quizzicalcontent

Mirrors, masks and self-portraits – seeking the Naked Face

2011-02-23T10:07:00.002+10:30

In the course of everyday facework to show ‘proper feeling’ that captures the wider social requirements of a situation and group, we often need to bracket, or keep to ourselves, the more eruptive feelings that are within us. The smiling waitress may have to bracket expressions of fatigue as she wishes guests to feel smiled upon. We have empathic connections to others and to the expectations of others who may required us to soothe them, or to fit in with them. However, even to shock an audience, or to challenge a genre of art, we still need to know the expectations of others. So there is an interesting line between what is included and what excluded from public self-presentation.

Dropping the mask

It isn’t so easy to drop the mask – even with oneself. There are unconscious processes against which we defend, whose expression we defer and delay – shape and change. So dropping the mask is less possible or easy than it may seem. The Portrait of Dorian Gray is a case in point. The ‘truth’ about his transformation as a result of the way he lived and treated others was on a painting in the attic. The traces inscribed themselves there on that face. His own fleshly face remained innocent and calm. But there were traces. He didn’t rush up to the attic to look at it, to know himself. He couldn’t have painted it, no matter how long he looked in the mirror. He was a stranger to himself, and, to a lesser extent, so are we all.

Mirror Face

We get a shock when we catch ourselves unawares without our mirror face on; that small moment of habitual composure, before we face ourselves. We brace, to see ourselves, to attempt to optimise oneself, to offer no trouble.

What do you encounter in completing a self-portrait?

When you paint a self-portrait, what are you looking at? What do you encounter? There are material symbols (the red chalk medium of Derwent Lees portrait marks him as Australian), many angles of a face (as with Lewis Miller), aspects of context, friends who are included (such as the tartan clad image ‘Glasgow’ of Madeline Green and her sister). The image can be more or less realistic, idealised, or grandiose. Hugh Ramsay’s piano, the ostrich-feather cap of a fine horseman from the light brigade with his trim waist in riding trousers, the scar of a lost pinky finger of a person in protest at Tiananmen Square healed and holding an image of the artist as a small boy, the disco ball pattern of cancer cells whirling like traces of motion capture machine tracing the artist’s form with their movement, the beauty of one’s youth.

Traces in spite of us

Yet the secrets we keep from ourselves still leave physical traces, more readily read by others, or by a later self. But in facing them, and registering them, there is some self-reflection possible and something happens at that moment in the face. So self-portraiture can be viewed from many angles, as painting a readily available ‘people’ (Lewis Miller) as an opportunity for self-reflection, or the offering of a personal vision across time. It is a form of narcissistic survival – an image of self that survives death. It is you, for the future. Our fleshly face perhaps long forgotten.

2010-10-14T19:18:00.000+10:30

Written in smoke

2010-08-12T20:43:00.003+09:30

on the road to Porvo - Finland

2010-07-21T19:47:00.000+09:30

Naked Raku

2010-05-15T20:26:00.002+09:30

Beside Janet Mansefield's kiln

2010-05-15T20:21:00.000+09:30

Janet Mansefield - potter extraordinaire

2010-05-15T20:18:00.001+09:30

the moth

2010-04-04T09:22:00.002+09:30

my kitchen sink

2010-03-26T20:21:00.002+10:30

salt

2010-03-26T20:17:00.001+10:30

One of the most remarkable series of images - makes me want to fire salt kilns, take photos on time-release of the stars spinning.

Salt

Hatters

2009-10-29T20:13:00.000+10:30

Inspired by Japan - 1500's

2009-10-29T20:11:00.000+10:30

tommy rolls

2009-06-18T21:42:00.001+09:30

Dog - happy

the beach

2009-06-16T23:01:00.004+09:30

just the time

2009-06-15T22:05:00.000+09:30

Sill

2009-04-06T20:45:00.000+09:30

Headstand in the McKenzie Country

2008-11-21T22:07:00.000+10:30

the handsome cricketer

2008-08-27T08:40:00.002+09:30

beneath the sky

2008-08-24T07:19:00.003+09:30

Raffish

2008-08-20T09:46:00.001+09:30

Raffish is my kind of word

Wild is the wind

2008-07-28T14:29:00.001+09:30

Wild it is

you must poise your life - at last

2008-07-23T22:06:00.002+09:30

wispy river willows

2008-07-19T20:02:00.003+09:30

off to the side - willow

2008-07-19T19:51:00.001+09:30

willow time 3

2008-07-19T19:48:00.001+09:30

willlow weep for me - bend and cover me, lay your branches down along the ground and cover me

