Hornithology” undermines the strength of the work by
retroactively assigning unrelated context to the images. If the images become associated with, for instance,
the Hitchcock film, The Birds (one of the references in the “Hornithology”) the tone radically shifts. In its
randomness, Larratt-Smith’s “Hornithology” adds levity and playfulness to the series and though the birds
might be experienced as funny or comical, this ascribed tone detracts from any open-ended interpretation
critical to this discussion.
9
very thing that portraiture permits us- an engagement with the face. Despite being
covered in feathers, Horn's birds are akin to body parts- not just heads, maybe phalluses,
elbows, bent wrists, or knees. Beautiful amputated body parts. If “photographs…cannot
themselves explain anything”, the birds make a point of explaining nothing. In the
absence of a face, the heads turn away from revelation and perform a defiant act of
withholding. Weston’s peppers imply the body through their analogous curvature in
form, but in Horn’s birds it is not the implied but the unseen. If Weston's peppers court
desire through an analogy to but absence of the body, Horn's bird heads, their backs
toward the viewer, perform this absence as a disavowal of explanation.
Figure 5: Gerhard Richter, Betty. 1988
To look at this in another way, consider, for the similarity of the subject’s relationship to
the viewer, the painting Betty, 1988, by Gerhard Richter. Betty, with her back towards us,
enacts the same denial of the viewer as the birds. Painted from a photograph, it even
behaves like a photograph, that is, it gives the impression of being tied to a moment in the
world- a snapshot, its concern with light and detail and its reproduction of space resemble
10
the look of a photograph. The critical (if superficial) difference is that the image of Betty
is rendered in paint and in this transference it becomes expressive in a way that the
photograph could not be. That the painting does not rely on the world to exist- Richter
does not need a picture of Betty or even Betty herself to make a painting of her- makes
the fact of its existence an expression detached from explanation. For the same reason
that Sontag’s photograph fails explanation, the painting is exempt from it. Though we are
denied the same frontal view of Betty as we are of Horn’s birds (Betty will also never
turn around), the view of Betty is an evocative and compassionate study where Horn’s is
blatantly clinical (even as it is a study in beauty). Transferred from a photograph to a
painting, Betty’s expressive capabilities are an assailment upon the photograph’s inability
to explain. Betty is perfectly content to be about Betty while the photograph, Weston’s
peppers (or even nudes) and Horn’s birds (as well as her portraits) gesture away from the
thing that they picture. In this way the objects act as prompts that substitute for lacking
expressive capabilities.
Figure 6: Roni Horn, Dead Owl. 1997
11
Preceding the bird series of 1998-2007, Horn's Dead Owl, 1997 shows a similar diptych,
but in this pairing, the bird is shown full-body, facing the camera and is clearly stuffed
and mounted to its perch. What we are denied in the series to follow is evidenced in this
earlier work. Even while employing the same formal device of the later series- doubling
presented as a diptych- Dead Owl is not seen as analogous to the body and, moreover, our
first engagement is not with the details of the feathers but with the eyes, the beak, the
perch, and the object's double-death preservation, first in taxidermy and second as a
photographic record. Given the same level of photographic detail as the later series, the
minute differences in the works are magnified in their psychological impact. Our two
eyes, which must move between them, are met with the fixed gaze of four. Confronted
with the menacing look of two identical stuffed owls, the effect of duplication is
simultaneously a doubling of the photograph's effect. With the birds turned away, the
diptych does not serve to magnify an effect, but to suppress it and withhold it from us. In
our position with respect to the bird, we are denied. We can only look at them. We look
at them and they look at nothing. Whether or not they are images of dead birds, as in
Dead Owl, their stillness is death as they produce the very literal understanding that they
will never face us.
12
Foil
Figure 7: James Welling, B35 April. 1980
It is important to note that the scope of Horn's practice is not limited to photography nor
are her photographs particularly "photographic"
7
, in the way that Weston's work clearly
is. To reconcile the gap between Horn and Weston, I want to look at Mark Godfrey's
comparison between James Welling's tin foil photographs from 1980 and Horn's From a
Gold Field (Surface structure) a photograph that is "pretty much identical" to Welling's
images
8
. Horn's foil photograph is taken from her work Gold Field, a sculpture that aims
at a dialogue with minimalism and uses the photograph as a "tool put to use to
7
For my purposes, I will loosely define “photographic” as having all of the concerns of the conditions
under which a photograph is made, its history, and the materials it involves including lighting, composition
within a frame, and the subject’s position in relationship to the camera.
8
Godfrey, Mark. “Roni Horn's Icelandic Encyclopedia.” Art History, volume 32, issue 5, December 2009.
pp. 932-953. According to Godfrey the black and white photograph of Horn’s sculpture, which is itself a
work, is visually indistinguishable from one of Welling’s tinfoil photographs.
13
Figure 8: Roni Horn, Gold Field. 1982
think about the sculpture"
9
. Horn's use of the photographic medium to meditate on the
surface of the gold foil, now in black and white, argues the camera's ability to present a
tactile surface more coherently than the sculpture. The photograph’s limited frame and
single point of perspective limits the viewer’s experience steering the topic of
concentration to the topographical surface; it performs the task needed to illustrate
properties that may be lost when viewing sculpture. Walter Benn Michaels identifies the
surface difference between the depicted object and the photographic object as the tension
and pleasure in Welling's photographs
10
. By withholding a broader context of
information, the limited experience of the foil and its tactile properties permit a
minimized but inexhaustible engagement, intensifying the pleasure of looking. “Welling
produces photographs of foil to interrogate the status of the photograph, question its
(in)ability to produce abstract images and our propensity to view a crumpled surface as a
9
Ibid. 934.
10
Michaels, Walter Benn. The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006.
14
landscape".
11
The argued distinction in the photographic works is that Horn, according to
Godfrey, has no such desire to examine the medium's use through its history. Horn’s
choice of the photograph over another medium, however, is essentially a concern with the
photographic and the properties that make the medium unique, which mounts identical
interrogations and results in photographs that look like one another. Even as the
differences between their practices will certainly affect the discrepancies in our
understanding of the nearly identical photographs, the exploration, for Horn of her Gold
Foil sculpture and Welling’s tinfoil as landscape, ultimately amounts to the same
engagement with the material’s surface and the camera’s ability to render its
representation, triggering kindred possibilities within its surface topography.
11
Godfrey, Mark. “Roni Horn's Icelandic Encyclopedia.” Art History, volume 32, issue 5, December 2009.
p. 944.
15
Torsos
Figure 9: James Welling, Torso 3. 2005-2008
James Welling’s series Torsos, from 2005-2008, present photograms of screens bent and
contorted in a fashion reminiscent of the tinfoil photographs. The screens are
recognizable as the kind one might find in a door or window. Like Weston’s peppers, the
familiarity of the object makes it easy to dismiss it as the subject of the image. It could
be said, as the title suggests, that the screens, like the peppers, resemble the body. Unlike
Weston’s peppers, which are immediately analogous to his female nudes, Welling’s
invocation of the body calls to mind the (male) torso one might encounter in a Rodin
sculpture. Assuming a similar analogous relationship to the body as Weston’s peppers,
