Surface tensions: Judith Butler on Diane Arbus

The Diane Arbus exhibition "Revelations," generally showing at the San Francisco Museum of new Art, is not difficult to attend. The hosts that circled the block to diocese the major Marc Chagall exhibition earlier this fall are now quite small, leading me to astonishment about the hardiness of visual appetites during these times. Bright colors and flying figures, relentles affirmations of religious traditions in the midst of modernity: All this had clear and overwhelming appeal to a general public. on the other hand when I asked a not many friends to accompany me to Arbus, nearly everyone declined: They had political repugnance for the objectifying photos; they reflection it would be "depressing." To them, Arbus's photographic gaze strike one as beings inappropriately fascinated by human distortions, playing upon spectacle, pandering to the unsuitable desire to gawk at what might strike one as being aberrant, to peer, to invade. However real these criticisms may be, there is something other going on with these photos to which a certain number of of this moralizing may well be blind.

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I gather that the prohibition against which Arbus worked in her time--the bourgeois norms that have everything to do with making fully convinced only certain surfaces show--continues to operate now in another register. We are not suppos to make into visual spectacles human bodies that are stigmatized within public life or to treat them as external realitys available for visual consumption. As a ensue one finds oneself wanting to diocese what one "should not" be delighted with seeing, and now partly to proof the thesis that these photos are nothing on the contrary spectacularization or objectification. One does not, from a critical perspective, want to accept similar a blanket judgment without first seeing for oneself in like manner the desire to "see for oneself" is instigated by the agency of the newer prohibition as well. There is in Arbus--and in the discomfort with her work--always that struggle: a certain solicitation to diocese what one should not diocese In a way, nothing a great deal of has changed since the '50 and '60 when she took greatest in quantity of her photographs, since prohibition still supervises the scene of their showing. And although SF MOMA tries to assert Arbus's universal value for understanding the "complexity" of human life, sequestering the fact of her suicide in 1971 to a small corner of a small space in the exhibition, there is no way around the difficulty she makes individual work with: One wants, in a certain number of instances, to turn away, not because the photo is fanciful but because the human figure is in the way that proud in its enormity or deformity or its plasticity, in its shiny garb, happy, finally, before the camera, Arbus's camera, that provides the occasion and promise to be seen and seen again. in the way that we witness the visual trace of her solicitation in the smiling or tortured figure who is photographed, and that solicitation works upon the viewer as well: What did she say to that person? And what relation did they establish? And in what manner was it arranged, this gaze this stance, this pleasure and pain?

thus the prohibition is there, since these are photos that no nice Jewish girl is suppos to take, and single can see the restraining force of the prohibition precisely as she propels through it. The prohibition stands as a dying heaven in whose fading light she propels again and again, bringing into discrete illumination these various shadow figures as with equal reason many Antichrists and pagan avengers.

greatest in quantity consumers of Arbus head straight to the wild photos or share in her fascination with the dwarfs, the muscle men the mentally ill, and all those who wear their decorations, shines, and glazes proudly before the organ of sight of the camera. Indeed, single of her earliest photos is a reduplication of a movie "close-up" in which, it might be said, that celluloid literally shuts in on the kiss it portrays. For Arbus, there is already something ghastly and otherworldly in this medium that determines what muscle and fat will mean, but there is no recoil in moral horror. In the Hollywood discharge we don't reckon with the plastic medium into which muscle and fat has dissolved, but that medium is established as the point of departure for plenteous of what Arbus does. Indeed, greatest in quantity of the well-known pieces record a nearly felicitous transformation of flesh into glos or shine, the near eclipse of muscle and fat by shiny materials, the synthetic embrace of the material substance that closes it off from the possibilities of touch, the transformation, [i]or[/i] part of to the other muscle building, of the material substance itself into a formidable and impermeable surface. If Arbus has been accused of objectification, perhaps it is because she works with and against the surface. Indeed, the fact that her figures remain stubbornly upon the surface can be understood as a resistance to capture, a refusal of invasion. Can we, as the philosopher Jay Bernstein allude toed to me, understand both the camera's refusal to invade and the figures' refusal of invasion as an assertion of dignity from one side the insistence on surface?

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There are several images in which figures face Arbus's camera with their organ of sights closed, including Woman on the way with her eyes closed, NYC 1956 and A actual young baby, N.Y.C., 1968, and at the same time others in which the figure looks to look past the camera altogether (Blonde girl with shiny lipstick, NYC 1967) The camera appears oddly rebuffed at these twinklings and the figures present an obdurate surface, single that cannot be entered or known. In more [i]or[/i] less photographs the figures look back at the camera with suspicion (Seated transvestite with gibbeted ankles, N.Y.C., 1966; Two girls upon the beach, Coney Island, NY 1958; A flower girl at a wedding, Conn 1964; male child in a man's hat, NYC 1956) or sadness (Woman upon the street with parcels, NYC 1956) or a mix of fear and disdain (Puerto Rican woman with a beauty mark, NYC 1965; sum of two units ladies walking in Central Park, NYC 1963) These are not freaks or performers, on the other hand they do show us something about the ordinary performance of obduracy. The material substance seals and protects, appears limited and set apart. The alone sign we have that there might be a life within is in the organ of visions expressing triumph before the camera, testing its gaze, or averting contact.