2008-07-19T19:43:00.001+09:30

failing and flying

2008-06-30T16:39:00.000+09:30

a poem by Jack Gilbert

2008-06-21T20:48:00.001+09:30

Honey Moon Gap
Victory at Gillen

Lured into Laughter

2008-06-17T10:16:00.003+09:30

Watching the film In Bruges as part of the Sydney Film Festival, I was forced to experience the affective consequences of mixed genres. Thriller/comedies are brutal to my nervous system and I leave the film weak at the knees - literally. I cannot defend against the callousness of the bloody murders by steeling myself because I am lured into laughter by the uncanny straightforwardness of Colin Farrell's character, and the bizarre mannerliness of the psychopathic hit-man boss played by Ralph Fiennes.

There may be no honour among thieves, but I have long been bemused by the blurring of morality and convention in the more psychopathically inclined. They might hand you a starched napkin to staunch the flow of your blood they have just occasioned.

It seems to me that the gales of laughter weaken and open me to the onslaughts of horror I feel at the killings. I've always thought the positive affects open you up to creative novel perceptions as the world floods in somewhat unfiltered, where more negative affects, like fear, leave you searching for and vigilant against the repetition of harm. In a cocktail of the (at least) two affects - the body is bewildered. Pumped for fear, the laughter is more explosive, but leaves you all the more bare for the next terror.

I think I should stick to comedies. I feel too much.

Aimee McLeod

2008-06-08T12:10:00.001+09:30

Aimee McLeod's webpage link

Leod's explorer

2008-06-08T12:00:00.001+09:30

lake tekapo

2008-06-07T18:48:00.000+09:30

High Heels

2008-06-07T18:47:00.000+09:30

Fabulous images of a man with an eye for a good frock

2008-06-02T21:57:00.000+09:30

Yves St Laurent to you

love this image

2008-05-30T20:59:00.000+09:30

The Elvis of Cultural Theory

2008-05-30T08:41:00.001+09:30

In Defense of Lost Causes
Slavoj Zizek

Publication: May 2008
ISBN 978 1 84467 108 3 / 512 pages / $34.95 / £19.99

“The era of grand explanations is over; we should no longer aim at
all-explaining systems and global emancipatory projects. … If the
reader feels a minimum of sympathy with these lines, she should stop
reading and cast aside this volume. This book is unashamedly committed
to the ‘Messianic’ standpoint of the struggle for universal
emancipation.” Slavoj Zizek

Is global emancipation a lost cause? Are universal values outdated
relics of an earlier age? In fear of the horrors of totalitarianism
should we submit ourselves to the reactionary third way of economic
liberalism and government-as-administration?

In this combative major new work, philosophical sharpshooter Slavoj
Zizek takes on the reigning ideology with a plea that we should
re-appropriate several “lost causes,” and looks for the kernel of
truth in the “totalitarian” politics of the past.

Examining Heidegger’s seduction by fascism and Foucault’s flirtation
with the Iranian Revolution, Zizek suggests that these were the “right
steps in the wrong direction.” He argues that while the revolutionary
terror of Robespierre, Mao and the Bolsheviks ended in historic
failure and monstrosity, this is not the whole story. There is, in
fact, a redemptive moment that gets lost in the outright
liberal-democratic rejection of revolutionary authoritarianism and the
valorization of soft, consensual, decentralized politics.

Zizek claims that, particularly in the light of the forthcoming
ecological crisis, we should reinvent revolutionary terror and the
dictatorship of the proletariat in the struggle for universal
emancipation. We need to courageously accept the return to this Cause
– even if we court the risk of a catastrophic disaster. In the words
of Samuel Beckett: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
SLAVOJ ZIZEK’S DEMANDS:
“1) Strict egalitarian justice (all people should pay the same price
in eventual renunciations, namely, one should impose the same
world-wide norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide
emissions, and so on; the developed nations should not be allowed to
poison the environment at the present rate, blaming the developing
Third World countries, from Brazil to China, for ruining our shared
environment with their rapid development).

2) Terror (ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed
protective measures, inclusive of severe limitations on liberal
“freedoms,” technological control of prospective law-breakers).