the torsos give the impression of representing the body, as a representation of a sculpture,
a generation removed. Reflected in the title, “Torso”, the screens bleed off the edge of
16
the frame, insinuating an incomplete view of the object. Their insistence on a partial
view, as the camera would frame the torso of a body, necessitates their condition as a
photographed object. Their potential relation to the body is complicated by the act of
bending and folding them for the purpose of the photograph and supports their
relationship to sculpture. Unlike Weston’s peppers, we cannot imagine an encounter with
the screens in the way in which they are presented. By way of their contorted
appearance, Welling’s screens enact a denial of explanation similar to the way in which
Horn’s birds, faced away from the camera, perform. Both Horn and Welling rely on the
object’s familiarity, its ability to be recognized as a screen or a bird, to achieve this
denial. Unlike Horn, the internal/ external relationship between image and photographic
object is collapsed in Welling’s photogram. Where minimal depth of the tinfoil
photograph suggests this collapse, the photogram is this collapse.
17
Collapse of Genre and Simultaneity
To look at the pepper and think of the body, or the foil and see its resemblance to a
landscape, or view the bust of a bird and analogize it to the human head or to body parts,
insists on the need not only to gesture outside of the photograph and the immediacy of the
depicted object but to invoke the image of another object. In the works of Weston,
Welling, and Horn we find the conflation of photographic genres (such as landscapes, still
lives, and portraiture) through the suggestion of a simultaneity of form within their
photographs. Godfrey describes Horn’s photographic work as “undoing” genre
distinctions “allowing a face to become a landscape and a landscape to become a face.”
Or a bird to become a body. The immediacy with which we see the object pictured gives
us the sense that photographs behave literally, as in, “We really do, literally see our
deceased ancestors when we see photographs of them.”
12
If we look at a pepper, we
would say we see the pepper rather than saying we see a representation of the pepper.
Weston negotiates the literal depiction of the pepper by suggesting, through skilled
command of light and shadow, the form of a body. Welling holds “the referent at bay,
creating as much delay as possible between seeing the image and understanding what it
was of.”
13
Horn’s birds however move towards a more immediate interpretation, as
unlike Welling we understand immediately that we are looking at birds and unlike Weston
they take on the human form as seamlessly and immediately as our understanding of
them as birds. The simultaneity of form is instantaneous.
12
Walton, Kendall. “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”. Critical Inquiry 11,
December 1984. p. 252.
13
Krauss, Roslind. "Photography and Abstraction." A Debate on Abstraction. New York: The Bertha and
Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery, Hunter College, 1989. p. 66.
18
The Kafkaesque in Roni Horn
Though the birds are presented as a series of diptychs, we experience each pair as a
syncopated installation with a single point of reception. Standing in front of the birds, the
viewer is implicated. Unlike Gregor’s lady in fur, or Weston’s peppers, or Welling’s
Torsos, Horn’s diptychs are incomplete without the viewer’s act of comparing and
actively looking between them. We stand before the diptychs with their backs turned to
us as if "Before the Law"
14
. They are essentially Kafkaesque
15
as they present the
possibility of admittance but do not allow it. The birds' position in relationship to us is
forever turned away and in two views. We stand behind the birds while paradoxically in
front of the photograph, their stillness in contrast to our active looking. The formula of
the series is disrupted through subtle shifts between each pair. Some of the diptychs
appear to be of the same bird, while others are clearly different birds, sometimes of the
same species, perhaps in different states- molting or not, male or female but they always
resemble one another enough to invite comparison. Furthermore, they play upon the kind
of experience we have with Weston’s pepper (alluding to the body) or Welling’s tinfoil
(absence of object context) while blatantly denying within the image that which they
implicate as a diptych: the viewer. With their backs towards us and our inability to walk
14
Kafka, Franz. “Before the Law”. Parables and Paradoxes. New York: Schocken Books, 1961. pp. 61-71.
“Before the Law” is a short parable in which a man waits before the door of the Law for the first
doorkeeper, the first of three, to grant him admittance. The doorkeeper tells him he cannot enter at this
moment but answers that it may be possible for him to enter in the future. The man waits before the door
and the doorman until his last dying day at which time the doorkeeper closes the door after revealing that
the door existed only for this man who waited his lifetime to enter it.
15
Gross, Ruth. “Kafka’s Short Fiction”. The Cambridge Companion to Kafka. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2002. p. 80. In the discussion of Horn’s birds, I am looking at the Kafkaesque experience
as “one in which the everyday becomes uncanny, weird, and anxiety ridden”.
19
around them, our experience is the counter to Horn’s works in sculpture. The
photographs not only insist on the single point of perspective within the image, but it is
triangulated into our single point of reception for the diptych. The sense of an internal/
external relationship with regard to the birds is amplified by our inability to experience
the work in the round. As photographs on the wall, from our limited point of reception,
their denial exists only for us, infinite so long as we are there in front of them. Their
inexhaustibility is thwarted by our sense of an external relationship to them, by our
understanding that the experience is governed (our viewership is controlled), and by our
simultaneous regard for the conditions external to the photograph.
The expectation that a photograph is equipped for explanation comes from its ability to
behave in a direct, almost literal, manner. In the frustration of the immediacy with which
a photograph can reveal itself, Weston, Welling, and Horn find the ability to gesture
towards something else entirely by simultaneously invoking another object and
challenging our understanding of forms we are familiar with. That our expectation has
the potential to compensate for what the image lacks is at the heart of the optimism of
Sontag’s quote. From the perspective of the photographer, however, the statement is in
fact not optimistic, as every photograph’s inexhaustibility is its lost potential for
communication. The question is: what territory is left for the photographer? In Weston
and even more in the works of Welling and Horn, the potential of their work lies in the
exchange of explanation for gesture, illustration for straightforward depiction, and to
confront, directly, our frustrations with the image’s withholding. They are optimistic in
their pursuit. Their images do not simply illustrate this inexhaustibility or the
20
impossibility of communication; instead they seek a less direct route and present it as the
very challenge of the direct medium.
21
Bibliography
Bataille, Georges. Story of the Eye. New ed. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987.
Benjamins, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schoken Books, 1968.
Godfrey, Mark. “Roni Horn's Icelandic Encyclopedia”. Art History, volume 32, issue 5,
December 2009.
Gross, Ruth. “Kafka’s Short Fiction”. The Cambridge Companion to Kafka. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Kafka, Franz. “Before the Law”. Parables and Paradoxes. New York: Schocken Books,
1961.
Kafka, Franz. “Metamorphosis”. The Complete Stories. New York: Schocken, 1995.
Krauss, Roslind. "Photography and Abstraction." A Debate on Abstraction. New York:
The Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery, Hunter College, 1989.
Michaels, Walter Benn. The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York, NY: Picador, 1973.
Walton, Kendall. “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”.
Critical Inquiry 11, December 1984.
22

