Face Value

Image, 2016

How to account for the peculiar attraction of certain photos? How to deal with the specific use of images in particular contexts? Monika Schwärzler presents a variety of photographic case studies exploring visual phenomena from the point of view of media analysis as well as from sociological, aesthetic, and psychoanalytic perspectives. The topics range from a new reading of Thomas Struth's street photographs to CERN photos with their charged rhetoric, from the assault of photographic close-ups to speculations on an anonymous slide collection featuring a woman with an ever-present white handbag. The book is intended for an audience receptive to the analytical appeal of images, prepared to go beyond what can be taken at face value.

2014

A great deal has been written about Andy Warhol. Alas, most of it appears to be dedicated to his museum and gallery bound art pieces. This paper will be approaching his lesser-known film work especially the more risqué piece entitled ‘Blow Job’. Examining the era in which it was born, the 1960s and deducing what may have caused such a piece to be filmed and indeed how the reactions were the most significant part of it all, from aspects of duration and beauty to that of the aesthetics, and ending within the realm of the aura. All of which rely on the scrutiny of the social beings of the time and indeed the social beings of today. The methodological approach consists of book of the sixties and Andy Warhol’s film work and theories on film as well as articles on Camp, beauty, desire and the social. Subsequently reading initial responses of the audiences as well as the responses of years later. This research established that it was indeed the audience’s social power, which deemed the success and/or failure of the piece. By removing us from the equation Warhol refuses us full access as an audience, and it is here that we may deem Warhol the solicitor of our desire. As he entwines his work within the decade of the sixties he understands that time is time at any point in time.

David Homewood/Paris Lettau (Eds.), Ends of Painting. Art in the 1960s and 1970s, 2023

The essay shows how exchange value - manifested in the sheen of the Silver Pillows, with which Warhol declared the end of his 'painting career' in 1966 - functions as a medium or support for Warhol's image production. It also offers a reading of Warhol's concept of an evacuated, mirror-like subjectivity.

Kunst og Kultur, 2016

Eighteenth-Century Life, 2023

A number of years ago, Mark Hallett published an important and influential essay on Joshua Reynolds, Royal Academy exhibitions, and eighteenthcentury British spectatorship that should have become an inflection point for scholars of the portrait.1 The essay focused on a single painting from 1784, Reynolds's equestrian portrait of the Prince of Wales. The essay's larger purpose was to suggest a different way of thinking about how eighteenth-century paintings functioned as a result of their appearance at Somerset House. Using Edward Burney's detailed renderings of the Great Room, Hallett argued that viewers at the time were fluent in the language of display, so much so that they could "read the walls" and understand the picture in question as participating in-and in fact, being defined by-a variety of different visual "narratives," some artistic, some social, some political, all of which derived from the logic of the hang. Moreover, he argued, dominant narratives from previous years could also come back into play, the speech acts from any one exhibition thus tied to those before and after. Eloquent about the forces at work "beyond the boundaries of individual canvases," Hallett nevertheless ignored the radical implications of his own essay and opted instead for a polite request that we remember that "works of art were often defined by the company they kept" (581, 604).

Published together with a text by Nicole Demby, "Art and the Freedom Fetish: Some thoughts on art and the state after 1945," http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/art-value-and-freedom-fetish-0, May 28, 2015.

Panel: "Cinematic Photography"

2004