3) Voluntarism (the only way to confront the threat of ecological
catastrophe is by means of large-scale collective decisions which run
counter to the “spontaneous” immanent logic of capitalist development).

4) And, last but not least, all this combined with trust in the people
(the wager that a large majority of the people supports these severe
measures, see them as its own, and is ready to participate in their
enforcement). One should not be afraid to assert, as a combination of
terror and trust in the people, the reactivation of one of the figures
of all egalitarian-revolutionary terrors, the “informer” who denounces
the culprits to the authorities. (Already in the case of the Enron
scandal, Time magazine was right to celebrate the insiders who
tipped-off the financial authorities as true public heroes.)”
(FROM PAGE 461 OF 'IN DEFENSE OF LOST CAUSES')
PRAISE FOR SLAVOJ ZIZEK:
“Zizek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is
master of the counterintuitive observation” The New Yorker

“The giant of Ljubljana provides the best intellectual high since
'Anti-Oedipus'.” The Village Voice

“The Elvis of cultural theory.” Chronicle of Higher Education

“Unafraid of confrontation and with a near limitless grasp of pop
symbolism” The Times

“Zizek is a thinker who regards nothing as outside his field: the
result is deeply interesting and provocative.” The Guardian

“The most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of
cultural theory in general, to have emerged in many decades.” Terry
Eagleton

“Zizek is one of the few living writers to combine theoretical rigor
with compulsive readability.” Publishers Weekly

Slavoj Zizek is a professor at the European Graduate School,
International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities,
Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the
Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His other
books from Verso include The Sublime Object of Ideology, For They Know
Not What They Do, The Indivisible Remainder, The Ticklish Subject,
Welcome to the Desert of the Real and The Fragile Absolute. He has
also appeared in the films Žižek! and The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema.
More information from the Verso website:
http://www.versobooks.com/books/tuvwxyz/xyz-titles/zizek_defense_lost_causes.shtml

South Land

2008-05-22T20:41:00.000+09:30

What the moa of Moa Flats sees

2008-05-22T20:39:00.000+09:30

The moa of Moa Flats

2008-05-22T20:38:00.000+09:30

Moa Flats by sunlight

2008-05-22T20:36:00.001+09:30

Moa Flats

2008-05-22T20:35:00.000+09:30

The land of the long white cloud

2008-05-21T21:57:00.001+09:30

For Janaki with love

2008-05-05T12:42:00.003+09:30

graduating feet

2008-04-26T15:37:00.003+09:30

2008-04-26T15:37:00.001+09:30

Late sun

2008-04-26T15:34:00.000+09:30

2008-04-26T15:33:00.000+09:30

Culburra

2008-04-26T15:30:00.001+09:30

Culburra in Blue

2008-04-26T15:28:00.000+09:30

For Agnes

2008-04-07T16:45:00.000+09:30

the young tommy

2008-04-06T19:39:00.004+09:30

2008-04-05T21:03:00.003+10:30

Is it just me or do exhortations which would seem trite in my own language take on a resonance in another?

all the seasons in a moment at Hathead

2008-04-04T20:43:00.002+10:30

hat head

2008-04-04T20:41:00.002+10:30

gloves on

2008-04-04T20:40:00.002+10:30

straw bale house making

2008-04-04T20:38:00.002+10:30

rozelle graffiti

2008-03-28T17:51:00.004+10:30

the inimitable naughty dolly

2008-03-28T17:49:00.004+10:30

townsville architecture

2008-03-26T16:19:00.001+10:30

the house at the turn off

2008-03-26T16:18:00.001+10:30

unique use of a car port in the outback

2008-03-26T16:16:00.001+10:30

Between Release and Reality - there is Cecily

2008-01-29T13:13:00.000+10:30

Cultures embroider themselves using pictures, metaphors and phrases that hit a chord. Within this embroidery the smart and savvy cultures make room for their own contradictions. Some creative people and traditions give voice or form to representations of those contradictions. For instance the ‘sacred clown’ of some Amerindian tribes, the court jester or the architectural follies of some European circles (Cline, 1998). Weapons of mass distraction.

Cartoonists historically have had this role, of exploring loudly the contradictions to dominant, polite culture. As Cecily does. Cecily explores what “goes without saying”, what is left unspoken - the tacit rules of culture. You are not supposed to think about your favourite TV show starting in five when your beau or belle is taking off your coat with reverent romance. But Cecily does. Having made the humble gesture of telling people not to bring gifts you are not supposed to regret that gesture. But Cecily does. Cecily does.

We speak of genius rather than perversity or eccentricity, says Cline, where a person’s private obsession hits a target which others have use for, where there is the “coincidence of a private obsession with a public need” (Rorty, 1989, cited in Cline, 1998, pg 115). And Celia’s private obsession, now uncannily public in Cecily, has hit a chord in New Zealand a chord that is now resounding across the Tasman. Cecily has landed.

“The satisfactions of this make-believe world may not turn the world around but they can radically alter our own position in the world.” (Cline, 1998, pg 96).

We know ‘somehow’ what it is cool to show and what to hide. In response to the cultural milieu we find ourselves soaking in, we hide personal intensities and uncool sentiments- modern indecencies really. The cultural have-to’s can be quite heavily scripted and programmed. Yet remarkably we don’t always notice them. Until, that is, we hear the siren’s call of Cecily. Cecily is the voice and face of and arch and humorous dissent, asking “Might there not be another way??????”

…Sipping martini’s in the bath and chatting avidly on the phone Cecily was not entirely sure that children would improve her lot...

She has all the virtues. Charity – she listens at the dentist’s, humility – she asks you not to bring presents, discretion (here, aka) practiced social lying – the assumed face of delight at getting a… horse model [!], decorum - in taking off [at least] some of the face furniture. But she also embodies the unsung virtues of a personal intensity: spontaneity, excess, the rampant pleasures of solitude; as in the dance of the patchwork quilt where Cecily transcends space and time; or the excess of a personal pleasurable absorption a kind of alone-while-in-the-world…the abandon of Cecily dancing to imagined encores, and in the face of the encouragement of receptive audiences, she dances herself into a frenzy.

She chimes the small alterations in being that come from giving ourselves over to a moment’s intensity. You may think that it makes no difference just to hold back, or diminish felt intensity. That is potentially to miss the transformation of one’s position in the world, to miss perhaps the private smile while alone that carries you through.

Celia creates a model in her cartoons of a larger than life way of being other. She supports our desire to embrace the uniqueness and idiosyncrasy in ourselves and in others by making us laugh at the rigours of polite conformity. And she supports such desires by reassuring us that by becoming more intensely ourselves we will also find greater shared connection with others.

That is quite a series of promises of a rich interiority of pleasure that nonetheless spirals out into a warmer communality with others. Quite a needed series of promises is made by Cecily, in these times of [somewhat paranoid] hypercompetition - where success masquerades as completely required even for survival, where notoriety is as good as fame, where those around us seem to flout that one can win through bluff, pretense and lies.

Yet Cecily thinks even backing the favourite in a horse race is unfair and goes for the outsiders. Unable to start her computer, she dusts it. Her bluffs so thin they invite discovery, and a shared sense that for many of us, this is how it is. We just omit the laughter until she invites it.

In an uncertain, insecure world of shifting, seismic complexities, we try to pare away what is given, apparent, taken for granted…to find something else to satisfy our (face it) desire for frivolity…for the odd carefree release from the grind of reality. Or to face reality with enough verve and laughter so that it releases its manic hold on us. And this is an endless balancing act between release and reality. We search beneath the customary for fresher strata of our mental lives.

Celia’s images have such freshness they make us feel that we could start anew after dipping into them – in a minor or a major way. Find a new life, a “life that would be [more] our very own, that would belong to us in our very depths” (Cline, 1998 pg 112). That’s a good thing to have springing at you from the leaves of your calendar or from your tea towel.

Cecily’s blind attachments and innocent fervour chime against a certain cut-through sophistication that is also her…her innocence is also her revolutionary edge…she is not compelled to see the world our way.

Cecily is uncanny…that which should have remained hidden is now meeting the light of day. The homely seen in a strange new light. Your fleeting thoughts beam back at you from the newspaper. Cecily has been the darling of New Zealand. She’s been in the Listener, a regular in NEXT magazine, The Christchurch Press the Waikato Times. Being a modern girl she has also splashed out into fabrics and cards, diaries and linen. My excitement is in seeing how she takes to her new cultural playground. Given that there are things in general and things specific to any culture, I’m keen to see what Cecily makes of Oz. My faith that she will make the Tasman crossing with panache – with aplomb and without seasickness comes from my faith in and admiration for her creator Celia - a robust and light-hearted genius. I’m sure Cecily will make a feast (for us all to share) of the least pangs of culture shock. I’d like to welcome her to Oz.

Books consulted

Cline, Ann (1998) A Hut of One’s Own: Life Outside the Circle of Architecture. The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts.

http://www.cecily.co.nz/

Red Troupe travels

2008-01-18T22:22:00.000+10:30

Great Ocean Road

Sleeping under mating Koalas

Art

Adelaide

Trees in Essoyes

2008-01-03T10:23:00.000+10:30

kissmas lilies with chun glaze bottle

2007-12-22T21:12:00.000+10:30

Anti-managerialism

2007-12-12T21:41:00.000+10:30

Camille: Le Fil

2007-11-29T16:57:00.000+10:30

Click on this link to view a video of a superb chanteuse...

Camille: Le Fil

Oh Joy

2007-11-24T23:18:00.000+10:30

Lunch time Protest in Todd Mall

2007-11-24T12:58:00.000+10:30

Singing, Dancing, Playing for Family

"Children are dying in front of us."

Howard's End

2007-11-23T14:28:00.000+10:30

funny green things

2007-11-14T16:04:00.001+10:30

Charlotte Sometimes

2007-11-14T16:03:00.001+10:30

returning by an unused path

2007-11-14T16:01:00.001+10:30

For in-seat dancing

2007-10-27T10:32:00.001+09:30

The Dam - just out of Bathurst

2007-10-20T12:21:00.001+09:30

the dam at High Heels

2007-10-20T12:20:00.001+09:30

redsunband

2007-10-20T12:19:00.001+09:30

Kristin Hersh

2007-10-20T12:17:00.001+09:30

Kristin Hersh

2007-10-20T12:14:00.001+09:30

Kristin Hersh

2007-10-20T12:12:00.001+09:30

Reconciliation

2007-10-14T19:46:00.000+09:30

This Country
Who's going to say
Sorry?
I am sorry that You have lost
Expanse Freedom Religion

But it is natural is it not
for people to explore and claim?

I hear the chanting mixed with earth
I know the connection: land and people
I feel the igorance ... history tests

Our Earth is One

The first people
are here to share
Are you ready to receive?

Country Highway

2007-10-05T16:16:00.000+09:30

the way there

the way back home

Forest

2007-10-04T21:39:00.001+09:30

Morning with eggs

2007-10-01T12:11:00.001+09:30

Jugs drying in the sun

2007-10-01T12:08:00.000+09:30

Culburra

2007-10-01T12:06:00.000+09:30

Here and now

2007-09-30T09:36:00.000+09:30

A poem by Rumi:

They say that paradise will be perfect
with lots of clear white wine and all the beautiful women.
We hold on to times like this then,
since this is how it is going to be.

Thankyou Janaki

2007-08-27T20:39:00.001+09:30

Those little silver anklets from India are divine!

Love and love
Diorissi

Delacroix's Garden

2007-08-27T20:17:00.002+09:30

Tout de suite

2007-08-27T20:17:00.001+09:30

Paree

2007-08-27T20:15:00.001+09:30

Espers

2007-08-03T20:52:00.001+09:30

check out the new Zizek film at this link

2007-07-26T20:49:00.000+09:30

http://philosophicalfragments.blogspot.com/

This Saturday (in Sydney, Australia) 28 July there will be a screening of a documentary on
Slavoj Zizek. It’s on at the Workshop Showroom in Edith Street, St
Peters from 6pm onwards. The film will start around 7pm and there will
be some food and drinks provided.

For more details check out:
http://www.workshopshowroom.org/?p=27

Return to India

2007-07-22T21:34:00.000+09:30

Chilianoula

India

washing in Nainital

The school holidays in Haidakhan come to an end

invited inside

roof top view

Villagers of Haidakhan

Gauhari and the 9 temples

Gauhari crosses the river Ganga

doorway above the 108 steps

Shri Muniraji plays with his birthday present

the sea from a casino

2007-07-04T21:49:00.001+09:30

Morning from my window

2007-07-04T21:47:00.002+09:30

Railing with leaves

2007-07-04T21:45:00.000+09:30

Hokusai

2007-07-04T21:44:00.001+09:30

Crescent Head

2007-07-03T15:34:00.001+09:30

stone and wood from 12th century

2007-06-27T21:35:00.001+09:30