Reading and learning a little bit about
Trevor Paglen was interesting, because I think it went in a direction we
haven’t quite veered in our discussions yet. This article regarding Paglen’s
work touched upon some general problems within art history discourse. Beckman
references Rosalind Krauss who raises a good point that also came to my mind
when studying landscape photography which I agree with (but she does a much
better job at articulating). She stated that, “This confusion between
topographic images and aesthetic categories… was producing an ‘illegitimate’
academic discourse and ‘a false history’ that left her wondering how to
‘understand the tolerance for the kind of incoherence it produce[d]’” (64). I
thought the way this was put made a lot of sense to me; that our language for
describing ‘landscape’ photography is limited, because it misleads us into
thinking a certain set of rules about its aesthetic. I agree that there is an
‘incoherence’ about this, but I also think that artists such as Paglen
creatively and interestingly engage viewers to start a discourse that
dismantles and questions ‘landscape’ as we know it, by transforming and
appropriating landscapes under different aesthetic conditions. Beckman
registers this point, too. “Paglen challenges us to recognize and articulate
how his photographs function neither as wannabe paintings nor
topographic-scientific photographic documents, although they bear traces of
both” (65).
I look forward to discussing him in
class, because I am curious to see how others interpret his work. Personally, I
am simultaneously intrigued, confused, and unnerved by his images, and think the
term, “paranoid/paranormal aesthetics” works well.
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