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Taking as its premise Susan Sontag’s statement that, “Photographs which cannot themselves explain anything are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy”, this thesis paper looks at the photographic works of Edward Weston, Roni Horn, and James Welling for the clues to how photography might negotiate the complications it faces with regards to communication. Using literature, painting, and sculpture to comparatively assess the entrenched disconnections that thwart explanation in photography, this paper looks to gesture, denial, and the suggestiveness of form as potential divergence from the problem of explanation and the spiral of inexhaustibility.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Asset Metadata

Creator Ohlweiler, Lisa (author)

Core Title An untitled act of withholding

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Fine Arts

Publication Date 08/10/2010

Defense Date 07/01/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Edward Weston,Franz Kafka,Georges Bataille,Gerhard Richter,James Welling,Kendall Walton,OAI-PMH Harvest,Photography,Roni Horn,Susan Sontag,Walter Benn Michaels

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor White, Charles (committee chair), Lockhart, Sharon (committee member), Tumlir, Jan (committee member)

Creator Email laohlweiler@gmail.com,lohlweiler@hotmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3365

Unique identifier UC1183995

Identifier etd-Ohlweiler-3991 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-362893 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3365 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Ohlweiler-3991.pdf

Dmrecord 362893

Document Type Thesis

Rights Ohlweiler, Lisa

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu