Re: Refrain/Assault

feminist period pieces make my eyes glaze over. i have a hard time 
staying with the discussion if we come from that angle. 

how about andres serrano's *morgue* show? this show was, well, beyond any 
trite adjectives, but its impact won't go away. has anyone seen this 
series?  for those who haven't: serrano photographed corpses in various 
city morgues. the photos are huge (6' x 8'), some b&w, some mild colored, 
blood very blackish. they are exquisitely shot, strange foreshortenings 
(one like Mantegna's Christ), some parts rather than wholes, some wholes 
rather than parts, grainy dreamy 
lighting on most, referents of morgue present in some (toe tags with 
short death description i.e. "rat poison suicide", "assault with beer 
bottle"), these marks often at right angles to the "visceral response" 
about the image of death presented: some "look" like peaceful death, yet 
are described as what we would take more readily "as" violent death 
(fire, drowning, assault, poison...). some "look" like "violent death" - 
where do we get these image categories from? - but are described as 
deaths closer to what we might take as "peaceful" (cardiac arrest, 
SIDS?). But then these divisions don't make much sense for very long. 

there is also a disturbing reaction that creeps up in me around identity 
and anonymity. i don't think any of these corpses are named, other than, 
maybe "baby john doe", but we're instantly intimately circling around 
the circumstances of the moment of their death. the unlashing from the 
identification of the subject matter does something really important, 
though i don't know what, or how to say what...

ASIDE: if one wanted to, one 
could say serrano was fairly careful here with, in addition to paper 
grain and lighting, class and gender. or maybe that his work is broad 
enough to "read" these categories as present. the presence or potential 
presence of 
these "representations of categories" seems  often to be "enough"; the 
total absence of them seems not an equal and opposite oversight. 

 
a last note on this show:

i took my kids to it. they are six. the gallery desk person thought i 
didn't know what we were about to see;  that i was about to make some 
huge mistake and scar my kids forever or something. she had a big problem 
with the fact that i knew damnwell what we were all about to see and was 
presenting this to them... my kids really didn't "react" to the images, 
other than to ask fairly straightforward questions about, say, what that 
jagged line was for, or what that word was, or where these people were kept 
when 
they were dead... and they didn't have nightmares after, nor were they 
the least bit upset or revolted or disturbed. why or why not? was it 
because, contextually, they "know" that this is "art":  well, I 'know' 
that too, but i was revolted and seduced by the whole show. 

are these images, these reactions, or lack of them, in any way relevant 
to this string about assault and aesthetics? 

-karen

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