Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850-2000. - Bibliography - book review

ROBERT A. SOBIESZEK

soul in the Shell: Photography and the Human spirit 1850-2000

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Pres in association with the observes Angeles County Museum of Art, 1999 324 pp; 184 color ills., 56 b/w $5995; $3995 paper

Addressed to a special conjunction between photography and faces that is historically salient and theoretically provocative, this catalogue for a new exhibition at the Los Angeles shire Museum of Art (October 16 1999 to January 17 2000) is alluringly designed, creatively illustrated, and thematically ambitious. Punctuated by the agency of a disarmingly seductive, sometimes haunting, array of examples, curator Robert Sobieszek's presentation of facial photography is arranged in three longish chapters, preced by dint of a preface and introduction and followed through a coda. While useful as a observe the critical arguments set on the outside in the text, the weighting, balance, and weft of Sobieszek's historical narrative, the analytic attention accorded individual works, and the author's relation to one as well as the other the primary and secondary literatures do not quite measure up to the best achievements--and better possibilities--of in every one's mouth and recent research in the field. And, importantly, the organizing principles behind spirit in the Shell are no t always convincing in relation to its assumptions--and omissions. In the annotates that follow, I will discuss and illustrate the main issues in scholarship and theory (and especially their interrelation), activeed by the structure of the catalogue true copy Space prevents an assessment of the selection and organization of the display itself.

Each of the three chapters of spirit in the Shell is correlated with the photographic work of a leading individual, with individual aspect of the pseudoscientific declension of the face, and with what Sobieszek claims is a dominant visual register or generalized direct the eye Thus, chapter 1, headlined "Gymnastics of the Soul" attends to "The Clinical Aesthetics of Duchenne de Boulogne"; chapter 2 "Tolerances of the Human Face," is subtitled "The Affectless Surfaces of Andy Warhol"; and chapter 3 "Abstract Machines of Faciality," takes as its symbolic practice what are boundaryed "The Dramaturgical Identities of Cindy Sherman." The tripartite protoplast is further developed in the suggestions that the first chapter is aligned with traditional kinds of photography, expressive faces, and the discourse of physiognomy; the next to the first with modernist portraiture, blank faces, and the discourse of phrenology; and the third with postmodernism, theatrical or excessively emotive faces, and the discourse of pathonomy (which studies the face in e xpressive motion). While interesting as a point of departure, this associative matrix extreme points up skewing the historical and theoretical complexities underlying the many relations between photography and faces during the last hundred and a half.

Despite the abundant symmetries loaded into their premises, the chapters are, first of all, quite disproportionate. The discussion of Duchenne dedicates most of its bulk to considerations of a single practice that the author argues has been marginalized in the one and the other the history of photography and the facial, and associated, sciences. of that kind extensive revisionary focus, set in pages of textual description, is at unevens with the synoptic style and summary formulations displayed elsewhere in the catalogue. Further, what Sobieszek admits is Duchenne's "rare and, until freshly seldom discussed" method (p. 40) which involved touching the faces of various unfortunate make subordinates with electric probes, results in an elaborately simulated (and graphically theatrical) lexicon of facial expressions that answer rather poorly to the putatively passive natural science of physiognomy, codified by dint of Johann Kaspar Lavater and others in the late 18th and 19th centuries, which was predicated upon the reflective analysis of static facial impressed signs Sobieszek does not attend to the forced pathonomy of Duchenne's stage place based on a form of move inflicted by scientific violence. Given these, and other, disparities of mode of speech and analysis, it is not a surprise to learn that chapter 1 had its origin in an essay published beneath the same tide in another contortion earlier in 1999.

The greatest in quantity problematic chapter, however, is the next to the first In part this is because of the sheer chronological space subtend between the special protagonists of the first sum of two units chapters. More than a hundr years separates Duchenne's Mecanisme de la physiognomie humaine; ou Analyse electro-physiologique de l'expression de passions applicable a la pratique de arts plastiques (1862) from Warhol's silk-screened celebrity portrait multiples. This cavernous gap at the heart of photographic history (which is also nearly two-thirds of its span) is telescop into a hardly any summaries and asides. More important, the correlation of modernist facial photographies with unexpressive blankness, upon the one hand, and the curious cranial hermeneutics of phrenology, upon the other, is inadequate (in the first instance) and simply wrong--simultaneously overstated and underdefended--(in the second) Sobieszek's take upon Cubist and Futurist portraits, for example, is too cursory. The divided, faceted, sometimes pulverized faces of Pablo Pic asso and Georges Braque's hermetic phase hardly go [i]or[/i] come back blank or unexpressive visages, as their inclusion here hints Instead, they shatter the facial field and the assumptions of unified identity that have historically informed it, while at the same time at no time surrendering to aniconic abstraction by means of holding onto mimetic fragments and associative types One of the things demanded by dint of blankness is surely the continuity of a even or uninflected surface, and neither a face nor a sheet of paper can be described as blank if it is thoroughly shredded